The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  The consequence was that the largely Hindu Congress was castigated for wanting to create a ‘Hindu Raj’. There was a grain of truth in those claims. Some Congress politicians had long flirted with Hindu nationalism. In a few towns and villages, Congress used Hindu religious imagery to mobilize support during the elections. In Bengal, Congress tried to win over the Hindu Mahasabha, which claimed the mantle of being the only true nationalist organization in the province; they also talked of a common Hindu identity to include lower castes. By 1938 Congress leaders emphatically asserted their secularism. Worried about alienating Muslims, Nehru insisted Congress banned members of Hindu nationalist organizations from playing any role in its activities. In the United Provinces, Congress did connect with some strands of Muslim opinion, trying to recruit Muslim members en masse, but none of this helped undo the alienation most Muslims felt from the still largely Hindu body. Congress’s attempt to incorporate different groups into their own structures looked like an effort to assimilate rivals and annihilate the different religion and identity of Muslims. As one critic wrote, Congress’s aim was ‘that the Muslims should walk into the parlour of Hinduism and be swallowed up’.

  As Indian-run ministries were formed, British officials withdrew from positions of executive authority in India’s provinces. The British retreat to Delhi or Simla after 1937 led to the de facto partition of India between regions ruled by representatives of the Congress high command and regions ruled by other parties. The division occurred, more or less, between the central mass of the Indian subcontinent and its peripheries to the east and west; between areas populated mostly by Hindus and those peopled mainly by Muslims. This split was not, however, a straightforward one between Hindu and Muslim communities. Congress did not claim to be a Hindu organization and the leading ‘Muslim’ organization, the Muslim League, had performed catastrophically in the 1937 elections. None of the parties elected to power in the non-Congress provinces claimed to speak on behalf of a single Muslim community. The politics of non-Congress India was dominated by organizations claiming to represent the distinctive circumstances of different regions, not an all-Indian identity.20

  But in protest at Congress’s effort to centralize power, Muslim leaders began to conjure up a rival political entity. If Congress insisted on national, centralized state power, Muslim politicians increasingly thought they needed to speak the same language. Congress’s victory in 1937 led Muslim leaders in the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal to authorize the leader of the All-India Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to negotiate on their behalf at an all-India level for example. Central Muslim representatives such as Jinnah argued that if Congress would not dismantle its ‘Hindu Raj’, they needed to push for the creation of a Muslim state to exist alongside it.

  That state was spoken of in a vague and abstract way. To give it definition would have alienated too many potential supporters. There was no sense here that Muslims had a shared history or common institutions, little reference to India’s Mughal heritage, for example. As historian Faisal Devji argues, there was no effort to link Muslim nationhood to ethnicity or land. For Jinnah ‘Muslim’ was an almost totally empty political category. When a Muslim state was first proposed at the Muslim League’s Lahore conference in 1940, its backers could not even agree whether it would be one or many sovereign entities. For most of the men who supported it, a Muslim state was merely a device to force Congress and the British to concede to Muslims significant power throughout India. But the new state had a name, which began to be shouted by crowds at political meetings with increasing intensity after 1940: Pakistan.21

  Historians interested in the division of India and the creation of Pakistan often tend to focus on the high politics leading to the split. Partition is seen as the tragic result of negotiations between the leaders of governments and political parties, resulting in the ‘Transfer of Power’ of the unified sovereignty of the British over India to two states at a single point of time. But a claim to sovereignty is not the same as the reality of being able to rule. The process of partition was shaped as much by the anxious facts of political power on the ground as negotiations in Viceregal drawing rooms. In fact, long before August 1947, governmental power had already begun to be practically divided.

  Losing their heads

  The Second World War accelerated this process of division. War forced the British government to cede the practical self-government of Indians in more spheres of life than ever before, as mobilization without Indian support was impossible; but mobilization occurred through a complicated mix of powers that often ended up creating divisions and antagonism. As importantly, resources were mobilized in a way that meant the economic troubles of the depression intensified. War created insecurity. It pushed many parts of India into famine. In the process, it created populations that saw themselves less as members of a nation on the verge of independence than as members of communities under attack.

