by Yasmin Khan
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On 18 September 1940 a German U-boat torpedoed the SS City of Benares in the Atlantic. Seventy-seven British children, many as young as five or six, who had been sent as evacuees from Britain to Canada perished. This tragedy stunned the empire. But less well known was the fate of the Indian crew manning the ship. Of the 160 Lascars aboard, 101 were drowned or died in the shipwreck.11 Many of them have only ever been remembered by their forename, without a recorded date of birth and with the simple epithet ‘boy’ or by the basic description of their duty on board the ship. Soria the apprentice, Sheikh Labu, a pantry boy, and Mubarak Ali, a baker, were among those who perished: they remain little more than ghostly traces in the archive. Abbas Bhickoo, who was twenty-two years old, and from Sangameshwar, Ratnagiri, in present-day Maharashtra, was one of the Lascars who managed to scramble onto a lifeboat. With other survivors, he lay adrift on the lifeboat for eight days until they were eventually picked up and taken to the west coast of Scotland. But Bhickoo died shortly afterwards, presumably from exposure. His grave still stands in Greenock in western Scotland. Yousuf Choudhary, who was a child in Sylhet at the time, in present-day Bangladesh, remembered how the news of a seaman’s death would ripple through the community. ‘As the news came, the dead seamen’s relatives and friends would gather and begin crying and shouting … soon the bad news spread from house to house, village to village. The people became nervous, worrying that they would be next in line for this shock. The British public never heard the cry of the seamen’s widows.’12 Shivers rippled through seafaring communities whenever a torpedoed ship was reported: over the course of the war 6,600 Indian merchant seafarers would lose their lives, over a thousand would be badly wounded and over 1,200 would be taken as prisoners of war. Although the war was still far from Indian towns and cities, the experiences of networks of seamen and soldiers, already engaged in wartime service, were starting to colour perceptions of the war back in India.
5
Not a Paisa, Not a Man
THE WAR NEEDED funding. In anticipation of the looming costs of conflict, the Indian and British governments had hammered out agreements in 1939 and 1940, dividing the cost of the war between the two exchequers. Put simply, this resulted in India continuing to pay for her own defence, in the form of the fixed costs of a peacetime army, while Britain footed the bill for any additional wartime expenditure. Britain would pay for the vast increase in recruitment, the assignments of soldiers overseas and the capital costs of developing industry and infrastructure. This looked, at first sight, like a fair deal for India, and was undergirded by political considerations. The headline story was that Britain was paying the cost of the war. Churchill was painfully sensitive to this fact, bursting into a ‘Wilsonian Volcano’ at the mention of the debts that were accruing to India in the form of sterling balances.1 But in reality, this was a payment deferred. Sterling credits were lodged with the Reserve Bank of India for use after the war – a tempting prospect for those dreaming of post-war reconstruction and nationalist projects. During the war years themselves, however, the money had to be raised within India. The government turned to tax, borrowing and ultimately, to devastating effect, to increasing the amount of money in circulation.2
The Indian public was asked to pay its share not only through taxation but also through voluntary collections and subscriptions to special funds. The War Fund, a voluntary fund established in 1939, and collected by District Magistrates on behalf of the government, soon placed a new burden on reluctant ‘donors’. This afflicted peasant cultivators and affluent middle-class elites alike and contributed towards the public disenchantment with the war. The War Fund, in the hands of local administrators, came to serve as an acid test of loyalty to the imperial state. Payments to the fund could also be used to secure small favours from officials and to untie red tape.
