The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

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  Lord Linlithgow, viceroy at the outbreak of war, had been in India since 1936. He had cut his teeth on Indian politics, not in the villages and towns of India but in Whitehall, by chairing important committees on Indian affairs in the 1920s and 1930s. A viceroy with no passion for India and only a little prior exposure to the country, he did not know the local languages and was similarly deaf to the nuances of Indian politics. Linlithgow’s stiff, towering body looked almost designed for the viceregal robes and he made an imposing impression standing next to his wife, who was six feet tall. He had a touching fondness for his own children and grandchildren but everyone else found there was a touch of granite about him. He was described in Time magazine as having a ‘half-dreamy, half-cranky’ face, but Nehru less charitably assessed him as ‘Heavy of body and slow of mind, solid as a rock and with almost a rock’s lack of awareness’.10 His limitations provided a rare point of agreement between Indian nationalists and many British civil servants. The Viceroy’s own enthusiasm for the role had also rapidly diminished. When the Bombay provincial ministry brought in the prohibition of alcohol he found it ‘something of a trial at public functions where a little anaesthetic is at times so very welcome’. He would ask for retirement on several occasions throughout the war, only to be compelled by Churchill to extend his term.11 He would have been a passable viceroy during a quiet spell of the nineteenth century but was no match for Gandhi or for the formidable changes that the war would bring to India.

  Linlithgow’s weakness was that he imagined that his Indian subjects would feel the same way about war as him, that they would share the same fears about German expansionism, the same need to defeat fascism, and would unquestioningly support the prioritisation of war. Linlithgow, whose own twin sons were now fighting in Europe, took the British case for war as self-evident: ‘our moral case is so strong it ought, I feel, to make an appeal to anyone who is prepared to approach it with an open mind’. This was a risky and foolhardy position to adopt for a viceroy charged with convincing a sceptical Indian public about British war intentions.12 His failure to consult and to make a concerted effort to join forces with Indian leaders at the very start of the war would have catastrophic consequences for years to come; within eight weeks, the new political settlement of 1937, which delivered Indian rule at the regional level, had imploded. The Congress ministries in United Provinces and Bombay resigned, followed by ministries in Orissa, Central Provinces and the North-West Frontier Province.

  To many in Britain the Second World War was a ‘just war’, an epic ideological struggle. In 1939 for many imperial subjects, without any clear promise of emancipation from British rule even at the end of the war, matters were far less clear-cut. Linlithgow had a blind spot: he was completely unable to see the need to persuade or convince his Indian subjects of the moral necessity to fight, assuming that right-thinking individuals would see it with simple clarity. Several weeks into the commencement of the war he wrote, ‘I see no reason why we should let ourselves become entangled in an academic argument about the merits or demerits of democracy.’13 His calculation was that the majority of Indians would come to their senses and support the war effort. He was warned by numerous advisers not to miss the psychological moment and to win over public opinion to the cause. But the Viceroy stalled, returning to old stalwarts of the colonial regime, spending his time meeting princes and other old friends of the British in India. He admitted to being ‘baffled’ about how to recruit men and to get a war plan in order without any clear plan of action coming from London.14

  There was a bastion in the Viceroy’s calculations: 600 princely states, some with land masses as large as France or with populations to rival those of European countries. The Nizam of Hyderabad had been featured on the front cover of Time magazine in 1938, celebrated as the richest man in the world. These princes, who ruled one third of the subcontinent’s population directly but owed their strength to the Raj, liberally opened their purses and palaces, offering their services. One by one, maharajas offered their help to the Crown. The day after war was declared the Maharaja of Kashmir offered to leave for any theatre of war immediately in a letter of fealty to the British state: ‘I have available in Jammu a reserve of man-power which has been judged … excellent fighting material and of this I have decided to give the benefit to His Majesty’s Government.’ He also offered for immediate active service two infantry battalions and one mountain battery for use anywhere in the world. The princely state would pay for these men and support their families while they were away from home; the government need only feed them in the field and meet their other daily requirements. The maharaja also invited the government to send recruiting parties into Kashmir as long as they co-operated with the local authorities.15 The Rajput princes of Jodhpur and Bikaner made similar offers and within days several more states were making lavish donations: Indore gave five lakhs, Travancore six lakhs, Bikaner one and a half lakhs, the Nizam of Hyderabad set aside over £100,000 for the air ministry, and Maharaja Jam Sahib of Nawanagar promised to contribute a tenth of the gross revenue of his state to the war effort. The Nawab of Bhopal was so keen to get to the front or to serve in some other capacity that he had to be persuaded to stay in his city. The Maharaja of Jaipur was soon in North Africa inspecting troops.

