The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  Another source of information was the Indian Civil Service officer, who exchanged bits of news in the villages while making his paternalistic tours. Manzoor Alam Quraishi held camp-fire meetings, distributing free cigarettes and snacks to villagers who gathered around to listen to his talks about the progress of the war. ‘They were interested to know the welfare of our national leaders’, recalled the District Magistrate, ‘I used to utilize this occasion to make appeals for voluntary donations and recruits, which usually met [a] good response.’18 Over time the British propaganda machine became more systematic and slick, but in the main the Indian villager pieced together an understanding of the war based on bricolage, stories gleaned from the families of soldiers, newspaper articles read aloud at village gatherings, radio broadcasts from a shop in a district town, the official visit of a civil servant or landlord, and counter-propaganda circulated by the Congress and the Axis. Posters were hammered onto telegraph poles and newspapers ran through hundreds of hands, often weeks after printing. Factual truths became hard currency. In one district in Punjab a rumour spread that ‘the corpses of Indian troops litter both sides of the Suez canal’.19

  Competing narratives of the war were in circulation already and while the government feared misinformation, propaganda and false rumours, ordinary people were equally wary of the accuracy of information that was being fed to them. ‘Even the news that comes is terribly lop-sided’, Nehru lamented. ‘The censor is always there.’20 The government fervently clamped down on papers that published false rumours, of air raids on Indian soil or sightings of submarines off the coastline. Officers constantly struggled to place suitably rousing articles in the local press. The Punjab government allotted 75,000 rupees for propaganda efforts and was ‘getting excellent stuff into the local dailies, including reproductions of some of the most striking cartoons of Hitler etc. published in English papers’ within the first few weeks of the war.21 Once again, there was murky confusion between sedition, poor taste and outright national threat. The state took the censorship opportunity to ban unpalatable literature on subjects ranging from communism to sex, raiding bookshops and printers. In early 1940, police carted off thousands of books from a bookshop in Allahabad called Kitabistan, including books on Russia, the Spanish Civil War and socialism. Nonetheless, Clive Branson found Hitler’s Mein Kampf ‘on sale prominently at every bookstall’ alongside novels, romantic pulp fiction and religious literature.22 But the preoccupation with rumour and false information would continue to plague the Raj and only increase as the profundity of disenchantment with the war effort became more apparent over time.

  * * *

  Premindra Singh Bhagat continued to write from North and East Africa to his sweetheart Mohini. She was very much on his mind. The couple had wanted to marry before he departed for the war but had been prevented by her father, a colonel in the Indian Army, who found the officer too irresponsible as a suitor. Premindra was typical of some of the professional high-ranking officers coming into the army in the 1930s; the son of an erudite and successful government engineer, he had been educated at the Indian Military Academy at Dehra Dun. He was a tennis player and golfer who, back home, drove a Model T Ford. His background was very different to the sepoys from the villages. Middle-class, educated men were often attracted to the army because of the technical skills they could develop and the chances for training and travel. Now near Metemma, in present-day Ethiopia, the young sapper had been clearing mines. The retreating Italians on their way between Gallabat and Gondar had left the roads embedded with explosives. The plan was to follow the Italians, to clear and set a path through these extensive minefields. Premindra Singh Bhagat faced potential explosions on every side as he worked to defuse the bombs. ‘The last ten days have been quite a revelation to me of war. Dead bodies lying on the road, some mangled and no one taking any notice of them. To think the very same body had life and enjoyed himself a few hours before is preposterous’, he wrote back to India.

  His letters were artfully modest and understated. ‘The last ten days have been a bit trying’, he told the seventeen-year-old woman he hoped to marry. His right eardrum punctured, he had been invalided to hospital after detecting and supervising the defusing of mines constantly over four days, working in intense conditions from dawn to dusk. His carrier had been blown up twice, leaving his fellow soldiers bleeding and dismembered around him, and on a third occasion he had been ambushed and had carried on with his task under close enemy fire. ‘I have been congratulated for getting blown up twice by the red hats. Though personally it does not make sense to me. After all, there were some people killed, and I was the lucky one to escape.’23 His ambivalence about the Victoria Cross that he was going to be awarded while so many of his colleagues had died, and the shock with which he reeled in the aftermath of battle, are still palpable. He would be the first Indian to receive the Victoria Cross in the Second World War.

  4

  Free and Willing Human Beings

  ON THE EVENING of 13 March 1940 Udham Singh, an itinerant radical and peddler living in London, shot dead a seventy-four-year-old man at Caxton Hall, in the heart of Westminster, a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey and within minutes of the Houses of Parliament. The victim was Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who had been the Governor of Punjab at the time of the Amritsar massacre in 1919. He had been taking part in a discussion on the future of Afghanistan. The BBC broke the news on the nine o’clock bulletin.