  Indian politicians were not sure how to respond when war broke out in September 1939. Congress’s nine provincial ministries resigned in protest at the Viceroy’s decision to declare India at war without consulting them, and were replaced by the direct but weak rule of provincial governors. A few nationalists on the state-socialist end of the political spectrum were sympathetic to Britain’s fascist antagonists, but the most vociferous campaign in the early days of the conflict protested against nothing more formidable than a monument commemorating the Black Hole in Calcutta. In 1940 the Bengali leader Subhas Chandra Bose organized a demonstration to pull down a memorial justifying British conquest, was put in gaol and then escaped and fled to Germany. Bose turned up in Berlin to ask the Nazis for help leading an insurrection against the Raj. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Indian Communist Party pledged its support for the imperial state once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and Russia was an ally. Most political leaders were not so clearly for or against Britain’s war effort. The bulk of Congress socialists saw the war as a fight between rival imperialist powers and wanted to stay out. Others pledged a vague loyalty to the allies while insisting that India be recognized as ‘fully independent’ to properly fight. In any case, until the last weeks of 1941, the war seemed a long way off. The greatest official fear was that Russia or Germany would invade through the Khyber Pass. As historian Indivar Kamtekar puts it, ‘the Second World War caught the colonial state looking the wrong way.’22

  But the Japanese army’s lightning march through South East Asia to the frontiers of eastern India from December 1941 exposed the fragility of the Raj. Garrisoned by Indian soldiers, Singapore was supposed to have been an impregnable bastion. It fell, though, in less than a week’s fighting, and set off a wave of hysterical panic throughout the subcontinent. Diarist Nirad C. Chaudhuri remembered that everyone in Bengal thought the Japanese would occupy all of the province by March 1942. Arrangements were made to destroy anything militarily useful in the city of Calcutta. Boats throughout Bengal which might have assisted Japanese invaders were burnt, destroying the usual means by which food was supplied throughout the province. British government officers sent their families to the hills; Indian officers moved them in with families elsewhere in India. In Madras, the prospect of invasion seemed so imminent that government offices were moved to towns scattered throughout the interior, and the big cats in the city’s zoo killed to stop them rampaging after the inevitable attack. When the city’s Indian chief officer complained that ‘everyone seemed to have lost their head’, the British chief of police sent a platoon to the zoo who ‘ruthlessly did their job in minutes’. By the middle of 1942, the government was drawing up plans to retreat from India and lead the fighting against Japan from Australia. Indians withdrew their savings from British-run banks and could not even trust paper money so started to collect small coins.23

  The Raj’s greatest failure was the rapid collapse of British rule in Burma. India’s eastern neighbour had been under British government since the late nineteenth century, governed separately
from the rest of the subcontinent only since 1937. The imperial regime in Burma was based on isolated European outposts, weakly connected by Burmese ‘collaborators’ and a dense network of Indian merchants. This structure collapsed quickly when faced with Japan’s military machine. In the monsoon of 1942, British and Indian troops trudged back through the highlands of Arakan and Assam, along with perhaps 140,000 civilian refugees. Army drivers were so weak from starvation many could not manoeuvre heavy Chevrolet trucks, and dozens fell into ravines. The British government’s relief policy was heavily biased in favour of Europeans. As in Malaya, once Europeans were evacuated British officers thought there was no one left to defend. All vehicles in Malaya, Singapore and Burma were commandeered by white Britons. Wounded soldiers were left without treatment. Between 50,000 and 100,000 people died of disease while trekking slowly through the mosquito-infested tracts on India’s eastern frontier.

