The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  In Britain, in recent years the sheer scale of the contribution of the British Empire to the war effort, in both the First and Second World Wars, has become apparent. No longer is it simply an island story of heroic, plucky Britain fighting against Nazi-occupied continental Europe; it has now become increasingly customary for historians to refer to the contribution played by Asian, African and Caribbean servicemen in the 1940s. This is only fitting. Some 5 million joined the military services of the British Empire during the Second World War, almost half of them from South Asia. It was only in 2002 that the Commonwealth Gates Trust installed a memorial on Constitution Hill in London to honour the role of these men. Museum exhibitions, oral history projects and television documentaries have continually probed and elucidated the role of imperial and Commonwealth servicemen and their lesser-known participation in the war, to reveal how crucial they often were to the action, the sacrifices that they made in the face of terrible odds, and also to divulge individual stories of great bravery and intrepid action.

  It is no longer true to suggest that this is an entirely forgotten story. From the life histories of Sikh pilots in the Royal Air Force to the memoirs of Caribbean seamen on board merchant vessels in the Atlantic, we now know more than ever before about the global mobilisation and deployment of men from across the empire. At El Alamein, Monte Cassino and Kohima, ‘British’ victories belonged to an extraordinarily diverse and international cast of men from the continents of Australasia, Africa, North America and Asia. These kinds of memorialisation have had an echo in India, with regimental museums and military historians speaking more vocally about Indians who won the Victoria Cross and South Asian participation in battles. Britain did not fight the Second World War, the British Empire did.

  However, this book aims to go one step beyond this. Rather than just looking at the contributions of South Asians to the war in Europe and Asia, it seeks to understand how the Indian subcontinent itself was reshaped by the war. How did the war impact on India’s ‘home front’? How did gearing up for total war, and the rapid re-purposing of the Indian state into a garrison, barrack and training camp for a vast army, affect and shape South Asian society? Beyond the well-trained and relatively well-paid infantryman or officer, which men and women propped up the Indian Army over thousands of miles of supply lines? How was the war experienced in small villages abutting aerodromes, or by young nurses in Indian General Hospitals?

  As well as acknowledging the role of South Asian men and women, then, this means asking some hard questions about the social costs of war and the coercion that accompanies such a massive military commitment. It also demands that we pay proper attention to the people who have tended not to feature so prominently in military histories: the non-combatants and camp followers, the Lascars, prostitutes, nurses, refugees and peasants whose lives changed because of the demands of military commitments.

  This book ranges across the subcontinent, from the commanding heights of New Delhi to the scrublands and jungles inhabited by adivasis and the villages of low castes and dalits. It is a story told in many voices, by individuals – Indian, British and many other nationalities too – who experienced the war in various and often contrasting ways. It reflects the diversity of wartime experiences in India. Merchants, industrialists, soldiers, merchant seamen, agriculturalists or black marketeers, in small towns or mega-cities, on coastal waterways or in the mountains, all had their own ways of negotiating the challenges and opportunities of war. Some profited and many were impoverished. This book aims to give the flavour of these plural, and often hidden, voices.

  Some of the experiences recounted here are universal staples of wartime: families separated over wrenchingly long years and vast distances, bravery in the midst of battle, the astonishing mushrooming of the state as it expanded and juggled the many tasks necessitated by the war, from postal services to ports. A defining feature of the war across the world was the upheaval of refugees and the movement of people on an unprecedented scale. The attrition of resources, the disruptions to labour and the effects of inflation caused by war are only just being recognised and fully researched as civilian dramas with similar contours, from North Africa to the Middle East and South-East Asia.

  This book focuses on this nexus between warfare and society. Understanding the Indian home front is a way of understanding the pernicious, unforeseen and often deadly consequences of war on the lives of ordinary people. It is also crucial to understanding the revolutionary turn of events leading up to India’s Independence and the end of the Raj.

  Looking at the events of the 1940s from the bottom-up or human perspective, rather than from the sweeping global panorama of war, also involves a moral dimension. The war was a just war against fascism in Europe and Asia, a necessary but painful corrective to the rising tide of fascist and expansionist politics, which threatened the rights of millions of people. But it also had other implications and costs, many of which could hardly be foreseen or anticipated by its protagonists. The priorities of war forced people into difficult moral and personal choices. Imperial subjects could not necessarily evaluate the war as a ‘good’ or ‘just’ war whilst they witnessed the effect on their own lives, as they faced astronomical price rises, lethal food shortages and famine, the loss of young men on unknown foreign battlefields, requisitioning and other disruptions to their everyday existence. The war sharpened dichotomies between the wealthy elites and the vast number of the very poor, heightened social tensions and exacerbated differences of class, caste and religion.

  Many societies have used histories of war or stories of national liberation to bolster their own cohesion and sense of national belonging. The 1940s have often been remembered in ways that have served national stories and myths. There is nothing unusual about this anywhere in the world. In India and Britain, after the decolonisation of the Raj in 1947, and in the latter part of the twentieth century, school curricula, textbooks, national myths and heroes developed along divergent tracks. For Britons, there was little reflection about the twilight of imperial rule and there was often amnesia about horrors such as the Bengal famine of 1943 that occurred on the imperial watch.

