The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  This was all well known by the War Office and also by the India Office, which surveyed the men, read the censorship reports and summarised the feelings in the ranks:

  The British Tommy hates the East. He hates the dirt, the heat, the discomfort, the lack of home amusements and the dislike with which the Indians appear to regard him. He does not understand Indian politics. To him it appears foolish to fight for a country that does not want to be helped and from which we are clearing out after the war.25

  On another occasion, the War Office reported, ‘The British soldier himself is convinced that India is not ready for self-government and illustrates his contention by pointing to the lack of roads and the almost complete absence of education, hygiene and all the other distinguishing marks of civilisation.’26 Men complained about the postal system and the lack of contact with their wives. Aware of the presence of Allied soldiers in Britain, men had anxieties about the fidelity of their wives and disquiet about what kind of home life they would be returning to. ‘Men are nervous about their womenfolk and consequently resent the presence of Allied troops in Britain and hate hearing about them.’27 The War Office requested that information about the Allies stationed in Britain should not be broadcast to soldiers in the East, as it was so unsettling for men stationed in India. Men in India heard rumours about affairs between British women and enemy POWs, and dalliances with Allied troops. They also worried about their job prospects if and when the war ended, believing astutely, as it turned out, that men stationed in Europe, closer to home, would get the plum pickings.28

  Yet the Raj itself was undergoing seismic change and was not as static as many imagined it to be. Across the subcontinent women started to work. The Raj was mobilising towards the war effort and some of the genteel ladies scorned as memsahibs began to live more intrepid lives. The Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India) – WAC (I) – was rapidly raised in 1942, and women worked in anti-aircraft direction finding and plotting, parachute inspection and packing, as cipher clerks and operators, as well as in more traditional roles of catering or housekeeping duties. Although treated patronisingly by some of the menfolk, and barely remembered by history, these women plugged the gaps in skilled labour and performed urgent and essential tasks. Qualified women also worked as intelligence officers, translators and radio mechanics. The formation of the WAC (I) has parallels with the raising of women’s militias, guards and units in many places around the world during the Second World War. Indeed, it was modelled on the British Auxiliary Territorial Service. British and Indian women could join on equal terms and the plan to give Indian and British women equal status caused consternation in Whitehall as, technically, Indian women officers might be able to command white men and this was seen as potentially inflammatory for white Tommies.29 The fact that the Government of India backed the plan is evidence both of the changing racial climate and also of the desperation of the state to keep the war effort on track at a time of skilled labour shortages.

  Sydney Ralli had now left her home in Karachi (the house had been requisitioned along with so many others and she had sent her children up to Simla) and volunteered in the typing pool at the General Headquarters in Delhi. She was struck by the ‘blowsy’ haircuts, fashions and double Dutch of the other ‘cipherettes’ working there: ‘The Anglo Indian girl, most efficient in charge of the typists, had cultivated quite a realistic American accent. She typed mostly figures with speed and accuracy yet she had the longest nails for a working girl I’ve ever seen.’ Initially unsettled by the way the women gossiped over their desks, Ralli gradually adjusted to the work, but disliked sending out death notices to the families of Indian soldiers: ‘I felt dreadfully inhuman setting out telegrams to families that so and so had been reported missing. I felt that there should be some scheme of sympathetic district visitors to break the news.’30

  On the other side of India, Veronica Downing, the British plantation owner from Assam, exchanged a life of riding, tea parties and pig-sticking for war work and worked as a coder with the Enigma machine at the RAF air base established close to her plantation. Her secluded existence at the plantation was radically altered by war work and she had never even been in an office before. She was friendly with the American, South African and British pilots stationed at the airfield and also volunteered at the American Red Cross canteen when the base was taken over by the US forces. She remembered: ‘It was entirely a man’s world. All I heard talked about was boost (aeroplanes), fragmentation (pieces of exploded shells), skies, the men’s misdemeanors and, of course, mostly aeroplanes. Somehow one grew to love them.’31 The social world of the Raj was being transformed as the annual summer visit to Simla was restricted, women’s husbands joined the services and wives joined the number of civil and military organisations that were being established to support the troops: the Women’s Auxiliary Corps, the Women’s Volunteer Service, St John Ambulance, the Red Cross, and other blood banks and volunteer aid detachments. In hospitals a number of memsahibs took up tougher and bloodier work as volunteer nurses with the Auxiliary Nursing Service, also raised in the midst of the emergency of 1942, showing incredible reserves of stamina and commitment. They worked intensely long and difficult shifts in military hospitals and were among the first white women nursing sepoys, a radical departure for the colonial state.

