The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  Government contracts soared in number and by the start of 1940 orders for manufactured goods weighed in at over £62 million. ‘It is reported to me by persons of status that money is being spent like water in the name of the war’, Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy.6 Seven million garments a month rolled out of Indian factories and 3 million pairs of boots. Within three years, India would be producing as much for war supply as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa combined together.7 Alongside government-run and protected ordnance factories, hundreds of trade workshops and railway workshops were subcontracted to produce spare parts, small machinery and tools. Private industries, particularly factories manufacturing chemicals, paint, paper, metal alloys, jute for khaki uniforms and canvas, all attracted increasing numbers of workers as the pressure to complete government contracts increased month on month; one paper mill owned by the Birla group, for instance, had soon tripled its output. By the mid-1940s India was churning out rifles and bayonets, machine guns and ammunition, artillery and shells, tractors and plating for armoured vehicles, anti-tank ammunition, boots, blankets, uniforms, camouflage and sandbags.

  The impact on the ecology of the subcontinent was becoming evident as timber from the forests of Burma and from the north-east and central India was hewn into packing cases, ammunition boxes, railway sleepers and telegraph poles, leaving the natural landscape of the Burmese borderlands changed even before the ravages of war in the region. A few voices spoke up for the preservation of the forests but they went unheard. The war was about to unleash an unprecedented assault on the natural environment of the north-east and once road-building began in 1942, the region became more accessible than ever before. Private companies, often British- and American-owned, like Burma Shell, were given the rights to prospect for oil and minerals, and looked hungrily towards the Bengali river basins for exploration.

  The economic boom was welcomed, especially after the long years of depression. Little wonder that G. D. Birla and his peers initially hesitated to support the Congress, and believed Gandhi was ‘wandering in the wilderness’. Business leaders backed the war for the time being, demanding with candour ‘a fair share of the additional demand’.8 For a while, businessmen like Walchand and G. D. Birla threw themselves behind the war and when Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, Birla telegraphed him to congratulate him. Pained by the increasing estrangement of the British and the Indians and concerned about the desperate fortunes of the Allies in Europe, industrial leaders attempted to straddle the middle ground, to mediate between empire and nationalists. Birla pressed his old friend Gandhi towards a settlement with the British and told him frankly ‘we are going the wrong way’ when Gandhi initiated satyagraha in 1940.

  Profits for war industries soared and time and again the roots of staggering post-war fortunes can be found in the 1940s. The larger Indian-owned companies could acquire licences, cartelise and buy out expatriate firms and concentrate wealth in ever fewer hands. Well-placed and canny operators like the Marwari Ramakrishna Dalmia, who had previously owned some of the largest sugar and cement companies in India but had not diversified, and turned his attention to finance. He established Bharat Bank in 1941 and was soon buying into flour-milling, sugar and jute mills, cotton textiles, civil aviation, railways, coal mines, electricity supply and newspapers. In Jamshedpur, the home of Tata Steel – India’s iconic steel plant – towering chimneys smoked day and night. During the Battle of Britain, Tata Steel made a voluntary donation for the purchase of two Spitfires, so keen was the Indian-owned business to display its loyalty to the war effort. Alongside the larger companies, smaller firms stockpiled warehouses, chased contract opportunities and risked new ventures, often reaping profits on a new scale, while it soon became apparent that small workshops and petty craftsmen could tap the new windfalls as well as the bigger players.

  Indian laboratories started to make advances too and scientists could already trumpet the technical and scientific innovations generated by the war. Nearly 300 different drugs that had formerly been imported could now be made locally. Military and civil hospitals looked to the domestic market for everything from disinfectants to surgical instruments, hot-water bottles, bandages, rubber gloves and enamel dishes. ‘An effective substitute for cod liver oil is now being made on an extensive scale in India’, a cheery government circular declared, ‘from the livers of sharks caught in Indian waters.’9 In the hills of Conoor, amla berries were being grown, dried and pressed into vitamin C tablets for troops while a few specialist manufacturers in Calcutta sprang up making thermometers and new firms began retailing surgical instruments and dressings, morphine, codeine and caffeine. Vaccines were increasingly made in Indian laboratories rather than imported and scientists experimented with sera needed for the treatment of tetanus, diphtheria and jaundice.

