[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 14 | May 26, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]

The First World War was a truly momentous event; things fell apart rapidly all over the world after it; the centre seemed not to hold anymore; millions died or were traumatized because of it; and innocence seemed to give way permanently to massive disillusionment long after everything had become all quiet on western fronts. Life became tragic for war survivors and their families; politically the Russian Revolution and Communism became unavoidable after it; feudalism in Europe was swept away, and the great empires of the nineteenth century now felt clearly for the first time that the sun was about to set on them. The rest of the 20^th century would be shaped by this war and the Second World War which became inevitable because of the first one.

The First World War impacted decisively on the arts too. Internationally, the nascent movement towards modernism gained impetus because of the war; poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brookes, Wilfred Owen and Issac Rosenberg wrote moving poems about the futility of the war; a novelist such as Ernest Hemingway declared a farewell to arms fictionally; and dramatist George Bernard Shaw depicted a British society drifting towards disaster because of the war in his Heartbreak House. Rabindranath Tagore tried to warn the West and the Japanese of the evil consequences of nationalism and the war-mongering that it had lead to; and it was only appropriate that his collection of healing song-lyrics, Gitanjali would be found among Wilfred Owens remains. Kazi Nazrul Islam’s life showed that colonials too were part of the war effort; their lives and literature would also be changed forever by the war. (more…)