The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  A number of other Jewish refugees found themselves interned in India. One Mr Joschkowitz, who had been born in Germany to Jewish parents and described himself as ‘a victim of Nazi and anti-Semitic prosecution’, had fled Germany and stayed temporarily in France, England, Egypt and Iraq before finding himself in India, where he was interned at Dehra Dun. He appealed with desperation for release. ‘Several times I have tried to explain to the Authorities the paradox of my position but … without result.’32Others worried about their association with or marriage to Germans. A Mrs Pohlmann, in Calcutta, who had married a German at the turn of the century, pleaded that she should not be interned or sent out of India.33

  As the provincial governments and local magistrates extended their powers under the Defence of India Act, surveillance was devolved to local and provincial police and from early 1940 it was they who made ad hoc decisions about internments. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, an Austrian who had trained as an anthropologist at the University of Vienna, had a German passport. He was friendly with senior government officials, so instead of camp internment he was ‘confined’ to Hyderabad State, in reality living as a guest of the wealthy nizam, for the first part of the war. ‘I was in the position of an enemy alien, but fortunately I had good connections’, he later recalled.34 In the 1940s he was carrying out anthropological fieldwork amongst local tribes, which laid the basis for his future career at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

  Special branches often had only names and addresses to work with and the police often lacked the necessary linguistic skills to investigate properly. Detection was an imprecise science. ‘Our own records … were practically non existent as previously they had given no cause for investigation. We did not even know whether there was a Nazi Party among the big German community, or what the relation was between the Germans, Italians and Japanese following the formation of the Axis’, one police chief from Bengal, Philip Finney, recalled.35 His own attempts to establish investigations into Axis fifth columnists involved finding a British policeman who had German parentage and could speak German, whom he ran as an undercover agent.

  Finney ran a network of Indian agents including house servants, chauffeurs and the head waiter at the German Club, who spoke both English and German. Interception of the mail of foreign nationals, which should have been authorised instead by the Indian Home Office, was taken up energetically by the police force (‘I felt this was a case where one should act illegally’) and accordingly when German and Japanese mail arrived at the post office it was temporarily smuggled out before being returned to the sorting office. ‘We didn’t really find out much about German spying, although two people I can recall caused us considerable thought and some anxiety.’36

  Across the cities of South Asia, routine policing and administrative duties now became saturated with the concerns of the war. It was difficult to separate out civil and military imperatives and this would become ever more apparent as the internal and external defence functions of the state blurred, and the policing apparatus was turned ever more inward, towards the Indian populace.

  Underneath this controlled surface, there was a strong streak of active resistance. The great ferment of political ideas of 1940s India was already in full swing and tussles over political ideologies were deeply and bitterly felt. Politicians struggled to articulate a response to an international war which was meaningful for their followers. Some dalit leaders thought of their own community’s share of military jobs. Some Sikhs wanted to protect their historic advantages in the army. Jinnah began articulating a powerful new brand of religious nationalism. Jailed communists protested by hunger-striking. For peasants, with less contact with the state, the war was even more obscure – a quarrel between Europeans not rooted in Indian conditions – but they were also on the march, campaigning for their own freedoms. Kisans protested everywhere for more land and more rights against the predations of landlords.

  By mid-1940 small pockets of resistance had begun erupting all over the country. Allah Ditta and Ghulam, both butchers in a village of Montgomery district, were prosecuted for exhorting people not to give money to war collections. Ghulum Nabi Janbaz of Amritsar was imprisoned for ‘Delivering [an] objectionable speech, speaking highly of Herr Hitler and condemning the British’, and one Sohanu of Bhanala for making anti-government and anti-recruitment utterances.37 Mulk Raj of Rahbur was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for printing anti-war statements. In Punjab ‘a small Muslim boy’ was arrested in Lahore for singing an anti-recruitment song. Women sang songs cursing the railways that swept off their menfolk to war. A memo was issued to policemen across India to watch out for agents provocateurs who dissuaded young men from signing up as soldiers. ‘The volume of specific reports reaching army headquarters of attempts to dissuade would-be recruits from joining is considerable and comes from a wide area though chiefly in the United Provinces and Punjab.’ The memo warned of ‘anti-recruitment propagandists travelling in trains and talking to serving soldiers and recruits’, also of anti-recruitment activists turning up in villages at the same time as paid or volunteer recruiting parties arrived, talking men out of joining up on the spot.38 Intelligence officers had a tendency to see organised agents lurking behind random events. Not all defiance was organised on the grounds of nationalism but it did have an inner logic. People feared being sent away to fight in far-distant lands to battle against what ever more appeared to be a superior enemy. Villagers engaged in their own debates about the wisdom of joining up, and arguments started up between ordinary passengers on trains about the value of the war.