  The assassin was a rootless London resident, who had worked as a travelling salesman and a film extra and was a passionately committed nationalist. He shot the retired governor twice in the chest with a revolver and the former Raj official died shortly afterwards. In the trial that followed, Singh declared loudly that he had sought retribution for O’Dwyer’s role in imposing martial law and defending the perpetrators of the Amritsar killings at the end of the First World War, almost exactly twenty-one years earlier. When Scotland Yard released the files on his trial they revealed his reaction when the judge gave the verdict: he spat and swore ‘against the King and Emperor’ and declared that he wasn’t afraid of death and that when he had gone ‘thousands of [my] countrymen would drive you dirty dogs out of my country’.1

  The Caxton Hall assassination was carried out at a time when Britain was intensely vulnerable. The assassination shrank the distance between Amritsar and London, collapsing time between 1919 and 1940. It brought back to the newspapers, and to the memories of many, the bloody scenes at Jallianwala Bagh, where hundreds of innocent men, women and children had died. The Caxton Hall murder reawakened those events thousands of miles away and many years ago in Punjab. Udham Singh’s case was a gift for the Nazi propaganda machine and within hours of the news the British Nazi ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ was broadcasting on the subject from Berlin. The case was conducted in camera with a small number of spectators and the transcripts of the trial were kept closed until the mid-1990s. The jury found Udham Singh guilty of murder and he was sentenced to hang.

  The Indian press and Indian politicians universally condemned the murder of O’Dwyer, and remained ambivalent about the death sentence passed in response. Nehru distanced the Congress from the killing, while Gandhi made his outright condemnation clear, calling it ‘an act of insanity’ and sending condolences to O’Dwyer’s family. The Bengal and Punjab Legislative Assemblies passed resolutions condemning the murder, as did the Congress Working Committee. But some members of the British public wrote letters pleading against the death penalty for Singh. Joyce Tarring wrote to the Secretary of State for India from a hotel in Cumberland to say that ‘it would be a great act of clemency which would touch the heart of India’. Another woman from Hampstead was concerned that ‘there is a real danger of this affair being misinterpreted in India’. The scholar and champion of Indian rights Edward Thompson also urged the Secretary of State for India to show leniency.2

  Regardless, Udham Singh was hanged in Pentonville Prison at dawn on 31 July 1940, just as the Battle of Britain was underway
over southern England and along the coastline, and clashes began above the English Channel which would intensify in ferocity over the coming weeks. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the grounds of Pentonville Prison, and his execution received scant mention in the newspapers and went mostly unnoticed around the empire. The story had been successfully relegated to the small-print columns inside the newspapers and Udham Singh was cast as a lunatic rather than as a committed, if unhinged, terrorist. The story soon fizzled out and was not given much more attention during wartime, although Sikhs, who particularly claimed Udham Singh as their own, circulated stories about his heroism and his bravado. The murder had been a warning shot across the bows of the British Empire, indicating the zealous strength of nationalist feeling, and the readiness of some to turn to violence instead of non-violence. It heralded the start of a tempestuous time ahead, but news about India was drowned out by the crushing drama of the war in Britain: the anxieties about France and the growing fear of a German bombing campaign. Indian problems were a very distant and secondary question.

  In Britain dogfights and clashes above the channel would intensify in ferocity over the coming weeks. Fears of German invasion, palpable if only fleeting, galvanised the British public in a new determination and national unity towards the war effort.3 But, with the fall of France, Britain was increasingly an island that regarded itself as standing alone. Britain struggled to integrate imperial subjects living thousands of miles away, subjects who wanted the freedom to choose whether to support the war or not, or who thought, in the words of one Indian peasant, that it was simply ‘not our quarrel’.

  * * *

  There were also many Indians living in Britain who did experience the real dangers and hardships of wartime cities at first hand. When the first phase of the Blitz was unleashed in September 1940, the Indian YMCA hostel in Bloomsbury was bombed and had to be evacuated. Savitri Choudhary, who was married to a doctor in Kent, slept in an Anderson shelter in her back garden with her husband, maid and children, and comforted local women whose sons had gone to war and were missing or killed. ‘Many a fierce battle was fought over us while we hid in our shelters like primitive cavemen and women, hoping and praying that they wouldn’t drop their load on us.’4 Mira Lam and his family were bombed out of the Toxteth area of Liverpool. Dr Baldev Kaushal, a Punjabi with a large surgery in Bethnal Green, was awarded an MBE for his ‘gallant conduct’ during the Blitz. By the end of the year, Indian Lascars recruited from ports and docks into the Military Pioneer Corps were clearing debris from the bombed tube station at Sloane Square.5

  Ideological demands for Indian freedom were entirely compatible with participation in the war effort. ‘We want to serve as free and willing human beings’, declared Aftab Ali, the president in 1940 of the Indian Seamen’s Federation in Calcutta, which supported Indian merchant seamen.6 Many of these seamen or Lascars originated from eastern India. They could be seen meeting each other in cheap cafés frequented by Indians, smoking, going for prayers, sitting around together in their overalls and distinctive topis. Many were illiterate but would find someone to write a letter back to a home village. Badly dressed, particularly for the British winter, and with meagre wages in their pocket, some found shelter and comforts at establishments like the Mersey Mission to Seafarers, where they might play board games or listen to the radio. Many of these men had been on the crews of ships that were now being refitted for war and as they waited for the ships to be turned around, some ventured inland. They made calculations about the risks that might be involved in sailing across the Atlantic or through the Mediterranean. Around the ports of empire, from Liverpool to Calcutta to Hong Kong, seamen had started to raise their voices, demanding war bonuses, compensation in case of death and increased wages in the face of the rising prices of commodities.

