The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  From December 1941 to the following May, the refugees trudged into India and disorganised makeshift camps became swollen to bursting point around the north-eastern border. It has been estimated that 600,000 Indians fled Burma and that 80,000 of them never made it to their destination. The refugees battled leeches, mud and diseases, especially cholera and malaria. Insect bites covered their skin and most suffered with dysentery and diarrhoea. Separated families worried about their kin, sometimes not seeing them or hearing word of them again. Finally, exhaustion and starvation took hold of many. By May 1942, the weakest and poorest remained trailing behind, casual day labourers from rice mills and factories, with little surplus body fat or savings to buffer them. By July 1942 the refugees still coming out of Burma had been on the road for weeks and had not been able to find food. Some had become so emaciated that they verged on starvation.

  Veronica Downing, a member of an old tea plantation-owning family of Assam, witnessed the arrival of the refugees as they reached the end of their terrible trail and a place of safety in the refugee camps near her family plantation in north-east India:

  A Naga carried a white woman all the way who had just had a baby. No-one knew who she was but once she got to safety she and the baby quietly died … The refugees would go through incredible hardship – once they got to a safe place and no more momentum [was] needed they would just give up the ghost and die. The Manipur road would slip down, the rock was shale and would not hold a road. They would just sit at the slip and die. It was a great problem disposing of the bodies, especially in the tropics as it must happen within a few hours. I was rather shocked when I passed the hospital early in the morning on my way to the office and saw them unloading bodies. Graves would fill with water, the water level was so high. The only thing was to burn them in heaps to save firewood.18

  On the Pangsau escape route, following the Namyang River to Lekhapani, reports of the refugees’ arrival started in May. Indian tea plantation labourers, stationed there for road-building work, were used to help with the evacuation, often despite great reluctance on their part. Nagas and other members of north-eastern adivasi tribes worked as porters and built refugee camps. Among the Garo sick levels were rising, many suffered foot sores, and porters resisted helping the refugees, scared of contracting illnesses. As one report euphemistically put it, ‘they were not working willingly’. The labourers’ apprehensions were justified: at least twenty-three porters died of illnesses in one week on this route. Some of the mules suffered 50 per cent casualty rates as the tracks disintegrated under the pressure of elephants and mules, leaving only boulders and potholes. On 20 May daily air drops of food by the RAF began. Some of the forward camps were so foul and full of sewage that even exhausted refugees refused to enter them; human waste covered the floors, and bedding and mosquito nets were in short supply. The disposal of the dead was a particular problem: ‘porters would not touch the dead and only occasionally could tea garden labourers be prevailed upon to do so’. Medical and liaison officers threw bodies into rivers or over precipices where they could, where this was not possible they carried out rough burials or burned them with kerosene.19

  To the south, over the Taungup Pass, some 100,000 to 200,000 Indians attempted to escape to the East Indian port of Chittagong against a tide of petty charges from Burmese police for inoculation certificates and passes. One well-informed eyewitness suggested that casualty figures were ‘infinitely greater’ on this route than elsewhere, although verifying casualty statistics for the evacuee escape is fraught with difficulty, especially as some Indians turned back and tried to melt into the Burmese population.