  For many people of far more modest means, wartime looked potentially promising too. The mega-cities, Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, buzzed with a new energy while artisans, clerks and railway workers in small towns and cities looked forward to greater chances of employment, far preferable to the long hard years of the 1930s. Workers flocked towards the cities, and factory employment went up by a third. As one Lascar recalled at the start of the war, everyone was saying ‘Money Coming! Money Coming!’10 The rising prices of commodities could be matched, initially, by rising wages and the urban middle class – clerks, teachers, journalists and college students with more money in their pockets – mingled at new coffee houses and spent their money on new consumer goods, from gramophone records and bicycles to Singer sewing machines and machine-made saris. They went to the cinema to see K. A. Abbas’s film Naya Sansar, or ‘New World’, which depicted a romantic young newspaper journalist, and appealed to the rising sense of radicalism among the young, urban middle class. More women entered the workforce, and in the cities the labouring poor manufactured munitions and cleaned tank parts and young men and women escaped family bonds by working at mines and brick-kilns, taking up seasonal work or adding to agricultural incomes. War workers were promised better conditions and higher pay and special access to increasingly costly cloth, food and medicines in return for their unswerving loyalty. This was all, at first sight, far preferable to the conditions of the 1930s, when it had been so hard to get a steady job at all and incomes had been precarious and uncertain.

  The rising wages, though, have to be set against rising living costs. The boom in wages quickly proved illusory as the wartime economic pressure cooker in India started to boil. Demand was intense and shifts in the factories and war industries became harder, longer and more disruptive to ordinary life, and labourers had to be prepared to pick up day wages and to chop and change contracts. The usual mechanisms for negotiating problems between boss and worker also started to fail as the state could crack down on strikes using the Defence of India rules and managers used every trick in the book to keep mill hands at work, to keep the spindles turning and the engines humming twenty-four hours a day. But inevitably, the machinery started to run down and when the quality of materials declined, factory managers expected the same standards. In Bombay’s textile mills, a worker who broke thread or tore cloth must pay a fine and all the workers had to improvise, ingeniously fixing up old machines and trying to meet targets against all odds. Bosses drove workers harder instead of investing in machinery – they could not update their machines or get hold of the spare parts even if they wanted to – and as a result factory workers literally risked life and limb. Industrial accidents were a common occurrence, and combined with the poor conditions in overcrowded new shanty towns or bustees, workers faced high risks of injury or disease.11

  The cities began to swell in a way that was unprecedented, beginning an irreversible flow of workers from country to city which has continued to the present day. On the outskirts of cities bustees became visible, improvised structures of cardboard and cloth. In Cawnpore, the pre-war population of some 200,000 or 300,000 would nearly treble by the end of the war, driven up by wartime workers to munition
s and industrial plants, although tellingly the number of hospital beds for civilians remained unchanged.12 Resources were stretched under the pressure of these new populations, aggravating friction between communities struggling for access to the barest provisions. In Ahmedabad, where the textile mills churned out fabric for uniforms worn around the empire, there were some 380 hospital beds for a civilian population of 600,000. ‘Nowhere in the world today’, observed Daniel Thorner, economic historian and well-travelled Indophile at the end of the war, ‘are there slums worse than the single-storey bustees of Calcutta or the multistorey chawls of Bombay.’13Factory workers in essential and government-controlled industries such as ordnance benefited from subsidised meals, but there was no simple trickle-down effect for those workers who served the war’s industries and whose pay was consistently eroded by the inflation of real prices.