  In Delhi, jeeps roared along the streets, men in uniform filled the cinemas and, the colonnaded Imperial Hotel became for a time the American Headquarters – genteel afternoon teas were now accompanied by men in uniform poring over maps. The American presence, combined with the great threat of Japan, injected new urgency and efficiency into the military operation in India. Everything moved up a gear. ‘American generals jostled for space with Chinese admirals, British air marshals and Indian administrators’,32 William Slim said of the scene in the corridors of power in New Delhi.

  As everyone waited for the next chess move in the war, men took every chance they could to go sightseeing, to visit shops and markets, cinemas, dances and bars, using the services of tailors, rickshaw pullers and taxi drivers, hotel and canteen owners. Chinese restaurants gained popularity, becoming favourite spots for foreign soldiers; Chinese merchant sailors jumped ship in Karachi to establish lucrative canteens. Dances and parties promised ‘girls galore’ and ‘Louis’ Jazz Band’ played Delhi ‘in good old Yankee “Jumpin’ Jive” style’.33 Street hawkers sold black market cigarettes, Old Gold, Luckies, Dominoes and Chesterfields, stamped ‘compliments of the Red Cross’. The Grand Hotel in Calcutta was a place where you could ‘Forget the War!’ with Teddy Weatherford at the piano in the American Cocktail Bar, Chinese jugglers, raffles, quizzes and ‘hand-picked dance hostesses’.34

  The big cities started to look and feel different. New goods came into India, despite the wartime food shortages and shipping problems. For those privileged few who could afford them, sparkling new goods had great allure. Fridges, air-conditioning units, cars, tinned foods and new kinds of medicine suddenly appeared on the market. ‘I don’t like America much but they know how to tin food, an art which the Australians have not yet mastered’, wrote Ian Macdonald.35 By 1943, America was exporting cosmetics, cars, radios and fridges. Some of these items were offered as prizes in raffles for the War Fund or at fairs and circuses. In Karachi, a Coca-Cola plant was in operation from 1942, producing bottles of fizzy pop. An American firm, Remington Rand, had a virtual monopoly on the supply of typewriters to government offices (a product indispensable for modern government and for modern warfare) and a factory in Calcutta provided the spare parts, while Volkart Brothers monopolised air-conditioning units.

  These items became prestigious symbols of modern living, changing the appearance of homes. The fridge in one affluent Indian household had to be moved out of the kitchen as the cook and servants’ children kept opening and closing the door to take out ice, marvelling at it.36 Bicycles were becoming increasingly prevalent and some women rode them more than ever before. But at the same time, some administrators with cars were tak
ing to horseback to tour the districts as the petrol shortages had become so severe. A number of wealthy families abandoned their cars altogether. Before his incarceration Nehru took to riding an Indian-made bicycle in response to the petrol shortages.

  Hollywood and Bollywood had been in competition for Indian audiences since the 1930s. Now posters and magazines showed curvy ladies with puckered lips. The expansion of the war brought fantasies of Hollywood glamour and sex into Indian cities and to Indian troops on a far greater scale than ever before. One consulate considered glossy prints of American army pin-up girls, in bathing suits and tight outfits, known as ‘girl art’, too sensitive for local sensibilities in the Middle East, but they were in wide circulation among Indian troops. ‘The Office of War Information has been supplying sets of pictures that are definitely on the spicy side’, noted the Consul in Karachi.37 In collaboration with the British administration, five magazines in eight different Indian languages published these pin-ups, which were aimed at the general population as well as at the troops. After consultation with the Government of India, it was now policy that ‘pictures of pretty American women can and should be used extensively in India’ (in contrast to the Middle East where this was warned against) and ‘lively’ images were offered for public consumption, although nudity or semi-nudity were strictly taboo.