The War Fund was widely resented. In the eyes of many villagers this was a semi-voluntary tax. If a man needed a favour from local officials or was submitting a job application for state service, a subscription to the War Fund became all but obligatory. Princes and feudal landlords made extravagant donations but traders and smaller farmers were also expected to contribute. ‘Petty government servants and minor officials dare not say “no” when they are asked to contribute. I just had a case like this from Allahabad district’, Nehru wrote, referring to his home town in United Provinces. ‘A poor village shopkeeper was asked to give Rs 15 or Rs 20. He said the most he could possibly give was Rs 5. He was cursed and sworn at and immediately a notice was given to him … Defence of India Rules … His case is up today in a court here.’3 Nehru’s antipathy to the War Fund is corroborated by other sources from the same province. There was pressure on local civil servants to generate funds and the amounts that they amassed were reported back to their superiors (along with the number of men recruited) in a pyramid of extraction. For Manzoor Alam Quraishi, a junior civil servant in United Provinces at the start of the war, the collection of war funds became part of his daily routine: ‘The entire district staff from the Collector to the patwari had to give topmost priority to “War Work” which meant mostly at our level, “collection of donations for War Funds” and help in the recruitment of soldiers.’ All routine deskwork was suspended. ‘Intensive touring had to be done by all the officers for war work.’ Quraishi remembered how the District Magistrate used elaborate rituals in the villages to celebrate large donations, wearing full ceremonial dress, as villagers looked on.4
In response, resistance mounted. Protesters chanted, ‘Na ek pie, na ek bhai’ (Not a penny, not a man). It is telling that in a classic Hindi novel of the time, Aadha Gaon (Half a Village), when the character Phunnan Miyan, the father of a soldier serving abroad in the military, is asked to donate to the War Fund, he retorts, ‘I’m not giving an anna to the war fund. Do whatever you like.’ By the end of 1941, 55 million rupees had been collected for the War Fund, more than had been donated to the fund in the whole duration of the previous war.5 Large gifts to the War Fund signalled to administrators that the donor was a reliable fellow. ‘Good’ families had a reputation for loyalism and a long history of service. When a District Magistrate penned a note on the promotion file of one Maharaj Singh from Muzaffarnagar district, he noted that his family had been conspicuously loyal, ‘supplying’ 1,502 recruits to the Indian Army, purchasing war bonds of 352,000 rupees, donating 6,500 rupees towards the War Fund and the Red Cross and making payments towards funding propaganda and other war activities.6 In essence, the landed often paid into the War Fund to secure access to government services and to certain rights. When the Katjus, members of a prominent Congressman’s family, tried to purchase a house in the coastal resort town of Puri in 1940, to their surprise, despite all their papers and finances being in order, the government refused the sale on the basis that no contribution had been received to the War Fund.7
The extraction of cash for war funds could involve arm-twisting or promises of favours in exchange. The Viceroy’s War Purposes Fund raised £3,500,000 of which half was sent directly to Britain – £150,000 to go to the victims of the Blitz, with other money forwarded to victims of Nazi aggression in Europe. But this money was not just extracted from the landed, but also raised by burdening poor peasants who were already struggling under inflation and the dazzling rises in the cost of wheat and cloth. The collection of the War Fund was part of the Raj’s struggling attempt to cement people together in fellow feeling about the war effort, to psychologically bond peasants and soldiers. In reality, it brought an extra pressure to bear on the Indian peasant and added to his growing suspicion of the sarkar. The War Fund and recruiting were often spoken about in the same breath. The government expected people to supply money or manpower and families complained to their soldier-sons serving abroad about the extortion: a long complaint from Gorakhpur in United Provinces was sent to the Middle East about how the village had been ‘disgraced’ when local landlords and a police superintendent turned up at the village with a gang of po
licemen to collect the War Fund. ‘They treated the Headmen and other respectable men of the village in a very disgraceful manner’ and forcibly collected subscriptions of ‘half the land revenue from everybody’ by entering houses, searching, and asking for details of accounts. ‘We have always been a loyal village’, the letter-writer protested, ‘with 100–125 recruits serving at present in the army.’8
Within months of the start of war, the Viceroy was worrying about the manner of collection for the war funds. Congress seized on examples of intimidation. Tales of arm-twisting floated upwards. In a wonderful piece of viceregal euphemism, Linlithgow noted ‘a considerable amount of testimony which might be interpreted as throwing doubt on the spontaneity of the contributions now being made’.9 Across India all kinds of innovative methods were being perfected in order to encourage ‘spontaneous’ giving. In Assam, the Governor admitted some problems with ‘over zealous officers’.10 In Sind the government had considered using ‘assessed demand’ – in other words an involuntary tax for landowners. One notable, Nabi Baksh Bhutto, doubled his original subscription of 1,000 rupees after a dressing-down by the Governor, who wrote him a letter expressing his disappointment with the paltry size of his donation. There was also evidence of prized gun licences being granted in exchange for War Fund donations. In Punjab, the Governor admitted that there was a certain amount of ‘grumbling’ among the rural folk, and in United Provinces they decided to tighten the rules so that appeals should only be made to ‘well to do gentlemen’ with ‘no further collections from tenants or small landholders’. Pressure was also being applied to clerks in the civil service hierarchy with some government servants being encouraged to give one day’s pay a month.
