GI Photos of Calcutta: Toward a Vernacular Understanding of War

During World War II, more than a hundred thousand US soldiers, popularly known as GIs, camped in Calcutta, India, to steer the Eastern Front war against the Imperial Japanese Army in the China-Burma-India theater. The port city became a strategically relevant transit hub for the soldiers to airlift food and military resources, alongside channeling information to war zones. But it also acted as a site for the rest and recreation of the soldiers. With higher salaries and added scope for leisure in Calcutta, the pervasive presence of the GIs introduced a new orientation of military relationship with the public—more cordial, touristic, and commercially transactional than the British officials. Military photographer Clyde Waddell captured the recreational activities of GIs in the streets of Calcutta at their behest and self-published sixty photographs in 1946. Though the images depict everyday scenes in the colonial city, their thematic elements and semiotics betray the ideological designs of the US Army in an era of changing global equations. Waddell's images inhabit a curious location between wartime reportage and personal memorabilia. This article undertakes a semiotic reading of such photographs by Waddell to situate the complex location of the American GIs in the erstwhile capital city of the disintegrating British colony.