The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  For most ordinary young men in Britain who did not have family connections to the Raj and who had come to adulthood in 1930s Britain, the empire was a remote and little-understood place, either part of royal ceremony and pageantry or a site for action adventure and heroic deeds in comic strips and films such as Alexander Korda’s fantastical 1938 tale of derring-do on the Afghan border, The Drum. Latterly, wartime newsreels in the UK had emphasised ‘a devoted empire coming to Britain’s aid at a time of peril’ and depicted both the selfless help of the British Empire and also the way that the empire itself was becoming developed, modern and sophisticated under British tutelage.8 It was a shock for British servicemen to see the slums of Bombay or the poor on the streets and they had to make sense of the British imperial ‘civilising mission’ anew. Officers struggled to maintain their men’s morale in an environment where local shopkeepers and people seemed indifferent or openly hostile to the military presence. A mutual undercurrent of apprehension and suspicion marked many initial transactions with shopkeepers. As one official perceptively remarked, ‘the imperial motif alone’ was not going to be enough to preserve morale.9 School textbooks had taught many British youth about the benefits of imperial rule for India but now many began to doubt this when faced with the evidence before their own eyes.

  American servicemen were even more confused by what they saw than their British counterparts and the US military tended to encourage ignorance of politics. ‘The political situation in India is not easily understood and a short stay in India is not long enough to be informed about it’, cautioned a handbook for soldiers arriving in India from the USA.10 GIs were warned against discussion of local politics, and their command strenuously tried to avoid GIs becoming caught up in Britain’s domestic conflict in India in 1942. Yet there was osmosis of information and knowledge; Nehru was starting to appear in American publications and his autobiography was published in the USA for the first time in 1941. The energetic diplomat and democrat Louis Johnson, sent to Delhi by Roosevelt, became a lifelong friend of Nehru and spoke out blatantly in favour of Indian Independence, much to the irritation of the Viceroy.11

  In the trail of troops came foreign correspondents and press photographers. Alan Moorehead, the razor-sharp Daily Express correspondent, arrived in 1942, on the eve of the Cripps Mission, to find a weary Viceroy who ‘left me with an even stronger feeling of pessimism than I had when I arrived’.12 The American journalist Louis Fischer was in India from May, and spent many hours with Gandhi during a stay at his ashram. Indian political leadership was courting favourable international press coverage in an unprecedented way, much to the chagrin of the British Raj. But much of this coverage was dictated by the pace and concerns of war and necessarily sanitised some of the less palatable aspects of the unfolding social context in India. Photospreads of the Burma campaign became more prominent in magazines but food shortages or denial policies rarely featured in press photography until famine made them inescapable. Privately foreign correspondents railed against the red tape, inefficiencies and stooges of the Raj, finding the imperial system antiquated and challenging to navigate.

  The presence of so many recently arrived British and American troops divided Indian politicians. It was hard to explain to the ordinary villager why Indian youth had been sent abroad to defend the Middle East and North Africa and yet foreigners had come to defend India, especially when the threat of sexual predation by ‘outsiders’ was a prevalent fear. A draft of a resolution demanding that the British ‘Quit India’, which bore Gandhi’s imprimatur, was presented to the Congress Committee on 27 April 1942. At its core was a strong statement about the presence of foreign troops in India, declaring them ‘harmful to India’s interests’ and ‘dangerous to the cause of India’s freedom’ and demanding their immediate withdrawal. The ambivalence at the heart of the Congress about the purposes and morality of the war was never far from the surface of such debates. Nehru, troubled by the idea of people harassing foreign troops engaged in war with fascists, insisted they should be able to stay in India undisturbed by nationalist protest for the duration of the conflict and had the clause removed. Gandhi consistently argued that soldiers should be expelled from Indian soil and continued to make complaints about their presence; his own spiritual commitment to ahimsa seemed to strengthen daily, alongside his disgust at the flagrant spectacle of warfare. Nonetheless, American and British soldiers were embedded in India, some for many years to come, and contacts with local people began to flourish, as they built aerodromes and installations, procured services on the camps, and employed builders, washermen, cooks and contracted for goods in the marketplaces.

  Labour was astonishingly cheap for the military. And soon people found that they could get jobs at bases and aerodromes at wages that completely outstripped local rates. American soldiers and airmen in India often had their own ‘native bearers’, locally recruited manservants who swept, dusted, polished shoes and, fetched and carried tea and snacks, thus helping, as one GI magazine joked, ‘make a perfectly lazy man out of a soldier’. The cost of hiring a local boy as a personal servant was so cheap that even ordinary GIs could afford it. As Douglas Devaux of the US Air Force, flying out of Dum Dum, remembered:

  A young Indian boy, about 12 years old, turned up next morning and asked for a job taking care of the tent: sweep it, put things in order, shine our shoes, and general cleaning. He said he would be our bearer. ‘How much?’ we asked. ‘Sahibs, a rupee a week, each,’ he replied. A rupee was 35 cents. Melvin and I hired him. He called himself Abdul Kali and we christened him ‘Kelly’.13