  In India, similarly, the war was also overlooked or remembered in partisan ways. The Second World War seemed sometimes, from an Indian perspective, an obscure or even irrelevant subject for research or the preserve of nostalgic militarists. Although wartime had a defining impact on nationalist politics, the historical emphasis was on the Gandhian campaigns of national liberation and on the creation of the new states of India and Pakistan in 1947. Crucially, the leading nationalists had been absent from many of the major wartime events as they were incarcerated. Nehru, the pre-eminent leader of his generation and the first Prime Minister of independent India, personally remembered the 1940s as ‘the quiet uneventful past’. He spent nearly three years in prison, his ninth period of detention: ‘We could only hear very distantly the far-off drums of the Great World War that was going on then.’5

  The social history of the war itself – the arrival in India of soldiers and nurses from around the world, the employment of millions of labourers, the recruitment and overseas service of thousands of Indian soldiers, the panic and rumours about possible invasion by the Japanese and the profound economic hardship (and, for a lucky few, profits) – has remained outside the scope of South Asian history-writing, apart from in the work of a few exceptional historians.6 Yet a better awareness of the war’s effects also helps us to understand the foundations of modern South Asia. As in Britain, it made the subcontinent a more recognisably modern place. Cities such as Karachi and Bangalore boomed, the infrastructure of airlines, companies and road networks was laid by wartime projects, and consumer imports from tinned food to fridges came onto the market. The Americans became more economically and socially influential than ever before. Middle-class women found new freedoms in work and activism, jazz and cinema thrived and, as in Britain, social expectations soared regarding what life would be like after the war. Nehru’s p
lanned economy and the welfare-oriented, developmental state that he tried to craft after 1947 had roots in the Raj’s transformation of the 1940s. The explicit trust placed in the ability of the government to provide better healthcare or education was an offshoot of the wartime changes, just as it was in Europe.

  The war flattened out the pretensions of empire, making ceremonial and ritual excesses look archaic, challenging old compacts between the King-Emperor and the landed elites. It mobilised women, workers and the urban middle classes in radical new ways. It heightened nationalism, both in India and in Britain, so that older forms of transnational solidarity became dated and obsolete. The Raj was left in debt, morally redundant and staffed by exhausted administrators whose sense of purpose could not be sustained. Development and democracy were the new political aspirations for politicians in Delhi and in London. Ultimately, the war delivered decolonisation and the Partition of 1947 – neither of which were inevitable or foreseen in 1939. All this is not to undermine the considerable achievement of the nationalists over the long duration, their sustained resistance to the Raj was also essential in knocking down its foundations and creating the possibility of a new order. Both elements interlocked. But ultimately, the timing of decolonisation relied heavily on the damage done to the structures of the state by the war, and by the empire’s complete lack of legitimacy when the conflict finally ended.

  1

  An Empire Committed

  ‘EVERYONE IS BUYING or if they can hiring radio sets’, Sydney Ralli recorded in her diary in Karachi in September 1939. A broadcaster and journalist, Ralli was married to an imperial tycoon, Charles, heir to a cotton textile and shipping fortune. News from Europe arrived by radio, newspaper and through family letters. Elites in India had a sharper appreciation of the threat of war in 1939 than many others because they were more likely to have access to a radio. ‘Every single person walks around with a gas mask … all the shops are practically empty, most of them closed at 5 o’clock. Everyone is doing some sort of national service. Sandbags everywhere. Everything is pitch-black at night and one is advised not to be out after dark as it is dangerous’,1 Ralli wrote home, determined to share in the grittiness of war’s outbreak and to play her own part in the international drama unfolding.

  The Government of India was busily announcing preparations for the defence of the Raj, air raid wardens had begun drilling and officials ordered the mobilisation of machinery and weaponry and began seeking contributions to the War Fund. The war also resonated through a network of family and friends back in Britain who sent detailed letters, riddled with mounting tension and apprehensions. Ralli even heard the details of other people’s letters, leaked by a friend stationed in the censor’s office in Karachi. But this initial sense of drama was short-lived and soon melted away. Ralli herself could not keep up the sense of suspense, when everyday life soon slipped back to normality. Within weeks, the atmosphere had returned very much to business as usual, with the war soon taking on a dream-like, fantastical quality.

