by Yasmin Khan
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In Britain itself, the fight for civil liberties was a concern for a small segment of society, and campaigns were waged by the usual sympathetic suspects: Quakers, churchmen, union workers and communists, members of the International Women’s League and the Peace Pledge Union. Whipping as a public punishment for anti-British activity during the Quit India movement hit a particular nerve with the anti-imperialists, making headline news in the UK in 1942. Members of the British public from provincial towns like Hove and Leicester wrote letters to the India Office. George Bernard Shaw commented on ‘this unpardonable flogging business’ and the publisher Victor Gollancz wrote a letter that was published in the New Statesman and Nation. The pro-Indian MP Reginald Sorensen asked in the House of Commons about the ‘deplorable and medieval practice’, to which Amery uncomfortably explained that whipping in India was ‘administered by a light rattan cane and not by the “cat”’. The issue reached cabinet level, with ministers worrying about the idea of corporal punishment in India and Amery reporting that feeling was ‘tremendously strong’ against it.50
Nonetheless, much of the political reaction, and Amery’s attempts to minimise news of floggings in India, were driven first and foremost by concerns about the propaganda issue. The Viceroy duly passed on instructions to provincial governors to keep publicity of floggings to a minimum. ‘It is very difficult to know what to advise,’ Amery wrote to the Viceroy, ‘except that in so far as it is inflicted as a punishment – and it may have to be so increasingly if things get really critical – care should be taken to avoid publicity. There is no doubt that the Left here and our opponents in America are making the most out of it.’ The Governor of Bombay demurred that whipping was only carried out on ‘the tough, sturdy, bullying type of offender’ in any case.51
Not so easily deterred, Indian voices in Britain continued to be raised against inhumane punishments and the infringement of liberties. A young Bengali student living in Oxford, D. M. Sen, wrote several letters to the New Statesman and Nation attacking the treatment of prisoners in Indian jails, the use of fetters and shackles, beating up by policemen and bodily punishments. Sen went on to have an extended correspondence with the Secretary of State and even managed to meet him in person. Although Amery admitted that some stories might have had truth to them, the Secretary of State brushed off Sen as an agitator who was raking up stories. When a Chief Justice of Bombay who was coming through London, and happened to be passing through the office as this matter was discussed, ‘expressed a view that it was undoubtedly a fact that beatings up occurred in Police Stations’ and said that he had personally seen the marks of such manhandling on the bodies of fresh inmates in jails, this was a step too far for the India Office.52 Penderel Moon, the brilliant and maverick British civil servant who was increasingly aligning himself with the Indian nationalists, resigned his position in protest about the treatment of political prisoners, but this minor embarrassment to the government was quietly hushed up.53 The management of news regarding the disciplinary practices in India was far more important in London than the actual practices themselves.
The priority in London was, understandably, defeating the Nazi state. This left little sympathy in Blitzed London for Indian activists. Indian nationalism was becoming increasingly divisive in British society. Krishna Menon was still touring, speaking and scribbling pamphlets, working long days and into the hours of the night. But he felt increasingly demoralised, and at one point admitted that he felt like ‘packing up the whole show’ and returning to India. Even a published version of Nehru’s statement about the Cripps Mission didn’t sell in Britain, he complained.54 The death-knell of the Cripps Mission resounded long after Cripps had returned to London and would continue to echo throughout the war. It opened up a gulf between commentators, with many Britons suggesting that the Indians had turned away from an opportunity to settle the constitutional issue to the benefit of all, while the Indian leadership reiterated their own sense of bewilderment at the weakness of Cripps’s hand. Propaganda and newspaper censorship further obfuscated the news that was reaching Britain, meaning that once again the sense of distance and separation between Delhi and London was enhanced. Yet again, the differing vantage points of Britons and Indians could not converge in the face of the wartime changes. The failure to find a legitimate channel for Indian expressions of political will would have long-lasting repercussions.
