Throwing Snowballs in France: Muslim<i>sipahis</i>of the Indian Army and Sheikh Ahmad's dream, 1915–1918
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The arrival of Indian sipahis (or ‘sepoys’) to fight alongside soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force in France in October 1914 was both a victory and a source of concern for the British Raj. It proved to be the zenith of martial race fantasies that had been carefully codified from the 1890s, and birthed fears about the effects that Europe and the rapidly intensifying conflict on the Western Front would have upon the ‘best black troops in the world’. The situation resulted in the appointment of a special military censor to examine the letters sent to and from Indian sipahis and compile a fortnightly summary of Indian letters from France for the duration of the First World War. This paper investigates a portion of the letters contained in these reports. More particularly, it investigates the life of a single chain letter and the effect its chiliastic message had upon Muslim troops of the Indian Army during the First World War. As the letter was read, rewritten, and passed on, it served as a rejoinder to missionary efforts by the Ahmadiyya Movement, reinterpreted as a call for soldiers to purify their own bodies and oppose interracial sexual relationships, before, finally, being used as a critique of the British war effort against the Ottoman empire.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it