The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  We saw lots of rupees in these recruiters’ pockets and their nice warm ‘sweaters’. They told us we would eat rice every day, see new places. What did we know about war? Nothing! … The recruiters didn’t talk to us about war, only about pensions and food and clothing. They were very clever. When you are young and have always been with your mother and father what do you know of the suffering of going to a foreign country? Nothing!19

  The greatest resistance came from women. Mothers hid their sons, trying to keep them away from the recruiting parties, sending them up into the more isolated hills or out of the village to stay with relatives. The richer the family, the more likely its young men were to escape the recruiting parties. Other mothers resorted to pleading and emotional blackmail to try to stop their sons from going. One Nepali captain who served in Burma believed almost half of Gurkhas in the Second World War left without parental permission.20 Mary Des Chene, an anthropologist who worked closely with the families of Gurkhas in one Nepali village, recorded the distinct feelings of misery and hardship associated with wartime many decades later. As one old woman, a widow from the war, told her, ‘Before they took our food but during that war they grabbed our people too.’21 Some of these women never had a chance to get to know their husbands: typical is Santamaya Limbu, who was married at the age of fifteen to a man she barely knew, who left for his post within a month of marriage. After ten months he came back for a number of days and then she never saw him again. He was presumed dead but she never had confirmation. She keeps his photograph and medals to this day.22

  The word dukha, sadness, resurfaces in many memories of the time. Brothers, husbands and fathers vanished and there was little support extended to the women left behind. Women were left with hungry mouths to feed and farmland and paddy to plough and harvest. Their days might start now at five in the morning, ending at ten or eleven at night, husking rice, cooking and cleaning, collecting firewood, water and fodder. Children and old men adjusted to the new conditions, worked longer and harder in the fields. As a Nepali woman recalled, ‘I hear the whole world was fighting but why they needed my son’s father to settle it, I can’t understand.’23 Sometimes men crept away in secrecy, fearing their mother’s displeasure. There was little ceremony or fanfare.

  ‘Mother May Ask Where My Son Has Gone’ is the title of one of the most popular folk songs of Nepal, still well known today. The song was popularised by the legendary folk singer Jhalakman Gandharva, who served as a Gurkha later in the century. The lament recalls the sadness of families left without their young men and the loss of kin, and captures the ways in which the recruitment of a family member echoed throughout a family. Its continued popularity perhaps suggests the profundity of wartime experience in Nepal.

  House to House, door to door

  They came to recruit

  Asking if we would like to be a Lahure

  Our hearts concurred

  The major saheb in the corner, he checked

  The squint eyed and the deaf, they went out

  The healthy went to the hospital

  And were taken in

  Six months to that day

  We paraded barefoot

  Many are wounded in the chest, and many more in the head.

  When I remember the wound in the head, my heart shakes. Poor Souls!24

  3

  Into the Middle East and North Africa

  IN BOMBAY, BY 1940, the loading of troop ships was becoming a familiar sight: the departure of long columns of men, kitbags slung over their shoulders. The troop ships were tugged out from the harbour when the tide came in before being released onto the open sea. As everywhere, the destination was a closely guarded secret, causing much speculation, although the painting of the desert camouflage on regimental vehicles was one sign that the destination would be in the Middle East or North Africa. Harnarain Singh stood on deck as his ship pulled away from the Indian coastline and later remembered the many destroyers, troop ships and battleships as a beautiful sight. Others felt more nervous. Shells and bombs became a constant threat for soldiers as well as for Lascars; Nila Kantan was in a convoy, escorted by three cruisers and six destroyers as he sailed through the Red Sea:

  There was a naval action – the Italians started attacking in the middle of the night. I tried to go to my action station, but the naval people were so quick that they completely blocked all the watertight compartments. I got stuck in one. When the ships started firing I began weeping like children – because I had never seen all these things. Then a naval officer came and said, ‘don’t cry lad.’1

  Many men longed for action and felt the excitement and tension mounting, especially as they reached their destination and came within sight of enemy aircraft. Harnarain Singh remembered how tense the men were; as his troop ship drew close to the North African coastline the men spotted enemy planes, and immediately picked up their rifles, yelling, firing into the sky with no hope of hitting their target.