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Asaf Ali was settling into his detention in Ahmednagar Fort. Like the other Congress leaders, Aruna’s husband heard about the eruption of the Quit India movement and the events sweeping the country remotely, from inside his jail cell in Ahmednagar. He also saw in the newspapers that a warrant had been issued for Aruna’s arrest and that she was absconding. Knowing her, and the recent radicalisation of her opinions, he feared that she was directly involved in violence, anathema to Gandhi’s ideals. He was right: Aruna was working hand-in-glove with men who had set off bombs or sabotaged railway lines; Nilubhai Limaye was a guest at a place she was staying at in Calcutta, and said of her years later: ‘I had not seen an organiser like her.’55 From his prison Asaf Ali sensed she was close to the front line, a sympathetic comrade to the insurgents, if not directly organising the hacking of rail tracks.
Along with the other imprisoned Congressmen Asaf Ali agonised about what was taking place. In jail, he experienced a deep turmoil as snippets of news about his wife’s underground activities reached him. Occasionally he would get an Urdu letter from her written under a pseudonym. ‘Seeing Rene’s [Aruna’s] handwriting was almost like travelling home after a long absence and seeing her at the railway station’, he wrote on 14 December. ‘How I used to crane my neck out to catch a glimpse of her, waiting to wave to me.’56 A month later his prison diary was becoming more anguished and angry: ‘For three days I have wanted to write to Rene but each time I started to write I tore it up. I do not know how to contact Rene and not the over zealous political stranger who has dominated her mind and activities during these five months.’57 When the government declared a new ordinance sanctioning capital punishment for stealing military goods, he feared for her future. ‘I know, and feel perfectly certain, that Rene will never go near violence, but how can I be certain that the persecutors will not try to implicate her in some dire offence?’58
Asaf Ali’s pride was also damaged. The balance of their relationship had been founded on a condescending paternalism: he had been forty when they married, she was just nineteen. At first she had appeared a clever but innocent ingénue who relied on him and looked up to him. He had been the leader featured in newspapers, the politician and the public figure, while she had been his charming but supportive companion, more noted for her saris than for her political views. Now the tables were turned as his wife’s fame and popularity eclipsed his own within the Congress movement; his wife was becoming someone new, born into a new identity through her activism, as he noted in his diary ‘an over zealous political stranger’, bobbing her hair short and using unknown pseudonyms.
Running through Ali’s diary one can detect the frustrations of the intellectual liberal questioning his own lack of passion, his own lack of willingness to use the same political methods as Aruna: ‘I can’t help admiring even her extravagances’, he wrote, wondering if she was better fitted for the challenges of life than him. Asaf Ali profoundly disagreed with her on many of her actions, but this tipped him into pangs of despair and self-doubt. His obsession with Aruna’s activities and her whereabouts was magnified by the loneliness and boredom of incarceration; her underground activity preoccupied him, until he fell into a three-day mental collapse during which he projected many of his own fears about death, ageing and colonial subjugation onto his wife’s dangerous but bold escapades. ‘[E]verything has become stale in this place where we have been rotting as in a graveyard.’59 He feared, rightly, both his own overshadowing and the damage that this time of separation would do to the fine balance of their relationship.
