The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  The Congress activists Aruna Asaf Ali and her husband had a difference of opinion. They had been travelling the country, taking part in meetings, discussing furiously whether or not to start civil disobedience. She argued the need to launch a concerted protest; he was more circumspect and cautious about the new demand for civil disobedience which was building a crescendo. Ironically, it was he who would be arrested alongside other Congress leaders. The government would come to regret leaving his wife off the list.

  In the early morning of 9 August 1942, the government pounced. The mass arrest of Congress leaders from the Congress Working Committee in Bombay that morning was swift and well anticipated. As in the past, news from government had seeped into Congress circles with ease, through sympathetic police and officials passing on the word. Abdul Kalam Azad heard about his own imminent arrest from a friend of a friend in the Bombay police. Aruna Asaf Ali recalled the police arriving at her home that morning: ‘My husband and I were not in the least surprised when, in the early hours of 9th August, the police knocked on the door at the flat where we were staying. When they announced Asaf’s arrest, I asked, “What about me?” “There is not [a] warrant for you, madam” I was told.’9 The arrest was impeccably civil although menacing and a train was waiting at Victoria Terminus in Bombay to take the arrested leaders on to where they would be detained. ‘The whole place was swarming with CID plain clothes men. We could not enter the platform’, remembered Sucheta Kripalani, who, like Aruna, was the wife of a jailed leader and was also in Bombay that day. ‘I think Aruna was the only lucky person who managed to get into the station. So we returned. The whole city was in turmoil. Overnight I was thrown into a larger role than I had ever played.’10

  The Congressmen feared deportation to another part of the empire but after deliberations about a secret extradition, Linlithgow had decided to imprison the Congressmen at Ahmednagar Fort in central India. Abdul Kalam Azad, who had also been seized that morning, saw Aruna on the platform and later recalled, ‘As the train started to move she looked at me and said, “Please don’t worry about me. I shall find something to do and not remain idle.” Later events showed that she meant what she said.’11 From every window of the train carriage the faces of the detained peered as the train pulled out of the station and receded from view. On board Asaf Ali breakfasted in the dining car with Nehru, Azad, Patel and the rest of the Congress High Command. The atmosphere was one of forced jollity.

  Each ordered what he desired, some had eggs, poached, fried or boiled; some had toast with coffee or tea, but the majority had only fruits and milk. As we passed station after station we found the platforms guarded by the police, with not even railway staff or porters on the platforms. Occasionally we caught sight of some railway officials in their black coats, stealthily peering from behind trellised screens or glass panes of office doors.12

  These would be the last members of the public they would see for three years.

  The guards took the Congress Working Committee to Ahmednagar Fort, a fifteenth-century circular fort with thick black walls of hewn stone, with twenty-four bastions and one gate. An immense curtain wall stretched upwards for 80 feet. Asaf Ali, Nehru, Azad and the others negotiated the steep steps and walkways into the more modern barracks in the interior of the fort. Around the fort ran a deep moat, which could be crossed by a suspension drawbridge. As far as the eye could see, rocky scrubland stretched to the horizon. Parts of the fort were crumbling but it had a reputation, centuries old, of impregnability; the Mughal emperor Aurungzeb had died here in 1707. For the next three years, without a radio and with only a handful of visitors, this would be Asaf Ali’s prison.

  In the meantime, his wife was taking matters into her own hands. Alone, she felt in a quandary. Unclear how best to vent her opinions, separated from friends and family, she kept repeating to herself, ‘What should I do?’ Crowds, hearing of the arrests, had started to mass on the streets, and the police had to erect barricades. Beaten back by police batons, and fired on with tear gas, a demonstration in Bombay deteriorated into violence. That day was a psychological tipping point for some of the Congress leaders, recalled by many of them in the years to come. It became part of national lore in Independent India. The sight of police violence against protesters who had heard of the arrests and attempted to get close to the train station fuelled anger. Like many others, Aruna was incensed by seeing gas attacks and lathi charges in Bombay. At a public square in Bombay, Gwalia Tank Maidan, where a Congress flag-raising ceremony had been scheduled, she found herself propelled forward to leadership, raising the Congress flag and heading a procession. The conflict with the state had reached boiling point. Thirty-three people died from police gunshots in the first four days after the arrests in Bombay.

