The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

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  The villagers living near Chakulia in present-day Jharkhand heard by the beating of a drum that their paddy fields were being seized. The District Magistrate sent messengers, beating drums, to announce their eviction. For the villagers, strange things had been happening for the past six months as foreigners arrived with vast aeroplanes. The locals worked for them, at first carrying and breaking rocks to construct the airfields, then building bamboo huts or bashas where the pilots, navigators, flight engineers, wireless operators and ground crew would live or pumping chemicals into the air to kill mosquitoes and flies. Some of the villagers had become involved in selling opium and ganja, and there were always rumours about which women were visiting or being visited by the men. The pilots joked with the villagers and paid them well and at first it seemed a promising sign that the foreigners had come. But many of the foreign men were sick with malaria, and now some of the villagers also fell ill with cholera. Military inspections had followed; strange doctors and visitors had been to the village and to the neighbouring airfields, looked at the wells and waded out into the low-lying paddy fields.

  The military had decided that the only way to protect the health of the air force men stationed at the airfields was to destroy and drain paddy fields within a half-mile radius of the aerodrome, which were harbouring deadly mosquitoes and flies, and to evict the local people who had cultivated these fields. The local Indian government obliged, invoking the Defence of India rules. ‘Signatures of as many villagers as possible should be taken on the requisitioning order’, instructed the District Magistrate, Arthur Kemp, from Singhbhum.6 Over 500 acres of paddy fields were taken over, amounting to 15,000 maunds of paddy.

  By March 1942 plans had been laid to build 215 new airfields in India. Provincial governments jockeyed to demonstrate their readiness to make land and materials available: ‘Bengal is as flat as a billiard table and given the requirements of the airforce, it is a simple matter to construct hard earth runways to meet the present emergency’, wrote the Governor of that province, promising to cement relationships between the RAF and his Public Works Department.7 By the end of the war some 122,000 RAF personnel, 13 per cent of the RAF’s total strength, would be in India. Commanders viewed air superiority as a vital ingredient in winning back Burma and South-East Asia. Fifty-seven Hurricanes in crates arrived for assembly in Karachi and were pulled through the city like modern-day juggernauts. Scattered throughout agricultural land in East India, Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) and USAAF pilots stationed at these aerodromes in Bengal and Bihar lived in a bizarre and demanding environment. Their quarters were extremely spartan, illness was rife and there was little to do in between sorties although ground crew worked long hours and leisure time was scarce. The rapid building and equipping of aerodromes in Bengal and Bihar was to support flying reconnaissance missions over Burma, or the notoriously lethal trans-Himalayan route, ‘the Hump’, keeping China stocked with essential supplies. Later, these planes would bomb and mine in South-East Asia and Burma. In order to disguise these airfields and to prevent them from being wiped out by aerial attack, numerous airstrips were scattered throughout different districts, in particular Midnapore, which would soon, perhaps not coincidentally, become notorious for an uprising against the Raj.

  By July 1942, barely a province of India escaped requisitioning. Central and eastern India were hit hardest. Whole villages and hamlets might be evacuated overnight to make way for aerodromes. In addition, the armies had other demands: for storage space, factory provision and housing. The police seized bicycles, cars and lorries and even took over mansions in prime locations of Bombay and Calcutta and cleared them for offices or depots. In United Provinces they took farmers’ carts. In Satara district 6,000 villagers were ejected; as in Midnapore, it is likely that the later strength of rebellion in 1942 in Satara was connected to this fact. In Manipur, tea factories, lorries, cattle and schools had been co-opted and in Central Provinces there had been ‘considerable acquisition of land’ amounting to some 13,500 acres. In Bihar, on occasion, military authorities stepped in ahead of the local police and took land by force, and ultimately some 25,000 acres were used for aerodromes and defence installations there.8 From Punjab a letter reached a sepoy in the Middle East complaining about the requisitioning: ‘All the land of the village has been acquired by the Government and numerous factories are springing up here. It is a troublesome thing for us.’9 The Famine Inquiry Commission, looking back at the war in Bengal, estimated that ‘more than 300,000 families were required to evacuate their homes and land. Compensation was of course paid but there is little doubt that the members of many of these families became famine victims in 1943.’10

  The sudden disruption entailed by this requisitioning is rarely factored into accounts of the 1940s in India. Furthermore, managing requisitioning and ‘denial’ policies – in essence, taking control of others’ property and warehousing it or commandeering it on behalf of the government – opened up a number of loopholes for profiteering or corruption by the firms and individuals paid to carry out the work. In Bengal a contract worth 1.5 crore rupees was offered to Mirza Ahmad Ispahani, a prominent businessman, Muslim Leaguer and friend of Jinnah’s, for the removal of extra paddy stocks in 1942. When other Bengali ministers objected to one of their leading opponents winning this contract, a compromise was reached by which Ispahani was given one district, and the other two districts were divided between four rival firms and their purchasing agents.11

  Throughout the 1940s the Ispahani firm, among others, would win lucrative, exclusive contracts for forcibly collecting and warehousing rice stocks. Agents were employed to seize stocks in ‘denial’ districts, but extended their work beyond these limits, seizing grains and moving freely around districts in order to get access to farmers’ stocks. These agents leaned heavily on reluctant cultivators, harassing them and forcing them to sell on terms set by the government. Accusations of profiteering, although unproven, increased and would linger long after Bengal descended into deadly food shortages.

