The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  Business for hotels, canteens and restaurants boomed. As members of the services reached the cities, these became packed with RAF, RIAF, army and naval men. Many complained about the shortage of suitable urban accommodation and the cost of rents. Senior military staff and large numbers of civil personnel all put pressure on the hotels and apartments, driving prices to record levels and placing hotel beds at a premium. One beneficiary was Mohan Singh Oberoi. Still establishing himself in the hotel business in the late 1930s, he had the chance to lease the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta at a cheap rate. Bad memories lingered, and the hotel was remembered as the place where a cholera epidemic had wiped out a hundred guests in 1933. The place was shabby and unloved. Oberoi’s timing could not have been better. He took it on at a reduced rent of 7,000 rupees a month, spruced up the place and refurnished it. Then, in his own words, he ‘improvised’ 1,500 beds for the troops at ten rupees per head for board and lodging.

  The British Army was frantically trying to find accommodation … Taking over a cholera-ridden hotel had been a landmark in my career. The fact that I converted it and helped the Army in the time of stress and difficulty had come to the notice of the government … From now on my good luck was assured and gradually I went on increasing the scope of my activities with, I hope, benefit to many and much fulfillment to myself. Everything I did prospered.25

  By the end of the war, Oberoi was managing hotels in Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Lahore, Murree and Delhi. He began to dream of building his own hotels across Asia. The foundations of the hotelier’s luxury chain were based on a fortune of war, an entrepreneurial ability to seize a chance in the new circumstances.

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  The indefatigable Walchand Hirachand now decided to capitalise on the sudden availability of American finance and expertise. Walchand, frustrated by the progress of his shipbuilding, had decided to move into the production of something even more alluring and just as crucial for the war effort: aeroplanes. He formed a partnership with William Pawley, president of the Inter-Continent Corporation of New York and a director of China’s Central Aircraft Company, and within seventy-two hours of Pawley’s arrival in India, the two men agreed to set up an aeroplane factory together. They secured 4 million dollars’ worth of orders from the Government of India and the Chinese nationalists, and the Maharaja of Mysore donated a vast patch of barren scrubland seven miles east of Bangalore. The Hindustan Aircraft Factory was born.26

  Labourers cleared cobras and termite nests from the barren land, built their own kiln for brickwork, and within three weeks an airstrip and outbuildings had been established. The building work went on day and night, made possible by electric lighting. A group of American technicians and their families stayed in Bangalore throughout the war working for Hindustan Aircraft and at least 300 Indian engineers worked on building India’s first planes. The first Indian-built aircraft, a Harlow, took to the skies in July 1941. The factory manufactured over 100 planes, used to transport troops around the subcontinent and across ‘the Hump’ to China. American and Indian capital (both private and later state investment and control) delivered Indian-made planes to South Asia.

  The RIAF, like elsewhere, was the most glamorous of India’s armed forces. Well-educated young men applied in large numbers, celebrated in the posters as ‘a splendid band of courageous and enterprising youth’. The recruiting posters beckoned men who wanted to fight but ‘equally importantly’ to serve India after the end of the war; the air force promised ‘thrills, adventure and a career’ and ‘free training for your post-war job’. The wartime state was again promoting the development of India, and the potential for acquiring technical expertise, as a way of attempting to harness the educated middle class to the war effort. Well-heeled young graduates, who had often thrilled to the exhilaration of flying in amateur flying clubs, started applying to the RIAF. They were promised world-class technical training and the chance to be in the vanguard of civil aviation at the end of the war. Schoolboys cut out pictures of the Hurricanes, Vultee Vengeances and Spitfires published in magazines. Cecil Beaton photographed the dashing student pilots training on the North-West Frontier. In Britain, too, Indian test pilots like P. C. Ramachandran looked as handsome as Bollywood stars as they posed with cigarettes and mugs of tea after their flights.27

  On the ground, things were more fraught. It took time to train enough Indian technicians and the spare parts, batteries and communication sets had to be cobbled together. And the RIAF did not share the glory of the RAF. Mechanically minded men yearned to get their hands on a real fighter plane and educated men were frustrated playing second fiddle as ground crew: ‘the feelings at that time were such that the RAF did not “want” us IORs [Indian Other Ranks] to be anywhere near the workspot. In clear but blunt terms we were told that we would only be a hindrance in the hangars. Hurricanes, Spitfires, Hudsons, Wellingtons and even Dakotas were kept out of our reach.’28 Some Indian pilots felt that they were treated as second-best to the RAF.

