by Yasmin Khan
16
The Cogs in a Watch
AT THE END of 1943 the King-Emperor examined the design of a new recruiting medal and approved it, ‘as an award for Zeal and Success in recruiting on the part of India’. The medal was a star surrounded by a scroll, suspended by an emerald-green ribbon. The Raj awarded the medal to Recruiting Officers and ex-servicemen but also to women. Mothers who had a husband and two or more children in the services or any parent with three children serving could now be the recipients of a special imperial medal. It was recognition of the heavy reliance on certain families by the state in the 1940s and of the part that all family members played in encouraging their youth to serve. But it was also another act of desperation by the Raj as officers needed to find novel ways to harness the morale and support of Indian families.1
In 1944, there was also another increase in pay for combatant soldiers. The fighting sepoy was now drawing 37 rupees and 8 annas a month when his basic pay before the war was 16 rupees. This new pay was also being topped up with proficiency pay, deferred pay and a special overseas allowance.2 This was above the rate of inflation, suggesting the determination of the state to keep the Indian soldier fighting on the side of the British irrespective of cost. As the army continued to suck up more recruits, and more Indian manpower was deployed around the Mediterranean, securing the loyalty of the sepoy and ensuring his morale stayed steady continued to be a pressing problem which occupied civil and military officers from Delhi to London.
How to continue to champion victories in the war while the appetite for conflict in India was waning? To add to their woes, the Raj’s most pivotal ally in Punjab, the Unionist government, was fracturing and losing its grip, precipitated by the untimely death of Sikander Hyat Khan from a heart attack and ever-increasing challenges to the Unionist authority from the Muslim League. The urban youth of Lahore now daily challenged the old, privileged allies of the Raj on the streets. Others railed against the cost of living and the decadence of the old feudals, and championed new political firebrands. Women as well as men staged mass demonstrations in support of a Muslim homeland, although exactly what form that state might take, if it ever came into existence, remained unclear.
In May 1943, as famine loomed and prices rose, with grim determination the government handed out money to every provincial government to celebrate victory in North Africa. Tunis had finally been captured in the first week of May. In large cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, it was suggested that ‘meetings on the Hitler model might be organised with as much theatrical effect as possible’.3 The provincial governments laid on parades, bands, displays of tanks, guns and arms, sporting contests, processions and illuminations and handed out sweets. Delhi suggested that government servants should be assembled for ‘talks’, and religious meetings with prayers for the success of the Allies should be encouraged. Every small step forward in the global war was presented as a sign of the ultimate invincibility of the Allies. Morale needed boosting and the Indian Army still needed new recruits.
The war was a painful but culturally prolific era for numerous writers and artists in India, who turned to painting, cinema and novels to evoke the darkness of the world around them, to find a voice for the everyman which went beyond the simplifications of political rhetoric. Stagy military efforts were no match for the grass-roots effloresence of travelling public theatre. This caught the attention of villagers and spoke to them directly. The Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), formed in 1942 and linked to the Communist Party of India, was able to reach people in a way that centralised propaganda could not. On basic stages and under trees, with minimal props, these touring theatre groups performed five or six times a day to thousands. Highly celebrated among the plays performed by IPTA was Nabanna, or New Harvest, which toured the villages of Bengal and enacted the suffering of a family afflicted by the famine. Cathartically, people saw their own pain acted out in front of their very eyes. IPTA also staged plays about the wider global issues of the war, from depictions of Hitler and Mussolini and Japanese aggression (one play was called The Downfall of Hitler), to dramas on debt, peasant exploitation and impoverishment.