  The law demanded that cultivators should receive compensation on the spot and that they should be assisted to find new land for cultivation when fields were seized. In reality, this was an idealistic hope. In Bombay, the government was still considering plans to give ‘doles to infirm and aged evacuees’ long after actual eviction had started.12 This was the combustible fuel firing popular anger in 1942. Compassionate District Magistrates, conscious of the problems the villagers faced, put their foot down on occasions, in one case intervening when a village had been forcibly relocated and was now facing eviction again for a second time. Decisions and requests did not go unchallenged by civil authorities; District Magistrates always had to balance the needs of the war with the pressures of anti-British agitation and the risk of rebellion. And the men on the spot had a difficult task carrying through orders from above, often feeling torn by their sympathy for the people affected by new policies. The official in charge would later describe the job of removing rice stocks for Bengal’s ‘denial policy’ as ‘a completely heartbreaking job’ but one that he had to carry through nonetheless.13 Requisitioning was also extensive in wartime Britain, but in India it was simply of a different order as people already lived at bare subsistence levels.

  Requisitioning hit a range of different people, from urban elites to peasants. The military establishment required houses and apartments in downtown Calcutta and Karachi. Clerks, schoolteachers, managers and lawyers all saw their bedrooms occupied by men in uniform or had to make way for military stores. Poorer ‘middle-class’ Britons, probably those involved in trade and business, and Anglo-Indians had been turned out of a large block of flats, Karnani Mansions. One government report admitted that requisitioning was causing ‘serious hardship’, and the American Consul also regretted the ‘considerable inconvenience’ to people in Calcutta, although this hardship of being made to move out to alternative residences, or being squeezed into rooms in cramped apartment blocks with numer
ous family members, was relatively mild in a city which was also beginning to experience famine.14 When the members of an important central government investigation on public health carried out their research, their chairman, Joseph Bhore, decided that they simply could not tour the country to collect further data due to the shortage of accommodation in major towns and cities and the restrictions on railway travel. Rail passengers had seen repeated ticket rises and were forced off some passenger lines altogether.

  In Calcutta, requisitioning disrupted extended families, even the well-off, and their servants and staff. The ports were crammed with ships, every godown (warehouse) space was packed and local factor-ies and properties were requisitioned for storage space. Workers suddenly learned that they had been replaced when the military took over their mills. Workers of the Craig, Anglo India and Reliance jute mills went on strike against the requisitioning of their factories. When offered alternative shifts in neighbouring mills, the men refused: ‘The position has been complicated by the recent bombing and by some shortage of labour, both skilled and unskilled, mainly owing to heavy military demands’, reported the Governor.15 Walchand Hirachand railed against the requisitioning of ships that he owned when twenty-four were seized with no terms for compensation: ‘Here we are at war and a few petty Indian owners demand certain terms’, retorted a British shipping journal, advancing the argument that complaining about requisitioning showed a meanness of wartime spirit.16 The industrialists usually knew how to play the game, though. and lobbied hard against requisitioning when it threatened personal interests. G. D. Birla, a favoured industrialist of the Americans during the war years, had orders to acquire his own private property in Birla Park, Calcutta, rapidly rescinded. The army wanted Birla Park, the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce complained, because it was ‘beautiful’, despite having already been offered land of a comparable size. The Birla Brothers dashed off a pointed telegram to the supply department: ‘American Army HQ trying to requisition our house Birla Park which is occupied by family members including ladies. Is also required for our business which [is] executing huge war orders … Unable [to] understand why we are harassed. Request your immediate kind intervention’17

  Similarly, the industrialist Ramakrishna Dalmia fought a successful campaign to avoid requisitioning of his own private property, refusing to sell it to the British authorities when they made him an offer. Once again, those with the right social capital or those perceived as loyalists tended to be able to manoeuvre their way through the minefield of new security legislation and regulations.

  Despite all this, many officials believed India was still too slow in changing into a base for total war. A number of strategists proposed inventive new ideas about how to maximise production. In August 1942, Henry Grady, a Californian diplomat, later the first American Ambassador to independent India, toured the country with a committee of economists and technical advisers. The team met with Indian workers and manufacturers, inspecting munitions factories, workshops, depots, shipyards and industrial plants. He spent two days touring Tata Iron and Steel in Jamshedpur, and crossed the country from Cochin to Calcutta. He met hundreds of people, from Walchand Hirachand and Birla to the shift-wage workers manning textile and munitions factories. The conclusion was damning. India was simply ‘not organized on a war basis’, Grady concluded. He argued ‘a much larger army’ could be recruited from among the local people, and his report called for ‘urgency’ in increasing Indian production, and railed against the ‘totally inadequate’ docks and ports and the ‘seriously overburdened railways’. In Bombay the docks were overcrowded to the point of gridlock, with 200 ships waiting to unload or be repaired in May 1942, and ‘prompt’ and ‘drastic’ steps were needed. Communications were also inadequate and conveying messages by telephone or telegraph involved very long, frustrating waits, as many a foreign correspondent would bitterly testify.