  Americans also carefully considered the growing popularity of Hollywood cinema, keen to use soft power to create support for war aims, literally using ‘the legs of Dietrich or Garson’ to try to garner support for the war, in the words of one official. Images of women and promises of sex, whether real or imagined, were hitched firmly to the war effort. The Raj had to jettison, or at the very least reformulate, the old ways of protecting the prestige of white women.38

  For the vast majority of inhabitants of South Asia, this was a world disconnected and alien to their own but one which was starting to impinge on their own resources: beneath the glossy exterior was the hard, material reality. Supporting such an extensive military presence required land, property and food. The war could not be based in India without infringing drastically on the everyday world of its inhabitants. This was a world soon occupied and transformed by the building of roads and aerodromes, by requisitioning, and, most devastatingly of all, by the demand for food.

  13

  Plantations and Paddy Fields

  THE DIRECTORS OF the British-run tea industries in Calcutta sent out telegrams to their plantation managers in early 1942. These managers lived on large remote hill farms in north-east India, overseeing great swathes of tea-growing territory, vast acres of emerald land chiselled from the north-eastern hills. Now the war was coming to the tea terraces. The planters had been requested to take labourers from their tea plantations to be used as manual labour towards the war effort. From 6 March 1942 planters started to arrive with labour gangs in tow at Manipur Road Station from where they would travel towards Burma. One plantation manager, Colonel Pilcher, who accompanied the workers harked back in time for an analogy:

  The journey from mid-Assam to Manipur Road by rail on that date was somewhat reminiscent of mobilisation in August 1914; every wayside station had a contingent of tea garden labourers waiting to entrain, each man was equipped with a hoe, two blankets, sufficient food for a fortnight, and the inevitable hurricane lamp. There was a large send-off party of wives and relatives who waved and cheered as the train pulled out.1

  These labourers were being sent into the mountains of the Indo-Burma borderlands, to build one of the three major roads which would be hacked out in the 1940s in order to create a link between India and Burma. Although controversial, a number of military commanders considered these roads critical in allowing the Allies to circumvent the Japanese attack to the south and traverse hostile jungle terrain in order to enable soldiers to re-enter Burma and ultimately recapture it. Just as refugees and soldiers were fleeing the Japanese, tea labourers were being sent back in the other direction: towards the enemy.

  Life on tea plantations was tough, regimented and heavily disciplined. The tea estates had a reputation for low wages and the plantation managers had become nervous about increasing numbers of strikes during the early years of the war. Tea was an exceptional industry and had been protected as a virtual British monopoly; nearly all of the estates were in the hands of British companies. The plantation owners had a firm grip on their labour in Assam and a long history of employing the Indian ‘coolies’ in semi-servitude. Managers on tea plantations had a reputation for beating workers and squeezing them for long hours on subsistence pay. Nightwatchmen kept the tea-pickers on the plantations at night, workers had to ask for permission to leave the plantations and sometimes had to seek permission even to marry. But, for all its hardships, work in the tea gardens followed set patterns and routines. Now thousands of men were sent forwards as semi-indentured labourers to work on roads where the conditions were unknown and the expectations uncharted.

  In early 1942, the work gangs on the border roads faced unprecedented dangers and a strange new landscape. As Indian, Burmese and European refugees fled the Japanese invasion, the road builders were pushed across the border back into Burma. They were put to work widening the mule-tracks that now had to be rapidly expanded into viable roads. Tea-pickers now quarried stone, built petrol storage depots, cut into the mud and rocks and widened the road with their bare hands. Pickaxes and hoes were the only tools, and long parts of the road to Tamu were cut entirely by hand. The track rose to 4,000 feet in places and all rations and water had to be portered up to the work parties. There were not even basic tarpaulins or shelters for the workers, who slept on the ground.

