It is amazing that Barindra Ghosh was able to write with a sense of humour about a place where he languished for so many years. He tells us that prisoners were made to do hard physical labour—making coir ropes, turning the oil press and so on. However, the prisoners, especially the revolutionaries, were constantly subject to mental and physical torture. This was not done directly by the British warden but through his Pathan subordinates, particularly a certain Khoyedad Khan. These petty officers further recruited enforcers from among the criminals in the prison in order to maintain their writ. The idea was to systematically break the will of the revolutionaries. Ghosh tells us how the petty officers and their enforcers would often sexually assault and rape the teenagers and younger men: ‘The very shame of it prevents them from complaining to the authorities; and even if they do, it is more often than not crying in the wilderness.’
Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress had expected major concessions after the war but they soon realized that Indians would get little in return for their cooperation. Instead, the British introduced the draconian Rowlatt Act in 1919 that gave the authorities sweeping powers to arrest and detain activists. It was the colonial government’s response to fears that the returning Indian soldiers would be susceptible to revolutionary ideas. The law elicited strong protests and, amidst the deteriorating political climate, culminated in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in April 1919. Like the massacre perpetrated by the Dutch in Bali, the cold-blooded murder of so many unarmed men, women and children ended British claims of civilizational superiority.
The colonial government tried to retrieve the situation by giving a general amnesty to several of the revolutionaries including Sachindra Nath Sanyal. The returning revolutionaries now agreed to work with Mahatma Gandhi on a movement of non-violent non-cooperation. The protests spread very quickly and brought the subcontinent to a standstill. It looked like the British authorities had finally been cornered but, just as some form of victory seemed imminent, Gandhi unilaterally suspended the movement. The proximate reason for the decision was an incident in Chauri-Chaura where a mob of protesters set fire to a police station and killed several policemen. Gandhi argued that this incident had violated the principle of non-violence but it caused a permanent schism with the revolutionaries who saw it as hypocrisy. Why did Gandhi have to make such a fuss over a single incident of violence, they argued, when he had been recruiting soldiers for the British just a couple of years earlier?
What particularly incensed the Indian revolutionaries was that only a few weeks earlier the Irish had managed to force the British to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty paving the way for an independent Irish Republic. If a tiny country like Ireland could gain freedom under the nose of the British, why did a large and faraway country like India have to wait? Sachin Sanyal now reverted to organizing the various revolutionary groups under an umbrella organization called the Hindustan Republican Association in 1924 and under it began to build the Hindustan Republican Army. The choice of names shows how the success of the original Irish Republican Army (not to be confused with later versions) had inspired Indian revolutionaries of that time. The Irish influence on India’s freedom struggle is barely recalled today.
It was during this period that Sachin Sanyal came in contact with a young, rising star in the Congress party—Subhash Chandra Bose, later to be known simply as ‘Netaji’ (literally, The Leader). Sanyal would be sent back to prison a few years later and many of his followers would be killed or executed, but Subhash Bose would leverage the international networks pioneered by the revolutionaries in his attempt to build an armed revolt against the British during the Second World War.
The Fall of Singapore
Countless Hollywood films have led us to believe that the attack on Pearl Harbour marks Japan’s entry into the Second World War. In reality, the very first shots were fired at 10.20 p.m. on 7 December 1941 on the beaches of Kota Bharu on the north-eastern corner of the Malay peninsula.13 Given the differences in time zones, this took place a little before the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbour. Despite resistance from Indian troops in the area, the Japanese were soon storming the beaches and landing men and equipment. By 4.30 a.m., Japanese bombers were making raids on Singapore.
To be fair, British commanders in Malaya had anticipated the possibility of such an attack but had thinly spread their troops as they did not know exactly where the landing would take place. Moreover, the best Indian regiments had already been deployed on the other side of the Indian Ocean in Africa where they evicted the Italians from Ethiopia before engaging Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Libya.14 The Allied troops in Malaya were inexperienced new recruits from India and Australia who, in many cases, had not completed their basic training. What made it worse was they were not backed either from the air or from the sea. The small number of outdated aircraft based in Asia would prove no match against the Mitsubishi Zero.
Soon the Japanese were landing troops at will and making their way down the peninsula. The defence crumbled so quickly that in many areas the invading force cycled over long distances without encountering serious resistance. When British Prime Minister Churchill realized what was happening, he ordered that Singapore should be defended to the last. This was based on a widely held belief that the island was an impregnable fortress. He also ordered the cruiser HMS Repulse and the battleship HMS Prince of Wales to sail to Singapore. Their arrival in Singapore on 2 December brought some cheer to the defenders but military strategists should have realized that they were sitting ducks without air cover. By 10 December, both of them had been sunk by torpedo bombers.
