by Yasmin Khan
We were scared of war as we are afraid of bombing by enemy countries. We used to live near the sea coast of Visakhapatnam. Defence services used to have coastal batteries, anti-aircraft guns and searchlights. Every week they used to practise firing into the sea. We used to watch as we were close by and get scared. We had training in Air Raid Precautions … They used to signal by a siren warning so that we could take shelter. Sirens used to be short and long, three or four times quickly. We used to keep food stored in small boxes and also we used to keep large torchlights. We dug trenches in our house deep in the garden and covered with planks and palm leaves. We used to take packed food and go into [the trenches] when we heard the siren and come out when we heard the long signal that meant we were safe. So many houses had been taken [requisitioned] to keep the army close to the sea. Soldiers used to march in front of our houses. Our parents never allowed us out of the house to protect us.
We had blackout throughout the city. City lights are covered with black cardboard domes. No light to be seen in the night. In the houses also we covered lights. Sometimes when air raid warning comes army used to cut off power so that enemy planes cannot see. They used to put searchlights into the sky whenever is needed.5
In April the government ordered Walchand to dismantle his prized shipyard for fear of aerial attack. He was left with thousands of pounds’ worth of teakwood in the yard, which he was unable to transport to Bombay. The industrialist’s company initially rented a plot in the neighbouring village of Anakapalli and constructed temporary housing for labourers. But workers were in short supply, either fleeing bombing or taking on risky but lucrative work on new Allied construction projects. When the shipyard in Vizag was closed, the Scindia company constructed a replacement yard at Mazagaon in Bombay, transported employees and railway-wagonloads of materials across central India and commenced construction there instead.
All was not well with the Indian war effort. People could justifiably point to the lack of shelters and there were no proper arrangements to protect people in the event of aerial bombing. Thousands of pounds were allocated for the construction of a state-of-the art reinforced shelter under the Viceroy’s House. A handful of elite administrators dug and installed Anderson shelters in their bungalows, but for the population at large such protection was never a possibility. The Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, was asked in the House of Commons about what kind of protection was available for Indians and had to publicly admit that people were making do with trench shelters. ‘In the main’, he told his fellow politicians, in the case of aerial bombardment, ‘resort will probably be had to dispersal of the population from crowded areas to temporary camps.’6 It was just simply, in the words of one official, a ‘physical impossibility’ to construct deep shelters to give protection from bombs and the cost of reinforcing the structure of private dwellings was ‘prohibitive’.7
Air raid precautions now absorbed much time and money, particularly in eastern India but also in all the major cities. Paying people to come out as air raid wardens was proving one way to make the service function. ARP profiteering was not uncommon, and as with other police functions, the opportunity to impose fines on people came with added advantages. In Cawnpore the recruitment of ARP wardens was proving ‘peculiarly difficult’, and in the Central Provinces and Berar, the response to the call for wardens was ‘poor in the extreme’. In Ranchi it was explained that it was difficult to get ARP volunteers because local people had heard that if you signed up you might be sent to the front in Europe and even those voluntary personnel who did join ‘almost invariably declined’ to sign anything on paper. In Raipur a Deputy Commissioner issued personal letters to fifty people inviting them to work as wardens and only three replied.8 In Parliament Amery continued to answer questions on the subject of the protection of Indians and confidently assured his audience that ‘there is abundant willing co-operation from the general population with the work being done’, although he knew as well as anyone that in reality this was far from the case. By the end of the year, not a single province had met its target for recruiting air raid wardens.9 Fire-fighting equipment was substandard and years out of date; in Bombay the fire service resorted to retrieving some hoses dating from 1859 from the local museum. Many factory shelters in the cities were stinking, filled with rubbish or used as latrines. These pits had little appeal to factory workers who were ordered to stay in them during air raid warning signals but were unable to join their families or to bring them into the shelters. Many people were suspicious of official information about potential air raids, and preferred to listen to rumour: ‘Don’t believe what people tell you about what happened in Burma’, instructed one pamphlet issued for factory workers. ‘You can get absolutely true and reliable news from the factory news bulletin or broadcasts.’10 The priority was to keep these men at work.
