by Yasmin Khan
The sharp upswing in support for the Muslim League was noticeable in the streets of many small towns of North India: in the strings of green bunting and green and white flags, the pictures and images of Jinnah installed in modest homes, the Muslim League National Guards in uniform parading through towns, and the scale and theatrical flair of rallies and demonstrations in support of the league. A new and virulent support for the league was also becoming obvious in the Urdu press. Manzoor Quraishi, working for the government as an ICS officer, was troubled by a visit in 1942 from his younger brother, who was a student at Aligarh Muslim University, an institution where Quraishi had also studied several years earlier: ‘From his talks, and to my shock, it looked that the entire atmosphere of the Aligarh Muslim University Campus had changed completely by 1942 to become pro Muslim League and Pakistan.’10 Another sign of Jinnah’s rising star was the fanfare now accompanying league processions and rallies, and their new scale. The league could now summon thousands onto the roadsides, often with the accompaniment of musicians, camels, horses and armed bodyguards, illuminations and loudspeakers. New calendar dates challenged the older rituals of the Congress: Jinnah’s Birthday and Pakistan Day now rivalled the birthdays of Congress leaders and the annual festivities that accompanied them. Jinnah was welcomed in Quetta, one government source commented, like a ‘royal potentate’.11
Jinnah was not the only one to benefit from the rising tide of public fervour, however. Everywhere a new militarism, and the protection of militias and clubs, was becoming commonplace. The link to wartime conditions was explicit. ‘In view of the grave world situation and its possible repercussions on India,’ noted the Muslim League Working Committee, ‘every community is organising its volunteer organisations for the defence of its life and property.’12 Everywhere, a new martial spirit was entering public spaces. From communists to Hindu nationalists, Khaksars to pseudo-ARP groups, there was a rapid and noticeable flowering of associations and clubs which championed self-defence, drilling and self-discipline.13 Women and men drilled with flags, lathis and daggers, wore distinctive uniforms and badges, sang songs and staged public dramas and lectures. Historians have noted the uneasy similarities with some of the European expressions of fascism, particularly the acceptability of violence as a political method and the global turn towards a new rhetoric of death and sacrifice in the context of war. This also meant that real servicemen and pseudo-soldiers could blur in the crowd. ‘In Bombay, I remember in those days, due to this war, military clothes and military uniform were available’, recalled Ram Krishna, a Punjabi Congressman and post-Independence chief minister of the province. He donned a uniform in 1942, ‘then boarded a train and left for Punjab’. In this case, Krishna was evading the police as a fugitive, but his comments are suggestive of the ways in which civil and military appearances could be deceptively similar in 1940s India.14 On maidans and along main thoroughfares political militias, armed groups and party functionaries could be seen at public gatherings, fired up by evocative slogans and extolling their leaders. In the vanguard stood lawyers, bureaucrats and shopkeepers, members of a new urban middle class in India. Men much like my own paternal grandfather, a modest Muslim zamindar who had diversified into shopkeeping in the North Indian city of Bareilly and gained a government licence for the distribution of radio sets and gramophone records, and was benefiting from increasing pockets of urban prosperity in the 1940s. He hitched his own star to the rising fortunes of the Muslim League. Many others in this new urban middle class looked to other organisations which might assist them to seek and win contracts, protect their families and secure their access to increasingly protected and rationed goods and foodstuffs. All kinds of leaders, lowly and mighty, with aspirations to rule in the new and unforeseen India that would follow the end of the war, made contingency plans by organising volunteers or by quietly stockpiling arms. Princely leaders in states like Patiala and Bhopal, for all their vocal support of the British war effort, also simultaneously realised the need to protect and defend their own territorial interests in the event of a political breakdown and started to amass armaments and to encourage local militias.