When Linlithgow considered completely changing the system he met a wall of resistance from civil servants. They reassured him that although there had been certain attempts to ‘curry favour’ the War Fund was a success story that could not be scaled back, for fear of defeatism. In fact, any change would have a deplorable effect and be seen as backtracking on the war effort. The truth was that collecting the war funds gave British officials in India something concrete to deliver in support of the war. It connected them directly to the effort and generated a sense of purpose. Stationed far from the centre of war, while their brothers and cousins back in Glasgow or London were enlisted, many officials felt deeply frustrated and enervated, cut off from the real action in Europe. Much later, in the 1940s and afterwards, this feeling of having been denied a real wartime role afflicted numerous colonial officials stationed in the more remote districts. Collecting for the war funds was a small but decisive way to do one’s bit.
A new generation of British officers had been arriving in India. Of course, the Raj was not as timeless as some of its advocates liked to pretend. By the 1930s, debates among British leaders about the right course for India had become more polarised. Within the administration there had been a sea change over the course of the interwar years in the kind of men who ruled India. No longer exclusively drawn from a narrow circle, or the same small stock of the most elite private schools, the men who arrived in India by the 1930s were usually middle class rather than aristocratic, curious and adventurous rather than classical orientalists. In comparison to their predecessors they often had less prior familiarity with each other or with India.
Many British men had started to turn away from a life in the Indian Civil Service, either troubled by moral compunction or realistic about the fact that the empire might well draw to a close over the coming decades. There was more scepticism about the long-term prospects in the service. British men in the ICS reportedly suffered higher rates of depression, premature retirement and disillusionment than in the past. Governors made assiduous attempts in order to keep some white representatives visible in the administration; ‘It would be a disaster if the small British element in this vitally important branch of the administration should disappear altogether’, wrote Henry Craik, the Governor of Punjab, regarding a vacancy in the Public Works Department in 1937, although failing to specify what this disaster might entail. On the other hand, when British men did present themselves for service, they still needed, in the view of the old guard, to be of the ‘right’ sort.11 The Indian Civil Service was changing, racial lines were blurring and it was not as impenetrable for Indians or for middle-class British as it had been in earlier decades. Yet, in the highest echelons of power, and where it most mattered, the British still kept a firm grip on the functions of the state: most provinces did not see an Indian Inspector General of Police until after Independence.
Men now arrived in India to take up positions in the Indian Civil Service having read E. M. Forster’s Passage to India and George Orwell’s Burmese Days. They were not immune to debates in the British press and had often a deeply complex relationship with the idea of empire, and their views had been influenced by socialist and communist ideas in Britain. They were reflexive about their own purpose and the moral propriety of empire. They were rarely uncompromising diehards on the question of the British imperial mission, although they often maintained an idealised notion of taking moral and material betterment to the East.12 Many men who would serve in India during the war and beyond, such as Malcolm Darling and Penderel Moon, had an enlightened and optimistic attitude towards eventual self-governance. They particularly believed in the power of modern science, and the application of development in all of its guises, from tube wells to aeroplanes, to deliver a better quality of life to the average Indian peasant.
Compounding the sense of frustration and uncertainty among British administrators was the plain fact that British rule had self-evidently not delivered on its promises: 90 per cent of the population of the country still faced dire and inescapable poverty. The vast majority of people lived in villages, and relied on crops for sustenance. More than half the population did not own or rent any land at all, and relied on day wages or seasonal labour to make ends meet. India’s poverty was endemic. A small number of rich lived in a country that was overwhelmingly poor. Three hundred and eighty million people lived in India and most of them lived as subsistence farmers relying on their crops, subject to indenture and debt, victims of landlords and their henchmen, living precarious lives vulnerable to small changes in wage patterns, natural catastrophes or calamities. Caste discrimination, which put dalits at the bottom of the social pyramid, had been challenged by Gandhi and by the dalits’ own leader, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, but had not been radically transformed.
