by Yasmin Khan
In Nepal, the effect on youth was also striking. Nepal’s population was sharply affected during the 1940s. ‘The heavy recruiting programme for the last four years has drained the manpower of the country to such an extent that I am afraid the quality of the recruits that can be made available now will be poorer.’ Nepal’s ruler explained this unambiguously to the British government. ‘Please direct the Recruiting Officer for the Gurkhas to instruct the Gurkha Recruiters to explore the remotest corners of the hills where intensive recruiting has so far not been carried out.’17 Even ten years after the end of the war one close observer of a heavily combed region of Nepal commented, ‘The handful of young men who live in Mohiriya is almost exclusively composed of those suffering from tuberculosis, the lame, those with rickets and other abnormalities. Certainly it is a limited case, but it shows to what extent mercenary soldiering can weaken a Gurung village.’18 Nepal was disproportionately affected by the wartime recruitment because of pre-existing traditions of recruitment of Gurkhas and because of the ruler’s wholesale backing for the war and acquiescence to British demands for men. The British government policy towards the Rana ruling dynasty was, as one senior official frankly put it, ‘keeping them sweet’, and so there was little organised opposition. The fledgling Nepali Congress was an organisation in exile, building up opposition to the Rana regime from northern towns in India. And the Nepalis had very poor sources of information. There was no independent newspaper or magazine being published in the whole country, and it was very difficult to find out what was happening in the war. All radio sets (mainly imported from India by a handful of privileged individuals in any case) had been confiscated to avoid the circulation of German propaganda.19
Younger boys easily found a way into the army. Across South Asia, the age constraints remained only loosely adhered to and younger boys often found a way to join. Recruiting forms for non-combatants asked only for an ‘assumed age’ to be written down in any case. Anecdotal evidence abounds about the recruitment of teenagers.
I was 17 or 17 and a half or maybe 16. I’m not sure. I haven’t got a birth certificate, when I went to the office of the military. At that time I say may be 17 years. They say you can’t go. I say alright. They say, you write 18 years and you be alright. So I said alright. So he wrote 18 years and enrolled me,
remembered one sepoy.20 One officer described how among the men he commanded in a Pathan regiment, ‘most were no more than boys. A few in fact were very young, not yet shaving in some cases.’21 When a rifleman called Abir died from a bullet wound in Italy, the subedar in his company of the 7th Gurkha Rifles started to sob:
The Gurkha officer [Chaturman] told me that Abir was his nephew – they had lived in the same village in East Nepal; Abir had been killed before his seventeenth birthday and to make Chaturman’s guilt worse, he had persuaded the recruiting authorities to enrol the lad under age or, more accurately, had told Abir to falsify his age on enlistment.22
The elderly could also slip through the net. On one extraordinary occasion a very elderly man was found working as a camp follower. In Geneifa in Egypt, one of the officers, Rupert Lyons, heard that one of the camp followers was ill and was ‘astonished to see how old he was’. Lacking medical services and stretchers, he placed the elderly man on a sheet of corrugated iron and hitched a lift with a colleague to the hospital. ‘When we arrived at the Indian Military Hospital the fellow was pronounced dead. The doctor said that he was about eighty years old and that his death was due to senile decay … he was recorded on the roll of camp followers as being aged eighteen.’23 The Indian Army had exploded in size and scope and needed an eclectic and miscellaneous cast of characters which had resulted in much unorthodoxy by the middle of the war.