In this sense, the rise of politically divergent movements, from the Muslim League and the communists to the Indian National Army, was entirely consistent with the public mood. These activists shared many more features than is initially apparent. Men wanted to act, stirred up by the uncertainties of the war, the loss of credibility of the British state and the weakness of the Congress leadership at a critical moment. Parallel Home Leagues and Civil Defence Units mirrored and mimicked those formed by the Raj. They drew on many of the same technical vocabularies and ideas as the military by emphasising muscle-power and masculinity, the protection of families and the safeguarding of homes. For many Indians in the 1940s these organisations presented the possibility of influencing constitutional outcomes that hung uncertainly in the balance. In the 1920s and 1930s, Gandhi had often been able to seize the initiative at a crucial moment and marshal politics into his non-violent movement. Yet Gandhi continued to advocate ahimsa and in the eyes of most people this seemed an ideology at odds with the realities of the new world order. But confused and weak, the Congress was one step behind the public, unable to assert party authority and soon to be banned altogether.
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In the meantime, for government loyalists, especially the princes, support for the war effort was paying off handsomely. Reaping the benefits of state subsidies and government orders, they found their balance sheets healthier than ever. Cities like Bangalore, Jaipur and Rampur boomed, as new factories sprang up, turning out specialised war materials. Gandhi’s home state of Porbandar supplied cement to the Allies, Baroda manufactured cotton textiles for uniforms, and Hyderabad invested in chemicals, fertilisers and cement and had a Bren-gun factory. A number of princely states doubled or even tripled their economic growth during wartime; in just one year of the war, 1943–4, over five crores of industrial capital flowed into the princely states.15 Maharajas who had already pioneered developmental projects and public works in their states in the 1920s and 1930s found themselves well placed to court wartime investment. From the 1940s, there was surplus that could be ploughed back into loans to other princely states and into Government of India securities, generating yet more profit. Much of Bangalore’s infrastructure was a result of the war, and whole new areas of the city were being redesigned and electrified.
Both the USA and the UK turned to these ‘loyalist’ strongholds as safe havens for wartime ventures, and the profits continued to flow in. Mysore was particularly fêted for its developmental success, and was featured in Life magazine as a ‘bright spot’ in India, ‘cleaner and more attractive than even most US cities’.16 Mysore workers mined kolar, produced iron and steel, and factory workers made paper, glass, porcelain, dynamite, Bakelite, soap and silk products.
Striking public works and building projects appeared on the skyline of some of the princely states. In Mysore, the German modernist architect and Jewish refugee Otto Koenigsberger designed geometric, domed pavilions and other public buildings for the Dewan. In Jaipur, the maharaja was warned by the Viceroy to slow down his beautification of the city; the Viceroy thought it unseemly in the age of wartime austerity. But the princes and their courts were not the only beneficiaries of the boom, and even traditional craftsmen could adapt rapidly to the changed conditions of war. The traditional gemstone cutters of Jaipur were soon cutting synthetic gems and supplying them to the Allies as sights in weaponry. But there was ultimately a new gulf growing here, as elsewhere, between those profiting and those being used as cheap labour towards the war effort. Trade unions emerged and strikes faced swift repression. The princes in states such as Mysore and Travancore also levied labourers into state labour units (30,000 men had been allotted by the states to civilian labour corps by mid-1942) and thousands of men and women soon started heading northwards towards the aerodromes and roads of North and East India to work on wartime mega-projects. The s
tatus and autocratic privileges of the maharajas would struggle to survive this transformation.
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By midsummer, with the failure of Cripps to deliver any meaningful rapprochement, the frustrations and tensions between the Indian National Congress and the British rulers reached incendiary levels. Nehru admitted he was ‘worried and distracted beyond measure’. The Governor of the Central Provinces described Gandhi as ‘the Hitler of India’ and called for his ‘deflation’, while the question of when and where to deport the Congress leaders was recurring as a prominent theme in government deliberations. Gandhi’s secret deportation and the risks concerning his ill-health were freely discussed. Should he be taken to Aden, to East Africa or to a secret location in India? ‘My own leaning would be to put him in an aeroplane for Uganda’, Leo Amery wrote, almost unashamedly wishing for the Mahatma just to vanish from sight.17 Serious investigations with the Colonial Office explored the possible arrangements for banishment of Congress leaders to East Africa, although this plan was always more keenly supported by London than by the men on the spot in India who perceived the potential for fuelling rather than dampening nationalist feeling. Ultimately, the fact remained that retaining popular support for the war and denying the legitimacy of the Congress had become irreconcilable positions.