  Indian women in the WAC (I) joined the plotting rooms, meteorologists and radio-location teams. The mechanics, engineers and technicians of modern Indian flight would serve the airlines of independent Asia, PIA and Air India, once the war was over. Flight had never been so crucial, not solely for bombing sorties and reconnaissance over South-East Asia but also for the sheer movement of people from A to B. Military commanders performed logistical wonders. Wavell was flying to and fro across South Asia, the Middle East and Europe at an astonishing rate, making several changes of aircraft and barely escaping with his life from crashes on several occasions. Senior officials, but also nurses and Red Cross girls, hitch-hiked, catching lifts on military planes as if they were buses from Karachi to Bangalore or from Assam to Calcutta. Crashes and collisions were frequent and often fatal (Subhas Chandra Bose later died from a quite typical wartime incident when his plane crashed) and in India the remoteness of airstrips, the Himalayan mountains and the heat all added to the delicate operation of keeping the planes in the sky.

  Requisitioned civilian aircraft could be rickety. Fifty pilots and air crew lost their lives and over 700 others were in associated incidents and accidents. ‘The weather was frequently very dangerous for ordinary flying not to speak of dive-bombing with deep sucking downward convectional currents over the fairly high hills between Burma and India. The snow white towering Himalayas to the north were equally menacing vying with the beautifully red Jap flak coming from the target below.’29 When Allied bombers crashed, the censor often suppressed the news, but the mangled wrecks made popular attractions. The wreckage of a plane in a paddy field near the railway station of Burdwan in Bengal pulled in crowds large enough to merit noting in provincial correspondence to New Delhi.

  This was all wondrous to villagers. The majesty of the shiny planes was certainly used as a way of trying to inspire, impress and threaten. In the centre of Madras a strange window display stalled passers-by. A German bomber, shot down in Britain, had been sent to Madras for exhibition and was placed behind a large shop-window frontage in the central shopping mall.30 Princes lined up to pledge money towards the construction of fighter planes. The Assam war fund raised £20,000s for the production of an ‘Assam Bomber’. Naming the planes after places and princes was one way of buying into the dream of aviation. The Nawab of Bhopal, a mechanical enthusiast, gave out solid silver medals imprinted with four-prop planes to civilians who helped out with war duties. In cinemas, Movietone films showed Hurricanes looping through the clouds, and the surreal sight of the fields from the air. Flying aircraft low over the pastoral folk grazing their flocks on the Indo-Afghan border was, by the 1940s, an old tactic for both impressing and intimidating them.

  In the summer of 1942 Linlithgow announced a ‘morale-boosting’ tour around the country, visiting Madras and the sites of coastal bombing. The Raj continued to attempt to boost morale by drawing on the ceremonial trappings of statehood. On 12 June, the King’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester (and in Amery’s view ‘the most soldi
er-like in appearance of the Royal Family’), arrived in Delhi for a month-long state tour, intended as ‘a real tonic to the loyal elements everywhere in India’. The duke made a demanding month-long whistle-stop tour of all the major cantonments and towns. He visited the Taj Mahal and reviewed American, British, Chinese and Indian troops outside the Viceregal Palace, while convalescent Indian troops, some with crutches and missing limbs, looked on.31 But this was ceremonial puff, which had little resonance for local people or indeed for some of the troops that the tour was intended to encourage. Clive Branson, stationed in Galonche near Poona, was one of the soldiers to be reviewed by the duke and expressed his fury in a letter home:

  This parade is a purely bull-shit parade. It will take several days to polish boots, brasses, etc. It will take days and nights for some eight Indian tailors to alter, clean, press, etc. etc. clothes for white sahibs to wear like bloody waxworks. The Indians, of course, will not be on parade, the lucky fools … nothing more could help the enemy more by undermining morale.32

  Even Linlithgow and the Heads of the Defence Services grumbled after standing in the furnace of Delhi’s mid-June heat on tarmac for three hours waiting for the duke’s plane to arrive. Soldiers were becoming frustrated by the long waits before action, and soldiers and civilians alike shared scepticism about the emphasis on viceregal and royal ceremony at a time when the dangers to India’s borders felt tangible.