  Soldiers gave their servants comical nicknames which bore little relation to their real names. ‘Our bearer’s name is “Smokey.” We’ve forgotten why we call him that, but there are no objections, since his real name is “Pabitra Mondel”’, another soldier wrote. ‘Aside from his regular duties, Smokey spends most of his time learning GI ways.’14 General Lewis Pick, the Chief Engineer who oversaw the construction of the Ledo Road in the later years of the war, had three servants who waited on him in Assam. A photograph of the general’s departure from Ledo shows the three men, wearing dhotis and barefoot, standing solemnly in front of a heavily garlanded car. In the British Army, officers had also long relied on bearers. Field Marshal Slim spoke warmly of his ‘faithful Gurkha orderly, Bajbir’, who woke him every morning. It was not unusual to be brought a cup of tea in bed or for servants to shave men in the morning.

  Some of the relationships between bearers and their soldier-sahibs developed paternalistically as they grew to know each other. Sometimes soldiers were invited back to local homes and introduced to families, or the soldiers helped pay for the cost of weddings or for the education of young children. For most of the people who worked as servants on airfields, at barracks and bases, the job gave them opportunities to learn some English and to earn inflated wages. For the most entrepreneurial, contact with the bases was even more lucrative: an opportunity to act as guide, procurer of alcohol and women, interpreter and general right-hand man. Some of the bearers participated in drinking games and it was not unusual for a soldier to swap roles with a servant, dressing in his clothes while he donned military uniform. But on other occasions servants were the butt of the jokes, shouted at or even abused, given ‘unprintable’ names. As the Hellbird Herald, an American propaganda news-sheet, summarised it: ‘Ever since the beginning of the present “invasion” of India by GI Joe, the native bearer has been a source of wonder and amusement … He affords one of the few amusements readily available in this part of the world.’15 Soldiers often did not take their bearers seriously, laughing at their mannerisms and habits although physical violence was strongly discouraged and could result in a soldier being disciplined. The acquisition of a personal servant by regular troops was rare in other theatres of war; it was seen as one of the perks of the jobs and a way to dodge some of the service hardships of India. Of course, it also contributed to the sense of India as a particularly peculiar site of war.

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  As foreign troops continued to pour into the country, prostitution in Indian cities steadily increased in prevalence and visibility. The threat to women of sexual predation by soldiers is one of the less well-known and yet most lurid features of the 1940s, at least as it was experienced through the eyes of Indian onlookers. The increased demand due to the new migrants to the cities and the growth of wartime production and military spending power drew more and more women to working in prostitution. The vast differential in the purchasing power of the foreign soldiers combined with the geographical context of war to produce a cocktail of supply and demand; troops could not easily go home for many years and took their leave in local towns and cities. India Command’s consultant venereologist, Eric Prebble, assessed the Military Police as ‘completely inadequate to deal with the situation’ and local police shied away from disciplining foreign soldiers. ‘Pimps and touts abounded wherever the troops were stationed or on leave’, and taxi and rickshaw drivers and men employed in the cantonments acted as middlemen.16 Troops of all nationalities saw the brothels as tacitly sanctioned, even if technically off-limits according to the rule book. By the end of the war, Calcutta would have some of the highest rates of venereal disease in the world, exceeding the rates in other theatres. This would be a source of tension and potential conflict with civil authorities until 1945, adding considerably to the alienation between the civilian population and the imperial state. It was also a military concern, as so many men needed treatment and hospitalisation, challenging resources and removing trained men from active duty.

  War, many argued, was bringing India to the brink of moral degradation. This opinion was fuelled by a prurient and often wildly exaggerated notion of western sinfulness, sexual amorality and lustfulness. This idea had a long lineage, and derived from far older notions of Indian respectability dating back to the nineteenth century. The chastity of well-behaved Indian women was stressed by some nationalists as a contrast to the flesh-pots and strumpets of the West. ‘Egypt is now full of ATS girls and British officers are enjoying shameless pleasures with nurses’, wrote one Bengali assistant surgeon. ‘They will win the war with merry-making.’17 In the subcontinent, the idea took hold that Indian women were being brought into disrepute because of the sinful foreign soldiers, and this often carried a dark undercurrent of extreme nationalism and a fear of miscegenation or the blurring of racial boundaries. This was an evocative and potentially explosive undercurrent in the context of deteriorating Anglo-Indian relations and one that would be turned to repeatedly in the months to come.

