by Yasmin Khan
The tattered company pressed on for the rest of the morning without Ram. They inched forward towards Sangar but were driven back again. Their lines were cut and they found themselves marooned again for the second time in a week. Around half past ten in the morning the men received the order to retreat. The shell-shocked men clambered back towards their starting point and began to realise their losses. In the words of one Commanding Officer, they had ‘failed gallantly’.
In five hours of fighting that morning the 4th battalion of the Rajputana Rifles lost a further thirty-six men. One hundred and thirty-seven were injured and seven were missing. The men who were killed alongside Richpal Ram that day ranged in age from seventeen to their late thirties. Both Muslim and Hindu, they were drawn from a sweep of India stretching from the northern districts of Punjab down to southern Rajasthan. Ghulum Haider was seventeen, unmarried and from Attock in present-day Pakistan. Gheba Khan was nineteen and from Rawalpindi. Bhuja Ram was twenty-five and from Jaipur.12 Many of their graves and cremation sites are marked in cemeteries in Sudan and Eritrea, where they can be seen today. And this was just a single day in the battle for Keren. It would be echoed across the mountain range and would involve soldiers from many other regiments and nationalities – including the Highland Light Infantry, the Central India Horse, the Baluch Regiment, the West Yorkshire Regiment and the RAF – and would doggedly continue over six weeks until the British and imperial forces finally pushed back the Italian General Frusci and his men and broke into Asmara in late March. The battle for Keren was an extraordinary feat of endurance and willpower, over six weeks of protracted and stubborn fighting in almost impossible terrain. The Allies were essentially trying to scale upwards into mountains, but from above them, the Italians had the advantage of being able to rain firepower down on the men, knocking them back off the slopes below, while, initially, the Allied troops had no air cover. It was such an extreme fight that Wavell considered calling off the entire attempt altogether and many considered the capture of East Africa impossible at this point.
Alongside the infantry, Indians employed as water-carriers, messengers, cooks and bearers died at Keren, among them a boot-maker simply named ‘Ghafur’ whose age, surname and provenance are unknown. There were at least 4,000–5,000 British and Commonwealth casualties in the battles to capture Keren, the turning point of the East Africa campaign.13 One historian would later record that it was ‘as hard a soldiers’ battle as was ever fought’.14
On 7 April Churchill sent the Viceroy of India a letter congratulating him on the performance of the Indian troops, using language evocative of the nineteenth century:
The whole Empire has been stirred by the achievement of the Indian forces in Eritrea. For me the story of the ardour and the perseverance with which they scaled and finally conquered the arduous heights of Keren recalls memories of the North West Frontier of long years ago, and it is as one who has had the honour to serve in the field with Indian soldiers from all parts of Hindustan, as well as in the name of His Majesty’s Government, that I ask Your Excellency to convey to them and to the whole Indian Army the pride and admiration with which we have followed their heroic exploits.15
An effusive book of propaganda about the East and North African campaigns, The Tiger Strikes, which was circulated widely in India in the 1940s, declared: ‘it is possible that history may mark this as one of the decisive battles of the world. It is a battle honour which all units, British and Indian alike, will treasure with particular pride in centuries to come.’16 In fact, it has barely been remembered at all.
Back in Punjab, victories in North Africa were being publicly celebrated. Schools, colleges, government offices and some shops closed and marching bands paraded down the main thoroughfares of Lahore cheered on by flag-waving crowds. The British Empire-Commonwealth, paradoxically, was helping Haile Selassie’s Ethiopian nation to emerge from colonial domination by the Italians, an accomplishment that was eyed with interest by Indian leaders. The politicians of the Punjab Legislative Assembly passed a unanimous resolution congratulating Wavell on his feats.