Asaf
Ali’s premonitions were filled with accuracy: he sensed the burgeoning influence of Jinnah, the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha and the way that the political ground was being opened up to the right-wing and fascistic movements in the country. He judged, again probably rightly, that the Congress was in such disarray and indecision about the right course of action that the Working Committee members would rather remain in jail than be forced to take a position in the open political field. He was particularly prescient about the situation developing between religious political activists in the country, regarding the collapse of the Jinnah–Gandhi talks, which tried to bring the two leaders together to find a solution to the political gridlock later in the war, as a total calamity. After he heard about the failure to reconcile the two leaders, his thoughts returned to his wife and ‘I prayed for her deep down in my soul’.60
Aruna’s appeal among many students and young people in the cities and towns was burgeoning. She was celebrated as a modern woman. She had made a decision not to have children and had cut her hair short. She was a byword for bravery and emancipation, a modern-day Rani of Jhansi. She was a mirror-image of the many women working independently in war industries and as Women Auxiliaries or WAC (I). Aruna Asaf Ali’s evasion of the British authorities became like a real-life detective story, echoing the popularity of detective pulp fiction in India in the 1940s. Her cat-and-mouse game with the British made a mockery of the police and surveillance powers of the state and showed up the holes in the state apparatus. Aruna was also a pin-up, modern, beautiful, pictured slightly dishevelled in her homespun saris, and the paradox of her vulnerability and her toughness caught the public mood and made her an icon of the 1942 revolution. The name Aruna became fashionable for new babies born in wartime India. Rumours (probably grounded in truth) circulated that she was moving across the country by aeroplane, even on planes requisitioned for military service. A schoolboy of fifteen at the time, later a Supreme Court advocate, who played truant from school for months in 1942 and acted as a messenger boy for the rebels, remembered her as ‘the most beautiful, romantic, revolutionary inspiration’.61 Police attempted to suborn other protesters by telling them that Aruna had been arrested and had confessed while she remained underground.
After nearly a year of incarceration, on the morning of his fifty-fifth birthday, Asaf Ali saw an article about a trial in absentia for his wife: ‘As my eye caught her name in the chronicle yesterday, my heart stood still for the moment.’62 From prison he read about the sale of their car and the possible auctioning of their house, although he wrote, ‘I don’t care what they do to the property as long as they leave her alone.’63 So time went by, and the months dragged past; there were annoyances and disagreements in their letters. She found his pity and dismay irritating. He found her dogged determination to stay underground immature. When a parcel arrived from his wife containing a shawl, cigarettes and cologne, their growing estrangement was made palpably real. He didn’t like the scent and the cigarettes were too strong. Nehru was worried about his old friend, wondering how he would feel if his wife or daughter had gone underground to take up arms for the nationalist cause.
In 1942 Nehru gave his entry to the American edition of Who’s Who. It noted that he was now serving his eighth prison sentence, as well as the usual list of educational and biographical data. Under ‘miscellaneous’ his entry read: ‘Dislike of politics but forced by circumstances into them.’ Under the category for ‘achievement’ he wrote: ‘That I have so far kept more or less sane in a mad world.’64
15
Scorched Earth
IRONICALLY, 1943 WAS a year that saw little fighting for Indian and Allied soldiers in South Asia. Divisions fought in Sicily and in Naples but in India the army was undergoing a concerted phase of training, re-organisation and preparation for the looming engagements with the Japanese. Yet, if we include civilians, it was the year with the most wartime casualties for India. There is a strong case for integrating the dead of the Bengal famine into calculations of the global war dead, much as the casualties of Stalingrad and Hiroshima have become part of global war histories.
On the afternoon of 12 July 1943, a crowd of forty to fifty men, women and children gathered at the railway crossing at Sitarampur on the borders of Bihar. They had brought bags and woven baskets with them along with sticks and farming implements. Freight carriages carrying grain would be passing though on the East India Railway line and this hungry band of villagers was determined to find something to eat. When the first train passed through, the guards onboard drove back the crowd, but when a second train approached the people became desperate. The guards fired on the crowd, killing an unknown woman.1
This frantic attempt was one of many on the East India Railway line in 1943. In Bihar and Bengal, the line was often under attack from hungry villagers who came to meet the passing trains. In response the railways increased the numbers of guards. ‘People come from as far as 15 miles to attempt to obtain small quantities of grain from railway cars’, stated one report. ‘The guards are often stoned and occasionally arrows are shot at them … railway officials are of the opinion that this is only the beginning of these troubles.’2 Although the great hunger of 1943 was most devastating in Bengal, where it resulted in mass starvation and death, there is ample evidence that across many parts of India people were going hungry, forsaking meals and cutting back on their meagre portions of essentials by the second and third years of the war and deaths caused by starvation occurred in other provinces, including Assam and Orissa. Famine is an exceptional event but it is also the extreme end of a continuum with other forms of food deprivation and malnutrition; hunger and shortages had become endemic early on in the war. Famine was the nadir of a much wider food problem, which afflicted India and many parts of the world from 1939 until the early 1950s, amplified by precarious supply, worsened by lack of trust in government price controls, limited rationing and provincial protectionism.
