by Yasmin Khan
Occupied South-East Asia was a strange twilight world for Indians caught between two imperial masters, and a world in which political allies could be fickle and the borderline between the Indian Army, the INA and civilian life was sometimes surprisingly porous. Sepoys went undercover as waiters, porters and merchants. ‘Numerous cases are coming to light of stragglers from Burma who maintain that they have never actually been prisoners in Japanese hands but who have spent varying periods in enemy occupied territory before returning to India’, said one War Office report.25 People darted between borders and in and out of the employment of the army; some soldiers deserted the Indian Army in Burma or became separated from their units and returned home as civilian refugees, only to turn up at their regimental centres again after many months.
The strength of the INA was undoubtedly built on the bedrock of local support from Indians resident in Malaya, who provided money and thousands of men for the cause and had already established a powerful Indian Independence League. The Indian National Army was forged at Farrer Park in Singapore just days after the fall of Singapore, and its existence was formally proclaimed in April 1942. Although the core of the INA constituted soldiers captured by the Japanese in Malaya, and these men were promoted as the INA officers, ultimately – once Subhas Chandra Bose took over the INA’s leadership – up to half of the 43,000 foot soldiers of the INA came from the local Indian population of rubber plantation workers, paddy cultivators and merchants, including Tamils, Punjabis and Orissans.
Among the Indian population of South-East Asia, in mosques, temples and gurdwaras, in marketplaces and public halls, Indians – living in tight-knit communities – weighed up their options. Rumours spread about Japanese brutalities in prisoner-of-war camps, of the conditions at the front, of the factions in the first INA, under Mohan Singh, which was fragmenting into acrimonious schisms. Relationships faltered under suspicions and accusations. Although starvation on the scale of Bengal did not take place, malnutrition and extreme deprivation were common as well as the extreme conditions of forced labour on the Thai–Burma railway.
In some cases, Indian Army soldiers felt heavy pressure to join the INA against their will. Others took shelter when and where they could, or decided to leave the army altogether and to attempt to find stability as civilians in the complex conditions of Japanese-occupied South-East Asia. Personal bonds or circumstances could drive people into unusual alliances. One Mr Govindasamy, a Tamil sepoy in Singapore, deserted and found work with a Chinese merchant. He was taken in as a member of the family, living and working in the shop. Despite pressure to join the INA from his Indian friends, Mr Govindasamy sympathised with the Chinese and their sufferings, ultimately joining the Chinese-led resistance army, often carrying messages for them and eventually losing a leg. He was able to dodge detection, living in hiding in the jungle, carrying out guerrilla attacks on bridges, roads and railways.26 Sepoy Abdul Matlab of 2/16 Punjab Regiment opened a tea shop at Serembam Railway Station and was earning his living there, and managed to avoid arrest by the Japanese or forced recruitment to the INA, attempting to carve out a peaceful existence in the midst of the war.27 In many ways, Indian soldiers often felt far more inner conflict about joining the INA than the local populace, who solidly backed Bose, to the extent that one officer recalled that when he reached Bangkok at the end of the war, ‘If you did not greet local Indians with “Jai Hind” they would not accept you as an Indian and they would treat you as a foreigner.’28
South Asians reproached the British for protecting their own welfare and securing escape routes for their own women and children first, an accusation that echoed across the press and in the chamber of the House of Commons, where Amery was challenged in Parliament on the matter. Muslim Leaguers who had remained relatively sympathetic to the British war aims recoiled at the ‘shameful discrimination against Indian nationals’ who had been arriving in their thousands daily, ‘penniless and foodless’.29
What was the substance to the rumours? While discrimination was not all-encompassing or simplistic, it certainly existed and left a bitter legacy among those who experienced it. At certain crucial bottlenecks when leaving Burma, Europeans had been prioritised, accessing safe passage away from the Japanese and leaving Indians stranded. For instance, in Burma, while the Tamu–Palel Road had been closed to Indians, the British had been able to get through. In the administrative chaos the government had tried to prevent refugees from taking perilous paths, closing routes or redirecting them away from life-saving exit points. The chaotic scenes at the port of Rangoon became emblematic of a two-tier system based on racial privilege, as Indians were denied spaces as deck passengers. Despite this about 70,000 did make it onto the steamers. ‘We left for Rangoon sometime in the end of January 1942’, Dr Krishnan Gurumurthy, the son of a Burma Railway manager, remembered:
With great difficulty, my father managed to get steamer tickets to Madras. On the appointed date, we went to the Rangoon port to board the steamer and at the last moment fate again played its tricks. Just as everything was seemingly going well, we were denied entry into the steamer. By that time, the Japanese had advanced to the outskirts of Rangoon City, and the then British government thought that only the lives of the British and Anglo-Indians were worth saving and allowed only them to board the steamer. The rest of us were thrown out to fend for themselves.30
At root there was a colonial mentality upholding the layered hierarchies on which the imperial system in Burma depended. It underpinned ‘the entire system of social relationships’, concluded one credible observer, Martin Hillenbrand. Hillenbrand was a young American consular official in Rangoon at the time and kept a personal diary, ‘full of anger’ at the debacle. In a sober report to his superiors he noted:
As one who witnessed the process of civil evacuation in Burma, the writer could not help noting that underlying the motivation of British evacuation officials was a concern pre-eminently for the safety of Europeans, secondly for the safety of Anglo Indians and lastly, for the safety of Indians. This was perhaps only natural since many of the officials engaged in evacuation work had their own families, relatives and personal friends to worry about.31
Compounding the sense of injustice, British welfare payments to non-Indian refugees in camps were paid at a higher rate, charged to the UK government directly.
At other times, discrimination was more coloured by class. Personal wealth and the ability to pay for fares on aircraft trumped skin colour, with wealthier Indians able to secure routes on aircraft and steamers. The Government of India considered an investigation or publishing a report into the question of discrimination in evacuation policy, but this was dropped once Linlithgow recognised that the findings would be potentially inflammatory rather than reassuring.32
The historian Indivar Kamtekar has made the argument that the ‘credibility of the state’ collapsed in early 1942 in the face of near invasion, and it is an argument worth reiterating. ‘Though only a few voices are audible, mentally we can hear the chorus: invasion is imminent, the Japanese are coming, the British are set to flee … Who were the Japanese, these men who could humble an empire that had seemed all powerful? What awesome powers did they have?’33 The approach of the Japanese was both concrete and illusory; it had repercussions on real resources and on the national psyche, the latter no less significant than the former. Real stories, mingled with half-truths and exaggerated rumours, reflected the loss of faith in the Raj as a plausible form of authority. Even if the Raj had never been actively liked in the past, at least it could be relied upon as a coherent administration, one that would keep its inhabitants reasonably secure from military incursion and underwrite the validity of currency and savings. Now, there was a widespread loss of faith in even the most basic functions of the imperial state.
10
The World at the Door
IN 1942, NEW types of people arrived daily in Indian stations and ports; refugees, fresh recruits from Europe, Australasia and North America, even surv
ivors from shipwrecks arrived on beaches. War and displacement were intricately interlinked. People decamped around the British Empire, often establishing new homes multiple times, trying to piece together some security, to find jobs and make a new life for their children. Flight was both forced and unforced and it was long- and short-term. It encompassed all the technical and legal categories of people who had moved – ‘refugees’, ‘displaced persons’, ‘the stateless’, ‘expellees’ and ‘evacuees’, as well as a great many more who never fell under these systems of categorisation or control, who escaped out from under the radar of the state. The refugee movements from Burma constituted the largest concentration of incoming people to India, but as the British Empire east of India collapsed there was a significant flow of people, of numerous ethnic, religious and national backgrounds, into the country. Many of the people who lived in India for a time in the 1940s have remained elusive in the historical record. This mass migration was also part of a wider story of population movement, death and dislocation during wartime and the long separations of families who did not see their fighting men for many years on end. The sight of new and quite distinctive people arriving in Indian ports and cities added to this sense of a state losing control of its population.