  By simultaneously arresting prominent Congressmen all over the country the government believed it had cut off the head of the movement. But trouble bubbled up everywhere from unexpected sources, linking together middle-class nationalists with villagers and workers in a surge of anti-state sabotage.

  * * *

  The Quit India movement has been heavily mythologised and celebrated by successive post-Independence governments in India, and often lauded as part of a linear progression towards Independence, chalked up alongside the movements of the 1920s and 1930s. The actions of freedom fighters have been well catalogued and their heroic actions tabulated by nationalist historians. However, in a number of ways it was distinctive when compared with many earlier movements that Gandhi had spearheaded. Most obviously, Gandhi was absent due to his imprisonment and was not commanding events. Younger members of a new generation, teenagers and students, stood in the vanguard and outran the constraints of their parents and elders.

  There was a groundswell of anti-state feeling in the country that was outstripping the control of Gandhi; it was amorphous, without a centre, driven by youth and peasants who were disenfranchised and furious.13 In the early weeks of August students stopped going to school and college (attendance in Bombay dropped to less than 20 per cent) and joined sit-ins, strikes and marches in their thousands. A sixteen-year-old girl, Chitra Mehta, was sent away by her Congress-leaning family to stay with more politically aloof relatives in order to try to keep her away from joining the movement, while she finished her exams.

  Whenever I used to open my study books I could not see anything but hazy black circles. At last the inner conflict proved too much for me and I was laid up with high fever. For about fifteen days I was in bed. Then I wrote a letter to my father telling him that under the prevailing circumstances I would never be able to study.

  Chitra Mehta’s account gives a sense of the intoxication of the hour, the sheer adrenalin and elation that were driving young women like herself to disobey their families and to take personal risks. ‘I would go mad if I tried to keep out of Freedom’s Battle’, she wrote.14 It was an intensely exhilarating moment for many young people. Interception of correspondence in Bengal was described by the censor as showing ‘women often worked up to a fever pitch of emotion’.15Chitra Mehta ultimately joined a crowd of political disciples who gathered outside Gandhi’s prison at the Aga Khan’s Palace and described being unable to sleep in fear of Gandhi’s death while he fasted.

  Many onlookers noted the youthfulness of the urban rebels. Teenagers and young people stood in the forefront of the rebellions, a new generation who had been only children or not yet born when Gandhi started his mass campaigns of non-co-operation. India’s young population had been increasing in size and political significance and now the number of school closures, the refusals to attend examinations and the presence of youth in the crowd were marked. There was a generational gap with their elders in spirit, in language and in commitment to Gandhian idealism. Growing up with the cinema, the radio and with a new internationalist consciousness, these were young men and women aware that they had to carve out a life in a new post-war, post-imperial world. They respected Gandhi and invoked nationalist symbols but they stood for a new form of radi
calism which was less tolerant of non-violence and impatient of the old order. Trilochan Senapati, a young underground organiser who was still evading the police a year on in 1943, wrote to his beloved, melding his belief in their future despite the forbidden love-match with his political vision: ‘You know what we the educated of our age are going to do … we will show the world a new way. All shall support us in the long-run in this progressive age …’ ‘I think I can be a man’, he promised her, if he could only build up his revolutionary life in the ‘right way’. Tellingly, he quoted Nehru at the end of his letter: ‘Don’t think about the past because the past is past. We must think about the present to make our future sublime.’ This was a generation seeking a radical rupture with the political standards of their parents.16