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Japanese civilians living in India now joined the inmates of POW camps. The police seized a Japanese follower of Gandhi, who had taken the name Keshav. He had become a Gandhian follower in 1935 and remained in India, living the life of a devotee in Gandhi’s ashram. The police turned up with no warning and seized him in front of Gandhi, much to the Mahatma’s repugnance.11 A local Japanese manager of a steamship company in Bombay, Hirozi Uemura, hanged himself, and was widely suspected of leaking information about the schedule of ships leaving Bombay harbour.
Some 3,000 Japanese civilians captured in Singapore, including women and children, were also arriving in India by the end of the year. A large camp was set up in the grounds of the old Mughal site in Delhi, Purana Qila, housing 2,115 Japanese in basic tents, exposed to Delhi’s extremes of heat and cold, susceptible to beriberi, dysentery and other diseases. One hundred and six died, including nine children, and a number of women, despite earlier protests by the Japanese government about the inadequacy of their accommodation. This incident (although well hidden from public view at the time) embittered relations between the two imperial enemies in the East even further, prefiguring Allied treatment at camps like Changi in the Japanese-occupied areas later in the war.12
There was ambivalence among many Indians about this new ‘enemy’. A number of Indian intellectuals had long taken an interest in Japan and the Japanese, particularly since the defeat of Russia in 1905; Japan was the country which proved, in the eyes of many, that Asians could ‘modernise’ and ‘develop’, that Asians could rise to the military challenge and equal European firepower, or aspire to a form of global modernism. For some, there was a mythic, though as it turned out largely ungrounded, sense of solidarity with the idea of Japan, expressed, for instance, in the paintings of Tagore’s nephew, Abanindranath Tagore, that had been influenced by Japanese landscapes and calligraphy. Others believed in a form of racial solidarity, again perhaps more imagined than real, but pervasive and persuasive nonetheless. ‘When I went to Japan, the Japanese treated me on terms of equality; they looked after me right royally in smart high-class tourist shelters like the Imperial Hotel; wherever I went out I was entertained with honour and respect’, remembered Walchand Hirachand, a number of years later.
In England on the other hand every hotel I went to would be found ‘full up’. Big merchants and industrialists had no desire to invite me to their homes. Even in America, hoteliers would tell me that they ‘didn’t allow blacks’. So what sort of feelings are men like me going to have about people like those?13
In India, among those who heard Subhas Chandra Bose’s first broadcast in February 1942, there was an exhilarating thrill of a new world order which might challenge the hegemonic power of Europe over the East that had shaped life since the eighteenth century. ‘This is Subhas Chandra Bose, speaking to you over the Azad Hind Radio. For about a year I have waited in silence and patience for the march of events and now that the hour has struck, I come forward to speak.’ Bose chose to speak out publicly for the first time since he went underground because of the wave of Japanese victories. ‘The fall of Singapore means the collapse of th
e British Empire, the end of the iniquitous regime which it has symbolised and the dawn of a new era in Indian history.’14 Bose remained convinced at this point in the war that the Axis powers would help to liberate India by initiating a new world order and gave strong voice to this view:
The Tripartite Powers – Germany, Italy and Japan – through whom this consummation will be brought about, are accordingly our natural friends and allies. It is the blackest lie to say that these Powers constitute a menace to India. From my intimate knowledge of these three nations, I can assert on the contrary that they have nothing but sympathy and goodwill for India and for Indian Independence.15
Like a deus ex machina, Bose’s appearance at the critical hour and his cry of faith, unity and discipline was a reassuring godsend for many in the uncertain and threatening days of 1942. Although much of the population at large still felt uncertain about what invasion might entail, he simplified the political task ahead and reduced it to one basic mission – the ejection of the British – and persuaded many Indians that they did not have the same reasons as the British to fear the Japanese. Instead, he encouraged his listeners to relish the breakdown of the old status quo.