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  The war was being treated with a new seriousness of purpose as the administration intensified blackouts, air raid precautions (ARP) drills and internal defence. Delhi was plunged into darkness in summer 1941 and held its first complete blackouts: in both Old and New Delhi all street lights were extinguished or shaded and in Calcutta time was literally out of sync as the clocks in the city’s municipal buildings, great monuments to ideals of Victorian industry and punctiliousness, were put forward one hour so that workers in the city’s factories, making textiles and jute gunny bags for the war, could hurry home before the blackout at nightfall. As in Britain, air raid precaution workers patrolled the streets, looking for lights seeping out from between drawn curtains or blackout paper pasted across windows, and offering first aid and warning sirens in the event of the dreaded attack. The coloured lights of religious festivals were identified as a potential target from the air and worshippers were told to extinguish their lights as darkness fell, cigarette-smoking was banned in the blackout and traders and stallholders had to extinguish the small lights that illuminated their vegetables and other wares.14

  Centrally disseminated propaganda was now targeted at the population in a variety of guises and languages. It was intended to show both the military might and preparedness of the country and to impress local people with technical wizardry. At the religious mela at Garhmukteshwar alongside the banks of the Ganges in the summer of 1941, big tanks were on show for the sadhus, devotees and pilgrims to admire. Displays of military hardware dubbed ‘circuses’ rolled through parts of the country that had ‘seldom seen a soldier’, part educational event, part rousing show of prowess, and exhibition trains and touring lecturers travelled the countryside with rolled-up maps and diagrams. Military and civil wings worked together to spread the word. Vans kitted out with loudspeakers and pamphlets, mobile cinemas and all manner of meetings and lectures toured from district to district while 44 million copies of a paper called War in Pictures circulated in twelve different Indian languages.15

  The state was projecting a more sober and less lavish image than in the 1930s and a more serious effort to reflect the gravity of the global situation was urged on colonial officials by the military. There was a clampdown on parties and on alcohol sales in hotel bars and restaurants. Prodigious amounts of alcohol had kept Raj high society afloat during the 1920s and 1930s and whisky, beer and gin were favourites. The more high-class the establishment, the later it was allowed to stay open: in Delhi, at Hakman’s Astoria and Davicos Restaurant at the Imperial and Maidens Hotels, parties went on until 2.30 a.m. on at least one evening a week and crowds listened to Russian cabaret artists and American jazz pianists. Officially, clubs in Delhi did not have the right to serve alcohol unless they had a special licence for dances or charity events; in reality, club-owners widely flouted such rules and drinking went on until the small hours. The rules had become increasingly elastic throughout the 1930s to the stage where a restaurant or hotel proprietor could get a special licence ‘practically as often as he liked’ but now, on army request, the normal closing hours would be ten o’clock.16

  Shortages also played a role in dampening the nightlife. ‘Only whisky and beer drunk these days,’ complained Ian Macdonald, ‘everything else substandard Australian import.’17 Shortages of petrol and other commodities had begun to bite even for the elites. Yet these cutbacks still felt a little bit of a charade, a pantomime war which was not fully integrated into the thinking or behaviour of the Raj. As soldiers arrived from Blitz-battered Britain and saw the lifestyles of many British people in India they were amazed and angered.

  Despite intensified attempts in 1941 to gear India towards war, the most important change that was taking place across the country was a silent, pervasive phenomenon. As the government printed more money and the purchase orders continued to flow, the economy looked, superficially, to be booming. But inflation was already outstripping rises in wages.18 Ordinary villagers did not buy a vast array of goods and the price of a small number of consumable items was critically important, the basic stuff of life on which people depended: grain, kerosene and cloth. Disruptions to shipping, the dislocation of the economy and the prioritisation of military production meant that even if they had more money when they had sold their goods to market, villagers were finding that they simply could not get hold of the items that they usually relied on or that the prices were outstripping what they could realistically afford. All across India, people complained of weevils, shrivelled grain and admixtures. The warning signs about how risky and precarious life was becoming for the rural poor flashed again and again. Silver coins were disappearing from the market as high metal content was regarded as a form of security in times when money was becoming less reliable. The new rupee note, introduced ostensibly to save metal, was also a signifier of inflation and people instinctively rejected it in favour of the former metal coin. These telltale signs of people severely squeezed by economic circumstances were subtle, but widespread.