Recognizing the deteriorating situation, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival ordered his remaining troops to fall back on Singapore. Nonetheless, there was still a sense of confidence that Singapore would hold. Even as the Japanese were closing in on the island in mid-January 1942, Robinson’s department store was still advertising ‘Snappy American Frocks for day and afternoon wear $12.50’ and the Raffles Hotel was still organizing dances. P&O was even running regular passenger services to Calcutta—$185 for first class and $62 for second class.15
By the first week of February, however, the Japanese had taken over Johor and were bombarding the island from the air and by artillery. There is an oft-repeated legend that Singapore’s big guns pointed south towards the sea in anticipation of a naval assault and could not be turned around against attackers from the north. This is not entirely accurate. The problem was that they were supplied with armour-piercing ammunition meant to be used against ships and were not effective against infantry. So, although the guns could be turned 360 degrees, there is an element of truth in the old legend.
Percival now had to guess where Japanese commander Tomoyuki Yamashita would make his main assault. Eventually, he decided to place his best troops to the north-east. This proved to be a big mistake as the main Japanese landing took place from the north-west where the Johor Strait is at its narrowest. Overcoming resistance from Australian units defending this sector, the Japanese were soon closing in on the city. On 13 February, the 1st Malay Regiment attempted a last desperate defence of Pasir Panjang ridge. A colonial-era bungalow on the ridge is now a museum dedicated to their last stand (most of the hand-to-hand combat happened just below the museum in what is now the car park).
By this point the centre of the city, including the underground command centre at Fort Canning, was being pounded constantly and civilian casualties were mounting. The situation was clearly hopeless and on 15 February, Percival drove to the Ford Motor factory in Bukit Timah to personally discuss the terms of surrender with Yamashita. It says something of the dire situation that Percival had to borrow a car from the Bata Shoe Company in order to go for his meeting. Thus began the Japanese occupation of Singapore. For the Chinese population, in particular, this would be a period of extreme hardship. The Indians would face hardship too but for them the period has a different significance. Another example of how the same history can have different meanings for different peop
le.
The Indian National Army
When the Second World War broke out, the British again looked to India for troops and support; some 2.5 million Indians would participate in the Allied war effort. However, having learned from the experience of the previous war, Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress decided not to cooperate with the colonial government and launched the non-violent Quit India movement. Note that not all Indian leaders agreed with the decision to launch the Quit India movement as they felt that opposition to Fascism was the greater cause. Still others felt that the war had produced a second golden opportunity to throw off colonial rule through armed revolt. By this time the senior revolutionary leaders from the previous war had mostly been killed or were in prison, so it fell on Netaji Subhash Bose to take up this cause.
Subhash Bose had drifted away from the Congress but the British still considered him a dangerous leader and had placed him under house arrest in Calcutta. In early 1941, he made a dramatic escape and made his way in disguise through Afghanistan and the Soviet Union to Germany where he requested help from the Nazi government. He was treated well and given a patient hearing but he soon realized that the Germans were unwilling or unable to commit large resources to his cause.
While Netaji was wondering about his next move, he received news of the fall of Singapore. Soon he heard that veteran revolutionary Rash Behari Bose was organizing surrendered Indian soldiers into the Indian National Army (INA) that would fight alongside the Japanese (recall that Rash Behari had escaped to Japan in 1915 after the collapse of the Ghadar uprising). Netaji next travelled by submarine around the Cape of Good Hope to Singapore where the older Bose handed him the command of the INA on 4 July 1943. The handover ceremony took place at the Cathay Cinema theatre where Netaji delivered a rousing speech. The next day he reviewed the INA troops at the Padang grounds in the middle of the city. Of the 40,000 Indians who had surrendered in Singapore, the majority opted for the INA.16 S.R. Nathan, a future President of Singapore, would witness many of these events as a boy.17
Some of the landmarks related to Netaji’s stay in Singapore can still be discerned. The Cathay theatre has been turned into a shopping mall but part of the old facade has been preserved. The open grounds of Padang and several of the surrounding buildings are still around. So is the old Ramkrishna Mission compound where he frequently withdrew to meditate. The bungalow where Netaji lived, No. 61 Meyer Road, has been pulled down and replaced by a high-rise condominium. It was here that he wrote down the Proclamation of the Provisional Government of Free India. The neighbourhood is popular with expatriate Indians today, perhaps some sort of subliminal memory of its historical links!
Meanwhile, the Japanese had taken over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and handed de jure control to Netaji. This would be the only piece of Indian territory that the Provisional Government would ever control but, given its associations with the revolutionaries, it had great symbolic value. The INA now joined the Japanese on their march through Burma to the eastern gates of India. The British responded by rushing a large number of troops to defend the line. Through the summer of 1944, the two sides simultaneously fought ferocious battles in Kohima (now capital of the state of Nagaland) and in Imphal (capital of Manipur). These are considered among the most hard-fought battles of the Second World War.18 The climax was a closely fought hand-to-hand struggle over a tennis court in Kohima. The Japanese lost and the tide of war turned in favour of the Allies. The campaign would cost the Japanese side 53,000 in dead or missing while the Allies lost 16,500.