  Boredom was the chief danger though. And conditions on board ship could be tough. Officers and Other Ranks experienced the same voyage very differently. An Indian officer, Krishna Kumar Tewari, recalled his journey from South India to Burma: ‘The ship was absolutely packed. Indian Other Ranks were accommodated on the lowermost deck … a number of men fell sick. This was due more to the overcrowding in the lower decks than to the roughness of the sea.’2 Indian troops were frequently accommodated on the open decks. For villagers from inland districts, perhaps never having seen the sea before, it was a disconcerting and alien journey.

  British Tommies setting out for India, sailing in exactly the other direction, also suffered.

  They [Other Ranks] ate at long tables nearly the width of the ship, men on both sides and very cramped, and they slept on a hammock above the table, or on the table, or on the floor beneath the table. Food was delivered in buckets and very large tureens to the top end of each table and then ladled out to be passed along to the far end until all were served. The atmosphere was fetid at all times but much worse during the period of seasickness as through the Bay of Biscay.3

  John Ffrench remembered the toilets as ‘just frightful. They were quite inadequate for our needs and usually became blocked and ankle deep in water by mid day.’ On the SS Andes sailing from Bombay, there were no facilities for Indian cooking and the cooks could only use petrol burners on the open deck: ‘You can imagine the difficulties in preparing chapattis in the howling gale we ran into off Aden. None of the recruits had ever been far from their villages, much less overseas, so that they did not turn out to be good sailors either.’4 Men whiled away their time, playing carrom and chess, cards, reading, sleeping, talking, pacing the decks in order to try and keep fit, while the rot set in and muscles weakened and training faded from memory.

  Thirty-one thousand Indian troops had already started arriving in the Middle East to fight the Italians in North Africa. Commanded by General Wavell, who would later become the penultimate Viceroy of India, they destroyed ten Italian divisions. They captured 130,000 prisoners and swept over 500 miles. This was the first good news of the war for the British. The men of the 4th and 5th Indian Infantry divisions would be celebrated across the empire, their victories announced with great pride in India.

  Back in India, what did people know of the battles taking place elsewhere? And what kinds of information did soldiers and their distant families share? Like everywhere in the world, people wanted mundane news: of births, deaths and marriages, of men who had joined the army or had returned on leave. As ever in war, it was difficult for men to share their experiences of battle with their loved ones. Premindra Singh Bhagat, a cheerful twenty-two-year-old officer from the Royal Bombay Sappers and Miners, was in East Africa in 1941 and was particularly eloquent when trying to capture the details of battle. He wrote a long evocative letter for his seventeen-year-old sweetheart, Mohini, who was waiting for him back in Poona, trying to share with her what he had experienced:

  Sorry to sound so melodramatic, but the tru
th is the last few days have altered my outlook, not that I am pessimistic. In actual battle one is heavily bombed from the air, there are mines on the ground and machine gun bullets in the air. I have been in an area, mentioned twice on the wireless, where in forty minutes some fourteen aeroplanes just littered the place with bombs. I lay flat on the ground, and after the bombing was over I was covered with earth, two bombs having dropped just five yards away. That was my first escape; the second from bombs was two days ago. They say I have been very brave for some small thing I did, but believe me I was the most scared person in the world.5

  Many could not find the words to express themselves and the illiterate relied on letter-writers and fellow soldiers in any case. The presence of the censor was well understood and letters made subtle gestures towards more explicit meanings. Like soldiers everywhere, the men also wanted to reassure and console their loved ones. Premindra later regretted his ‘sloppy letter’, wishing that the censor had stopped it. Letters were usually far more concerned with the basic stuff of life: family marriages, petty local disputes, the health and protection of elderly parents and children, how to handle savings accounts and matters of buying and selling, land disputes, relationships with kin and neighbours, spats and feuds. As the head of the family or at least as the main breadwinner, soldiers often carried the heavy responsibility for family well-being on their shoulders. They took great care to respond to household matters and to suggest ways of protecting their relatives, even from hundreds of miles away.