  2

  Peasants into Soldiers

  FIFTY-THREE THOUSAND men were enlisted in the Indian Army in the first eight months of the war. By late 1940, 20,000 a month were joining up. By the end of the war the army was over 2 million men strong, a vast intricate machine which needed to be fed, clothed, equipped with arms, moved and housed. The Indian Army was never a singular entity. Some of the toughest infantrymen and artillery would trek across the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East before moving on to the completely different demands of jungle warfare in Burma and north-east India. Many would be away from home for three years or more. Some would revolt and leave the Indian Army altogether, defecting to the Japanese. Some were officers from privileged families, trained at Sandhurst or Dehra Dun, more at ease with their fellow British officers than with the men under their command. Others were doctors in Indian Military Hospitals. Some would have a more comfortable war, manning depots, teaching languages, plotting air-routes, fixing vehicles, working on scientific schemes. And behind them all stood the non-combatants who made the Indian Army function: the washermen, tailors and boot-makers who maintained, repaired and replaced uniforms, the barbers and cooks who looked after the needs of the men, the nursing orderlies and the sweepers, who mopped up the camp and latrines. Religious teachers, pandits and munshis, mule-handlers and vets, all accompanied the troops. Behind the caricatures of ‘martial races’ were millions of people with miscellaneous backgrounds, ambitions, fears and needs.

  Indian soldiers had long been used for a dual purpose: sent overseas to fight for the empire and used closer to home to conquer territory and to secure the frontiers of the Raj, as it expanded ever outwards and absorbed Indian-ruled territories into the empire, piece by piece. Indian soldiers were the motor of expansion and in the vanguard of imperial defence from the nineteenth century in Java, Malacca, Penang, Singapore and China. Indian troops fought against the Mahdi uprisings in Sudan, in the Boxer Rebellion in China, in the Afghan wars and in Tibet. They both triggered and helped suppress the Indian uprising of 1857. In the First World War, 1,302,394 Indian soldiers had left the subcontinent to fight in France and Belgium, in Gallipoli, Salonika and Palestine, in Egypt and Sudan, in Mesopotamia, at Aden and in the Red Sea, East Africa and Persia.

  In 1939 the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, who was born in Peshawar and had grown up in the military cantonments of North India, published a novel d
edicated to his father, Lal Chand, a metalworker turned soldier who had fought in the First World War as a sepoy. His book, timing uncannily with the start of the next global war, told the story of a company of sepoys from a village, thrown into the dislocation and horrors of Ypres. It emphasised the faraway nature of the First World War, its eerie other-worldliness for men coming from north-west India, their difficulty in making sense of the trenches. The first scene depicts the ships carrying the men towards the ports of France:

  ‘Is the war taking place there then?’ a sepoy asked. No one answered him as most of the sepoys did not know where the war was … ‘So we have come across the black waters safely then,’ he said to himself apprehensively, as if he really expected some calamity, the legendary fate of all those who went beyond the black seas to befall him at any moment.1

  In 1939, many of the First World War veterans could still be seen, sitting chatting by tea shops or sitting on charpoys in the villages of Punjab. Some still wore items of uniform, a faded jacket or hat. If you asked them they would fetch their medals from old tin boxes or wrapped up in cotton bundles. They told tales not only of horror, but also of heroism, adventure, travel and exotic women. Elderly veterans helped to round up new recruits. In Rajinder Singh Dhatt’s estimation, there were twenty to thirty men in his village in East Punjab who had also been in the First World War. The First World War had brought price rises, revenue hikes of over 15 per cent and political dislocation to India, alongside some 74,000 deaths. Yet the war itself had always been remote, something heard about by civilians but less often seen. The idea of a total war, which brought calamity right into Indian households, was not really contemplated. At the start of the Second World War many people drew a parallel with the First and believed this new war would follow the same script. They did not expect it to come to their own shores.