The first months of 1942 had seen India’s old imperial equilibrium thrown into turmoil. The superficial compact between Indian political leaders and the British was shattered, as the sovereignty of the country was sacrificed in the name of war. The public looked on as foreign troops arrived at their ports, goods and land were appropriated in the name of defence and the physical resources of the country were placed at the services of the military. Aerial bombardment became a realistic threat along the eastern coast. Ultimately, the official casualties from air raids in India were 3,521 people, including 1,432 killed: a minuscule number of global wartime casualties but enough to cause widespread panic in major cities.18
By mid-1942 government documents alluded routinely to ‘abnormal conditions’ and the ‘abnormal situation’ in India. Officials sweated it out in the ministries of New Delhi and the provincial capitals, from Lahore to Madras, banned from retreating to the hills for respite from the fearsome heat and equally unable to evade the rising political temperature. This rapid transformation was changing the ordered relationships that underpinned the Raj: between communities, within cities and villages, exacerbating differences of political affiliation and ethno-religious expression, and accentuating differences between the wealthy and the poor. Once the failure of Cripps to deliver any meaningful progress on Independence became apparent, the Raj forged ahead with wartime priorities while relying on a diminishing and pragmatic partnership with a small wedge of society – mill owners, factory workers, princes, military families, large landowners, the bedrock of sepoys. But even these apparent accommodations with so-called loyalists were fraught with contradictions and ambiguity. Paradoxically, the increase in foreign troops to India in the summer heat of 1942 would add to the dissolution of authority.
12
Welcome to Bombay
THROUGHOUT 1942, BRITISH and American troops poured into the country. British regiments had always been stationed in India from the earliest days of British rule in the eighteenth century. This was something different: a great wave of incoming soldiers, fresh to the country, unfamiliar with local languages, conscripted and sent to Asia not of their own free choice, often resenting their posting and longing to be fighting the Nazis instead. In the past British regiments had cracked down on locals after insurgencies such as the 1857 uprising. This time of course their primary purpose was not internal security, although as resistance to the war intensified, they came to be used as a way of exerting control over domestic disturbances too, further muddying their mission and purpose in the eyes of both British soldiers and locals. They had come to secure the empire against Japanese invasion. American GIs with the mission of ‘saving China’ from the Japanese found themselves in alien and unknown landscapes, dealing with Indian traders, merchants and craftsmen, trying to thrash out a war plan in a densely populated, and unfamiliar, part of the world. Many more men came to India than would actually see fighting on the fronts of Burma.1
Behind the fighting fronts lay long supply lines and complicated chains of men (and increasingly women too) in non-combatant roles: manning the aerodromes, supplying, equipping and feeding the juggernaut, carrying out training, planning strategy, and running hospitals and clinics. The formidable range of activities needed to service a total war had to be rapidly assembled within India, and the military commanders started to reconfigure the state, acquiring land and food, clearing villages, and recruiting local labour. The creation of an Indian war front was starting to impinge on lives all over the country, not simply in the big cities.