Government attitudes towards food shortages consistently took metropolitan ideas of sacrifice and making-do as their reference point, ideas transferred from the British home front. The government severely overestimated the Indian peasant’s ability to cut back, living as he or she often did on the margins of viable existence in the first place. As the Bhore Committee Report on public health in India had already established, most Indians had a diet ‘defective in quality’ at the start of the war. A peon in full-time government service was simply unable to afford to support the calorific and nutritional needs of a family of four. Almost a third of people regularly consumed fewer calories than they actually needed for their basic energy requirements. When food shortages hit Assam, the government communiqué told people that ‘military requirements are bound to take precedence over others’ and that this was just one more ‘aspect of our sacrifice in the case of the war effort’.3 People were advised to grow more soy-beans and onions, rice and lentils. This attitude may have been applicable to those in Britain who had previously enjoyed a surplus, but was hardly relevant to subsistence share-croppers already on the edge of life.
Food quality and range was poor; even the most privileged soldiers complained of scrawny chickens, small and damaged vegetables, dirty grains mixed with stones; and good-quality milk, eggs and meat were luxuries. The military presence had also undermined the availability of foodstuffs across India and was adding to the pressures on supply around the region. Initially, American quartermasters in India dealt direct with food suppliers, negotiating prices and buying directly, with dire consequences for some local markets. It was only after a year that the forces were prohibited from procuring fresh food supplies from any source other than military depots.
Military demands for meat were outstripping supply by late 1942. Despite attempts to import South American or Australian beef, there had been little progress on this idea, and the majority of beef consumed was from local Indian cattle, sold by cultivators to the army. Cattle from Orissa and Bihar usually used for milk and ploughing were slaughtered to
meet military demands. The Indian government, in response to local reactions, rapidly passed laws banning the slaughter of milch and young working cattle. The army had by its own admission ‘exhausted’ local supply by 1943.4 ‘The food here is not good. The meat is poor because it cannot be hung and there is little variety of vegetables’, Kenneth Hulbert of the Royal Army Medical Corps wrote in his private diary. ‘But when I see the local people looking like walking skeletons it makes me feel grateful.’5 Clive Branson noticed this too: ‘In the United Provinces there is a dearth of bullocks. Due to indiscriminate slaughter of cattle by military contractors and their agents kisans are not able to get bullocks.’6
Soldiers bought vegetables, eggs and other goods for themselves at some markets. In Assam, mine managers noticed that undernourished colliery workers were underperforming and affecting coal supply. ‘The vitality of the labourers was being affected by the scarcity of fresh foodstuffs, such as milk, eggs, meat and vegetables in the local bazaars’, the managers complained to the local military. ‘All such supplies are purchased by troops, particularly the Chinese, to the detriment of the working population. Apparently the shortage of fresh foodstuffs is not so acute where the local bazaars are out of bounds to troops, and it is suggested that bazaars in all affected areas should be placed out of bounds.’7 The broader picture of food supply was one of shortage and competition for sources, even beyond the famine-struck regions of Bengal.
Widespread famine, as was to strike in 1943, is, however, of a different order altogether. It leaves lasting imprints on the demography of a region by affecting marriages, births and deaths. It brutalises people, forcing stark choices about who will live and die, and pushes people into leaving their homes. It is often accompanied by disease, by crime and by banal evil.
