“THERE is nothing I need except a flute, please find me a flute, if you can send me a flute, I would be very happy.”

These are the words sent home by an Indian soldier being treated in the hospital set up around the Pavilion Estate in Brighton during the First World War.

This simply written phrase in a letter home to his family struck a chord with Ajay Chhabra, artistic director of production company Nutkhut, who the team behind the great sprawling outdoor performance installation Dr Blighty.

The flute has become one of the central motifs of the installation which marries history and art and tells the untold tales of the soldiers who found themselves being shipped to Brighton from the Western Front after leaving their homes in India to fight a war they had little stake in.

“He does not refer to his family, or missing anything except this very specific woodwind instrument which would have easily found its place in his knapsack,” says Chhabra. “This stood out to me, so we used the flute to represent the musicality of the memories associated with this.

“It was important to hear both the voices and the melodies going through these soldier’s heads.”

Commissioned by Brighton Festival, 14-18 Now, and the Royal Pavilion and Museums, the ambitious piece is one of the festival programme’s largest events – with a creative team including Tom Piper, the man behind the Tower of London poppies.

A hospital installation will be built in the grounds of the Royal Pavilion and will be built around a walk-through animated by actors, video projects, soundscapes and theatrical interludes inspired by the letters written home by the Indian soldiers.

The Pavilion Estate’s time as a hospital is well documented in a series of photographs taken by East Street based photographer AH Fry, but Chhabra said he set out to delve into the stories behind this pictures and strip away the layers of propaganda associated with them.

“This is an installation about both our shared histories and our shared vulnerabilities,” he says. “If you first look at those images they are of course very compelling, they are a window into another world, but on closer inspection you began to decode them.

“Many years ago I spent weeks going through all these photographs, looking through them, zooming in nu the soldier’s faces and realising men in hospital do not wear turbans.”

He goes on; “It was becoming clear we needed more men and we did not have enough men in this country volunteering, so those soldiers had to come from the empire.

“That first wave of men who came to the Royal Pavilion became an opportunity to tell the empire, if you sign up as a soldier you will be taken care of, you will have wages, a career, a uniform, and also if you are injured you will be taken back to this beautiful palace with the best medical treatment in the world.”

Between 1914 and 1916 more than 2000 Indian soldiers wounded on the front would be brought to Brighton’s temporary hospital, and throughout the course of the war more than one million men travelled from India to fight for the empire.

While their experiences in the city are documented in these staged photographs, part of the mission for Chhabra and the team from Nukthut was to give the soldiers a voice beyond these still moments in time.

“I first heard the story of the pavilion hospital in my early 20s,” says Chhabra. “I think as I have got older I have started to see myself in these photographs and the connection just became more and more compelling.

“I knew at some point I wanted to tell this story in as public a way as possible and using as many art forms as possible – so not to make our life easy, but to make more difficult.

“The more difficult we make our art the more interesting the story can become.

“My version of the lives of these men is an alternative version I realised we had not heard their voices.

“These men came from a region of north India I am familiar with through my close family, so their dialect, their language, their humour, their pathos, were all things I was interested in and wanted to bring out with this project.”

To create the interactive installation the team poured through scores of copies of letters home written by the soldiers which had been compiled at the British Library.

It is from these deeply personal writings which motifs such as the flute emerged, as Chhabra says it became a deeply personal and intimate experience.

“My great grandfather did not convalesce in Brighton, or fight in the Western front, or in any theatre of war, but there are two things which I found connected me through these letters,” Chhabra says. “The first is my very first memory from when I was three years and 11 months old.

“I remember the funeral of my grandmother, from my mothers side, and her coffin coming into my grandfather’s shop and the casket being opened.

“It is a Hindu tradition for people who come to the funeral to see the face to get this spiritual connection before the person is taken away and cremated.

“Now that is not a dark part of my memory, I am not frightened by it, in a strange sort of way it gives me an energy, but it is questions of life and death which I connect to the soldiers with that memory.”

He said the second memory was when his father and grandfather first came to the UK 50-years ago they were the scribes in their community.

“The story of the scribes and those letters is fascinating,” he says. “Without those we would not be telling this story and through those letters we can feel the anxiety, the emotion, the loss, the despair, and even the humour.

“I had never made the connection with my father and grandfather before, but it struck me doing this project we make all these connections to our own memories and they somehow find their way out.”

For four nights the Royal Pavilion will be lit up with a spectacular aft dark project with video projects dancing across the structure to represent the memories of the wounded soldiers far from home.

Alongside the production will also be a host of related performances and outreach activities including a special performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra who will feature some of India’s leading contemporary musicians in a marriage of Eastern and Western styles.

“'This is an important story, both in the history of Brighton & Hove and in the wider context of the First World War - one which we think deserves to be better known,” says Andrew Comben, chief executive of the Brighton Festival. “In Brighton Festival's 50th year, it's even more appropriate that we present this piece now and I am delighted to be working with our partners to bring it to fruition.”

Jenny Waldman, director of 14-18 NOW, says “We are thrilled to be working with Brighton Festival to present this ambitious project with an amazing group of artists brought together by Nutkhut, which will offer audiences an insight into the little-known and remarkable story underpinning the city's involvement with the First World War.”

Dr Blighty

Royal Pavilion Garden, Pavilion Buildings, Brighton

May 24 to May 28 at 2pm to 10pm, free.