Saadat Hasan Manto was writing Urdu short stories for All India Radio, writing for Bombay cinema and producing some of his own best literature. There was a flow between theatres and cinemas, actors and directors like Ritwik Ghatak working in both worlds of film and theatre. Amateur film clubs started to thrive, sometimes organised and patronised by army personnel too; Ferenc Berko, a Hungarian photographer employed to make images by the Indian Army, organised art house screenings in Bombay above the Eros Cinema. The government propaganda machine had little hope of formally competing with more vernacular and localised expressions of theatre, cinema and music that used local languages and artists. Indian theatre troupes and new forms of cinema captured the inner meaning of people’s lives in a complex and ever more violent world.
For the troops, theatrical offerings were more limited. Singers and performers did not tour in the East to the same extent as some of the other theatres, and the military was criticised for failing to boost morale. As one letter to the Spectator complained, ‘ENSA has at last put in an appearance in India. I saw a show by one of their parties this week. It was worse than any third-rate show in England, and such people would be booed out of anywhere but low-class hovels at home.’4 Complaints reached the highest quarters that ENSA in Asia was operating on a shoestring, and that malaria and travel restrictions undermined attempts to entertain the troops. Tickets remained limited and morale suffered as a result. In response, entertainers such as John Gielgud and Vera Lynn were sent to India and Burma. Noël Coward arrived for a tour in early 1944, invited personally by Mountbatten, and toured Calcutta, Assam, Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Ceylon. His convoy drove through mud and rain close to the north-eastern front, navigating hillside roads with a piano strapped precariously to a lorry. He saw a number of the dead and dying on his tour, and was repelled by the stench of battlegrounds and hospitals. One of the songs he penned during this time, ‘I Wonder What Happened to Him’, poked fun directly at the old regimental traditions of the Indian Army and at the wider structures of the Raj, which had been crumbling under the duress of war:
The India that one read about
And may have been misled about
In one respect has kept itself intact.
Though Pukka Sahib traditions may have cracked
And thinned
The good old Indian army’s still a fact.
But not all of his entertainment struck the right note with the men, and his reception was mixed. His presence in many ways seemed outmoded and out of step with the modernised, international army which now manned the borderlands of India and on one occasion he was jeered off stage by 2,000 black troops.5 Many other entertainments for the troops remained ad hoc improvisations and relied on the ingenuity of the men themselves. Indian troops liked wrestling, cinema and improvising music and shows, and a number of circus troupes, local entertainers and dancers, many of them Russians and Poles, became popular with the men.
For the civilian population, the formal channels of propaganda often looked stodgy and simplistically jingoistic. The short films produced for Indian Movietone News and later Indian News Parade – which had to be played before any feature film by law – tended to dwell on battles, pageantry and pomp and rarely captured the hearts of cinema-goers, who often whistled and chatted through them, or arrived late. Over time the government’s own Information Films of India became more sophisticated and subtle, using more Indian cameramen and producers. They developed films which reflected less overtly militaristic themes, for instance, showing the daily lives of village labourers or taking a more anthropological angle, recording the music and singing of ‘loyal’ hill-tribes in the north-east. Nonetheless, the ultimate aim of winning round hearts and minds to the war was never far from the surface of these films.6
Within the army itself, Commanding Officers had honed morale-boosting
techniques and approached their men with new levels of honesty, sensitivity and openness. In the mess, men discussed politics and wartime strategy. They could listen to the radio. Propaganda papers aimed at soldiers, like Fauji Akbar, Jang ki Kabren and Duniya, Indian Information and the War in Pictures, used professional journalists and intrepid photographers. Officers advocated a light touch when censoring letters home.7 Men felt far more committed to their work if they had reliable news from home and knew the truth about their families and their circumstances. But alongside this new strategy of openness the men were also subject to manipulation by propaganda that played up the fear and loathing of the Japanese and targeted the particular soft spots and sensitivities of the Indian troops. Soldiers heard stories of heinous crimes by the Japanese, the rape and sexual exploitation of Indian women in South-East Asia, and lurid accounts of crimes against places of worship and religious customs, such as Sikhs forced to cut their beards and hair and Muslims and Hindus forced to eat pork and beef.8
* * *
Many soldiers had been promised modern goods like radios and electricity installed in their villages, as a way of encouraging them to come into the army. As the war dragged on, more money and effort were being spent on trying to improve the morale of men, particularly those overseas, but these efforts were often insufficient. Frank Lugard Brayne, an energetic and resourceful stalwart of the Indian Civil Service, was disapproving of most of what he saw when he reached the Middle East and began inspecting the local scene. ‘The troops particularly Indians like wandering in the bazaars but the prices of everything are prohibitive, the towns are extremely squalid and unattractive, the villages look like chamar busties [slums], VD is extremely prevalent and altogether, the less the troops visit the bazaars the better.’9 He found the men bored, inactive, uncertain about when they might see action, merely waiting around for future orders with little to distract them. They were cold at night and had little to take their minds off homesickness by day. Brayne was an evangelical Christian and a reformer, and he believed that the imperialists had a mission to improve and develop India and to spread better living standards among villagers and peasants.