In India, the recruitment of non-combatants or camp followers was also still in full swing, drawing in more skilled labourers from poorer and lower castes and from increasingly far-flung regions. These non-combatants had a lower priority for leave, which they could scarcely afford even if it was granted. A Parsi captain in the Indian Army Medical Corps (IAMC) remarked in a letter home that ‘about 60 of our followers – cooks, bhisties, sweepers – came out with this unit in 1939 and are nearly 4 years without leave’.24 By 1944 these long separations were telling on family relationships and on the men themselves. Relatives continued to ask in letters when their men would be coming home. A Punjabi barber, who had been away for over three years, wrote a poignant note to his family: ‘I always replied I am coming on leave shortly. But actually that was because I did not want to disappoint you. I tried so many times but was not lucky enough to get leave.’25 Once discharged from the army, these men received little or no pension and they suffered if they were no longer able to work in their trades. In a small village called Chetru near Dharamsala in the Himalayas the writer Compton Mackenzie was introduced to a cook. The man had been wounded in the back by a shell in Libya and was unable to work due to his damaged lungs.26
These jobs, though, however lowly, also came with a considerable amount of pride attached and even the most menial could be made to feel that they were contributing in essential ways to the war. Nila Kantan, who ferried water during the battle of Keren, remembered how ‘we were very, very crucial to the action’.27 The men assiduously noted and cultivated subtle differences in rank, status and pay, whether troops or non-combatants. When a ‘British Cook’, a Muslim from Lucknow, who had been trained to make anglicised custards, gravies and puddings for officers, was requested to cook Indian food for the mixed officers of his regiment instead he protested vigorously to the senior officer in charge, Kartar Singh:
When I told him he said ‘I’m a BT [British troops] cook not an IT [Indian troops] cook.’ I had to coax him and tell him he was an Indian and surely he knew how to make chapattis and things like that … and after a lot of pep talk I was able to persuade him to make Indian food … Slowly he started making nice Indian food and the British officers started enjoying that.28
The cook’s obstinacy was based on the marginally higher status of the ‘British cook’. Status and hierarchy were passionately defended. Field Marshal Slim was emphatic about making all the parts of the Indian Army feel like the cogs in a watch, insisting that non-combatant clerks and secretaries took part in physical drills. The condition and training of the men varied considerably depending on their unit and regiment, where they had been recruited and posted and the tasks that they were charged to do. Men who had been recruited as troops found themselves working as hospital porters and orderlies in some regiments.
For the units left back home, often not deployed to the battle fronts, and in regiments that had been milked of inspiring officers and frustrated by long and boring routine work, standards easily slipped. Satyen Basu was posted near Madras in 1944, commanding a unit which had already mutinied, ‘A unit in rags, with forty deserters and a recent mutiny to its credit’. As the men worked long days loading and unloading hospital cars and trains, ‘to a casual observer they looked more like prisoners than free sepoys’. Basu was immensely irritated at the lack of loyalty and discipline among the men, ‘pilfering and insubordination were common crimes and summary disposal of cases by convictions of one to four weeks imprisonment was a daily occurrence’. But he also commented that there was one water tap for 280 men, they were in ragged clothes and spent hours without breaks loading and unloading coal. ‘The average sepoy in this unit is just a mercenary soldier who is fighting for money’, he wrote in an irate report to his superiors, ‘the lofty ideal of fighting for king and country is foreign to them. The standard of education and common sense is so low that it is difficult to drive any point home, and they can little realise the gravity of the calamity in case of an enemy event.’29 This scene was a far cry from the dashing action of finely honed sepoys depicted in imperial propaganda, yet these labourers were also unsung heroes, keeping the supply lines of the eastern war functioning, if only for a meal and a monthly wage. This unevenness in the Indian Army was inevitable given the size
and rapidity with which the army grew.
17
Longing and Loss
ABOVE THE HILLS of the battlefields of Europe, North Africa and Burma, leaflets on thin paper floated down from the sky, dropped by circling planes. Although they had been trained to ignore Axis propaganda, some of the propaganda reaching the Indian troops was extremely unnerving, just as its German and Italian creators intended. It was directed at the weakest spots in the psychological armoury of the sepoys. It played on their homesickness, on their anxieties about hunger at home and on their desire for the war to end. In monochrome cartoons, smirking white officers chatted up alluring Indian girls against an oriental skyline or hid behind brave sepoys on the battlefield who charged forward obliviously. Officers use men as cannon fodder, so the storyline went; why would Indians fight for an imperial master? As well as targeting the sepoys’ darkest fears, propaganda was aimed at their desires and fantasies. One bizarre German leaflet promised the Indian soldier troupes of dancing girls and a holiday in London after victory. Thousands of ‘safe conduct passes’ fluttered from the sky, luring deserters, and promising decent care in prisoner-of-war camps. The war for the mind of the sepoy was cheap and could be bitterly fought.