  By mid-1941 the reality of the war, its severity and extensive reach were becoming clearer. The tentacles of war reached out slowly, grasping more and more territory. Germany overran Romania and Bulgaria and attacked Yugoslavia and Greece; in March 1941, 60,000 men from North Africa set off to defend Greece, including many thousands of Indians. But it was Operation Barbarossa, the game-changing moment of the war, when Hitler made a colossal push against Stalin’s Russia, which resonated loudest in India. The war took on a new magnitude.19

  Russia had long been part of a utopian hope as when Indians thought about progress and development, they looked to Russia for inspiration. Nehru had first visited Moscow in 1927 and the poet-polymath Rabindranath Tagore had also been an admirer. At a time when many Soviet crimes remained unreported, the leaps forward in industrial production and living standards had left a deep impression on Indian minds. The advance on Russia that summer shocked and divided people even further. Rabindranath Tagore, eighty years old and ailing, gave voice in a public speech, his last public statement, to the agonies of seeing the world in conflict, and also the disillusionment with ideas of Europe as the heartland of mankind’s progress:

  I had at one time believed that the springs of civilization would issue out of the heart of Europe. But today when I am about to quit the world that faith has gone bankrupt altogether … the demon of barbarity has given up all pretence and has emerged with unconcealed fangs, ready to tear up humanity in an orgy of devastation. From one end of the world to the other the poisonous fumes of hatred darken the atmosphere.

  The feeling of a world cut adrift, of old ties severed with European friends, persisted. ‘Letters from across the sea have become painfully scarce,’ complained Tagore in a private letter, ‘we crave mutual touch with distant friends.’20 On his deathbed later that year Tagore would ask for the news from Russia.21

  Indian communists now openly supported the war, and aligned themselves with the war effort, alongside the anti-fascist Radical Democratic Party. B. P. Jain, a member of the Radical Democratic Party, remembered later how difficult the decision had been to support the anti-fascist cause, how, over lo
ng hours in coffee shops and in each other’s houses, his colleagues had painstakingly assured themselves of their position. They would continue to be ridiculed and sidelined by opponents in other political parties for this unambiguous stance. But despite their pro-war stance, the police and state administrators continued to blacklist them and to view them with deep suspicion because of their leftist views. B. P. Jain’s friend, Vatsayan, who had been writing anti-Nazi books, tried to join the army but was turned down at first. For Jain, Vatsayan and other followers of the radical politician M. N. Roy, taking a clear stand against fascism was not easy. Often these men had studied in Europe and had a thorough grip on global politics, and they saw, as Marxists, the political questions of the day on a global canvas. But politicians opposing the war targeted them as quislings, selling out to the imperialists. ‘On this issue of war we discussed and discussed and discussed to reach the conclusion that the war had to be anti-fascist’, remembered Jain. ‘I would not have been a revolutionary had I not stood up against the masses even at the cost of my prestige, to fight fascism.’22

  With the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war in the East on 7 December 1941, India was about to be transformed. Tagore would not live to see the great changes to his home city of Calcutta. He died on 7 August 1941, just weeks before the Japanese began their lightning sweep through Asia. His funeral was marked by Bengalis who came out into the streets in their hundreds of thousands in a public outpouring of grief and respect, one of the greatest street spectacles ever witnessed in Bengal. There was a riotous element to the funeral: the body was manhandled as the crowds surged along; they threw wreaths and flowers from the roadside, climbed trees and telegraph poles to get a better view and the bier swept towards its pyre on a wave of shoulders, upheld by the people.

  By this time, the focus of the war was still upon Russia and Europe, but the Japanese had been steadily advancing in China, and the threat of Japanese imperial ambitions for British rule in South-East Asia, across the Bay of Bengal, had been under-appreciated. Nobody suspected that Calcutta would soon find itself close to the front line of the war and that once the war came to Indian shores, the effects would be cataclysmic.