  Aruna, meanwhile, was dodging the police, who had now issued a warrant for her arrest. Shielded by friends and sympathisers, she decided to go underground and to help organise the movement. The plan was for a number of leading politicians, wives and middle-class activists who had not been jailed to work as saboteurs and agents provocateurs. First Aruna went to Delhi, her home city, although she could not go back to her house. Police had already stripped the place of her furniture and possessions, and so she kept moving, at first living in the home of a civil surgeon and his family. The government offered a 5,000-rupee reward for her capture. Those uncaptured by the police started to organise, to hold fiery meetings and to make perilous strategies. ‘We had to travel all over the country. I went to Calcutta, UP [United Provinces], Madras, Bombay, Pachim, Maharashtra. And then the others were travelling all over. It was a very hectic time and we worked under great difficulties because the CID and police were everywhere.’17 Sucheta Kripalani recalled the early meetings, the frantic travelling between flats, offices and hideouts, rapid changes of colourful saris on trains, the attempts to merge into other families when travelling, the way that, as a young woman, she could also pass for a student and evade detection. The network gradually flowered, channelling money to protesters and saboteurs who had started attacking the railways and targeting government property including ammunition factories and army depots, as well as printing and distributing radical pamphlets and running an illegal radio station.

  The rebellion was a conglomeration of different uprisings with their own logics and leaderships; it had its own regional dynamics. In towns and cities it was championed by prosperous students who led strikes, hartals and demonstrations. In the countryside, it was far more nebulous but also far more violent from the start. Pre-existing peasant activism and grievances fused with the movement, and at times undefined general crime and disorder segued into more organised political protest. The name of Gandhi, as in earlier decades, provided the millenarian inspiration for acts that could be carried out in his name, even if they fell outside his own sanction. The rebels dipped into the ideological resources of the Congress, invoking language and ideas distorted or derived from the nationalists. As the ruminations of Asaf Ali and Nehru in prison reflected, the Congress leadership was far from content with the course of events and was concerned by the way that the movement had spun away from their own direction or grip. There was an uneasy tension between acts being attributed to Congress, by both government and rebels, and the actual position of the leadership.

  Secret radio broadcasts, made by anonymous Congress supporters from clandestine transmitters that were shifted around from apartment to apartment, instructed the public on what to do if the Japanese did reach Bengal: ‘Let it be clear that in the event of Japanese invasion, the British administration will be completely demoralised as was seen before. You should capture the administrative machinery, declare the free state of India and hoist the national flag.’18 Pamphlets and radio broadcasts blasted the government in a tone that was sensationalist, hysterical and revolutionary. The call of the hour was to self-sacrifice, even oblivion, akin to the call made to soldiers fighting in the war: ‘“Live Dangerously” ought to be the motto of every young man of India. Live life to the fullest and best effect. The Congress has sent its clarion call. Mahatmaji is in jail rotting in a British dungeon. It is up to you, young sons of India, to take up arms and march abreast!’19

  Aruna and Sucheta, like other leading members of the underground movement, were cushioned by their elite status and their many friends in high places. Along with other ‘absconders’ Aruna surfed on a wave of goodwill from friends, sympathisers, high and humble officials, including the station director of All India Radio, Z. A. Bukhari, and distinguished civil servants. As one police officer reported, ‘against nine of us who are searching for her, there are nine lakhs in Delhi alone to offer her protection and quarter. It is an uneven game and you cannot blame us if we cannot succeed.’20 Networks of hospitality kept the rebels alive; they did not need to buy food or railway tickets or even carry money. Strangers ferried them from safe-house to safe-house, wanting for nothing. They even pretended, on one occasion, to be patients in the beds of a Bombay clinic. The flow of money towards the rebels was steady and generous. The government rightly suspected the larger industrialists of siphoning cash towards the movement, but to Linlithgow’s frustration could find no traces. The big bosses of industry, among them Walchand Hirachand, G. D. Birla and Gaganvihari Mehta, the president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce, continued to secretly bankroll the underground rebels, anonymously channelling tens of thousands of rupees.21