  The darker side of this was the fear among villagers, particularly those living close to army training grounds or aerodromes, of local women suffering rape. The Governor of Madras, Arthur Hope, complained to Linlithgow of ‘the genuine feeling that the troops, both British and Indian, will rape any women they can get hold of’ and that he had heard this sentiment ‘everywhere’.18Some soldiers occasionally but undoubtedly did make sexual attacks on women and such incidents reverberated far beyond the locales in which they took place, becoming the subject of more generalised fears and rumours and adding to the ‘deep-seated feeling’ that soldiers were ‘savages’ and ‘not respectable’.19 Gandhi distilled this mood into words, entangling his own deep-seated ideological objection to the increasing presence of troops of all nationalities on Indian soil with the perceived threat to women.

  The behaviour of troops, white or brown, has become a public scandal. Even respectable and well-known women are not free from danger … The instances of looting in the open are too common to be decently challenged … I get almost daily complaints of such cases … No wonder. Full-blooded soldiers not on duty find vent for their exuberant physical energy by taking liberties which cannot be allowed in a society not used to such conduct.20

  The insinuation of sexual threat was only lightly veiled, and unusually inflammatory for the Mahatma, once again reflecting his particularly acerbic tone in early 1942. The heightened threat to Indian women generated by the presence of soldiers would continue to be an emotive motif for many years to come.

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  ‘Where there are Americans prices become Prohibitive. They certainly get colossal pay and live much more luxuriously than British troops do.’21 The Indian civil servant Ian Macdonald liked to use his letters home to complain about his circumstances and to let off steam. But many British administrators around the empire who feared and admired Americans in equal measure would have shared his sentiments. The newcomers were transforming the Raj. The purchasing power and superhero stature of the American GIs made much of the Raj look fossilised and diminished. The old hands of the Raj struggled to adjust in many cases, disorientated by the rapidity of the changes that were now overtaking India. In the clubs of Simla, the rumours of increasing American designs on South Asia, the strength of American imports and the sexual irresistibility of American men all mingled together to create profound wariness about the new allies.

  Raj officials were also riled by American exhortations to democracy and their implied support for freedom from British imperialism. Americans publicly stressed their own commitment to freedom for colonies, emphasising their difference from the British rulers. Indian newspapers ran a series of full-page advertisements designed by the Office of American War Information in late 1942 and January 1943 under the clunky title ‘America Fights for Freedom’. These pictured episodes in American history and folklore, including the Declaration of Independence and the freedom of the Philippines from American rule. One poster, under the Star-Spangled Banner, carried the pledge that ‘the people of America, through their president, have reaffirmed the right of all men to freedom’ and ‘the American people will not permit these freedoms to disappear from the earth’. Propaganda directly invoked the Atlantic Charter of 1941 in which the Allies had stated their aspirations for post-war freedom and self-determination. Readers could even apply for a free, fully illustrated copy of the life of President Roosevelt from the Bombay office. The Government of India expressed fury when these adverts appeared in Indian vernacular and English newspapers and quickly pulled them from circulation.22 Nevertheless, managers at the Tata steelworks irreverently displayed them under the glass surfaces of their desks over the months to come.

  Behind the rhetoric, there was a great deal of ambivalence about Asian decolonisation in Washington, and much more shared feeling between Churchill and Roosevelt about the need to prioritise the war above all other political considerations in the immediate term. And on the part of Indians there was no simplistic belief in America as a liberating power. In particular, America’s own internal race issue and the blatant subjugation of black citizens drew comment and reprehension from a number of south Asian politicians. ‘You have yet to abolish slavery!’ Gandhi reportedly told one American visitor.23 Ultimately, as many in Asia found, American demands for wartime resources might quickly start to resemble a form of neo-imperialism. But in appearance at least, the arrival of the Americans in India seemed to signal the possibility of a new world order.

  There was also a yawning difference of class and sensibility between the old India hands and the British Tommies now arriving daily. Many of the imperial administrators in India had family connections with India that could be traced back several generations, had themselves often been born in India and more often than they cared to acknowledge had Anglo-Indian ancestry, and knew the local languages. The incoming junior ranks from Britain, and later America, often had no prior knowledge or interest in the subcontinent and would have preferred to fight the Germans in Europe. Mutual exasperation and frustration divided the old sahibs and the new Tommies. Soldiers fresh from training in Britain, painfully conscious of leaving families behind in a Britain vulnerable to bombing and conscious of conditions on the home front, found the high life led by some of the Raj officials shocking, perceiving a lackadaisical attitude towards war and an antiquated way of doing things. They felt the sharp end of Raj snobbery and disliked the elitism, etique
tte and pecking orders that defined cantonment life. These conscripts had neither chosen to come to India nor elected to join the army and were repelled, on many occasions, both by the Indian resistance to the war effort and by the ruling men and women of the Raj:

  There is no war here on Sundays! They will not realise there is a war on. It is exasperating and disgusting. Last night I went to the club here. The last time I was in it was 1934 and there was not the slightest change – memsahibs in evening dress, sahibs, God help me! in dinner jackets, same cackle about anything but the Jap who is right at the door.24