The longer the war went on, the more subtle the propaganda became and it was based on ever better information. ‘Do you ever wonder why India is so poor?’ the Grim Reaper asked, holding the Union Jack and standing amidst the cadavers and wasted figures of famine victims. ‘If you think about answering this question with all your new experiences and ideas you can figure out what can you do for betterment of India once the war is over.’ The propaganda emphasised the ability of the individual soldier to be master of his own destiny.1
Some of these cartoons remained crudely obvious. Churchill, cigar-smoking and rotund, was portrayed as a particularly nasty and avaricious character, wheeling off cartloads of Indian money. And Axis illustrators never quite failed to make the Indian sepoy himself look like a malevolent Aladdin, with pointed beard, goggly eyes and ludicrously oversized turban. But others hit a more poignant note. At Monte Cassino in 1944, Gandhi’s unmistakable image floated down to soldiers on hundreds of leaflets: ‘Your children should not have to join the army to fulfil their hunger and earn a living, and they shouldn’t have to give up their life for free for another country and race. Like you! And if you lose your life for this army all of the sacrifices of the Mahatma will go to waste.’
Omnipresent throughout, the sepoy’s lonely wife and his children appeared time and again on Axis propaganda. A barefoot woman, looking out into the distance, with a chubby child in her arms while another one clings to her sari. ‘After bidding farewell to you, we kept on looking for you on the horizon’, one pamphlet titled ‘Milap’ or ‘Reunion’ reminded the soldiers in Urdu calligraphy and roman letters; it was Urdu ghazal poetry in the midst of industrial warfare. Like soldiers everywhere, the separation from family was punishing and the defeat of the enemy was longed for because it would mean the chance to go home.
Like all soldiers, the sepoys missed their homes and their women. In memoirs, letters and interviews, the need for female company and the longing for home recur repeatedly. When sepoys saw Indian films they remembered the women of their villages and home towns: ‘These Indian pictures are very much appreciated by all’, a havildar of the 8th Division wrote home, ‘because it reminds us of India when we see our own ladies in saris etc.’ Another found watching the films almost unbearably poignant: ‘Indian films come very seldom and make me recollect past days when you and I both used to go to cinemas in our own beloved country.’2 When they wrote home, talked among themselves and when they went to sleep at night, the memories of home and the familiar comforts of extended families floated back to the men. Remembering the difficulties of war as older men, the separation from domestic life was one of the hardest and most painful adjustments for many. As everywhere in the world, it was a time of fractured relationships, longing for marriage and consummation, worry about fidelity and uncertainty about reunion. A captain of the IAMC in Egypt told a potential recruit who had not joined that it was ‘Quite a good thing that you did not join otherwise you would have been trapped and cut off for six years from your wife and children which of course will certainly be painful to you [sic]’.3
Angela Bolton, the nurse working in the Combined Military Hospital in West Bengal, used to speak to Indian patients through an orderly, Abdul Bahadur from Allahabad, who acted as a translator. ‘He would stand among a group of patients as they sat outside in the cool of the evening smoking biris and say expansively, “Sister Sahib, what you wish to know?”’ The patients she treated had parasitic infestations, TB, typhoid or dysentery, as well as several suffering from psychological disturbances. But Bolton found they were also concerned about the health of their families back in their home villages.
