by Yasmin Khan
Despite the extraordinary assessment of the War Office that it would be ‘obviously easier for ten thousand comparatively intelligent Englishmen to reach a reasonably high standard in a foreign language, than to instruct a million far less intelligent Indians’,30 in actuality, much of the linguistic flow was at least as effective in the other direction, with many Indian sepoys able to communicate in English within a short time. The Indian Army’s language structures clearly functioned well enough for military operations and communication skills were sufficient enough for basic orders and military needs. But these slippages and misunderstandings of language rippled throughout the Indian Army in its later years.
But among the Other Ranks, more generally, it would be misleading to see war as a leveller. There were still important differentials of pay and conditions and when it came to food and sex, those two perennial barometers of social mixing, arrangements remained separate. One of the first tasks for the military commanders on the capture of the Eritrean city of Asmara, following the eventual fall of Keren, was the establishment of two sets of official racially segregated brothels, one for British troops and the other for Indians.31
Among sepoys, the time away from their families and the length of the stay in North Africa was starting to erode old ways of doing things and to change expectations of military life. In the desert all men seemed more equal. But this also meant more vocal demands for equal treatment. The sepoys started turning down cheap Indian bidis and asking for foreign cigarettes; they would not be fobbed off with lesser treatment, with bad equipment or poor-quality soap. ‘The Indian is developing European tastes which he is requiring to be satisfied on British Army Standards’, the commander of an Indian division overseas observed. ‘He has quickly learned to appreciate the European cigarettes and demands his share of what is available of British stocks, claiming that any other distribution would show discrimination against the Indian.’ Anonymous appeals from soldiers for better pay arrived at the General Headquarters in Delhi.32 These sepoys had already sacrificed much for the war by 1941. Medals for fallen comrades were not enough to assuage opinion as maltreatment started to be challenged, standards were now critiqued and pay and leave allowance came under scrutiny.
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Meanwhile, the fighting escalated in the Middle East and North Africa. In the spring and summer of 1941, Indian troops were playing a critical part in holding Persia and Iraq and seeing off an Axis puppet ruler, Rashid Ali. But earlier gains achieved with the help of 4th Indian Division, of which Richpal Ram was just one distinguished member, were being lost by late March 1941 as the see-saw battle between Rommel and the Allies went on: Benghazi was lost and the British imperial forces rolled back towards Tobruk. Until North Africa was finally secured for the Allies, battle went on backwards and forwards across the desert between El Agheila and El Alamein. The desert campaign ended on 4 February 1943 with the retreat to Tunis and the Tunis campaign that followed ended on 13 May 1943.
Large numbers of Indian troops were captured at Mechili in North Africa and taken to Italian POW camps. Among the Indian prisoners, Satyen Basu’s capture in North Africa by German troops was frightening:
Suddenly we heard somebody giving orders in German about 200 yards behind us. Then as if from nowhere, the whole convoy was smashed by a terrific firing from tanks and machine guns. In the night the fiery streak of every shot passing through the air could be seen. It seemed to me as if somebody with a giant broomstick of fire swept the whole convoy off the ground.
He was soon reassured to hear a German soldier say, ‘Indiano no enemy, Indiano friends.’33 Taken to Italian POW camps, he had times of hunger and anxiety and laboured digging trenches in Naples, but he also recalled local generosity, ten-pound Red Cross parcels with tinned meat, cheese, milk, sugar, tea, fish and chocolates, and a thriving black market; he even managed to acquire a violin. Inmates in the camp argued vociferously about the politics of the war. Was Gandhi right? What was the Indian responsibility to defeat fascism in Europe? They also started putting on their own theatre performances: Gurkhas doing Indian dances to everyone’s amusement, the men using tinfoil wrappings and Sikh pugri fabric to make costumes and saris, army carpenters making stage scenery. Compared to the experiences of some POWs who were held by the Japanese later in the war, these men had a palatable, even comfortable confinement.
About 15,000–17,000 Indians were taken prisoner of war in the campaigns around the Mediterranean. They suffered similar privations to their international counterparts – the monotony of incarceration and impatience while the war was being fought without them, the scrambling for precious foodstuffs, the moments of jollity and glimmers of hope. As with other POWs the particular camp, time and country of confinement made all the difference. The Indians were seen as particularly worth enticing into a fifth column by Axis leaders who recognised the propaganda potential of undermining the British Empire, as well as the attractions of gaining additional manpower. Attempts to suborn Indian sepoys and to use them as propaganda poster boys for the Axis were mildly successful, although limited to small pockets of men: a few thousand in Italian and German camps went over to the Axis in total and some were flown to Berlin and Rome. At a camp in Annaburg in Saxony (Stalag IV) several thousand were persuaded or pressured to join the Free India Legion by Indian activists living in Germany. In Italy, the smaller Centro Militare (India) trained up a select group of Indian saboteurs and parachutists. Axis leaflets showing smiling, well-dressed prisoners proclaimed in Hindi and Urdu, ‘They have saved their lives and are living happily in the prisoner-of-war camps.’ Just as in later years the INA’s formation would be kept from public knowledge, this was top-secret information in the wartime British Empire. When the Evening Standard ran a picture of a Sikh named ‘Chandra’ in a German uniform with the caption ‘an Indian quisling in Berlin’, Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, reined in the editor immediately.34Some men undoubtedly escaped and rumours of small bands of Indian POWs roaming around the Alps and southern France persisted for some time.