  Along the way there was evidence of long-remembered gestures of kindness and solidarity from Burmese monasteries, ordinary people and fellow Indians. Ramesh Benegal, who sheltered in a gurdwara with his family after they had abandoned their car, wrote years later, ‘I will never forget the peaceful atmosphere there and the kindness showed to us.’20 But refugees also suffered looting, robbery and extortion by the strong over the weak as the trek produced ruthless cut-throat competition simply to survive. In this crisis, some sepoys had deserted with their weapons, afraid of the Japanese onslaught, and rumours of aggressive acts of opportunism or desperation persisted. Some disorganised troops threatened people with loaded rifles in order to obtain food, or looted villages on their path out of Burma. ‘A refugee, who said he was a sepoy, had taken possession of the stores at Shamlung and had 2000 Rs on his person. He was said by other refugees to be selling stores at extortionate prices.’ Robbing of corpses or abandonment of weaker members of parties sometimes took place. There was, as in other moments of desperate refugee crisis, a persistence of class and caste differences and sometimes the rich could use their assets to insulate themselves by hiring porters or transport for carrying personal possessions, or buying favours. Indian traders and merchants left with their life savings, and carried large wads of cash or jewellery, and sometimes became targets along the route. Occasionally, justice was served. After the theft of over 20,000 rupees from a Marwari trader in a refugee camp, soldiers found the offenders and captured them on the road. Another prosperous Indian family trying to get away had to watch as their father was knocked unconscious and robbed but the assailants, a party of poor Indians, were apprehended and sent to base under escort.

  Further down the line, at Asansol in Bengal, a young and thoughtful British nurse, Angela Bolton, who had trained as one of Florence Nightingale’s Queen Alexandra’s Nurses in Britain and had reached India in 1942, was working long hours in a General Hospital for troops, both Indian and non-Indian, who were housed in separate wards on different sides of a corridor. Over the spring and summer of 1942 she saw the ramifications of the war, and the story of the fall and recapture of Burma inscribed on the bodies of men, while nursing British, Indian, West African, Chinese, American and even Japanese casualties. Men arriving at the General Hospital told depressing tales, many of them sick with malaria from their long trek. ‘British, Indian and Gurkha troops, distinguished solely by the identity discs around their necks – we never knew their units – shared a brotherhood of emaciated raggedness.’21 Throughout the month of May men died daily. A melancholy mood pervaded the hospital, its staff and patients:

  There are now sixty-five patients in the medical ward. My heart sinks when I see yet another casualty brought in on a stretcher. All these deaths are having a bad effect on the morale of the rest of the patients in the ward. The dramatic treatment of wringing out sheets in a tin bath of ice-water and wrapping them round the patient in full view of everyone (there is no room for screens even if we had them) must be having a depressing effect on the others as it is frequently followed by the death of the patient. Can the heat get any worse? It is said it will be even hotter next month before the monsoon rains.22

  In the sudden evacuation from Burma, military men received scarcely better care than refugees. There was a scramble to try and prepare beds, hospitals and rest camps and to organise transport. Sometimes only airlifted as far as Dinjan in Assam, the less serious casualties went onward by ordinary train to Dimapur and further along the tracks towards northern and eastern India. Exhausted and filthy Allied troops, even if not badly injured, could be seen by other passengers, on stations and passing through the towns. Villagers, who watched these soldiers coming back from the front looking bedraggled and sick, drew their own conclusions about the progress of the war. Some fellow passengers gave out water, fruit and snacks to men who had exhausted their rations, passing goods up through the bars in the windows to the fatigued soldiers. Onlookers talked to each other about what they had seen and rumours spread.

  * * *

  The Burma retreat, and the differential treatment of refugees, shocked the nation. The effects of the British rout could not be screened from the public. After his harrowing escape from Burma as a nine-year-old with his family, Dr Krishnan Gurumurthy recalled the relief on reaching India, and the ensuing long journey southwards from Calcutta:
<
br />   It took about ten days for us to reach Madras. The train wended its way slowly, partly because of the over-load and partly because it stopped frequently in all major stations. At every major station, people from the villages flocked to the train and showered us with delicacies, fruits and beverages. The affection shown to us by Bengalees, Oriyas and Andhras en-route was touching. At that time in the year 1942, the fervour of patriotism and freedom from British Rule was such, everyone was vying with each other to do their bit for their fellowmen.23

  Lending a hand to the refugees from Burma became a nationalist cause. And among the refugees, the idea of Congress as a protector had taken root:

  Fantastic rumours spread among the evacuees; it was said that Gibraltar had been taken and that the Japanese were advancing so fast on the Manipur road they were being machine gunned by their own planes. Indian refugees were told in Burma that a Congress organisation would feed them en route. They frequently asked where this was.24

  The faith in the Congress to provide protection where the British state had failed to do so is a telling insight into the loss of faith in the Raj.