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  The war was not completely unwelcome. As mentioned earlier, depending on wealth, region, occupation and status the war’s effects were variable and for some they were a boon. In the Hindi novel Aadha Gaon, the traders and weavers in the village of Gangauli want the war to continue, as their profits are accruing. As with the larger companies, zamindars who diversified into selling consumer goods, from gramophone records to opening shoe shops in United Provinces and Punjab, often reaped the rewards. Wages were still being driven upwards and there was plenty of work available; men who had been working in mines and collieries could find comparatively easier work overground, in the construction of roads and aerodromes. Workers in the jute factories of Calcutta, turning out the hessian gunny bags, were working round the clock. In Bombay and Ahmedabad workers did back-to-back shifts, working for sixteen hours or more at a stretch. Factory labourers resisted opening the factory doors to migrant labour from the neighbouring provinces.

  But increasingly when they took their pay home at the end of the day, workers found the market emptier than usual, with less for sale, in both quantity and quality. Bags of rice and lentils mixed with stones or rough grains, sold at higher prices than the previous month; stores had empty shelves; stalls displayed less and scrawnier meat. The Faustian pact of war work was becoming apparent. By the second year of the war, prices had gone up over a third in real terms. By August 1942, General Raymond Wheeler, the deputy commander in South-East Asia Command, could report to his senior commander, Joseph Stilwell, ‘that the US forces were practically living off the land in India’.33

  14

  Living Dangerously

  BACK IN BRITAIN, a small committed cadre tried their best to bring the Indian cause to public attention. Krishna Menon was forty-four years old and a councillor for St Pancras. He was the lodestar of the Indian Independence movement in Britain. He stood behind campaigns to lobby, cajole and shame the political establishment into granting Indian Independence and was the driving force behind the India League in London. The offices of the India League, at the top of a dingy staircase above a shop on the Strand, consisted of two small rooms. The front room doubled as a print shop, stuffed with printing machinery and tottering stacks of magazines and papers, the cheap pamphlets that Menon sold at the endless rounds of lecture meetings he addressed. In the back room, Menon could be found behind a shambolic oversized writing desk, overloaded with books and papers. From here, he wrote newspaper columns and pamphlets, arranged meetings and speaker tours, planned demonstrations and protests. Volunteers and sympathisers, many of them women, tiptoed around him. This was the epicentre of the movement for Indian Independence in Britain and the channel through which the actions of the Indian National Congress back in India were filtered and publicised.1

  In February 1942 Krishna Menon’s frenetic activities for the India League reached a new fever pitch of intensity. He began a tour of all the major cities of Britain, voicing the need for Indian freedom. ‘India faces the gravest moment in all its seventy centuries of history’, he told a large mixed Indian and British crowd in Glasgow. One hundred and fifty people stood in the audience, among them students, peddlers, workers from munitions factories and merchant seamen.2 They had paid sixpence to hear him. In Cardiff and Birmingham the crowds included Africans, West Indians and Chinese workers alongside whites. In Dagenham a week later, factory workers, members of the Workers’ Educational Association, gathered to hear him speak at the local public library. When asked by one about the threat of Japanese invasion in India, and the risk of Indians preferring Japanese rule, Menon shot back that the question was like ‘asking a fish whether he wished to be fried in butter or margarine’.3 What India wanted was Independence, and, he argued, the country had been left defenceless and without the motivation or ability to resist invasion without a truly popular government.