Churchill’s Dirty Secret
From an Indian perspective, the tragedy of these battles was that Indian soldiers fought and died bravely on both sides, sacrificing their lives for someone else’s empires. Even worse was the famine that killed 3 million people in Bengal in 1943. Crop failure and the disruption of rice supplies from Burma may have initially triggered the problem but the British colonial government did little to provide relief. Instead, they commandeered all the boats in order to deny the invading army the means to traverse the riverine terrain. This meant that locals could not even fish.
Meticulous research by writer Madhusree Mukerjee shows how Churchill was fully aware of the dire situation but seems to have deliberately delayed and diverted supplies as part of a scorched earth strategy against the advancing Japanese.19 He is reported to have remarked that Indians were a ‘beastly people with a beastly religion’ and that the famine was caused by Bengalis who ‘bred like rabbits’. There is a strong case for terming this genocide.
As the Japanese retreated, the INA fought against the Allied advance in Burma but by early 1945 it had effectively disintegrated. A day after Japan surrendered on 15 August, Subhash Bose flew from Singapore to Taiwan. What happened next is a mystery. The official line is that he died in a plane crash in Taiwan but the story was disputed right from the start. It is beyond the scope of this book to evaluate the evidence for and against various theories except to say it remains a highly controversial matter to this day.
Netaji’s decision to ask Axis powers for help also remains controversial but this is unfair. First of all, the British had behaved appallingly from the Jallianwala massacre to the Bengal famine and, from an Indian perspective, there was little to morally distinguish the Allies from the Axis. They were just two sets of evil empires and Netaji cannot be faulted for trying to use every available opportunity to free his enslaved people.
Secondly, he was following up on international support networks established by the revolutionaries a generation earlier. We know that Subhash Bose repeatedly met Sachin Sanyal in the late 1930s when the latter was briefly out of prison. The links between the two are not widely known but Sachin Sanyal’s son, then a teenager, was witness to these clandestine meetings and personally recounted them to me. On one occasion, the Japanese counsel was also present. In other words, one cannot judge Netaji’s actions and the formation of the INA without taking into account the longer history of the revolutionary movement and its long-standing connections with Germany and Japan. This was not a case of developing a sudden love for Fascism.
The Decisive Rebellion
From the Ghadar plot to the INA, the revolutionaries had made several attempts to incite a revolt among Indian troops on whom the British empire relied. So far, they had not succeeded but their efforts did eventually bear fruit. The general public had been largely unaware of the activities of the INA due to wartime censorship but it caused a sensation when the prisoners of war were brought back and put on trial. As their stories circulated among the troops, rumblings of discontent began to grow. It culminated in the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 18–23 February 1946.20
The episode was triggered by a minor altercation in Bombay over the quality of food being served to sailors but, given the overall mood, it blew quickly into a full-fledged revolt. The sailors stopped obeying their officers and took control of a number of ships and shore establishments. Remember that the sailors were not novices; this was just a few months after the war and the British were dealing with battle-hardened veterans. Soon they had taken over the wireless communications sets on their ships and were coordinating their actions. As the news spread across the city, students, industrial workers and others went on strike and marched in support of the mutineers. Next, sailors in Calcutta and Karachi also mutinied. At its height, the unrest involved seventy-eight ships, twenty shore establishments and 20,000 sailors. When Baloch and Gurkha troops in Karachi were sent in to quell the revolt, they flatly refused to fire on the sailors. Officers and pilots of the Royal Indian Air Force similarly refused to help the authorities.
Unfortunately for the mutineers, they received no support from the Indian political leadership of the time. Both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League asked them to surrender.21 Subhash Bose was missing, and the senior revolutionary leaders Har Dayal, Rash Behari Bose and Sachin Sanyal, who had tried so hard to trigger exactly such a mutiny, were no longer alive. Lacking political leadership, the
sailors eventually surrendered. Despite various assurances, large numbers of sailors would be court-martialled and dismissed (note that none of the dismissed would be reinstated by the governments of Pakistan and India after Independence).
Although the episode ended peacefully, the British colonial administration must have realized that they were rapidly losing control over their Indian soldiers. Just a week after the naval mutiny, the signals unit of the army in Jabbalpur also rebelled.22 It was quite clear that another large-scale revolt was only a matter of time. The Indian soldier was one of the bulwarks of the British empire and once his loyalty had been undermined, the British empire began to unwind not just in the Indian subcontinent but worldwide. The revolutionaries had finally succeeded.
It is quite telling that the role of the revolutionaries in India’s freedom struggle is barely presented as a footnote in official Indian histories. Having come to power in 1947, the Indian National Congress would ensure that story would be told in a way that focused exclusively on its own role. The Naval Mutiny is almost never mentioned and I learned about it accidentally after stumbling across a memorial tucked away in Colaba, Mumbai. The dominance of the Congress party’s narrative was helped by the fact that it fitted the face-saving British account that they had peacefully granted freedom to India at the end of a successful ‘civilizing’ mission. This is not to suggest that Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress did not play an important role but merely to point out that India’s freedom struggle was made up of many streams.
The Majapahit Dream
The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History Page 26