People arrived from South-East Asia but also from other parts of the world shattered by war. ‘Few people realise that destitute people have been flocking here not only from the far east but also from the near and middle east’, reported the Indian Telegraph in 1942:
There are also large numbers from the Balkans largely Greeks. The threat of war drives others from Persia, Somaliland, Djibuti and Aden. They include French, Austrians, Rumanians and Canadians. There are also numerous Anglo-Chinese, Anglo-Burmese and Anglo-Malayans. Many of the European refugees although holding British passports cannot speak a word of English.1
India had been a hub for pilgrimage and trade for many centuries; now it entered a new era of cosmopolitanism in the 1940s. These newcomers added to the challenge to uphold the prestige of the Raj, as the arrival of poor or destitute refugees from around the world symbolised the loss of imperial territories. They also held up a mirror to the fabrications of the Raj: colonial prosperity clearly did not depend on white skin, as Europeans could also be intensely vulnerable, fall into poverty and become victims of war.
Thousands of those who arrived in 1942 had come from war-torn Europe and the Middle East. About 600 Maltese arrived in India. They had travelled through Turkey, escaping their besieged island, which was caught in a protracted struggle between Allies and Axis. On the outskirts of Coimbatore, men and women cleared forest to make room for tents housing thousands of refugees from Greece and Malta, later sheltered in barracks in the grounds of a local college. The police surveilled ‘Iraqi beggars’ who had come overland, escaping the upheavals in the Middle East. The Muslim League even passed a resolution in support of Muslim Kazaks, arriving destitute from Soviet Russia.2 Vast upheavals of population accompanied the Second World War on every continent and for some in Europe, India, despite all its own difficulties, looked like a potential safe haven, protected from the worst extremes of war on the European continent.
Around 10,000 Polish nationals found asylum in India, escaping from the cleansing policies of both Soviets and Nazis. Over 5,000 of the Poles were children who had undergone harrowing ordeals in the Soviet Union. Some had been the victims of earlier Soviet deportations to gulags in Siberia, Kazakhstan and central Asia. Aged between two and sixteen, most of the young had been through terrible hardships, orphaned or separated from their parents. Many had skin ulcers, rotten teeth, whooping cough and other afflictions. Evacuated under an Allied agreement with the Russians, via Ashkhabat in central Asia, and onwards to Tehran, some had managed to pick their way to safety; one seven-year-old boy, exiled to an Uzbek farm, carried his little sister on his shoulders over many miles after his parents had died of typhus, in order to reach the Red Cross evacuation point. Once picked up, most travelled in convoy trucks overland through Quetta and present-day Pakistan, then onwards by rail. On their long and difficult journeys, they received an unexpectedly warm welcome in India. ‘In spite of their shaved heads and ill-fitting, tattered clothes, the children made a good impression, arousing genuine sympathy’, reported the wife of the Polish Consul General to the Polish Red Cross. ‘At many stops on their way to Bombay, local people greeted the children at the stations, treating them with sweets, fruits, cold drinks and toys.’3 Their home for the next four years was a children’s camp at Balachadi near Jamnagar, part of a princely state on the Kathiawar peninsula of western India. Maharaja Jam Sahib had opened his doors to the children, funding the camp and acting as a jovial father figure to the Poles in India.4 He placed the camp in the shade of his own summer palace, close to the coast. The children found themselves living in ordered barrack-style camps in barely inhabited scrubland.