  The Indian Army encouraged contact between men and their families. The officers knew that this was essential for morale and that worries about domestic life would weigh upon the soldiers, especially when so far from home. But the cost of postage was a burden for families with sons overseas; in 1940 and 1941 so many letters were being posted without stamps that it became a government matter. In May 1941, the Defence Department agreed to pay the difference on letters and parcels that were not sufficiently stamped, finding that returning them to the sender ‘could give the wrong impression’. Soldiers were issued with free ‘safe arrival’ postcards to send to their loved ones.6

  But for many families, there were very long absences and poor communications, given the remoteness of some of the theatres in the desert, and later the jungle. Mohini, Premindra Singh Bhagat’s beloved, remembered ‘days when she didn’t get letters for a while and would panic’.7 Sepoys’ families looked for help from local District Welfare Boards, set up to provide support. Originating in Punjab for soldiers demobilised from the First World War, the system had spread and boards sprung up in North-West Frontier Province, United Provinces, Poona, Madras and Rajasthan by 1940. Manned by retired officers (often with the help of their wives), these boards operated in diverse ways. In Punjab they tended to be more elaborate and reputable, with local tehsil subcommittees manned by retired soldiers who knew the villages and the regiments well. Elsewhere, they were underfunded or less well established. The ideal was a one-stop shop for all the grievances that affected soldiers’ families – news of the progress of the war, employment for ex-soldiers, gratis payments and grants for widows and the elderly who had run into trouble, helping the wounded to receive treatment in government hospitals and sending retired or wounded men to homes or training institutes where they might learn a trade. They were there to help if disease or famine struck a family, to give out free airmail letters to relatives and to forward news from regiments.

  The boards were also the chief channels for remittances, an important function as men often handed over more than three-quarters of their wage to their families. The thousands of appeals and petitions to the boards by families suggests that there was a considerable amount of faith placed in this institution. The idea was to smooth the path of the soldier and his family, and to help dodge red tape or even the law courts if necessary. If a soldier was serving overseas or in a war area then any court proceedings naming that soldier would be suspended. In Punjab, the tuition fees for children whose fathers were on active service overseas were waived up until eighth class. District boards also had a good grasp of detail. They advised families about how best to support their men, recommending the ideal contents of parcels: chocolate, cigarettes, chewing gum, cottons, silks, knitwear, pens, pencils, pipes/tobacco pouches, safety razors and blades, small musical instruments, soap, face cloths and sponges.8 But they also had a more political role; in 1940–1941 the Punjab Board was mainly preoccupied with helping to enlist men and ‘counteracting anti-recruitment propaganda’. In Assam, the war board was being used to ‘deny false rumours spread by enemy agents’.

  In Punjab, the leading politicians stayed closely entwined with the military. Sikander Hyat Khan, the chief minister of the province, had his sons enlisted in the armed forces and early in the war went on a tour of the Middle East and North Africa. The army’s careful nurturing of links to the homeland was another way of enforcing discipline; the disapproval of a father or uncle might be feared more than the stern words of an officer. Reporting back to the head of the family on the conduct of a soldier was another way of keeping him in check. The army’s reach stretched, then, right back into the soldier’s home. And many of the families from the older, established recruiting grounds had been inculcated with loyalist values which they passed on to their children, even as they watched them depart for war, urging them to keep the oath they had pledged to the military, telling them often to face bullets squarely, not to take one in the back. Exhortations to behave and to avoid getting into trouble frequently peppered letters to soldiers.