  With prescience, the report warned of the potential for rice shortages in the future, now that rice stocks from Burma and Indochina had been cut off, and criticised the lack of price control. Like many others in 1942, Henry Grady noted the potential for famine (using the actual word) without giving the issue more than passing interest. (He was not the first: Gandhi had already pointed out in April 1942, ‘Bengal is suffering from famine’.18) Taking a purely technocratic and politically neutral line, the Americans urged a step-change in war production and more opportunities for Indians to manufacture and produce the materials vitally required for the war. Anyone who read it, however, could see it was also a censure of Britain’s failure to fully extract the most from its colony; it could be read as an implicit criticism of British rule. Yet, it was also a command to squeeze India’s people and resources much harder. The Americans had arrived and meant business.19

  The quick, well-connected and enterprising traders and manufacturers sensed the possibility of profits. Vast numbers of men needed provisions. Those who had already established themselves as reliable contractors or purveyors for the British Army and Indian Army in the past, who had usually supplied food and basic provisions on more modest scales, now found themselves well placed to supply goods at previously unimaginable volumes. Small-scale military contractors, based in specific regions, could transform themselves within weeks into giant all-India suppliers. If they were fortunate they could secure almost exclusive rights to supply soap, boots or tyres with little oversight of charges or profits. In Lahore, some family businesses boomed on an unthinkable scale.

  We were called purveyors to the British Army. Whatever they needed by way of clothing, food – nothing to do with army hardware – boots, uniforms, food, canteens, what they required, consumables. And this was spread all over India, because the Indian Army was spread all over India, especially during the War, when the Indian Subcontinent was a big theatre, feeding both the Middle East and the China theatre. Lever Brothers came here and set up their factory and we were linked up with them,

  recalled Syed Babar Ali many decades later, whose own family business in Lahore had begun as a traditional military contractor.20 ‘We were buying soap and other Lever Brothers’ products for the army, not in wagon loads but in train loads.’ A number of these Punjabi contractors looked increasingly to the Muslim League as a way of securing their own provincial commercial power base.

  Many people attempted to find employment or to secure contracts with the US forces by using their previous track record as suppliers to the Indian Army. M. N. Chakraverti, who described himself as an engineer, contractor and general merchant, was a registered contractor to the British Army at Fort William in Madras and wrote to the US forces offering to sell them fresh fruits and vegetables in East India. Others made donations to the Allies in the hope of securing supply contracts, such as the battery manufacturer Nalini Choudhury, who was already supplying the RAF and sent a hundred rupees to the Americans to support their Defence Fund. Initially decisions on American supply were taken from Delhi but this responsibility was soon transferred to Calcutta, where contracts could be more responsive to the needs of the army that was concentrated there.21

  Other negotiations for supply continued to be made locally with contractors and suppliers directly, for everything from textiles and blankets, uniforms, shoes, equipment, paper and printing, to building materials and major raw materials such as metals, coal and minerals. These purchases would be paid for by India under the terms of reverse lend-lease.22 Multi-layered accommodations, agreements and convenient quid pro quos emerged on both sides. Indian contractors and suppliers recognised immediately the opportunities on offer. Gandhi, unusually, was dragged into a commercial controversy about whether it was legitimate to sell homespun blankets to the army, and made a statement to clarify that it was permissible to trade products like rice and blankets with the Allies although it was a matter of conscience for each trader.23

  Some potential contractors made accusations of foul play against their rivals: an anonymous ‘wellwisher to the allies’ informed the American Consulate that a shoem
aker and tailor at a US Bengali base, A. A. Qureshi, was acting as an enemy agent but, after investigations, nothing incriminating was discovered. Another unsolicited letter from a former Indian police prosecutor, backed by a member of the Bengali Legislative Assembly, warned the Americans that Hindu policemen were failing to prosecute thefts of American supplies. In another case a shoe contractor, Shankar Ram, was accused by a rival supplier in a letter to the Americans both of political involvement in the 1942 Quit India movement and of overpricing his stock. The implication was that he should not be given the military contract if he had been involved in the anti-war Quit India campaign. Noticeably, the investigation into these allegations ignored the issue of 1942, and only sought to find out whether the shoes were being sold at the right price: it concluded that the rival’s charge was baseless.24 The urgent need to scramble resources for the war, to feed, clothe and supply an army at a time of great peril, had transformative effects on the fortunes of some local people.