The orphans soon began to adapt to their new surroundings, and aroused considerable interest. Physically they had suffered terrible attrition and the Times of India reported how ‘In spite of the abundance of food in the camp, the children remember the days of hunger during the war, and, unable to get rid of their fear that there might be no food the next day, they often hide bread or fruit under their pillows’.5 Although now well fed the children remained vulnerable, prey to the spike in Indian summer temperatures and the dangers of malarial mosquitoes, and over 80 per cent of the children contracted malaria in the camp in 1942. Life was basic, regimented and mundane; there was little for the children to do other than to explore outside and climb trees. Polish religious and military leaders who staffed the camp lost little time in setting up schools, religious services, scouting groups and clinics. The children performed folk dances and Polish songs, encouraged to keep alive their cultural traditions, stitching folk dresses and braiding their hair with flowers.
Another large Polish refugee camp was also being constructed, hundreds of miles away, at Valivade near Kolhapur, this time for adults, including some families with children that had managed to stay united. The Government of India hurriedly knocked up the camp at the lowest possible cost, under pressure to take Polish refugees against its own wishes. As Linlithgow had put it in a terse telegram: ‘Take this number [of Polish refugees] despite difficulties. No guarantee in good all year climates. Old buildings e.g. disused barracks may be available, but if new required, because of materials shortage, we can guarantee only mud huts or tents or other accommodation below standard previously provided for prisoners of war, internees and evacuees.’6 Linlithgow, ever sensitive to the projection of imperial grandeur, was nervous about the diminished status of Europeans in the eyes of locals, and suggested that Poles should not come to India partly on the grounds of the ‘humble’ locations they would have to be housed in, such as refugee camps, convents and mission schools. The refugees unsettled the conservatives of the Raj as impoverished white Europeans on Indian streets became another visible sign that the white man was not invincible.
* * *
In the Andaman Islands, the Governor’s difficulties had already begun. By the close of 1941, and the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was widely known in Delhi that it would be almost impossible to hold the Andamans from the Japanese and an evacuation plan was ostensibly put in motion for the islands. As the war tilted eastwards and the Japanese made their advance through Asia, this sleepy backwater was now under the threat of imminent invasion. The Governor, Charles Waterfall, was in a tight spot but heard little from Delhi. The Government of India would have gladly been rid of the responsibility to defend the islands altogether, but attempts to have the islands fall under a different area of command, so that they would be beyond the responsibility of Delhi, were rejected. As Waterfall waited patiently for ships to arrive throughout December, officials in New Delhi apologised for leaving him ‘without news since the outbreak of the Japanese war’.7 By now shipping had been so badly disrupted that stocks of imported goods had started to run low on the island. The islands’ s
upply officer, and Waterfall’s friend, neighbour and right-hand man, Major Alfred George Bird, was seriously concerned about the need for ‘brown sugar, salt, dal, wheat, flour, rice, ghi, mustard oil, chillies, tamarind, tea, jam, pepper, cumin, coriander, tinned meat’.
When Waterfall did finally hear from Delhi, the news was not comforting. ‘General staff do not consider Islands in imminent danger of attack but air raids are likely’, he was told, disingenuously; there was no further suggestion of a plan to defend the islands: ‘Government of India have no doubt you and all concerned will do your best in difficult circumstances and you have their full support in all reasonable measures you consider necessary.’8 On Christmas Eve Waterfall wrote a letter to Delhi reporting on the evacuation of women and children. Fifty-three children and thirty-three women had already sailed for Calcutta. He was anticipating the worst. ‘The settlement is quiet but nervous. The convicts have so far behaved well. Our most serious anxiety for the time being is shortage of supplies.’9 He was optimistic that lives would be saved if air raids took place; there was an air raid scheme on the islands and people had been dispersed away from the only real town centre.
Property, of course, would be another matter as most of the buildings would burn like fireworks or collapse like a pack of cards. All the crowded parts of Aberdeen have been thinned out by sending those who can get away to distant villages. Convicts too, who are not required to work in headquarters have been moved to barracks in out stations … We will do our best to hold on but as you know we are woefully weak especially in equipment.10