  More than any other event, this moment of British state failure enraged millions of Indians, turning the attitude of many towards the Raj from ‘sullen passivity’, as Nehru put it, ‘to a pitch of excitement’. Wounded soldiers returning from the front spread news about their treatment and escalated the mood of anger. Political leaders challenged the empire’s hypocrisy, claiming to fight in the name of freedom while refusing to let Indians rule themselves. August 1942 saw the greatest upsurge of anti-British sentiment in India since 1857. In his weekly newspaper column Gandhi was apoplectic. ‘Hundreds, if not thousands, on their way from Burma perished without food or drink, and the wretched discrimination stared even these miserable people in the face. One route for whites, another for blacks! Provision of food and shelter for the whites, none for the blacks! India is being ground down to the dust and humiliated even before the Japanese advent.’ It was time, Gandhi said in May 1942, ‘for the British and the Indians to be reconciled to complete separation from each other’. A month later his message was even clearer: ‘For God’s sake leave India alone!24

  ‘Every Indian who desires freedom and strives for it must be his own guide,’ Gandhi said while launching the ‘Quit India’ movement on 8 August 1946. Gandhi’s idea was that every Indian should take freedom for themselves, and create their own self-government in the chaos of wartime. Congress’s entire leadership was arrested on 9 August before a plan could be communicated to Congress volunteers, so the campaign which followed was indeed shaped by the local ideas of activists. In fact, its course was probably directed most of all by the public articulation of imperial anxieties. The British government’s Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, justified mass arrests by listing the outrages he imagined Congress were planning: ‘strikes, not only in administration and commerce, but in the administration and law courts, the interruption of traffic and public utility services, the cutting of telegraph wires, the picketing of troops and recruiting stations’. Nationalist activists thought these activities had indeed been planned, so put the imperial government’s worst fears into practice.25

  Over the following two months, imperial institutions faced a rebellion in a large swathe of territory stretching from the eastern United Provinces to south-west Bengal, as well as isolated pockets of insurrection in western India. The ‘August rebellion’ was fiercest in areas of the eastern United Provinces and Bihar where large numbers had migrated to South East Asia, and had experience of Britain’s collapse. With the Congress high command in prison, leadership came from students and young people, peasants and factory workers. Expecting British rule to quickly fall, rebels blew up government offices and cut telegraph lines. In most cases, sabotage occurred with the least possible damage to property; Congress volunteers consulted engineers about how to disrupt British communications without damaging infrastructure which they hoped would soon be in national hands. In some areas violence was more visceral, trains were stopped and Europeans dragged out and killed. British power did totally vanish in some districts, as ‘national governments’ were established in Maharashtra, Bihar and south-west Bengal, the latter surviving until 1944. ‘I am engaged here in meeting by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857,’ the Viceroy wrote to Winston Churchill.26

  As historian Yasmin Khan puts it, ‘the ghosts of mutiny floated everywhere in the air.’ Like the rebellion of 1857, the Quit India movement was only suppressed with massive force. As one British officer wrote home, ‘the police were completely demoralised and we were given a free hand, pretty well, to use force where necessary without the usual rigmarole of getting a magistrate’s written sanction.’ Between 1,060 and 2,500 protesters were killed and 60,000 to 90,000 imprisoned, with the conditions in gaol for most volunteers appalling. An American observer compared the state of prisons to concentration camps.27

  A nation in arms

  The movement was a sign of revulsion against British power at a moment when it seemed on the verge of collapse. But revulsion was not accompanied by universal opposition to the war effort. A few nationalists did want to assist the Axis powers. Having travelled from Germany to Japan and then reached Japanese-occupied Singapore, Subhas Chandra Bose gathered an Indian National Army, a force which eventually included 43,000 men but played no significant role in the war. Always with an eye for a good conspiracy, British officials imagined the whole of Congress was an organization of fifth columnists, plotting with their opponents to help the Germans and Japanese to victory. But the anger of Congress leaders was based on their being dragged into a brutal conflict they thought the sclerotic systems of imperialism in India could not win, not opposition to the war itself. Many Congress leaders wanted to evict Britain from India quickly so that they could better resist fascism. Japan was recognized as a potential Asian ally, but its own imperial conquests were castigated and feared. Even when angriest at the British empire, Gandhi assured the British and, particularly, their American, Chinese and Russian allies, that an independent India would allow the ‘United Nations’ (the term the Allies used to describe themselves) to use India as a military base to drive Japan out of South East Asia and China. ‘I do not want to be the instrument of Russia’s defeat nor of China’s’, Gandhi said. Privately, he even admitted that Subhas Chandra Bose, with his active support for the Axis powers, ‘will have to be resisted’.28