  People had high expectations of support and protection from Indian politicians. Many of the South-East Asian refugees from Malaya and Burma had family roots in Madras Presidency. They had been arriving in large numbers at short notice throughout the early months of 1942. Inflammatory reports reproduced in local newspapers were blamed on the tales told by refugees from South-East Asia. Local newspapers faced government censure for churning up panic, sounding defeatist or reproducing enemy propaganda. In truth, though, much of this news had been circulating regardless of the newspapers, filtered through the networks of refugees and soldiers who passed on smatterings of information from across the Indian Ocean.

  Refugees arriving in India urgently needed to find an Indian foothold. The survival strategies and rehabilitation of the Indian refugees from Burma, Malaya and Singapore varied and depended heavily on their previous education, connections and class. Some of the businessmen, Marwaris and Chettiars, with close links to the commercial interests of Indian business magnates, championed their cause through Chambers of Commerce and other public organisations. In Assam and Bengal, refugees benefited from the lobbying and activism of an Indian evacuees’ relief committee with no less than G. D. Birla at the helm. This organisation worked closely with the provincial Congress committees, and lobbied central government for compensation for traders who had lost orders and stock, had had property requisitioned or warehouses and stores damaged by the Japanese or the retreating Burmese government.25 Other organisations working for the displaced included the Burma Indian Association and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and the Muslim League urged its committees to assist Muslim refugees coming from South-East Asia. These committees also articulated the hardships of the refugees and called for preferential treatment in the allocation of government jobs. Ramesh Benegal’s brother, who had been hospitalised with lacerated feet for a number of weeks after his trek from Burma, eventually took up a senior position in the Ordnance Department of the Government of India.

  A number of other refugees, however, continued to face visible hardship and destitution. Many urban shopkeepers and merchants from Burma could not adjust easily to agricultural or manual labour. In Madras, some 200 evacuees from Burma employed on aerodrome construction complained about the work they were doing breaking metal in the searing summer heat.26 It was estimated in May that in Madras alone, 15,000 evacuees from Burma had no employment at all. They faced ‘acute distress’ and it was suggested by the government that public works under the famine code, which provided for state intervention in extreme conditions, might be needed to ensure their survival.27 Only a small number had received any government grants even by early 1943, and the interpretation of the welfare rules had been ‘over-strict’.28

  * * *

  India’s war had now become a global concern. Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese nationalist leader, had arrived in Delhi in February 1942 to talk to Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah to much excitement in the press; those who supported the war hoped for mutual co-operation between the Chinese nationalists and Indians, other onlookers thrilled to see Asian world leaders in conference, glimpsing a foretaste of future post-colonial Independence. Leading Bengali politicians, headed by Fazlul Haq, signed a letter and called a meeting ‘to express the enthusiastic admiration of the people of Bengal for the people of China’ and calling for Indians to show ‘the same spirit of determination and fortitude in adversity as have the people of China over the past four and a half years’.29 One-third of the world’s population should stand side by side, the advocates of Indo-Chinese solidarity proclaimed. Chiang Kai-shek was making a bid to reconcile Indian leaders to the war effort, believing the future of China, and his own leadership of China, depended on an Allied victory which now hung in the balance. But he found his five-hour conversation with Gandhi on 18 February disappointing. ‘My expectations were too great, but perhaps the pain of being ruled by the British has hardened his heart … he knows and loves only India, and doesn’t care about other people and places.’30 There was mutual incomprehension between the two men, and Gandhi’s non-violent principles could not be squared with the Chinese war leader. Indian nationalism was now, in any case, outstripping any other forms of pan-national solidarity or cosmopolitanism that had been more ascendant in the 1930s. The emphasis was narrowing to a simple but powerful message, that the empire had to be swept aside, although the form of politics that would replace it was still highly uncertain.