  As yet, few knew where it would be fought or for how long. When people contemplated war, they cast their eyes northward to the frontier with Afghanistan. Over a third of the army was stationed on this frontier in 1939 and the army had grown accustomed to thinking of the enemy as rebellious Pathans and murderous mullahs, ‘not only fanatical but armed to the teeth’ in the words of the Viceroy, who was absorbed by the frontier through the first months of the war.2 The army had been beating back the followers of a charismatic and evasive Pathan chieftain, the Faqir of Ipi, since the late 1930s. He had been trying to push the British out of the frontier country, especially around the region of Bannu, and had started to be accredited with miraculous powers, as he repeatedly escaped capture and death. The fighting was tough and sustained. The faqir’s followers mined roads and set booby traps at junctions and on bridges; his band of roaming guerrillas launched surprise attacks on soldiers with rifles, grenades and swords. Weekly news arrived of kidnappings of civilians and soldiers, daylight raids and ambushes on main roads and frontier towns. The frontier tribes looted mail trucks and fired directly on the military.

  In response the government spent over 15 million rupees in a year trying to pacify the rebels; the RAF and the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) dropped red warning notes from the air before bombing villagers in Waziristan into submission, strafing them from the air and machine-gunning them from armoured cars. ‘The embarrassment in the present position’, confided the province’s governor about the unclear aims of the campaign, ‘is that we maintain a large military force in a potentially hostile country, while at the same time, seldom if ever is any real military objective offered.’3 By 1939 the rebels were losing ground. But the worst fears of the Government of India still turned on the ‘Russian menace’ and the idea of the Great Game, the fear of Russia taking advantage of the volatile frontier to break into the British Empire. The state issued plans for action in the event of a Russian invasion, with a northern line to support the Afghan government in Kabul and a southern line to forestall Soviet troops around Kandahar. A Nazi or Italian enemy seemed far-distant and less pressing.

  The Indian Army was slowly trading horses for tanks. Indian Army chiefs saw this as a way to fortify South Asian defence but London soon started pressing for increasing numbers of troops to be sent to the Middle East, where the Italians had declared war on 10 June 1940, which expanded the theatres where Britain needed to send men. Force Trout was sent to Iraq in August 1940 in order ‘to stiffen the morale of the Iraqi government’, to protect the refinery at Abadan against sabotage and to protect the line of communication to Palestine.4 There was a tension between these domestic and international needs; manpower was stretched like a very thin skein around the Middle East and Asia in 1940 with too little equipment, training or shipping available. The Indian Army was already widely spread all over the world, even in the very first year of the war. The soldiers of the 6th Rajputana Rifles, for instance, could be found from the Mediterranean to East Asia as early as September 1940. The 1st and 4th battalions were readying to fight the Italians in North Africa, the 2nd and 3rd were battling tribes in the North-West Frontier Province, the 5th battalion was doing garrison duty in Hong Kong and the 6th was still being formed in northern India, and was soon destined for Bengal. The Indian Army existed to protect and fortify British regions of interest.

  This was, though, an army being scrambled for action in the face of unprecedented challenges. The army still lacked motorised transport and was heavily reliant on mules and horses. It was also severely short of everything from guns to boots. Delays in raising regiments and in sending them out to operations occurred while equipment was shuttled from place to place. Some in Delhi believed that the internal defence of India should still be prioritised and remained reluctant to leave holes in India’s own defence, wary of the situation at the frontier and the strength of the rebellion there, while others in London wanted troops extracted for the European and African fronts as quickly as possible. Numerous internal tussles over money, equipment and men ensued. Some regiments were left with second-hand equipment and substandard training. The sepoys at war on the Afghan border did not know that very soon long days in rugged hill country would be replaced with the deserts of North Africa.