When local people did become fearful about the threat of invasion, as rumours of imminent Japanese attack grew more plausible and realistic, panics were localised, and failed to connect with British orders and commands. There was a gap in communication between the government and the public and people made their own arrangements, without reference to the orders emanating from the District Magistrate or local police. The Blitz spirit of wartime British cities, the cheerful if mythic ideal of community united in resistance to the enemy, was entirely absent. Instructions and pamphlets told factory workers how to conduct themselves in a shelter: don’t crowd out space, obey your shelter marshal, do not leave until he gives the word, ‘Try a little singing. It will keep your spirits up.’16 But these instructions and models had been directly imported from blitzed London and had far less resonance among the Indian population, already struggling with more pressing daily concerns of subsistence amidst rampant inflation.
This elusive but significant feeling of a war not properly understood or appreciated troubled the imperial administrators throughout the 1940s in India. Accompanying this was the attempt to emulate tried and tested methods from the British home front, to export diagrams, manuals and handbooks directly to the Indian public with the concession of translations into local vernaculars. The problem, mused one official, was that the material coming from Delhi was ‘very academic’. Euphemistically, he cited the ‘different’ conditions of India, without putting his finger on the vast iniquities of income and living standard.
I retain an uneasy feeling that our system is too much an attempt to copy methods which have proved effective in ‘blitzed’ British cities (which are inevitably copied very badly) and that with the material at our disposal and our conditions we want something rather different, possibly a more diffused effort with a greater concentration on the prevention of casualties.17
Ian Hay Macdonald, now engaged in ARP work, wrote to his parents, ‘It is all based on British experience – many think that a far better model would be the Chinese cities, which have been bombed, as they are much more like Indian towns.’18
Gradually more expensive air raid equipment was produced and large buildings in Calcutta were requisitioned as shelters. The government used films, light shows, puppetry and loudspeakers to educate the public. But despite this, protection remained extremely patchy and was most effective in places attached to essential services and industries.
People fled inland, away from the eastern coastline. Marwaris and other business people had been the first to leave, pushing up rental prices and creating a small rental boom in the lush lands around Conjeevaram and Chittoor. Government officials sped to the hill resort of Ooty. Local administrators and officials, told that they did not need to stay on the spot if the city was endangered, fled. This sliced through all sections of society in several eastern port towns too; over half of the total population of Vizagapatam had gone by the end of January 1942. Madras was particularly chaotic and lost 20 to 30 per cent of its total population, initially women and children, and later on the men. This steady flow of migrants continued into February and early March, when the government advised people to leave Madras ‘as soon as they conveniently could’.19 Then in early April, there was a day when the Governor believed that the Japanese invasion had actually commenced, having been told by Southern Command that ‘a large Japanese force was on its way to South India’, and called for a public evacuation of all remaining non-essential residents in the city. The whole administration except for a skeletal staff and the greater proportion of the city packed up and left. Convoys of vehicles, bullock carts and people trudging on foot away from the city stretched many miles inland. There was chaos at Central and Egmore Railway Stations where people converged, trying to get aboard specially commissioned trains. In just one day on 8 April, railway tickets to the value of 50,000 rupees were sold in Madras, before it was announced that the trains would actually be free of charge. Businesses packed up wholesale, and removed their entire stocks. Many people had family or ancestral villages to flee to, and Vellore, about ninety miles west of Madras, was a popular destination, but government-operated refugee camps also sprang up in at least six places on the outskirts of the city, housing several thousand between them. The Governor, Arthur Hope (who remained behind in the beleaguered city), reported on the panic that afflicted Britons and Indians in equal measure as people as far afield as the hills of Ootacamund ‘gave way to sheer terror’.20