  The princes knew from their experiences of the First World War that this was an opportunity to cement their loyalty to the British and to prop up the existing political order. Many of them also had close ties to the military, had been educated at Sandhurst or in British schools and felt a strong affinity with the cause. The Nepali regent, desperate to defend his country’s own sovereignty, surprised the Commanding Officers by his obsequiousness. ‘If money was needed, the Maharajah sent it’, wrote the Indian Army officer Lieutenant General Francis Tuker.16 In return, Linlithgow and the Marquess of Zetland, the Secretary of State for India, positively gushed at the loyalty and largesse of the princes.

  This was not an uncomplicated story of Raj loyalism, devoid of more ambivalent undertones. The princes of India, albeit a diverse and vastly varied bunch of sultans, maharajas and nawabs, had long been anxious about safeguarding their constitutional future and preserving their power in the face of the waning of the British power that supported them. Agitations and rebellions in their states had been erupting with uncomfortable regularity in the late 1930s. They had long sought guarantees of their sovereignty, inviolability and continued leadership in any kind of post-British state. Both the British and the Congress during the 1930s had urged autocratic maharajas to reform their constitutional positions and to devolve more power to the people in their states. The princes now saw a sliver of opportunity to entrench their position and to curry British favour on an unprecedented scale by volunteering men, materials and money. The princes would continue to play the role of loyalists to the Crown throughout the war, and their own states would often witness rapid economic growth as a result. These apparently unconditional promises of loyalty were firmly predicated on an expectation of mutual support from the British Crown, an expectation which, ultimately, would be sorely misplaced.

  For the majority of Indians, the start of the war was more disquieting and confusing. Abdul Kalam Azad, who would soon become President of the Congress Party and was a close confidante of many key leaders, remembered the uneasy feeling after war was declared: ‘Everybody seemed to be waiting for something to happen but their formless fears were vague and undefined. In India also there was a sense of expectancy and fear.’17

  For South Asian politicians, international politics did matter. Nehru had been absorbed by the Spanish Civil War during his stay in Europe in 1936, speaking out in favour of the Republicans in Trafalgar Square in London. The settlement of Jewish refugees, hounded out of central Europe, was already a subject of concern for sympathetic politicians in India. By December 1938 Nehru was urging his old friend, the provincial chief minister in United Provinces, to offer government positions to skilled Jewish refugees and stre
ssing the urgency of offering them help: ‘I have received information that things are moving so fast’, he wrote to Pandit Pant, ‘that perhaps many of these unfortunate persons may simply be crushed out of existence unless some way out is found for them.’18The politics of the Middle East was always avidly followed in India and Muslims in particular watched the Palestinian question with concerned curiosity, following the Arab revolt and the British machinations regarding the creation of a Jewish homeland in the newspapers.

  Fascism and communism had left deep impressions on Indian minds and on South Asian political organisation in the 1930s. Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini had millions of admirers and books about them sold in great numbers, and their photographs regularly dominated the front pages of newspapers. India had its own forms of local militarism. Militant youth movements, including the Khaksars, Muslim League National Guards and Congress youth wings, had attracted surging numbers of young people who drilled, exercised, sang songs and marched through the alleyways and marketplaces of Indian towns. Some, such as the religious militants in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), celebrated a future vision of an exclusively Hindu India, and their leaders openly celebrated Hitler’s ideas and methods. The cross-currents of international fervour had distinct echoes in India.