  The work was hard and tedious. The road was prone to landslips and rockfalls and a rainy mist often hung over the workers. Occasionally a Japanese reconnaissance plane would circle overhead. By late spring the rain was falling in steady streams on many days, creating a mud slick. The workers were terrified of being stuck there in the monsoon rains or of being attacked by the Japanese. Some of the porters were Manipuri and Naga hillsmen, who were regularly loaded with 40-pound packs. Naga porters also evacuated sick soldiers on stretchers from Burma, carrying them down to the railheads. Others laboured under compulsion: convicts from the Imphal Jail were forced to carry heavy loads for hundreds of miles along the mountain trails, escorted by guards.

  In April 1942, the tea workers on the Manipur Road, nearly 200 miles from Dimapur and much further away than had originally been agreed, became deeply worried. Short of food, cut off from their families and with an alarming number of them falling sick, they became scared and angry. Bedraggled refugees talked to the labourers as they passed back down the road towards India: ‘A constant stream of demoralised refugees was meeting and passing the labour marching in and all sorts of depressing rumours were rife.’2 Corpses and bones glimmering in the mud told their own grim stories on some stretches of the road. ‘Every few yards one sees a pathetic-looking bundle of clothing and nearby a human skeleton – mute reminders of the sufferings the refugees had to undergo.’3 Rations fell short of promises and, already undernourished and stunted, the labourers began to lose weight. Even to the untrained eye the men looked ‘under nourished and weakened by fever’ and labour gangs had to be large enough to allow for the high sick rate.4

  As the gruelling work on the road pushed on into late April, the labourers started to fear that they would never be able to leave; they were completely isolated on the road, cut off from home without road or rail transportation. Desertion was not an easy option, as any fleeing workers faced a dangerous journey back through the hills and the complete loss of wages. That many did decide to leave is telling of the perils the road builders encountered if they stayed. By early May labour was, in the veiled terms of one of the tea managers, ‘very jumpy’ at the forward end of the road. Outbreaks of cholera and cerebral meningitis, dysentery and malaria, had broken out in the camps and there were ‘definite signs of unrest’ among the labourers. The original request had been for
six weeks’ work and some had now been working for twice that long. The workers insisted they wanted to inform their relatives of their whereabouts. Rumours were also rife about the future security of tea gardens.

  When the work parties trekked back down the mountains to recuperate, many of them were sick and under ‘tremendous strain’. Resistance broke out in the railheads of Imphal, where refugees had been passing in their thousands. To add to the woes of the local people, the Japanese started bombing raids. Deaths were small in number but panic ensued. During bombing raids on 10 May about twenty refugees in the camp at Imphal were killed, along with Mrs Shaw, the woman who had been overseeing the running of the camp. Buildings and houses were destroyed, cattle were killed and vehicles smashed. The Indian camp nearby at Korengei was undamaged but the attack sparked an exodus of 10,000 refugees, walking against the tide of incoming soldiers. A breakdown of law and order followed and protests broke out on the streets. Prisoners in the local jail (from which workers had been recruited for road-building) escaped and went on a campaign of looting and arson. The targets had been carefully planned, to do maximum damage to the road-building plans. Public Works Department officers had their quarters completely stripped and Indian Tea Association trucks were unable to move; lorry keys were stolen or the batteries shorted to sabotage them. Clerks, postal workers and sweepers all fled, the post office closed down and for a number of days there was no receipt of mails, telegrams or news.5

  The tea-plantation owners fully realised the Japanese threat posed to the empire and the vulnerability of their own plantations. They could not risk the hazard to their own workers, and needed to continue to produce tea for consumption back in war-torn Britain. Once the crisis of invasion or bombardment had been averted in 1942, they suggested a new plan to the government, ‘the shadow force labour scheme’. With their expertise in recruiting and managing labourers, they would provide the work parties needed for road- and aerodrome-building by employing new workers from around India and marshalling them into levies. This would keep down wages and keep up the supply of men. Every tea estate in North India agreed to supply one labourer for every ten acres of estate and the industry created a steady force of 75,000 to 90,000. These men and women constructed buildings, quarried stone and built the aerodromes that were starting to transform India’s borders and landscape. They would also be the backbone of labour on the Ledo Road, an even more drastic and treacherous project which would commence later in the year: a 500-mile road switching back through the mountains of northern Burma designed to link India and China, and to provide a supply route to the beleaguered Chinese nationalists.