  While Menon toured the country, trying to garner support for the India League, the security services were on his tail, tapping his phone calls and sending detectives to take notes from the back of his meetings. MI5 also tried to ensure that Menon was enlisted in the military as a way of eradicating his troublesome presence. ‘It is time that the machinery of the law was put into operation to compel him to take up National Service’, one MI5 officer urged. ‘He is a first class wangler and will strain every nerve to avoid his obligations.’4 The attempt to enlist Menon floundered because of his age and ill-health. In any case, he was already doing war work as an air raid warden in his borough of St Pancras. He earned notoriety and admiration from the locals for his punishing hours on the streets and his apparent obliviousness to the bombs of London, apocryphally at one point emerging unfazed from his office after a bombing raid with fragments of glass stuck in his hair.

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  By June 1942 the direct Japanese threat to India was passing. India was starting to release troops again, and sending men to North Africa to assist in the fight against Rommel; Tobruk fell on 21 June and by late July there was stalemate at El Alamein. But by the end of the summer, British authority in India was unravelling. The exodus from coastal cities, the fall of Singapore and the raids on Ceylon, threats of invasion with little real concerted strategy to explain how Indians would resist the Japanese, the general panic and above all the sight of refugees from Burma on the road and the stories of the two-tier refugee system all conspired to fundamentally damage the reputation of the Raj to a point where it looked beyond repair. As the historian Indivar Kamtekar has suggested, ‘the state seemed to be announcing its impending demise’.5 The withdrawal of savings from post offices and the widespread hoarding of small coins in preference to notes indicate the scale of uncertainty and distrust of the state. In the summer of 1942, as the threat of invasion receded, workers started to drift back to their factories in the cities from their rural homes (although often leaving families behind in the villages) but now the threat was a political one and the overriding question was whether the Raj could ever come to some form of settlement with the Congress.

  Internally, the Congress was in factional disarray, trying to decide whether to launch street action and civil disobedience against the Raj. On 14 July the Congress Working Committee at Wardha passed a resolution calling for complete Independence, with Gandhi moving towards a more confrontational stance than he had ever taken. All summer, as the heat rose and the monsoon broke, the tension and speculation over the future of Gandhi and his movement reached boiling point. The government dithered about pre-emptive arrests and weighed up whether to send the Congress’s senior leadership out of the country altogether. Uganda
and Aden were potential destinations. The Governor of Madras wrote to the Viceroy in July in typical vein about Gandhi, ‘the villain of the piece’: ‘If the movement comes to anything I would suggest arresting him at once and deporting him to Mauritius or Kenya, and prohibit any reference to him in the press. If he fasts let it not be known; and if he dies announce it six months later.’6 Yet within the Congress the path was not clear; the right-wingers became split and the communists and the Congress Socialist Party stood on opposing sides. Nehru felt the issue acutely. He had great sympathy for the Allied forces in Europe and wanted to back an anti-fascist cause but the failure of Cripps, and the ongoing suspicion that the mission had been an insincere set-up, forced a polarisation of opinions.

  The uncertainty over a Japanese invasion stood at the heart of the indecision about commencing the Quit India movement in the summer of 1942. For a time in early 1942 Gandhi had believed that India would fall to the Japanese.7 He calculated that it was better to wrench Independence immediately from the British than to fall into fascist hands, perhaps even with the consent of the disgruntled Indian public who watched Bose’s every move with the glee of a cinema audience. Gandhi was alienated by the ugliness of war and its transformative effects on the Indian landscape: the killing of cattle for beef rations for troops and the reports of assaults on village women that circulated widely. Earlier in the year when the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek had met Gandhi he had been struck by his obstinacy. Everywhere under conditions of war, positions had calcified. Now, Gandhi’s statements became unequivocal and more clearly marked by ideas of race than they had ever been. It was time, he announced, ‘for the British and the Indians to be reconciled to complete separation from each other’.8

  Ironies abounded. Communists, once so feared by the government that they had been banned, but now a rare and much-needed government ally, were legalised in July, released from jail and bans on their publications lifted. Among other nationalists, the question of how to proceed was still causing heartache and wide differences of opinion. Old colleagues, husbands and wives took up different places on the political spectrum and anguished discussions divided former political allies.