I would ask him what the patients liked to eat, what they thought of the army and – the question they liked best – how many children they had. Thus I discovered how fraught with uncertainty was their life in the agricultural villages; how their debts, passing from father to son, weighed them down; and how few of their children survived infancy.4
Above all, the men longed for leave. But for many, this did not come for four or five years. And, again as elsewhere in the world, it was inevitable that men away for many years at a time would find alternative comforts, and meet women in the places where they were stationed. Relationships developed, erratically, surreptitiously and outside the usual conventions. An Indian officer in Burma was struck by the fact that local Burmese women in an oil town spoke excellent Punjabi.
They had married Indians, Sikhs from Doab area and all that. In fact, it used to be a regular thing for these families. They knew that this soldier, this individual, has a wife in India, and the wife in India knows that he has a wife in Burma and so he looks after these two families, separately, then when the Japanese came they [the men] had all gone away and these Burmese girls were left without anybody. They could speak Punjabi and they were quite pro Indian.5
Relationships between local women and sepoys were particularly common in Italy and Greece. Men held as prisoners of war in Italy struck up relationships with Italian women where and when they could. Satyen Basu, captive behind a barbed-wire fence in Italy, watched ‘an old dame trying to convey her sincere sympathy to us by her gestures and her grandchild corroborating her sentiments’ and how local girls would come up and make flirtatious gestures to the men.6
Officers and sepoys did not have the same advantages in this matter. Status and higher pay gave officers a better chance of finding a girlfriend. Unmarried officers occasionally took new wives home with them. One Sikh officer from Patiala married a woman he met in Greece and she has lived in India ever since. Another man ‘with some seniority in rank’ guarding airfield, wireless and radar stations on Cyprus wanted to marry one of the local women in the town but the colonel ‘put a stop to it’.7 These were happy matches on the whole but if the men were already married, these affairs could create complicated and unhappy circumstances.
Usually soldiers sent back the greater part of their wage to India. But there was no compulsion to send this and the precise percentage sent back to India was up to the individual sepoy. Most men sent back everything they could spare. Fifteen rupees from an eighteen-rupee wage was quite typical. A soldier had most of his basic needs looked after by the military and could live a modest existence without much cash while in service. Families placed considerable pressure on soldiers to send back the maximum that they could afford. As we have already seen, the soldier was often not perceived as an individual, making decisions about his own salary, but as the elected breadwinner for his whole extended family network and was expected to send back money accordingly.
On occasion, however, where marriages had been arranged in absentia, or where relationships had broken down due to feuds or fights, the soldier might turn his back on his wife, causing hardship and heartache back home. Nazir Be
gum, the wife of a sepoy from Jhelum, who was posted overseas with the Rajputana Rifles, pleaded with his Commanding Officer to intercede on her behalf with her husband, who had been away from home for four years serving in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy. She claimed he had not sent a penny in her direction and employed a letter-writer to write a letter:
Sir, I most humbly and respectfully beg to state that my husband, No 13312 Naik Boota Khan, has been serving the Crown on Overseas service. Since his departure from India or from home no maintenance or family allotment is being paid or remitted to me. I am living at my parents’ house who owing to indigent circumstances can hardly provide to maintain me. Owing to this trouble my father has run into debt as all the necessaries of life are too dear that can better be imagined than described. I venture to submit this my humble petition in the earnest hope that some measures may kindly be adopted to order my said husband to send me money from the date i.e. four years I am living at my parents’ house. In the absence of any monetary help I will be sunk into a deplorable posture.8
Women would often move back in with their own parents while their husband was away from the home, particularly if they still had young children. Nazir Begum was becoming a burden and her family was no longer in a position to support her. Her final plea was that she might be released from the marriage altogether by her husband and be granted a divorce if the soldier continued to refuse a remittance: ‘At the end I will also request if he is not willing to provide for my maintenance he can by all means extricate me from his clutches by a divorce deed.’ For a woman in such a position, this fate was worse than that of a war widow as she was unable to access any kind of pension or hardship fund and did not see the benefits of her husband’s pay packet. The British were reluctant to intervene in such cases: the soldier was signed up to serve as an individual, and although harmonious family life was the military ideal, there was a limit to the extent that the sarkar could, or would, dispense family justice.