As defeat in North and East Africa eventually turned again to victory there was a determined effort in India to champion the role of the 4th and 5th Indian Divisions and their distinguished acts. The survivors, the injured and the dead were given a number of significant medals in the months to come. Richpal Ram was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, his citation recording ‘great dash and gallantry’.17 Two awards were given at the same time, to Premindra Singh Bhagat, the stoical officer of the Royal Bombay Sappers and Miners, and to Richpal Ram. They recognised two distinctive faces of the war: Richpal Ram represented the old traditional loyalties to the Indian Army, a man who had worked his way up as an officer from a humble village, spoke Punjabi and had served for two decades; the other was a highly educated, technically minded man who came from a more urbane and worldly background, more recently inducted into the army.
Newspaper stories and newsreels relived their exploits and heroism. The photographs of the famed Indian Victoria Cross winners appeared on collectible cigarette cards around the British Empire-Commonwealth and the Taj Hotel in Bombay printed their faces on menu cards. During the rest of the war, medal winners would be heavily photographed, featured on propaganda, sent on international tours to Britain and the USA. Back in India, once discharged from hospital, Premindra Bhagat Singh found himself fêted as a VIP wherever he went. The self-deprecating, gentle hero seemed just a little bewildered by his reception. He had lost hearing in one ear, been returned to India and separated from his unit. He would start at loud noises for some time to come. On his arrival back in Bombay in July 1941 the Times of India reported the scene:
To all who met him on his landing in Bombay on Saturday afternoon he was a picture of a dashing but a modest soldier. He was characteristically ill at ease with the press and reluctant to discuss his daring exploit which won for him the highest award for valour … Were it not for the small purple ribbon on his tunic, it would be impossible to guess from his self-effacing conduct that he has displayed a bravery that makes the imagination reel … Indeed he might have been playing golf instead of exploding land mines.18
Though individual acts of bravery were well appreciated, not everyone was convinced by the storyline: the acerbic Ian Hay Macdonald, from his magistrate’s bungalow in Orissa, grumbled that Indian troops were being celebrated more in the press than the British troops: ‘Keren, for instance, was really captured by the Cameron Highlanders, who now have a hill there named after them, but from the papers here one would think it was done entirely by Indian troops’, he told his parents back in Scotland.19 There was pride among some nationalists in India that the Indian Army was being celebrated in a global war. But among the public, upbeat coverage of the victories in 1941 could not mask the leakage of casualty numbers and rumours of trepidation and defeatism.
Two hundred miles away from Lahore, in the district of Barda in the princely state of Patiala, Richpal Ram’s wife – Mussamat Janki – had not yet heard of his death. It would be several weeks before she knew that her husband had died in Africa and had been cremated there by members of his regiment. Nine months later she would appear on the pages of newspapers across the world from London to Australia. On a sunny November day, later in 1941, Richpal Ram’s widow was greeted with full military honours, cavalry and marching bands and crowds of onlookers at the Viceregal Palace in New Delhi. She was wearing full sweeping scarlet and yellow skirts and heavy jewellery, and held her tiny daughter by the hand. Mussamat Janki and her child had been looked after by a British officer’s wife who had helped shepherd the family around the capital and purchased the special clothes for the occasion. There was a distinguished turn-out including Wavell and the Commander-in-Chief. In the forecourt of the Viceregal Palace the medal was presented to Mussamat Janki and also pinned on the chest of Lieutenant Premindra Singh Bhagat.20 During the ceremony, the citation was read out in Urdu and English. Lady Linlithgow bent down to
speak with Richpal Ram’s child. Looking on were injured Indian soldiers, dressed in dark coats and starched white pyjamas, many with crutches and with limbs missing.
The award of the medal had a significant effect on Mussamat Janki’s status. The proud Maharaja of Patiala came from a family with a long association with the army – his father had visited troops on the Western Front in the First World War – and the maharaja himself would later serve as a colonel in Italy, Malaya and Burma. This Victoria Cross had been awarded to one of his own subjects and he announced a grant of 500 bighas of land to Richpal Ram’s family, a patch large enough to provide a comfortable income, while Mussamat Janki also received a special state pension of 525 rupees a year in addition to the usual widow’s pension. Richpal Ram would become a Jat hero, his memory kept alive by members of his regiment and his name appearing sporadically in local history books.
