“Harnessing the Power of Youth in the Fighting Forces”: The Indian YMCA’s Caregiving Work with Allied Soldiers during the First and Second World Wars

In connection with the recent boom of research on the First World War, a new historiographical trend has become apparent: scholars increasingly acknowledge and explore the role of care-giving work and troop entertainment both as important facets of modern warfare and crucial hinges linking combatants and wider civil societies. In this paper, I shall explore the phenomenon of such ‘soft factors’ in global conflicts by reconstructing the Indian YMCAs ‘army work’ targeted at British and American troops stationed in South Asia during WW I and WW II. In doing so, I want to advance three main arguments: First, I contend that in both conflicts the (largely US sponsored) Indian YMCA significantly contributed to the allied war effort as it played an important role in making the life of European soldiers stationed in the subcontinent bearable. Second, I submit that there were even more far-reaching ambitions especially among many North American Y workers in India to act as ‘intercultural trainers’ of sorts, translating South Asian culture, religion and everyday life to the newly arrived soldiers with a view of preventing cultural misunderstandings and violent clashes with the local population. Third, I argue that the level of visibility, social prestige and leverage the Y-‘secretaries’ thus gained in WW I and its aftermath was never reached during the Second World War. This was mainly because the Y no longer had a monopoly on caregiving and troop entertainment schemes in the region and military authorities monitored and regulated its activities much more strictly. The great vision to use the ‘army work’ to educate and transform a generation of young soldiers into men who would be moral and cosmopolitan civilians after the war thus had to give way to more modest goals.