  Playing chase with the authorities, Aruna’s evasion of the police was becoming a running drama in the press by September, and held particular appeal for young students. S. M. Y. Sastri, a young journalist working on radio news programmes, was ‘thrilled by the way Aruna Asaf Ali and the CSP [Congress Socialist Party] members were now fighting’ and felt inspired to give up his job and return to his home district to join the struggle.22 Some military men followed the story too, albeit clandestinely. When sailors from the Royal Indian Navy ship HMS Talwar went on strike after the end of the war, it was Aruna whom they thought to approach: ‘She had endeared herself to the country and to many of us by her militant role in the Quit India movement in 1942. To some she resembled the legendary Laxmibai of Jhansi who personally led her soldiers against the British during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.’23

  Over the weeks, Aruna and Sucheta were astonished by something which they had not expected, however. Congress was not in control at all. The underground activists were merely tapping into the ferocious surge of anger that was ricocheting around the country. The leaders were themselves being carried away on a tide of protest, which went far beyond their own blueprint. ‘The sabotage, destruction, whatever had happened, was spontaneous. If I say we had organised it, it would be wrong’, recalled Sucheta Kripalani many years later. ‘What the AICC [All India Congress Committee] did was to collect information, help the people who were hiding, send them money, send them assistance, and whenever they were in trouble we’d go and try and see in what way we could resolve their difficulties.’24

  Peasants who came out of their fields and cotton-mill workers who left their factories were the real rebels behind the struggle. Their complex grievances, deeply rooted in long-standing inequalities but compounded by the changes of the war, now erupted with unrestrained fury, much of it far outside the bounds of centralised political control. In Midnapore, Ballia and Satara parallel administrations ran unimpeded for a number of weeks. In Ahmedabad two-thirds of the mill workers left the city, unhampered by ambivalent mill owners. Gandhi’s order to ‘Do or Die’ was a mantra vague enough to attach to any kind of rowdiness. But this was not anarchy. This was a clear attempt to destabilise the war effort and the pamphlets in circulation unambiguously targeted the war. They voiced anger at requisitioning and wartime change:

  The British, who have ruined our villages and converted our golden country into a cremation ground, will then come along with hirelings and loot all the ripe paddy that you have cultivated with such labour and care. Just think it over, whether it is better to let this happen or drive of
f the devil and try to live as a free man with the right to enjoy the fruit of one’s labour.25

  Some of the worst fears of the British, which had unwisely been articulated in public by Amery, now became realities. Railway engines ran covered with Congress flags, an aerodrome was burned to the ground in United Provinces, and at ammunition factories workers were being suborned and encouraged to sabotage production. Munitions workers broke equipment or manufactured faulty supplies. Railway officials leaked information to rebels. Everywhere there were degrees of complicity between some officials and policemen whose sympathies lay with the rebellion rather than the state. Determined sabotage, insurrection and disruption blazed – albeit only for a quick and brazen flash in some places – through districts in Bombay, Gujarat, United Provinces, Bihar, Central Provinces, Madras, Delhi, Bengal, Orissa and beyond. In some districts the ICS lost control completely for weeks at a time. Rebels burned post offices and government property, smashed railway signals and tore up track. Telegraph poles were uprooted and bomb explosions occurred in Poona and Bombay. Large bands of villagers with crude weapons made strikes on targeted government-owned bungalows or tax offices and then melted back into the countryside.

  Some well-known leaders vocally opposed the uprising. The dalit leader Ambedkar called it ‘irresponsible and insane’; the leftist M. N. Roy continued to champion supporting the war and called for a kind of cosmopolitan humanitarianism which did not foreground nationality. Some flysheets produced by rebels used extreme imagery, playing on terrors of interracial sex and the protection of Indian women from bestial foreign soldiers. There was a Manichaean edge to some of the Quit India speeches and pamphlets, playing on the fear of Muslims and driving a wedge between Hindus and Muslims, who were becoming increasingly politically estranged. Historians differ on the extent of the movement (if it can be called a movement at all), how radical it really was and to what ends it would have brought India. Among the revolutionaries themselves factions differed on the role of violence and on the war against fascism. Arguments raged into the small hours of the night: was tearing up telegraph wires an act of violence or passive resistance that could be squared with Gandhianism?