  As the Spanish Civil War ended, the Munich crisis unfolded and Hitler and Stalin began to align, Europe’s troubles and the growth of fascism provoked a highly charged intellectual and divisive debate in metropolitan coffee houses and university common rooms. The assault on China by Japan was closer to home and watched with deep interest and concern. But even the internationally astute Jawaharlal Nehru could confidently state, ‘I do not think there is the slightest chance of a German or Japanese invasion of India.’19 Even as global events became daily more critical, and dominated the headlines, the threat of actual warfare on Indian soil was still far-distant; there were too many pressing concerns within India’s own borders.

  Many Indian leaders had some sympathy for the war. They wanted to know what India would get in return for fighting a war in the name of freedom. As Nehru saw it, the old world order was dead and the war would inevitably bring seismic change and a new world in its wake. The leaders of the major parties were under pressure from the public not to come away empty-handed and often the party followers wanted to go further than their leaders in using the war as an opportunity for pushing nationalist goals. But there was also a sense of uncertainty about taking advantage of Britain’s great vulnerability. Gandhi told how as he was boarding a train in Delhi, people in the crowd were smiling at him ‘whilst they were admonishing me not to have any understanding with the Viceroy’.20 Jinnah’s words to the Viceroy the same week held some revealing echoes of Gandhi’s. ‘He, Mr Jinnah, personally shared those sentiments of loyalty and that same readiness to give his full support [to the war effort]. But he was a public man and had to think about his followers.’21 Subhas Chandra Bose made clear, a week before the war started, ‘if war broke out between Germany and Poland the sympathy of the Indian people would be with the Poles’. But he then followed this with the pivotal question, ‘Whatever our subjective reactions in this international conflict may be, what are we to do as a nation?’22

  Different priorities, between the British and the Indians, started to show and drive rifts even where cordial relations and common purpose had previously prevailed. ‘Feeling hardened on both sides’, the newspaper editor Desmond Young recalled.23 The pre-eminent industrialist Ghanshyam Das Birla, whose factories were soon booming with wartime contracts, talked of British ‘wooden-headedness’ in private, while an ICS officer wrote to his parents that ‘The Indian race must I think be quite the most contemptible on earth at least the bits I have seen of it’, declared the Congress ‘incapable of running a Sunday school picnic’ and admitted that he had recently become ‘a confirmed diehard’ on the political question.24 This estrangement was a tragedy for those on the left of the Congress. They had long championed the anti-fascist cause from Spain to Abyssinia, and detested Hitler but felt embittered by the British stance. Nehru felt deeply let down by old British friends whose sights were now fixed single-mindedly on Europe: ‘It shows the enormous gap between India and England. I had not realised, when I was in England last, that this gap, which was obviously present, was quite so wide and unbridgeable as I now feel it is. Of course the war makes a difference and confuses people’s minds. But what a difference!’ Later he wrote to Rajendra Prasad, ‘What has surprised me more than the invasion of Holland etc., has been the quite singular obtuseness of the British.’25

  As the war proceeded, many British people, from journalists to Tommies, would come to sympathise with the Indian cause for political freedom, as we shall see, and the division was never simplistically along racial lines. However, this sense of two worlds drifting apart, of two peoples less entwined than they had been in the past, runs through many accounts of the time. The sheer geographical distance and the diverse priorities of imperial subjects and metropole pulled people in different directions. Across the world, empires were giving way to nation-states.