Malnourishment and undernourishment were commonplace. At the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, south-eastern districts of Punjab were suffering some of their worst famine conditions for a generation. Poverty was becoming more of a public concern across the world, nourished by the apparent successes of Soviet policies in feeding and developing the Russian populace and fuelled by a new belief in man’s ability to redress the balance of rich and poor. But this concern cut across the political spectrum and included conservatives and Gandhians. Gandhi was occupied with practical remedies to alleviate hunger and malnourishment in the late 1930s, and recommended certain types of leaves and grains as a way for the hungry to forage and sustain themselves. He spelt out the predicament of life for the majority: ‘No one has, to my knowledge, said that the Indian villager has enough to keep body and soul together.’13
The state was expected to take the lead in addressing poverty. This was a consensus shared in surprising quarters and by Indian and British leaders of all different political backgrounds. ‘We are conscious that, for the man in the street and the man in the fields, life often lacks not only all that may provide comfort and dignity, but even the greater part of that which is necessary to sustain life itself’, said Sir Muhammad Zafarullah Khan, a loyalist follower of the Raj, who represented the Viceroy’s Council in a speech at the start of the war.14 The belief that the very poor could be helped by the right kinds of state intervention, by sanitary housing, improved healthcare or population control, was emerging everywhere as a hal
lmark of the age. Shortly after the commencement of war, Sir Joseph Bhore, a self-styled Indian version of William Beveridge, chaired a report investigating the state of public health which underlined how precarious lives were in India, reflecting on the ‘large amount of preventable suffering and mortality’.15 With measured but damning effect, the report pointed to social causes ranging from state neglect, poverty and unemployment to illiteracy and social customs. The literacy rate in India on the eve of the Second World War was 12.5 per cent and life expectancy was twenty-six years of age. Blatant poverty, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, fuelled the nationalist cries for Independence. The Indian National Congress, and to some extent the Muslim League, as well as smaller but influential parties which represented Sikhs, socialists, dalits, Anglo-Indians and Hindu nationalists, based their demands for immediate Independence not simply on nationalism alone but on the widely held belief that British rule had reversed earlier Indian chances of prosperity by encouraging reliance on extractive cash-crop markets and free trade, and that not only the political rights of people but the economic welfare of the country were at stake. The Raj had delivered on few promises of development.
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Gandhi announced his own formal programme of resistance to the Raj in October 1940. It began haltingly, only really taking on momentum in early 1941. People had long been waiting for a bold and definitive act by him in response to the war but the actual programme for the satyagraha was oddly muted and heavily circumscribed compared to the great salt march or moments of civil disobedience which had gained Gandhi such international stature in the 1920s and 1930s. For many Congress followers, it was disappointing or confusing, not going far enough at a time of critical leverage against the state. Gandhi was tightly holding the reins of civil disobedience, trying to keep the restless public under centralised Congress control, in particular to restrain violence and keep the movement close to his own spiritual as well as temporal concerns. Gandhi was more contemplative about the subject of violence than ever, in the face of the war now taking place. He wanted to shine a moral light on the war, to hold up light to dark. ‘The idea is to make all action as strictly non-violent as possible’, Gandhi announced. ‘How far I shall be able to present an example of unadulterated non-violence remains to be seen.’ Gandhi called on certain specially selected individuals to make gestures that would lead to their imprisonment. The chosen satyagrahis gave inflammatory speeches in public places and gradually the movement opened up to other individuals. In January 1941 members selected by Provincial Congress Committees were permitted to step forward and to invite imprisonment by making peaceful protests like chanting anti-war slogans and after that came ordinary Congress members. Gandhi’s tentative, experimental attempt to encourage the courting of arrests and peaceful individual satyagraha resulted in 20,000 arrests. Yet the movement was not a serious challenge to the Raj. High wages in the cities, driven up by war work, and the availability of employment meant that the crisis for the Raj was averted. For now, the peace held, but the foundations of the old order faced steady erosion.