This debacle compounded the sense of an administration no longer in control of the fate of the people, and the Congress inevitably seized on this ‘astonishing exhibition of panic and incompetence in Madras’. For those who did remain in the city, food supplies ran low and milk was in desperately short supply. Government advertisements for emergency co-operative shops ran with the less than reassuring headline ‘Madras Will Not Starve!’ Regulations extended across the city, to try to secure air raid precautions, food supply and public health. The animals in Madras Zoo were taken out one by one and shot dead on government orders, in the apprehension of wild animals roaming the streets of a bombarded and desolate city. Even the cremation of the dead was now controlled and had to be completed in the morning, so that the flares of the pyre did not attract the attention of enemy pilots.21
Gandhi, who suggested evacuation to villages as the best protection from bombs, also encouraged the flight inland from the coastal cities. People fled to the relative safety of West and inland India, often finding housing with distant relatives. Towns and cities along the eastern coastline became desolated for a time. Chittagong was described by Field Marshal Bill Slim, now plotting his recapture of Burma, as a ‘melancholy place’:
It had not been badly knocked about, but the light bombing it had suffered had driven out a large part of its inhabitants. Those who remained, the poorest, were menaced by approaching famine. The railway workshops, formerly the chief industry of the town, had been dismantled when it looked as if the Japanese would advance into Bengal and even the roofs had been removed. The docks, whose demolition had been stopped just in time, were a brighter spot. Under the energetic drive of Hallet, the naval officer in charge, and of some devoted civilians, the quays were beginning to show great activity. In peace, Chittagong must have been one of the most attractive of the larger towns of Bengal; now, its general air of neglect, stagnation and apprehension was depressing.22
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As Malaya and Indochina fell to the Japanese, the Indians of South-East Asia, caught between rebel and imperial armies and living in archipelagos with complex ethnic mosaics, had to make rapid decisions. Many of them had been away from mainland India for generations. Some had scratched a living on Malayan rubber plantations or grown rice, while others lived more comfortably in Singapore or Hong Kong as moneylenders or traders. Different Indian communitie
s looked to India as ‘home’ to varying degrees. The Japanese challenge to white superiority initially looked bracing and dynamic, drawing together Burma, Indochina, Malaya, Hong Kong and the Philippines into one Asian bloc, but, as the historian Sunil Amrith puts it, ‘The sense of possibility that many Asians felt in the first flush of Japanese victory soon soured’.23 Now, as the Japanese armies swept forward, Indians in South-East Asia became vulnerable to forced labour, to the predations of hungry armies on the march and to aerial bombardment. The realities of life in wartime, as the old imperial system crumbled and gave way to a new one, splintered the economy. Some workers fled upcountry or into interior jungle. Often they were cut off from their old markets or family connections across the Indian Ocean, and the future soon looked uncertain. A great question mark fell over the future citizenship rights of Indians in South-East Asia. Compared with other ethnic groups such as the Chinese, who suffered very heavily at Japanese hands, many Indians had a strategic advantage. Some positioned themselves successfully as local agents for the new power, whether driven by ideology or by hunger. This could be a matter of life and death; access to food was easier for pro-Japanese Indian Independence Leaguers in Singapore and Malaya and they soon started to control rations and passes. They could intercede with Japanese officials and take forward petitions and complaints. As in Burma, decisions to flee or stay turned on contacts and swift calculations. Building strategic alliances with the invading power was simply a matter of survival in some cases.24
The Indian Ocean was not an abstract geographical feature for those Indians settled along the coastlines of eastern India; oriented outwards, to the sea, the ocean was the source of life: it sustained daily life for fishermen, and was the gateway to South-East Asia for traders. Many of the Indians living in Malaya and Burma were drawn from trading communities scattered around India; they had sailed around and along the coastline, selling, buying, marrying and visiting kin. Other Indians had investments and business interests tied up in Malaya, Thailand and Burma. A number of districts depended heavily on remittances from kin employed overseas in South-East Asia and these chains of remittance were now dramatically severed. The sweeping Indian Ocean network was broken.