  In the midst of a violent campaign against the atrophied structures of British sovereign power, some offered more active support. India’s bureaucratic and commercial elites were unwilling to throw their lot in with the chaos promised by Congress’s struggle. Business leaders saw an expansion of wartime production as a potential source of profit. Small-scale landholders and local aristocrats feared that Britain’s quick exit would break down order and hierarchy. Many feared that a Japanese invasion would be more violent than the continuation of British sovereignty. Conservative Muslim leaders in Punjab and the north-west went so far as declaring jihad against the Japanese for treating Muslims in South East Asia badly. Non-Congress leaders saw the war as an opportunity to consolidate power and ‘colonise the attenuated public sphere’, as C. A. Bayly put it. The Muslim League joined Lord Linlithgow’s war cabinet. Jinnah condemned the Quit India movement as ‘Gandhi and his Hindu Congress blackmailing the British’ to create a ‘Hindu Raj’. Right-wing Hindu nationalists called on their supporters to enlist in the imperial army to turn their mythical homogeneous Hindu national community into a ‘nation in arms’.29

  These allegiances were limited and complicated. But, together with a transformation in the institutions of British power, they allowed the state in India to recover after the multiple disasters of 1942. Two developments particularly pushed a restructuring of the Raj. First, in 1943, what C. A. Bayly called a ‘quiet military coup’ occurred. The government in London dismissed British India’s stuffy civilian bureaucracy and placed military men in charge. The Commander-in-Chief of the Indian army, Lord Archibald Wavell, replaced the aloof Lord Linlithgow as Viceroy; a general noted for his logistical skills, Claude Auchinleck became chief military officer. Auchinleck and Wavell restructured the g
overnment to focus exclusively on victory against Japan. These were two intellectually ambitious men who understood the importance of technology and logistics to modern warfare, and believed British victory required key institutions to be controlled by Indian leaders.

  As significantly, American involvement in the war put pressure on the British regime to organize the war effort more efficiently and inclusively. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was followed by the quick flood of American government officials, military officers and technical experts into the subcontinent. India had been a destination for supplies under the Anglo-US Lend-Lease agreement since late 1941, but shipments increased dramatically in 1943, with 125,000 tons of goods arriving every month from the beginning of that year. American military hardware transformed the Indian army; the number of anti-tank guns increased from twenty to more than 2,000 between 1941 and 1944, for example.30

  Despite their physical investment in the war effort, American visitors worried that Indian opposition to British authority would cause the country to fall to the Japanese. ‘India is about to Fall. The uncomprehending philosophy of England is meeting its reward,’ the US Assistant Secretary of State Breckenbridge Long wrote in April 1942. Britain in India was ‘blind, self-centered and tenacious of the phantoms of the past’. The American President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded Britain grant India full self-governing dominion status. With the die-hard Winston Churchill now Prime Minister, the British government refused to grant India independence. But the importance of American money and soldiers forced the Raj, finally, to promise self-government after the war, and take the United States’ demands seriously in the meantime. By 1944, American soldiers and engineers had taken large sections of Indian infrastructure. They were running the 800-mile Bengal and Assam Railway, doubling the amount of freight shipped to eastern India’s front line. They were also building a network of landing strips to allow planes to take off to bomb Japanese territories.31