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  The Raj had a renewed sense of uncompromising confidence, as the democratic gains of the late 1930s were rolled back. As a wartime state, under the Defence of India Act passed in 1939, policemen and civil servants acquired unprecedented power and the state began to use its security apparatus for internal defence. Provincial governors could detain indefinitely anyone whom they believed jeopardised the war effort. These powers went far beyond any that had been in place in India since the First World War. ‘This is the largest district in India – 12,000 square miles I think – of which I am now lord of 4,000’, Ian Macdonald, who was rapidly promoted to new responsibilities, joked in a letter home to his parents, only partly in jest.26 The Act gave civil servants extraordinary powers: to control food distribution, to suspend newspapers, to seize property. In fact, the Act enabled the government to do anything considered ‘necessary or expedient for securing the Defence of British India, the public safety, the maintenance of public order or the efficient prosecution of the war’.27 Defence Acts were not unusual in wartime, and were also passed in Britain, but the difference in India was the great discretion suddenly centralised in the hands of a local magistrate. The Chief Press Adviser at the time, Desmond Young, well understood that there could be a blurring between the powers required to effectively fight a war and to run a disgruntled empire, particularly when nationalist protest had preceded the war by two decades. ‘Press criticism which in peacetime was just tolerable, provided always that it was “constructive” (or favourable), was now “disloyalty”.’28 These binaries of loyalty and disloyalty were the prism through which all political action was increasingly viewed.

  This logic was also applied to foreign nationals. Rules of internment varied considerably across South Asia, so that scattered German and Italian nationals had diverse experiences. India had small but significant communities of Germans and Italians in 1940, around 1,500 Germans and over 700 Italians. Many worked for the consulates; some of them were employed by firms such as Siemens Schukert and Agfa. They worked in businesses and companies, as doctors, missionaries and teachers. As elsewhere in the British Empire, as war loomed closer these individuals came under surveillance. The process was patchy and riddled with inconsistencies. In India, police faced particular difficulties in deciding who was potentially troublesome. The British Empire had by its very nature attracted global explorers and nurtured hybrid romances and it was not always easy to pigeonhole people by nationality. Border and passport control was rudimentary and less carefully controlled than in Britain, and the number of continental Europeans arriving in India was growing all the time as Europe’s ethnic patchwork came under ferocious attack from many sides.29

  Police detained some of these Europeans, including women and children, as soon as the war started. An Austrian mountaineer, Heinrich Harrer (who became famous for his escape from detention and time in Tibet), recalled that
once the war started the arrests went ‘like clockwork’.30 A large troop of police entered the restaurant garden in Karachi where he was eating and detained him immediately. At the Bombay Talkies, the German technicians and cameramen were arrested, including the director Franz Osten, who was later expelled and sent back to Germany. Whilst some Italians and Germans were allowed to roam freely, some were confined to the limits of a controlled environment within a two-mile radius of a particular police station.

  Nevertheless, despite the hostilities in Europe local relations between Europeans in India and the British rulers were often cordial, less coloured by the conflict taking place in Europe than by the prior dynamics of the Raj. German Lutheran missionaries in Orissa entertained members of the Indian Civil Service at a Christmas party in 1940 and later baptised the baby of the District Magistrate by reading out the Church of England Service when no other clergymen were available.

  Magistrates and policemen often based decisions on political risk as much as nationality. Jewish central Europeans could easily fall into the net if they also seemed politically suspect. The taint of communism or radicalism was a way to put troublesome characters behind bars. Leopold Weiss, better known as Muhammad Asad, was one of the first to be seized. A Viennese Jewish convert to Islam, he had been on the police radar for a number of years, labelled as a Bolshevik. He was interned in Lahore, and remained in the hill station of Dalhousie for the next six years. Surrounded by barbed wire, Nazis and anti-fascists lived inches from each other. Weiss was deeply worried about his relatives back in Vienna, aware of the pogroms and deportations taking place. His concern was justified; the entire family had been rounded up and sent to their deaths. His father, stepmother and sister did not survive the war. When asked many years later about his Indian internment he still recalled it with resentment. What did he do in the camp, for six long years? ‘Nothing. We were housed in seventy-man barracks. What could we do there?’ he remembered with some bitterness. ‘Once, at Christmas, we fought with the Fascists. We won, because we were sober and they were drunk.’31 Asad later became a prolific author on Islamic reform, but spoke only rarely of his years in the internment camp.