As a veteran of the Indian Army’s First World War, Brayne was attached to his charges, knew Punjabi (and he did not hide his partiality for the Punjabi troops) and wanted to return to India, which he clearly considered home. Paternalistic towards young soldiers, he urged British officers to take an interest in the family lives and homes of the sepoys: ‘A week spent by an officer in a recruiting area is worth a year in a unit for learning about his men, their way of living and their troubles.’10 Suspicious of urban literate Indians, he saw villagers as the true heart and soul of the country. But as a leading Welfare Officer he also wanted conditions for these soldiers to be as palatable and comfortable as possible, to bring them up to standard and in the process to extract as much cash and as many concessions as possible from the British and Indian governments and charities like the Red Cross.
Brayne was in charge of enabling the smooth delivery of parcels, the acquisition of musical instruments like harmoniums and tablas and ensuring the right kinds of newspapers and periodicals arrived in the right numbers. Sepoys read novels and newspapers (if they could read – and many did become literate and learn new languages during army employment), played games, listened to the radio if they could, smoked, talked, sang and played musical instruments. Some took up knitting, making scarves, fingerless gloves and balaclavas as a way to while away the time but also as a practical necessity once cold weather set in. ‘Remember it is the small things that irritate most’, Brayne wrote back to India. On his first visit, he was dismayed by the barren landscape of Iraq, the widely dispersed Indian troops and the shortages of small comforts. ‘The walls of barracks, recreation huts etc. are painfully bare’, he wrote in his diary, and he made arrangements for railway officials to send coloured posters of Indian scenes to cheer up the barrack walls.11
Brayne also courted newspaper editors and publishers, asking them to produce lively papers and books for soldiers in languages they could read. He railed against radio sets arriving with parts missing or broken in transit. He was well attuned to the soldiers’ preferences and they did not hesitate to tell him what they wanted: they liked Lifebuoy and Lux soap and Sunlight bars for washing their clothes, they did not necessarily want bidis and were developing more of a taste for pouch tobacco and cigarettes, for cooking they needed a better supply of spices and condiments from cloves and cumin to chillies and ghee, Sikhs wanted hair-oil and combs, and the oversupply of Bengali gramophone records wasn’t to their liking: ‘Don’t let any more Bengallee gramophone records come out but heaps and heaps more of the “martial languages”.’12 Crucially, the living standard of the average sepoy on active service remained much higher than that of the average peasant back home. Soldiers on leave carried back goods from the NAAFI shops of the Middle East in their kitbags because these had trebled in price in Indian towns. Many soldiers owned small personal possessions – razor blades, pen and paper and soap – which they could never have afforded in India.