Italian POWs also flowed in the opposite direction in 1941, back towards the Indian home front. Thousands of the captured Italian prisoners from the Middle East and North Africa were shipped to India as POWs and disembarked at Bombay, where they were paraded through the streets in front of curious onlookers.35 Conditions varied considerably. Germans were housed in camps in Purandhar near Poona, Satara and Dehra Dun while Italians were placed in Ramgarh, Bairagah near Bhopal and Poona. In Ahmednagar Elios Toschi, an Italian prisoner brought to India directly from the battlefields of North Africa, along with about 7,000 men captured at Sidi Barrani, Bardia, Tobruk and Benghazi, praised the camp organisation for the quality of the beds, bedclothes, cigarettes and mosquito nets. Nevertheless, life was monotonous and over time many of the men felt they were forgotten and became more desperate. Health was the most serious worry. At the camp at Ramgarh many succumbed to beriberi and typhoid fever, ‘at an alarming rate’. The camp then turned into a sea of mud and was filled with mosquitoes when the rains started. ‘The lorries, with the coffins covered by the Italian tricolour, drove slowly past our ranks.’36 Several hundred Italians died while interned during the war in India, some from natural causes but the majority from illnesses caught while in confinement. For prisoners of war of all different nationalities, the war was characterised by a long, testing time of waiting in camps, longing for letters and hoping that their own news was getting through.
Within South Asia, opinions about the war in general remained diverse and depended very much on the location and perspective of the individual, his own economic prospects and the uncertain prediction of what course the war would take. Everywhere, however, South Asians wondered what the war was going to mean for the political future of their own country and how the war might be a way of leveraging freedom from colonial control. Some thought strategically about the possibility of higher wages and serving their families and communities by sending home savings. Few, though, anticipat
ed the great economic devastation that was about to unfold back home in the subcontinent.
7
Money Coming, Money Coming
ON THE MORNING of 26 June 1941, a series of earthquakes shook the Indian Ocean for three minutes. The writer Sydney Ralli felt the ripples in Delhi, recording in her diary how the ground moving was more frightening even than war.1 The worst-affected part of the British Indian Empire was the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The long arc of tiny islands dotted in the Indian Ocean had, since 1858, been the site of the Cellular Jail, a prison for the most threatening political opponents of the Raj, convicts considered too dangerous to keep on Indian soil. The jail was a place of dread, with cells designed so that prisoners could not see each other, the sense of loneliness and isolation in the midst of the black waters underscored in every brick.
A very small community of British officials and their families, numbering less than one hundred, lived on the islands. They were in charge of running the penal settlement and overseeing the colony, which was increasingly populated elsewhere with less high-security prisoners who were allowed to farm and settle the land. Alongside this community lived the descendants of prisoners who had finished their terms, and migrant and indentured peasants from mainland India. Charles Waterfall had been in the Andamans since 1938, when he was appointed Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. At the time of the earthquake he was nearing his fiftieth birthday. His had been a solid rather than stellar career and the posting in the Andamans was a mixed blessing. It took several nights by ship to reach the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which were much closer to Burma and South-East Asia than the subcontinent. The Chief Commissioner’s House was the single compensation for the isolation and the thankless task of governing the islands. Reminiscent of the grander homes in Indian hill stations, part Swiss chalet, part English country house, it was a vast wooden-beamed building, with intricately carved gables and shaded verandas, surrounded by well-cultivated gardens. The house was situated on Ross Island, where the higher-ranking officials lived, which could be circumnavigated by foot in an afternoon, and so society was necessarily tight-knit. Equipped with swimming pools, ballrooms, squash and tennis courts, the Chief Commissioner’s House had Italian tiled floors and was served by extensive granaries and a local bakery. The church had window frames of teak filled with fine Italian stained glass.
The number of prisoners in the penal settlement had been reduced to a few hundred and the jail was not full to capacity. The government had made attempts to settle less-threatening prisoners from other Indian jails on the island’s land in exchange for their labour, in new efforts to tame and develop the landscape.2 Every day at noon a cannon on Ross Island would boom, a reminder to the prisoners that they were not alone. In the late 1930s Indian politicians called vociferously for repatriation and the closure of the Cellular Jail and a serious hunger strike by 190 convicts on the island in 1937 had shaken, but not stalled, the administration of the penal settlement.
On the morning of 26 June 1941 the earth began to tremble on Ross Island. In a matter of seconds the buildings were uprooted and rearranged. The ballroom floor was severed in two, the house caved open and tree roots punctured the tennis court. Elsewhere, on the archipelago the damage was extensive. ‘For miles along the west coast north and south of Port Anson … the hillsides had slipped into the sea littering the beaches with huge boulders and uprooted tree trunks. It will be several generations before the hills are covered with jungle as before’, Charles Waterfall reported after touring some of the damage. ‘Parts of the coast appear to have sunk. All made ground has cracked or sunk. Port Blair harbour is believed to have become deeper by a couple of feet in several places.’ The centre of the west coast had been hit the worst, ‘trees fell, hillsides slipped, cracks opened in the earth, all huts collapsed and people had to hang on to tree stumps to avoid being thrown about violently’.3 The Cellular Jail, however, still stood, its high brick arches and ramparts undamaged. The earthquake’s timing was eerie. Some even saw it as a portent of impending doom.