  The Lascars had been hired on ships for three centuries as cheap labour. They had hard and peripatetic lives. Their monthly pay was £1 17 shillings compared to the £9 12 shillings earned by European seamen for the same work at the start of the war. By 1938, 50,700 of the sailors employed on British merchant vessels were Indian or just over a quarter of the total number.7 The Lascars had a poorer clothing allowance, worked longer and less regulated hours and slept in more cramped quarters. They ate a cheaper diet and suffered more ill-health. The system had barely evolved since Victorian times and was a particularly suitable target for labour leaders both in Britain and in India. Anachronistic even by the standards of the time, it was criticised by the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan as providing ‘cheap human fodder’ and a potential source of embarrassment for the British government. The war proved the catalyst that would lead to at least some changes in the Lascars’ conditions, although real change would only come after the war.

  A wave of strikes and protests broke out in ports around the empire in late 1939 and early 1940. Mass arrests took place. Some Lascars had prison sentences with hard labour for up to twelve weeks. At the end of October 1939, forty Indian seafarers from the SS Clan Alpine got two-month sentences for ‘willful disobedience of lawful commands’ and men from other ships berthed in London, SS Britannia, SS Somali and SS City of Manchester, received prison sentences for striking. Four hundred Lascars were imprisoned in the UK at the end of December 1940. Strikes erupted in other ports as far afield as Cape Town, Burma and Australia as the word spread around the seafarers’ global networks. Eighty-three men from the SS Prome, who had been stuck at port in Liverpool for several months, too poor to afford telegrams back home to their families or to buy tobacco on shore or from the ship store, garnered considerable local sympathy in Liverpool when they started to strike, and the local superintendent refused to arrest them.8 The Liverpool Lascar Welfare Officer, Mr Bukht, advocated their cause, citing their poverty and subsistence wages. The case was mediated successfully and the shipowner handed out extra supplies. The ship finally set sail for Ceylon in February 1941. Nehru’s friend and ally based in London, Krishna Menon, was in communication with Aftab Ali, the union leader for many of the men from Calcutta. Menon joined his voice to the pleas for Lascar welfare, lobbying MPs on their behalf. He was just one of several advocates and representatives of Asians in London, men who were speaking up more loudly than before but were also falling into factions and disagreements with each other. The war jolted the government into making improvements to the Lascars’ conditions: for instance, the Indian Comforts Fund, initiated by British women, provided humanitarian relief and was dedicated to the needs of Indian troops and Indian seamen in Europe, knitting scarves and balaclavas for the men and packing up parcels of tinned food for Indian prisoners of war.

  Some of the Lascars came from families with generations of experience on sailing craft that plied the Indian Ocean or the Konkan coast. Goan Catholics worked as stewards, Muslim smallholders from Chittagong and Sylhet manned the decks, Punjabi and Pashtun ‘ag-wallahs’ (literally fire-men) stoked the engines in the boiler rooms. Others took to seafaring from rural inland districts and had never seen the ocean before. They were rounded up by serangs, the middlemen who acted as boss, big brother and overseer to the seamen. Even when away from home for years at a time, the Lascar still thought of home. By leaving home, the Lascar removed an extra mouth to feed, and while siblings tilled the land, or wives wove and stitched handicrafts, they sent back remittances, enabling the family to buy more animals or a small patch of land. Far inland, children of the Lascars looked at pictures of steamships sometimes proudly kept in the family home, imagining their absent fathers.

  Lascars showed tremendous concern for their families back in India, over long periods of separation. One of the first thoughts on the outbreak of war was how to secure the future of their wives and children should their ships be torpedoed or bombed. The demands put forward by Atur Mian of the SS Clan Rose and Abdul Majid of the SS Clan Macbrayne in September 1939 are revealing of the hardships and the concerns of the Lascars: they asked for back-dated double wages, overtime and more leave, but also for two suits of
warm clothing for each sailor, half a pound of tobacco and one piece of soap to be given to each man every week, and also, noticeably, that half their wages would be taken to be wired as remittance to their family by the state. They demanded that an officer visit their ships and ‘take the names and addresses of each member of the Indian crew and their heirs in India who are to receive this money’.9 The final demand of the strikers was again intended to secure the welfare of their communities back home: ‘Compensation for death or disablement due to war injuries will be paid to the Lascar or his heirs in accordance with the rules which the government are now framing.’10 Wartime journeys would be perilous and different to the work of peacetime. The men worried about wives and children back in India, and wanted to provide for them, whether dead or alive. Throughout the years to come, a number of wartime workers, from road builders to soldiers, would face dilemmas similar to the Lascars’ and seek to champion their own rights in the face of wartime transformation. The war would bring the possibility of novel forms of work, with higher wage packets, and many would try to negotiate or manoeuvre to maximise their own advantage. But ultimately this had to be reckoned alongside the risk of death, long and arduous absences from home and the uncertainty of a long war beyond Indian political control or influence.