Abas Bhawoodeen Ghansar’s life was far from an easy one. He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) at the height of the British Raj. Like thousands of subject Indians, Ghansar was raised a Christian and almost certainly educated in one of the many mission schools established in India. That rudimentary education, and the opportunities offered by a great port city, enabled Ghansar to travel from one outpost of the Empire to another. The young man worked his passage to Australia via London and landed in Sydney in 1907.

Compared to the slums of Bombay, Australia must have seemed a land of opportunity. A prosperous nation with seemingly limitless possibilities, it offered the chance to build a new life and escape the teeming millions of India. But as for many immigrants the promise fell short of reality. The early Commonwealth was intent on creating a white Australia. Suspicious of ‘coloured labour’, Indian workers like Ghansar were relegated to the fringes of the economy. He became a hawker on the streets of Sydney, living off what he could sell and what he could carry.

When trade was doing well, Ghansar took a room in lodgings, but often he slept rough, catching what rest he could in laneways and parklands. Hawking was a life of constant movement – vagrancy laws meant he drifted from town to town, trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

Abas Bhawoodeen Ghansar lived with the possibility of deportation every day of the eighteen years he spent in Australia. And come the war, there was yet another chance to remove coloured labour from a fervently British and largely monocultural Australia. India was part of the Empire, and by 1917 the loss of white troops was making Britain increasingly reliant on the vast reserves of coloured manpower across its colonies. That October, Ghansar offered himself for service at Victoria Barracks, Sydney. A recruitment officer looked askance at this malnourished black man, his body pitted with smallpox scars and his feet blistered from walking.

Almost 40, barely five feet, four inches in height and weighing less than 130 pounds, Ghansar would not have been accepted some months earlier. But that very week the Allied advance on Passchendaele had stalled in the mud of Flanders. Now the Army would take almost anyone. A man born in Bombay donned an Australian uniform and was sent off to fight in Europe; such was the transnational reach of the first global war of the twentieth century.

The transnational reach of the world’s first global war: Charles Burleigh’s painting of wounded Indian troops in the music room of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. The Pavilion was used as a military hospital for Indian troops in 1915. The authorities assumed the exotic surroundings would be to the liking of troops from the subcontinent. The Music Room of The Royal Pavilion as a Hospital for Indian Soldiers courtesy Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove.

By any measure, his was not a distinguished record of war service. Worn out by a life on the road, Private Ghansar spent more time in British hospitals than he did in the field in France. His constitution, used to the hot climate of Australia and the subcontinent, broke down in the freezing conditions of Europe. He suffered bouts of influenza and severe tonsillitis, and was also treated for VD.

In and out of hospital: Sutton Veny in southern England. Abas Bhawoodeen Ghansar spent time here in 1917. An Australian hospital, this image captures the character of the white Australian troops who were treated there. We do not know if Ghansar would have mixed well with any of these men; if anyone took a photograph of him, it has not survived in the historical record. H01343 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

In July 1918, barely nine months after leaving Sydney, Private Ghansar was deemed medically unfit to serve by the military authorities. A doctor at Horseferry Road, London, listened to Ghansar’s complaint of pains all over his body. Though only in his forties, Ghansar showed signs of ‘premature sen­ility’. The doctor raised the age of his patient to 45 in his notes, perhaps to discourage any second thoughts by an army hungry for men. In his opinion, Abas Bhawoodeen Ghansar ‘was of no use to us as a soldier’ and was ordered back to Australia.

For a time, it seemed Ghansar had been offered a second chance. His war gratuity and deferred pay made it possible to purchase a grocer’s store in Pyrmont. And in 1922 he married. Annie Buckley was 50 years of age, and we know nothing of the circumstances – personal or financial – that brought them together. But repatriation was seldom easy for white diggers, and certainly not for a black man. The business failed to thrive, and Annie died in the first year of the marriage.

In 1926, Ghansar returned to the subcontinent. We have found no record of what became of him there. There is no acknowledgement of his service on any monument raised in Australia, let alone the few memorials that survive in India. Abas Bhawoodeen Ghansar is not a name that ‘liveth for evermore’.

Few memorials survive: A war memorial in the grounds of St George’s Church in Kochi, India. Over a million troops were raised in India and some 60 000 died. Even so, few memorials were erected and – seen as vestiges of colonialism – many were destroyed in postwar independence struggles. This memorial commemorates a British regiment that served in India and then on the Western Front. Lutyens’ India Gate was raised in New Delhi to honour (but not to name) Indian servicemen, and a memorial to Indian seamen still exists in Mumbai. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

Over a million Indian troops fought for the British Empire in the Great War, and 62 000 of them died. Another 87 000 Indian troops died in the Second World War. Britain did not grant independence to India until 1947, and then only after a long and bitter struggle. It’s debatable if the war Abas Bhawoodeen Ghansar fought in was waged to defend freedom and democracy, but he would see neither in his lifetime.1

For the British Empire: A souvenir booklet issued for the first Anzac Day in Queensland. This is a rare depiction of Australian soldiers serving alongside the so called ‘coloured’ troops of the Empire. Anzac Day Booklet 1916 courtesy National Museum of Australia.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READINGS: This story draws on Private Ghansar’s service dossier NAA: B2455, GHANSAR A B; his other military records NAA: B741, V/3124 and NAA:MT1486/1. The authors look forward to reading Peter Stanley’s revealing study of the relationship between Indian and Australian troops on Anzac, Die in Battle, Do Not Despair: The Indians on Gallipoli, 1915 (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2015). The history of Indian hawkers in Australia is an area yet to be fully explored. For a captivating introduction see Hanifa Deen, Muslim Journeys exhibition uncommonlives.naa.gov.au/muslim-journey/stories/camelees-andhawkers.aspx

1 NAA: B2455, GHANSAR AB.