I recently wrote to a friend of mine who is has spent a lot of time in India in many locations. I asked him to keep an eye out for Indian war memorials as possible contributions to sites-of-memory.de. He wrote back that he had never seen one in India. I can think of several possible explanations of why that might be the case:

• He just never noticed. I have talked to people here in Germany who don't notice the memorials here at all.
• Perhaps India has not had a large enough war in the correct political context. I assume that no war in which India has been involved over the past 150 years or so has had anything like the demographic effect that the major wars here in Europe have had. Every village in Europe had dozens of dead and a national culture which offered ways to formulate collective memory. India has been spared that trauma.
• Or perhaps India simply lacks the same kind of or need for memorial culture. Perhaps Indian memory is not collective or the dead are not subsumed in or collected under the times they died, the causes of death, or the justifications for their deaths.
• I considered that Indian memorial culture might be subsumed in religious culture - with certain temple niches dedicated to war dead, for example. But my friend is an expert on Indian religion and would have certainly informed me of this

I know that there is a major war memorial in Dehli - the "India Gate" which appears to be modeled on the Arch d'Triumphe in Paris, a sample of European colonial culture in the Indian landscape. Is this the only war memorial in the country? I would find that very hard to believe.