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In Calcutta, Bombay and Karachi locals suddenly saw soldiers everywhere, ferried by rickshaw drivers, shopping in the marketplaces for trinkets and souvenirs to send home, taking photographs of the Taj Mahal and other tourist spots, holidaying on houseboats in Kashmir and visiting tribes up in the hills. Arriving in India after long and cramped journeys, these young soldiers often knew precious little about India and were pale and nervous in the face of the disarray that greeted them in the dock areas of Bombay. Officers warned new arrivals against tricksters and fraudsters, shoe-shine boys and snake charmers. A pamphlet issued by the Bombay Hospitality Committee, Welcome to Bombay, instructed soldiers to ‘AVOID exposure of your head to the sun before 4pm; eating over ripe fruit or fruits not protected by skin; drinking water from a street fountain; walking bare footed; drinking intoxicating drinks during the day, especially spirits; soft drinks from marble stoppered bottles; patronizing beggars, mendicants, fortune-tellers and curio dealers’.2 Old hands who knew the city teased and frightened the younger ones who often had rarely left their own local counties. The men, uncomprehending and stunned by the sights of poverty, resorted to clichés about the city. The communist (and later history professor) John Saville, who had many Indian friends in London and was probably more worldly than most, having studied at the LSE and read extensively about the empire, still found Bombay ‘frightful and frightening’ on arrival:
The buildings in the centre were I suppose what might be called classic colonial architecture and this was the area of large shops including salesrooms of very expensive cars. The contrast was striking and unpleasant between this administrative, residential and shopping district and what seemed to be the rest of Bombay – filthy, smelly, the streets full of rubbish and the native Indians looking half-starved.3
There was a disjuncture between the imagination of the exotic East and the men’s first experiences in Bombay. Strikingly similar motifs run through memoirs of soldiers remembering their arrival in Bombay. An American GI named Tom Foltz recalled:
I was only 19 when I arrived in Bombay. The sights, sounds, smells, poverty and the life of the average Indian in those days were quite overwhelming to me … The minute we left the dock area, the smells and sounds of this foreign land simply overpowered us. The crush of humanity, overwhelming poverty and grime, the squalor and appalling smells of the everyday living conditions these people endured engulfed us. We had never experienced anything like this in our lives. Such would soon become commonplace for us.4
Clive Branson, a committed communist, poet and vocal opponent of British rule, who also arrived in India with the British Army in the spring of 1942, recorded in his diary: ‘We went by train from Bombay to a camp outside Poona. Everyone was filled with amazement at the appalling conditions in which the people live – this has been the subject of many very lively discussions since.’5
This initial sense of shock was common. The ‘real’ India was a contrast to the jolly, sanitised newsreels which troops had been shown prior to their departure, in which they had been promised tropical fruits, constant sunshine and cheap shopping. One journalist thought Americans expected to find Hollywoo
d’s oriental fantasylands: ‘The Americans, accustomed to see India through Hollywood’s cameras as a fabulous land peopled by maharajas and elephants were appalled and sickened by the stink and poverty of the place.’6 On arrival at Bombay, troop ships stayed in port and men often slept on board the ship at night awaiting their onward orders, and passed evenings playing cards or reading. But in the daytime, after cramped weeks at sea, men shopped, toured local sights or sought out alcohol or company at canteens. Brothels did a brisk trade; Bombay was notorious for a red light district in which ‘the women display themselves behind bars rather like goods in a shop window or animals in a zoo’.7 The fear among the population at large of single men looking for sex with Indian women was to become a prominent and recurring theme for the rest of the war.
Bombay was a transient place that troops passed through, en route to other camps and training centres. Matching up the timings of troop-ship arrivals with onward train connections to military camps around India created a logistical bottleneck, and meant that troops often had to linger for a few days or weeks. Over the duration of the war, the facilities for troops in Bombay and the other port cities improved. Volunteers, often British memsahibs, began to start up canteens, hostels and rest rooms with magazines and newspapers, games like billiards and table tennis and services like mending and stitching for troops. Greens, opposite the Gateway of India, was one of the largest and the most well-known hotels for troops in Bombay. Many also stayed at the Salvation Army hostel, the Wesley House Institute and the Sir Alwyn Ezra Services Canteen, whilst the Seamen’s Institute offered dances and socials and the Shandy Tavern, refreshments, darts and billiards. Nearly all the major cinemas admitted sailors and soldiers in uniform at concession rates, and cinema owners noticed that their usual Indian clientele began to drift away, replaced by the troops. Men in uniform filled local cinemas like the Regal and the Eros playing The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca and Gone with the Wind. Photography burgeoned as a popular hobby among those soldiers who could afford it. Entrepreneurial locals also responded to the thousands of foreign soldiers passing through Bombay each year. Gharry and taxi drivers organised guided tours to the Elephanta caves and to Juhu beach. The seeds of nascent tourism industries took root in many wartime beauty spots.