For Premindra Singh Bhagat, the award of the medal had a very different effect. He was able to marry his sweetheart, Mohini. Back in Poona, Mohini’s father, Colonel Bhandari, was finally won over by the persistence of the young couple and by Bhagat’s new status as the first Indian Victoria Cross winner of the Second World War. They were married in Poona on 24 February 1942. Premindra did not return to the front and instead was assigned the task of using his iconic status, speaking on All India Radio about his feats and drumming up new recruits, touring rural parts of Maharashtra during the mid-1940s and encouraging and training more young men who came forward.
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‘British and Indians fought shoulder to shoulder, sharing the same dangers and discomforts and acquiring a remarkable degree of admiration and friendship for each other’, a British major later wrote.21 In the war diaries from North and East Africa there is little differentiation between British and non-British officers in the Indian Army. Battle in North Africa united the men, it erased petty tensions when they did exist and officers always pulled together at the critical moments. Propaganda aimed at an Indian audience such as the book The Tiger Strikes implied that the men had almost become indistinguishable and that race was now immaterial, with even the physical difference between men blurred in the conditions of war. While in Egypt, the book suggested, ‘The British troops were so tanned by the blazing sun from which there was no shade that they became as dark as the Indians, while the way in which all fraternised made this encampment in the desert a friendly and happy place.’22 Yet such propaganda also unwittingly revealed just how much racial consciousness of skin colour and of difference still mattered.
Sometimes racial difference marred relationships between officers or created pecking orders and hierarchies within the more senior ranks of the military in the 1940s. Some Indian officers privately referred to petty acts of discrimination and long remembered snubs by their British counterparts, but this was compatible with maintaining close friendships and having positive feelings about the British as a whole. It is difficult to generalise on this question and as Major Kartar Singh remembered, ‘The British people were very mixed – there were some who were very anti-Indian and some who were very friendly.’23 Differences may have been more profound in some ways between officers new to the army (both Indian and British) who had been commissioned during the war, and those of the older sort of officer, who tended to be more attached to the traditional structures of the Indian Army before the immense changes of the 1940s. The new officers who had been rapidly recruited brought a fresh spirit to the army and often had more sympathy towards political campaigns for Indian freedom.
Indeed, many British officers shared and understood their Indian colleagues’ nationalist aspirations. As one British sergeant of the Sudan Ordnance Corps wrote home from the Middle East, ‘I have met scores of these Indian troops in Cairo and have had drinks with many of them and would do so again. If India was composed chiefly of these kind of blokes I would say they deserve Home Rule and be glad to see them get it.’24 Nonetheless, for others, cordiality was not necessarily the same as solidarity. Differential treatment of Indians and Britons remained enshrined in the Indian Army’s rules, and it was only midway through the war that Indian officers could sit on courts martial of British soldiers. The debate about courts martial revealed the stark attitudes of the British government – ‘ICOs should not have power of punishment over white men’, ordered Whitehall – but also reflected the differences of opinion between leaders in New Delhi and London on this question, with those in Delhi pushing for equality between officers, which was eventually allowed in 1943.25 Command of important operations also remained a bugbear, with the most senior Indian officers feeling eclipsed by their British commanders.
The closer men got to the front line, the more the sense of racial difference and racism receded, however. In the heat of battle, the determination to defeat the enemy was an equaliser and the immediacy of battle erased many other considerations that appeared petty in the face of life or death. An officer of the Cheshire Regiment recalled a ‘hellish’ scene, when under heavy fire in North Africa, an Indian officer unknown to him risked his life to ascertain that his batman was dead: ‘Throughout the rescue attempt this officer was as calm as though nothing particular was happening and I am deeply indebted to him for confirming the fate of my batman.’26 Partly as a result of such encounters, throughout the duration of the war there was a drift towards more equality and shared fellow feeling in the army, and this was particularly experienced at the officer level, where glaring anomalies were erased. But camaraderie was never a reflection of a complete dissolution of identity.