  The vast, almost unfathomable expansion of the Indian Army was beginning. Joining up as a volunteer after the start of a war in Europe still involved a leap of faith, a step into the unknown. As propaganda regularly reminded the world, this was a ‘volunteer army’ not raised by conscription. It was far easier for men from the traditional recruiting lands of North India to learn the ropes. Many Jats, Rajputs, Pathans and Sikhs from North and north-west India had come from generations of military service, had always expected to join up, in war or peace, and regarded themselves as tied to the sarkar by bonds of fealty. In parts of Punjab, Rajasthan and west United Provinces family expectations and traditions, the more prominent presence of the military in the daily lives of the village, and the welfare and resources provided by military investment to their areas, had all cemented bonds with the Indian Army. Punjabis still made up 60 per cent of the army in 1939. In these districts, villages had been carefully cultivated, government had given strategic assistance over the years to the local farmers and the expectations and experiences of war were part of local folklore. The systems of promotion, leave and pay were all understood.

  In Punjab, medals and scars of war were worn proudly as heroic symbols. In the irrigated tracts of the southern Punjab, landholders with sprawling estates could be relied upon to drum up men and to provide them for the sarkar as soldiers. In return, these local landlords had untrammelled power on their own estates, received the benefits of government investment in irrigation, the ability to continue to cultivate and sell, to hunt and to live their lives undisturbed by the rulers, while retaining the ear of the governor if any small difficulties needed easing. By 1940 some of these older solidarities had started to break down and the zamindari families that the British looked to, to prop up their rule in the region, had often begun an interminable decline into genteel poverty. Henry Craik, the aristocratic Governor of Punjab, had been in India since 1
899, and now feared that the ‘old families who have for generations used their influence in support of the administration’ faced sinking into ‘comparative insignificance or poverty’.5 But the days of the great loyalist zamindars were not numbered just yet, and when war broke out some of these old links between crown and country were revitalised.

  Here, the military was a well-known and domesticated beast. ‘I went with happiness. My whole family for generations has been in the army and it was my dream to do army service’, remembered Ali Akbar. But even for these men, real information about the war was sometimes scarce. ‘When I enlisted that’s when I found out that the war had started’, Ali added.6 Among the Sikhs, recruitment was a traditional avenue for employment and income, leaving a number of nationalist Sikh leaders in an awkward position in 1940, caught between the desire to furnish their followers with jobs and their own ambivalence about serving the British. Master Tara Singh wrote to Gandhi asking him not to do anything that would limit Sikh army recruitment, to which Nehru tartly remarked it was not possible ‘to have it both ways’.7 Some leaders had long been straddling the uncomfortable position between their own anti-imperial sentiments and their followers’ reliance on the state for jobs and resources.

  But in other areas, recruitment was less straightforward. In 1940 the political agent in the remote region of Sabar Kantha – a princely state in what is today the Gujarati-Rajasthani border, a scrubland, far-removed from big cities and in the shadow of the Aravali hills – sent out a circular. He wrote to chiefs and landlords seeking Rajputs to join the army. He was looking for men aged sixteen to twenty-five, with a minimum height of 5 feet 5 inches, a chest of 33 inches, and weight of at least 112 pounds. The local landed magnates or thakurs wrote back dutifully one by one, politely informing him that no one was suitable or interested or available. ‘Now there is not a single Rajput available for recruitment in the Indian Army’, replied one. ‘There is no possibility’, wrote another. ‘I have the honour of informing you that the Rajputs and Mohammedans residing in this state were called by me for recruitment and exhorted to join the military service, explaining the terms stated in your letter but I regret that none shows his willingness to join the army and so no suitable candidate at present is available from here.’ Another told the agent: ‘Regret to inform you no response whatsoever’. Some blamed ‘a lack of warlike and martial spirit’, others the ‘backwardness’ of the area. The agent reminded the thakurs in further letters of the advantages of joining the army, the free rations, clothes, and games that soldiers would be able to access. Development and the promise of a more modern future were used as enticements to induce the men to sign. The thakurs were asked to tell the men that they would have electric lighting and the chance to learn to read. But still nobody was forthcoming. In Malpur State, the young males asked for more time ‘to think over the matter’.8