That very same week that an earthquake shook the Andamans, Hitler attacked Russia. The brutal, unrelenting sweep against Russia in June 1941 would dominate the Indian news for months to come. For Indian leaders, who looked on with ‘anxious interest’, in the words of Nehru, the potential fall of the USSR was a sign of the changing world order, but also a threatening harbinger of fascism’s real menace. The Congress Working Committee commended the Russian people for their ‘self-sacrifice and heroic courage’ and there was deep sympathy with the plight of ordinary Russians battling the Nazi war machine.
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On the mainland, around the same time in late June 1941, a new shipyard was opened in the eastern coastal port of Vizagapatam to great public excitement. Four thousand guests attended the inauguration festivities, priests said prayers and blessed the site and astrologers were consulted on the timing. Five kinds of jewel were buried deep in the concrete foundations where a berth in the shipyard would stand. Garlanded luminaries of the nationalist movement, most notably future president of India Rajendra Prasad, gave speeches extolling the enterprise and Prasad laid a foundation stone at the site. Gandhi sent a message of goodwill – ‘May your enterprise be successful and may it be beneficial to the whole country’ – while the renowned poet Rabindranath Tagore spelt out the dream with more precision: ‘I hope the day is not distant when Indians shall sail the seas in their own ships flying the flag of their own country.’ Commemorative brochures were produced to celebrate the historic moment.4
Midway between Calcutta and Madras on the Coromandel Coast, Vizagapatam had a burgeoning port, fed by new railways connecting the city to Madras and the eastern countryside of India, which was rich in natural minerals and coal. The sheltered natural harbour faced away from the open sea, carved out between two protective promontories. The port was a strategic asset in wartime as it was well hidden and the deep waters could hold large ships. Here, manganese from the interior, crucial to the making of steel and iron, was shipped, cargo steamers carried goods along the coast to Calcutta to the north and Madras to the south and workers sweated through the night during the war, loading and unloading coir, tobacco, groundnuts and cloth for export, and receiving incoming machinery and cloth.
The new shipyard was the start of a bold new venture. The owner of the site, the indefatigable industrialist Walchand Hirachand, had grand hopes for constructing a steamship, the first Indian-built steamship. The ships bringing and taking goods to and from Calcutta and Bombay had usually been constructed in Glasgow and Liverpool. Steamships, Walchand speculated, would make him wealthier still (he was already one of the wealthiest men in India) and also create a prestigious trophy for Indian industry.5 Like many industrialists of the age he was not so much interested in waging war with the Germans or Japanese, as with making profit. The war presented opportunities to generate capital, to acquire technical assistance, to launch mega-projects and to found his own dream ventures. From the eighteenth century onwards British approaches to Indian shipping had been characterised by an unequal dualism, with one rule for British-owned ship companies and another rule for Indians. There were higher insurance rates and bars to Indian involvement in shipping, the deskilling of local crews, and outright resistance and dirty rate wars which drove Asians out of the business. War, many businessmen believed, would turn the tables. They eagerly hoped for new opportunities – unprecedented profits and the advancement of Indian heavy industry, and the chance to manufacture for the domestic market for which they had waited so long.
If the war had not really touched South Asia as yet, in the waters around India it had already started. The war in the East depended on shipping and shipping was the lifeblood of the empire. By March 1941, 643,198 imperial servicemen had moved through the waters of the Indian Ocean sea routes, many of these men in huge convoys, carrying troops in vessels that had been rapidly reconditioned and adjusted to accommodate men. Ships carried everything from
coal and diesel to mules, petrol and tinned meat. India needed aeroplanes, cars, machinery and ships. The ability to sail commodities across the globe, either around the Cape or through the Suez Canal, had never been greater or more necessary.
Nor had it ever been more dangerous. U-boats had already started hunting in the waters of the Indian Ocean and raiders were soon laying minefields in the approaches to Indian ports. Attacks on shipping were an effective way of crippling supply lines. At least 385 Allied, British and neutral ships sank in the Indian Ocean over the next few years, many of them manned by Lascars. Indian businessmen waited anxiously to see if their orders would arrive, and both imports and exports suffered, while orders for new machinery could take three or four attempts. As fronts in Egypt and the Middle East became central to the ongoing conflict, India came under pressure to support the war by supplying manufactured goods to the expanding Indian Army and also the wider British cause. Channelling supplies from the eastern empire towards the Middle East was a solution to the pressures placed on Britain as the industrial and manufacturing pivot of the empire. After years of drawing on the empire for raw materials in exchange for manufactured goods, Britain now needed its colonies to provide ready-made products: guns, uniforms, paper, steel, leather boots, if not for export, at least for import substitution.