* * *
By this point in the war, many officers allowed that Independence was inevitable and liked to stress that the future modernisation, prosperity and development of India, from electricity to paved roads, women’s education to aviation, were inextricably linked to victory in the war. In josh talks, common rooms and on the screen, this message was underscored. But the promise of ‘development’ was an elusive one and the Indian Army encouraged men to serve the empire ‘today’ in order to work towards a better future for their own country ‘tomorrow’. As it became clearer that Independence would soon come to India, the army promoted its ability to bring modernisation, technical skills and development – from irrigation to literacy – as one of its main assets. ‘Development’ had become the new ideological benchmark. As one British Ordnance Corps officer put it in a letter home, every country was already thinking about the future of its soldiers. In Britain the ‘Bevin plans’ gained traction, ‘but what are the plans for Indian soldiers? Is anyone thinking of it?’13 Back in Britain, Ernest Bevin, the powerful Minister of Labour, was drawing up ambitious plans for keeping British workers in full employment after the cessation of war. Many of the more enlightened officers, often strongly influenced by socialism and by wartime changes back in Britain, wanted to use the army as a way of spreading material progress. They had idealised versions of sanitised, model communities in mind, with modern agricultural techniques, well-staffed clinics and schools.
By 1944 the Indian government and army were both laying the groundwork for demobilisation and post-war reconstruction. But this was planned as segmented reconstruction, not aimed at the population as a whole, still based on the old grid of loyal and disloyal communities, which would be used as a guide for the distribution of state largesse after the war. It was also intended to be apolitical and technocratic, carried through from the top without reference to politicians or people. For a society reeling from famine and politically radicalised, and for the 2 million men who would have to be demobilised at the end of the war, these plans would go neither far nor fast enough.
* * *
By 1944, even in the traditional recruiting regions, recruitment was not straightforward. Families made strategic decisions about whether to send their sons into the forces, trying to avoid sending more than one or two sons into the army and so spreading their risk. In regions with long histories of recruitment, it had always been traditional for one son to stay behind, to till the land and to care for ageing parents. Rajinder Singh Dhatt, from the district of Hoshiapur in Punjab, remembered how in a family of three boys, his mother had put her foot down when the third son wanted to join up. ‘Our mother told [us] that “You two are in the army and you are taking this third one also, no, we can’t send him” so he didn’t join army.’14 South Asia in the 1940s may have outwardly looked like a patriarchal society but at home women often knew exactly how to apply moral pressure
and played the decisive part in determining whether their sons left home for the war or not.
In the villages of India, the young, hardy and keen were in shorter supply in the latter years of the war. John Ffrench, who had led men at Keren and Monte Cassino before a serious injury, was back in Rajputana drumming up recruits in 1944, touring by horseback and camel, but soon discovered ‘there were literally no recruits available’. Recruiting in Rajputana was organised by a network of retired subedar-majors.
These honourable old gentlemen knew of every young man available and had them signed on and off for training as soon as they reached enlistment age. But at that stage in the war the only men left were the eldest sons of families who were responsible for working the land and were often approaching middle age anyway. Gone were the days of pre-war recruiting when there were twenty applicants to fill every vacancy.15
In Bihar, the picture was more promising and Ffrench was more successful, pushing up the numbers of recruits from 40 sepoys to 200 per month, but he soon realised that recruiting was providing ample opportunity for kickbacks. When swearing in new recruits he was taken aback when they placed rupees on his office table. ‘When I asked what on earth that was for they replied that it was dastur [the custom] for each man to give one rupee to the recruiting officer and eight annas each to the doctor and the clerk.’ Like many other types of secure state employment, acquiring the job was worth a small initial sweetener. The doctor denied all knowledge of the ‘custom’, although he was soon after dismissed for putting in false travel claims for tours in Bihari villages when he was actually, the officer suspected, taking time out in the less salubrious parts of Calcutta. At the same recruiting office, the havildar also had a scam running. He had connived with a team of ‘professional recruits’ who would enlist at one village, collect their signing-on pay and army-issue blanket, pullover and plimsolls. Before long, the new soldier would rapidly desert, sell his kit, and turn up at another village again in order to repeat the trick.16