Despite this, gaps in communication confronted officers and men. Emergency commissioned officers were fast-tracked and expected to grasp the basic rudiments of Hindustani (the Hind–Urdu hybrid lingua franca of North India) in a matter of months. This tended to be written in the Indian Army in a romanised typeface rather than in the usual Devanagari or Arabic scripts. Leave and promotion were tied to passing tests in Hindustani. The old guard of senior commanders prided themselves on their language abilities and a number could speak Hindustani with consummate skill. Wavell had not been in India for thirty years by the time that he returned in the 1940s so his earlier familiarity with Indian languages had faded, although his linguistic knowledge did aid his command of the Indian Army and later added strength to his leadership as Viceroy. Frank Brayne, the Indian Army Welfare Officer who had worked in Punjab for many decades, was an advocate of Hindustani in the roman script and was at ease in Punjabi. Field Marshal Slim was probably one of the most able to communicate directly and knew Gurkhali and Hindi. He was extremely conscious of the importance of language, ‘the closest and the strongest link in the bonds between officer and sepoy’, he wrote some years before the war, and even prized less successful efforts to try to learn the language as ‘an effort to really understand’ the Indian soldier, remaining concerned about the diminishing linguistic skill in the Indian Army in the 1930s and 1940s.27
Real proficiency in the language was a challenge even for the linguistically gifted officer, particularly when listening to dialect, slang and regional pronunciation. Among the ICS, too, the linguistically versatile pukha sahib of Kipling’s day, a man who had picked up languages as a child of the Raj, had become more rare. Ian Hay Macdonald struggled with learning Oriya and complained about the difficulties in his letters home to his parents. A number of officers crammed in their spare time, particularly on board ship and on long journeys. During his military service, Clive Branson took opportunities to go into market towns and practise speaking Hindustani when he first arrived, but the increased demands of war work, the diversity of languages within India, the rapid changes of personnel and shifts in location, all conspired to mean that among civilians and military the linguistic versatility of the Raj was no longer what it once was.
Within the Indian Army, many of the British non-commissioned officers were exceptionally dependent on intermediaries, primarily havildars, who did the work of translation and interpretation for them. This added to the abiding sens
e of a world ‘lost in translation’. For John Ffrench – who was Indian-born and had a long family connection with India stretching back to the eighteenth century – the challenges of speaking the languages still unsettled him, despite good relations with his men.
As a young British officer at the time I did not really know what the soldiers felt, my Urdu never being particularly fluent at any time. Even after four years with the same Company, whenever I spoke to them at muster parade, the subedar would always add ‘sahib ke matlab hai …’ (what the sahib means is …) I am not sure whether they really did not understand me, or whether the subedar was just putting his oar in!28
Middle-ranking Indians, including those who acted as havildars, often had halting speech in English. ‘I was matriculate and I worked with the British Officers also. But we were speaking slowly English, only Punjabi English, you can say’, recalled Major Dhatt.29
Sepoys did not have to be literate or have any knowledge of English on recruitment, although for many of them, the chance to learn literacy skills and English were additional attractions of the army. A number of officers recalled how soldiers studied from primers by lamplight after dark, took opportunities to practise their English and improved their ability to read and this could be rewarded by promotion and extra pay. In addition, as the recruitment pool rippled ever outwards into new districts, the sheer diversity of languages in the army was bewildering, and Hindustani would no longer suffice for communicating with Tamils and other southerners, speaking Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. The army even briefly considered changing the lingua franca to English, and in African regiments officers changed from vernaculars to English as the language of command during the war. But in India, the chief training officer dismissed the idea as ‘not practical politics’. The course had been set midway through the war and due to the lack of instructors, curricula and training manuals the emphasis remained on Hindustani as the medium of communication.