  India soon became a site of escape and release from war-torn Britain, a place where there was less scarcity and more security for Britons. This was still the time of the funny or phoney war. Despite premonitions of future destruction, such as the wide distribution of gas masks among the well-off, the war felt surreal and distant in India. Parents called back their children from European boarding schools believing they would be safer in India. When the newspaper editor Desmond Young’s wife and teenage daughters came to India, ‘they left shamefaced, for all three felt that they ought to stay whatever might be in store for England’.2 As children were evacuated from the cities of England to the countryside, many of the children of the Raj came to India, especially after the fall of France, and found places in boarding schools in the hill stations of Mussoorie and Dehra Dun instead. ‘With the more modern living conditions, fridges, and better though scarce medicines the old theory that children could not stand the climate for long was partly confounded, neither was it found to affect their schooling to any great extent’, remembered Margaret Stavridi, the wife of an East Indian Railway engineer.3

  Men in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) were exempted from military service and army officers looked less likely to be called straight to a fighting front. There were long delays creating a National Service system, and even once some 15,000 Britons had been registered, allocation to military roles was sluggish. In September, Sydney Ralli persuaded her husband not to sign up, encouraging him to continue working in the Naval Control Service in Karachi. She won her husband round. ‘After all it is far better for him to do a job here, where he knows conditions than running up mountains with Gurkhas as a second lieutenant, tramping with his troops over the plains of central India. He seemed to think at first that he was shirking things but eventually became convinced.’4 Ian Hay Macdonald, an Indian Civil Service officer based on the other side of the country in Orissa, looked on with some disbelief as the war unfolded in Europe and as he learned of his brother’s enlistment in the Royal Navy at Portsmouth and of bombers sighted over his family home in Scotland. Within a year several of his university class-mates would be dead. Later he would describe watching the war as if it was a show, ‘it is like being in a grandstand watching some game or other, we are so cut off from it here’.5 As in Singapore, Hong Kong and the other great Eastern imperial cities, the war was impinging on life in random, occasional ways rather than apparently causing any real restructuring of the Raj. This brought guilt but also a sense of relief. The empire provided an extended British sphere, beyond the British Isles, in which some subjects could find sanctuary.

  * * *

  The colonial class in India felt indulged and fortunate compared to their relatives in Britain. Here they were protected by large whitewashed villas, long lawns, servants and drivers, and could acquire all manner of goods on the black market. ‘You would certainly not think there was a war on if you saw us here’, Macdonald reported from a relatively remote town in Orissa. ‘We get as much butter and bacon as we want etc. and there is no shortage of British goods, all sent out presumably to keep up the export trade … I must say I have had bad attacks of conscience at the easy life we lead.’6

  The Raj protected the prestige of the European community and explicit segregation along the lines of race was common. Hazratganj, the main thoroughfare of Lucknow, where glass-fronted shops lined the streets, and diners enjoyed the city’s famous biryanis, was out of bounds to Indians during certain hours of the day and they were banned from walking on certain sections of the pavements. Although never pursued as ruthlessly as in South Africa, the racial division was a recurrent affront to people. Signs saying Whites Only on railway platforms and in waiting rooms were still on display. A number of elite clubs, such as the Bombay Gymkhana, refused Indians membership. At Breach Candy, a racially segregated beach, ‘Europeans only’ could swim. Planters and factory managers unthinkingly prodded workers with rattan canes; police used lathis to strike at unruly crowds.

  Nonetheless, Indian landowners, princes, industrialists and a small but powerful middle class of lawyers, journalists and academics lived comfortably too, and sometimes exceptionally well. Santha Rama Rau, a sixteen-year-old from an affluent family, returned to India in 1939 after ten years in Britain, to the relative comforts and safety of Bombay. She was learning again how to be an ‘Indian’ in an unfamiliar environment, and her memoir charts her growing racial consciousness in 1940s India, on seeing benches on a railway station marked ‘Europeans only’, her increasing sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’, coming from 1930s London where, as the daughter of a diplomat, she had had an elite, cosmopolitan and charmed childhood. As Santha Rama Rau admitted honestly on her return to life in a prosperous suburb of New Delhi, it was possible to insulate oneself from the sounds of economic desperation in the countryside. She could spend a whole day ‘not thinking about the majority of Indians who are as foreign as the Germans or the French’.7 For India’s most wealthy minority, as for the British, the sta
rt of the war was of little consequence to their everyday lives, creating the inconvenience of steeper prices and the need to acquire things on the black market, but barely denting the routine business of life.

  Since the 1920s and the first wave of reforms which encouraged the participation of Indians in the running of the state, there had been a slow recognition of the rights of people to participate in the running of their own country. The devolution of power to provincial assemblies and the promotion of Indians to civil and military positions of leadership had been accepted as policy. Indianisation had been fully accepted in principle.8 However, this ‘Indianisation policy’ did not automatically translate into an inevitable trajectory towards Independence. On the contrary, Indianisation was in some ways used to forestall change. Any devolution of power still had a number of vocal opponents, both within and beyond India, and the actual deadline for the British leaving India had never been enunciated. The ‘readiness of the Indian to govern himself’ was forever moving further away on the horizon, always subject to another set of qualifications or objections, always open to the charge that progress and liberalism had not yet been fully embedded. A new generation of administrators within the ICS – both British and Indian – had very different ideas: they sympathised deeply with nationalism, believed in ideals of material and political betterment and worked hard towards the ideal of a developed and more prosperous land. Indeed, these men would be in the ascendancy in the 1940s.9 But even Nehru admitted in the late 1930s that his best hope was for Independence within a decade. A futuristic novel set in 1957, in which maniac Indians turned on their British masters 100 years after the mutiny, only to be crushed by the power of aerial bombardment, could still be published without any irony in Britain in the 1930s. There was no inevitability about Independence.