  News from the war reaching India could be patchy. Taking possession of the letter in the first place was not always straightforward. At least one postman was accused of charging for handing over a letter and routine complaints about the post office flooded in. Postmen were the bearers of news – good and bad. ‘The postman’s statement that I am dead is baseless’, wrote an infantryman to Kanpur. ‘You should forget that. It is quite wrong. I am quite well here by the grace of God. I am not feeling bad here. Ask the postman how he came to know that? Forward me too a clear statement from him.’9 Soldiers reprimanded their families for overpaying postage costs, telling them not to waste money, while families complained about the cost of postage, some even using it as a reason for not writing. From Dera Ismail Khan, ‘You must have thought that Khuda Bux is angry with you, but that is not the case. The cause of my silence is that the time is very critical now … An average family man can’t post you a letter with eight annas stamp at such a hard time.’10

  Tempers could fray when letters were delayed or lost, each sender defending his record of writing or making convincing excuses. A Sikh Recruiting Officer wrote to another Sikh officer in his regiment testily, ‘I have written you two letters before I went on tour, I can’t say why you don’t get them. Well I can’t answer it myself but I have been writing to you. Now it is up to you to believe it or not.’11 For those engaged directly in battle finding the opportunity to write was more difficult. While Harnarain Singh served as an officer in the Middle East for three years, including at Keren and Tobruk, his new bride remained in Punjab and like so many other wives wondered whether her husband was alive or dead. For one year of the three she heard nothing from him at all – none of the letters that they wrote to each other reached their destination. For the bride who, in keeping with tradition, had moved in to live with her in-laws and had a new baby daughter to look after, this was a testing time.12

  As time passed, the wives embroidered shoulder flashes for military uniforms, wrote and waited for letters and carried out harder and longer menial tasks. From Nepal, an observer recorded shortly after the war the ways in which villagers thought about the Lahure who had gone away to fight in foreign places.

  He is always in the thoughts of those who are in the village. During the evenings they talk a lot about him, commenting on letters they have got, and information given by men on leave. They anticipate what they will do during his leave: a marriage, a ceremony for the end
of mourning. A mother makes a wish that one of her children who is sick will be better before her husband comes back, so that he finds all the family in good health.13

  As elsewhere in the world, the Second World War for many women in Asia was a time of waiting and worrying.

  At the same time, the Government of India struggled to convey a consistent propaganda message. How to convey to the public what was happening overseas and how to make the war ‘real’ to those who felt very far away from its heartland? ‘The war, its causes and effects and implications will never, to my mind, be understood by the simple country folk of villages’, wrote Henry Twynam, the Governor of the Central Provinces, to the Viceroy.14 There was a great deal of unease in colonial circles about how much villagers did – and should – know about the war. Of course, knowledge and understanding of the war varied from region to region, person to person. For the literate, detailed coverage of events was available in English and vernacular newspapers. The number of foreign correspondents based in India grew as the fighting escalated in Asia. Politics was hotly and strenuously debated and many people followed the news closely and were intensely concerned to know about British fortunes, in particular as France fell and Russia was invaded.

  The radio was becoming a crucial source of information and – although still mostly available only to rich households – radio sets with loudspeakers would be placed in public parks and outside shopfronts, particularly when a vital piece of news was about to be broadcast. One challenge keenly felt by the British was the popularity of German radio, strictly forbidden although extensively listened to. German services in Hindustani reached wide audiences; when 13,507 listeners were surveyed in 1940 by All India Radio the preference for German radio was striking.15 The government prohibited the public dissemination of Axis broadcasts in June. Sayeed Hasan Khan, at the time a child in Bareilly, United Provinces, remembers the family gathering around the wireless to hear German radio broadcasts, while the shutters were kept closed and a servant stationed at the door as a guard.16 Even the ICS was not immune to the appeal of the German programmes. Almost everyone who could listened to them. Ian Hay Macdonald told his family that the BBC compared ‘very unfavourably with the German wireless’, both in terms of reception and quality, and that the German broadcasts were ‘more musical, bright and chatty’.17