  Gandhi mentioned Burma repeatedly during these critical months and his speeches and writings became uncharacteristically angry. His new determination to see the British quit India can be directly linked to the fallout from Burma. ‘Hundreds, if not thousands, on their way from Burma perished without food and drink, and the wretched discrimination stared even these miserable people in the face. One route for the whites, another for the blacks! Provision of food and shelter for the whites, none for the blacks! And discrimination even on their arrival in India!’ an irate Gandhi told American journalists from Time and Life magazines. ‘India is being ground down to dust and humiliated, even before the Japanese advent, not for India’s defence – and no one knows for whose defence. And so one fine morning I came to the decision to make this honest demand: “For Heaven’s sake leave India alone.”’31

  9

  Urban Panic

  THERE WAS A scramble now to put India on a war footing. A young Quaker volunteer, Richard Symonds, who had experience of the Blitz in London and was now living in Bengal, recalled how ‘with a strong sense of urgency’ he helped to set up air raid shelters, dispensaries, fire-fighting units, first aid posts, ambulance services and information points for those whose homes had been destroyed. He gathered thousands of volunteers armed with stirrup-pumps and buckets:

  The greatest danger of conflagration was in the vast bustees or shanty towns inhabited by the migrant population. During the day the men were out at work and their wives were too shy to volunteer, so we mainly recruited the prostitutes who were delighted to come forward and when I came on inspections, would greet me with the cry, ‘Long live commander.’ Why the Japanese did not continue the bombing is difficult to understand, for though the damage was small, the disruption was great.1

  Panic had gripped people who rightly feared that the country was about to fall under attack, that their property and land were not safe and that their subsistence livelihoods would be subject to the predation of either an incoming conquering force or a military backlash against Japan.

  At this critical juncture, some Congressmen also took part in civil defence, raising their own People’s Volunteer Brigade to carry out parallel functions. Bhulabhai Desai, a famed lawyer who would later defend the accused of the Indian National Army in their trial, presided over a civil defence committee, discussing air raid precautions in Bombay.2 Gandhi also had to face the issue of what to suggest in the occurrence of i
nvasion. He called for calm and equanimity. ‘I would not like it to be said of us as a nation that we run about like madmen on approach of slightest danger … while I was and am against Congressmen joining ARP I have never thought of or suggested that Congressmen should leave points of danger or fields of service.’3 Elements of Churchillian rhetoric seeped into the speech of British and Indian leaders alike. Jinnah even bowdlerised Lord Nelson: ‘Islam expects every Mussalman to do his duty by his people and by his nation’, he declared in March 1942.4

  In Vizagapatam, Walchand’s shipyard was standing empty, as it would do for several years, the local workers having abandoned their work and fled inland. Walchand had failed to foresee, along with many of the British imperial administrators, the vulnerability of India’s eastern coast. The speed with which the Japanese now seized territory in South-East Asia and drew closer to the Raj’s borders and coastline surprised Walchand, and overnight his shipyard became moribund. As the Japanese advanced in Burma and South-East Asia, the blue bay of Vizagapatam looked exposed, and the atmosphere changed to one of apprehension.

  Parents, as anywhere in the world, fretted about evacuation and securing the future well-being of their young. The evacuation of children in Britain was organised by the state, but in India people made their own arrangements, drawing on the resources of large, widespread extended families. The writer Kamala Das remembers in her memoir of childhood how she was sent away from her parents in Calcutta to live in a family village in Malabar, a strange and disconcerting adjustment at first. A schoolgirl from a prosperous family, Sulochana Simhadri, remembered the foreboding atmosphere in the Vizagapatam of her childhood, the blackouts, rations and panics, which now bore some resemblance to the British home front: