by Yasmin Khan
Women could initiate separations too, although at the risk of family censure and personal immiseration. The district soldiers’ boards reported that appeals connected to broken marriage contracts were ‘very numerous and difficult to deal with’ and complained of ‘exaggerated claims’ of cash paid or jewellery gifted as dowry.9 Women had often been married young to absent soldiers, had not yet conceived and faced troublesome relationships with in-laws. Stories circulated about ‘miserable and desperate’ women who, when their husbands were home on leave, threatened to end the marriage if he returned to his unit.10 Among the Kumaonis in the Himalayan foothills, a prospective bride could be dressed for marriage – with a nose ring, black glass bangles, a necklace of black beads, and a ceremonial skirt tied at the waist – and publicly taken to the groom’s house, perhaps with accompanying trumpets, while the absent groom was already away serving overseas. Further ceremonies would be performed when the groom came back, sometimes after many years. Occasionally a marriage to an absent soldier would be conducted without any ceremony at all; the price was simply paid and the bride taken to the husband’s home. Other families would wait until the man was on leave or had just returned from the army – both seen as opportune moments to seal marriages.
Some wives in Punjab barely knew their husband’s name and would be presented with silver spoons engraved with a name or army enlistment number as a marker of marriage, and a useful aide-memoire. While men were away from home for so long, women also found new lovers and struggled with the consequences. ‘An illegitimate baby always brings problems’, said one female doctor working as a Welfare Officer in an Indian princely state:
Sometimes the mother has the courage to keep and care for her infant and face the music when her husband returns. This has happened in two cases. Sometimes she gives the baby to the hospital authorities in the hope that it will die. One cold November morning a newborn baby was found abandoned on the veranda of the hospital. The mother was found to be a soldier’s wife, and the WO [Welfare Officer] was able to bring her and the baby together again. There were many difficulties but eventually husband and wife were reconciled. Fear is often stronger than maternal instinct.11
As in Europe and America, during the long absences of war, both women and men suffered in loneliness and in love.
One of the most popular Bollywood films of the 1940s, a veritable wartime blockbuster called Kismet, was released in 1943. Unusually, it depicted an illegitimate pregnancy. Distinctively, the hero, played by Ashok Kumar, was an anti-hero, in and out of jail, a rebel and petty criminal. The film captured the spirit of the war in India and angry youth in the towns and cities flocked to see it. It skirted censorship because nobody could accuse the film directly of disloyalty. But the animating spirit of the film was youthful rebellion. It was a story of an underdog finding courage but also highlighted the problems of fidelity and illicit love. It caught the mood of many young Indians.
The close proximity of troops and local societies in India naturally created plenty of chances for sex, and soldiers of all backgrounds and nationalities took the opportunity. By 1944, the rates of venereal disease had soared in India, in both the civilian and military populations.12 Prostitution became endemic wherever soldiers were stationed; women sold sex illegally from notorious streets and brothels, or from more discreet and expensive establishments. Many parts of cities such as Calcutta, Delhi, Karachi and Bombay had been declared off-limits to soldiers and Military Police patrolled these areas to ensure that servicemen did not enter them. They also raided brothels on numerous occasions.
The Americans, particularly concerned at the impact on the well-being of their own men, took matters into their own hands. There was deep-seated unease among the American military leadership about the widespread existence of brothels close to army bases in India. Around the Chakulia air base in Bihar, for instance, American military officials took ‘prostitutes and operators of illegal liquor houses in surrounding villages’ into custody and turned them over to the local police with requests for prosecutions.13
The Americans and the British in India differed in their attitude towards servicemen visiting brothels in India, and the British attitude was less strict. Up until 1943, if American men in India failed to declare that they had sex with a prostitute without the use of prophylaxis they could be court-martialled. This order was eventually rescinded but men could still be court-martialled for concealment of venereal disease and medics were entitled to carry out random bodily inspections. Among the British the policy was slightly different: there were penalties for the concealment of disease but no courts martial, and the approach was generally more lenient. Among the British military command tacit acceptance of the inevitability of prostitution was combined with education and warnings, determined provision of condoms (‘Defeat the Axis, Use Prophylaxis’ was one catchy slogan) combined with much discretion and turning of the proverbial blind eye.14
Still, high levels of sexually transmitted diseases posed a concern for all armies. A fervent, almost evangelical, strain of thought stressed how wholesome amusements and worthy occupations such as team sports could distract men from the more unsuitable and destructive habits of drink, drugs and sex. Sepoys recruited from towns and cities, not from the traditional ‘martial races’, came under particular suspicion as being ‘more sophisticated than the recruits from rural areas and also more accustomed to consorting with prostitutes’, noted one army medical report.15 But increasing levels of sexually transmitted diseases could also be put down to more mundane reasons: the long stretches of time away from home – even while stationed in India, Indian Army troops could be many hundreds of miles from their own district – and the steadily increasing wages of the Indian soldier as well as the ever-present fear of death which haunted serving soldiers. Anti-prostitution propaganda films with alluring titles like Mitha Zahar (Sweet Poison) failed to frighten Indian soldiers away from the brothels. Frank public information advertisements appeared in respectable national newspapers, warning the general public that abstinence was the only protection against disease and that ‘syphilis affects most of the professional, clandestine and amateur prostitutes’.16
For the majority of enlisted men their only opportunity for sex was as paying customers and as a result Calcutta recorded some of the highest levels of sexually transmitted diseases among troops anywhere in the world in the Second World War. In a 1944 survey of two American bases in India approximately 60 per cent of the men surveyed said that they had had sex in the China–Burma–India theatre and had paid for it and a majority said that it was likely that they would consider doing so in the future.17 ‘V.D. seems to be the prevalent disease here, due probably to the large garrison’, a British soldier wrote home. ‘The fault is entirely the Army’s, as a normal man cannot stay out here at the most impressionable period of his life, without some outlet for his passion. The authorities who understand are all in agreeance [sic] about re-opening regimental brothels, but stupid parliamentarians in England veto the idea.’18
The Governor of Bengal described the levels of venereal disease in Bengal as ‘appallingly high’ and in Calcutta the visibility of prostitution was generating political protest and deepening anti-war feeling.19 Two hundred extra Military Police were recruited in Calcutta at a time of extreme manpower shortage to patrol brothels and unusually the military invested in civilian clinics. Field Marshal Slim hinted at the problem of ‘less reputable relaxations’ in Calcutta, which offered ‘the whole scale of vice from doubtful dancehalls to disease-ridden dens of perversity’. Clive Branson also commented on a visit by men to a brothel near Poona ‘under official patronage’ and on the ‘well known fact that white sahibs go into cheap brothels with native women’.20
People in Britain and in India continued to believe that some brothels were maintained for the use of troops, although this was never official policy. The Secretary of State for India had to deny any such thing to a member of the British public who wrote to him, ‘Do the Governmen
t run brothels for the troops in India? A number of soldiers etc. have stated that brothels are run for the troops in that country.’21 There may have been confusion among troops themselves about the legality of the matter. Commanding Officers reluctantly accepted that troops did sleep with ‘coolie’ women, presumably low-caste Indian women workers, either agriculturalists or manual labourers, many of whom were employed by the Allies in the construction of aerodromes and roads and in military supply centres. It was suggested that the men themselves turned to poor coolie women only when their own ‘morale was low’.22 Naive white soldiers, it was argued, became confused and subject to the predatory advances of Indian ‘pimps and prostitutes’, especially when under the influence of alcohol.
As so often in history, the women who sold sex were blamed. The military correspondence depicted ‘Eastern’ and ‘Anglo-Indian’ women as sensuous, immoral and lascivious. Other Indian women who had sex with soldiers were described as disease-ridden, filthy and easy.23The reality was that poverty had driven many women into selling sex by the later years of the war. The historian Paul Greenough, who personally conducted interviews in the 1970s with some sex-workers as part of his research into the famine, recalled how families in Bengal sold their daughters for small sums and how reports of boatloads of women and girls circulated. Two of the women he interviewed told their own stories: widowed by the cyclone in Midnapore and driven to destitution by the famine, exploited and raped by other men, they had eventually survived and carved out a new life in Calcutta as sex-workers; one even bought a small piece of land and procured other women.24
Rumours spread about trafficked women, families selling their own daughters, and the rising numbers of single women on the streets. This question even reached the House of Commons in 1944 after an article was published in the Birmingham Mail about the purchase of an Indian girl by a British officer in Bengal for less than two rupees, although the Secretary of State denied any knowledge of the purchase of destitute children.25 A wartime survey carried out by Santosh Mukherji claimed that while interviewing women joining the brothels in Calcutta, he found 62 out of 100 gave ‘starvation’ as their motive for prostitution.26
For Indian politicians of all hues the noticeable increase in urban military prostitution was inflammatory and politically sensitive. Politicians angrily raised the issue in the Legislative Assemblies and in vernacular newspapers. Fazlul Haq, the former premier of Bengal, gave a speech about the exploitation of starving Muslim women by American and African soldiers, reportedly saying that 30,000 Muslim women had been sent to American and African troops in Bengal and that when he had tried to raise the issue in the Legislative Assembly he had been stopped by his rival, Nizamuddin.27 An Urdu paper, the Ansari, published in Delhi and owned by a municipal commissioner of the capital, printed an article stating that Calcutta’s population had increased markedly because of the large numbers of soldiers stationed there:
Most of them are young and have not brought their families with them. They have money and get a large number of currency notes from the Government treasury. How do they spend these currency notes? They use them to buy those starving Bengali women who lost their brothers, fathers and husbands in the Bengal famine. These unfortunate women can be counted in millions and they are to be found in every street, lane and side-road of Calcutta. Prostitution goes on openly.
This neatly crafted a form of anti-colonialism which linked the famine, ideas of moral purity, communal identity and a nasty evocation of racial miscegenation: ‘What will this generation be like? Matters will not end here. In the veins of some American blood will flow, in others English, while in others again the blood of Indian soldiers of different communities will flow. An entire generation of bastards will thus come amongst us.’28 This raised the spectre of familiar nationalist tropes about the protection of ‘our’ women, the threat of racial ‘impurity’, and championed the symbolic threat to women in service to a broader political cause.29
Many local men profited during the war from their ability to provide services, directly or indirectly, to the military bases stationed in Calcutta, Karachi, Bombay and beyond. Taxi or gharry workers would help soldiers locate brothels and men employed at military bases could earn extra income by acting as intermediaries. Around the bases and encampments a service culture grew of local men who would procure women, alcohol and other services. Smuggling, sex-trafficking and petty crime were often closely linked. The Anglo-American shop in Karachi was a first stop for some troops who wanted to find women for sex. Afterwards, they became ‘friendly’ with the shop owner and struck a deal to supply him with stolen goods like stocks of paracetamol taken from army stores. One investigation uncovered the regular delivery of US goods in an army vehicle to an Assamese village twice a week. Undercover Indian personnel discovered that army rations were being delivered under cover of darkness in exchange for ‘coolie’ girls from local tea estates. The rations, sold onwards by a local trader, then appeared on the black market.30
Civil and military leaders decried the sanitary and political implications of this increase in prostitution. India was full of journalists from around the world. Keenly aware of international political opinion and the risk of negative Axis or nationalist propaganda, British civil servants, politicians and Allied military leaders had to be responsive to critical voices from Indian nationalists and international campaigners. The military priorities of sustaining the war effort and keeping up the morale of fighting men had to be balanced against local domestic concerns. There could no longer be any straightforward endorsement of military prostitution in the colonial setting by the 1940s (as there had been in the nineteenth century), but the increase in interracial sex was undeniable. This all added to the sense in India of a world gone awry, and was fodder for those propagandists who wanted to demonise the imperialists.
18
Catalyst of Change
I came on duty tonight to find the wards in a very disturbed state. There was nobody to hand over the day report to me and sisters were hurrying about from basha to basha with dressing trays in their hands. ‘What is happening?’ I called to Isobel Mckenzie, who was preparing a drug at the medication trolley. ‘Haven’t you heard? Wounded from Kohima,’ she answered. ‘There’s an officer for theatre right away.’ I followed her into the ward, where she administered the pre-operative injection to an Indian in the bed at the far end of the room. ‘Who is he?’ I asked. ‘Captain Magid [Majeed]. Both his legs have been blown off and he is being taken to theatre to see if they can save his right arm.’ ‘Oh God!’ I said. ‘How terrible’ … Captain Magid died on the operating table under anaesthetic.1
THE JAPANESE DID make an ambitious incursion into Indian territory but by 1944 the Allies were fully prepared for it. In March 1944, the Japanese pushed into the north-east, and advanced along the Imphal–Dimapur Road, in an attempt to cut Imphal’s supply lines and to capture the strategically pivotal Kohima. The 14th Army – an eclectic collection of nearly half a million troops including British infantrymen, Canadian and American pilots, the Assam Rifles, the King’s African Rifles and troops from the Gold Coast – had been trained, equipped and honed into a modern fighting force by now. Among the infantry morale was high, there was an effective organisational esprit de corps, and powerful air support gave the Allies a distinct advantage. Nonetheless, the Japanese made a massive thrust, sending in 85,000 men, far more than had been expected, and for a time it looked as if they might cut off and occupy north-east India at Kohima. But in stark contrast to 1942 the Japanese quickly became overstretched as their supply lines were bogged down over hundreds of miles of difficult terrain, winding back into South-East Asia.
The fighting was bitter and often intensely personal with men enclosed in claustrophobic spaces and foxholes, exhausted by prolonged siege and locked in hand-to-hand combat. Vicious and bloody experiences of the bloodshed during the Arakan campaigns of 1944 as well as at Kohima and at Imphal left a deep imprint on the soldiers of all nationalities who
fought there and many Indian infantry soldiers recalled later their single-minded focus and determination to defeat the Japanese. This was fuelled by the intimate experiences of brutal battles. ‘Firstly, they shelled our mules in their line and killed dozens – this made us mad’, recalled Gian Singh, who was in the 7th Indian Division and fought in the Battle of the Admin Box.
Secondly on the night of about 8th or 9th of February, the Japanese broke into our defences. They chose to break in where we had our field hospital. About 500 of them killed the wounded and even doctors who were operating. They took a few prisoners who we found the next day when we sent out patrols. They found Indian surgeons and orderlies bayoneted … We saw our men who, when captured, had been tied to trees by their turbans and used for bayonet practice. Also, on that night I learnt how easy it is to push a bayonet into someone’s body. I was surprised that it made me feel somehow good. After all we were fighting those who did not behave as people should.2
For many men on the front line, winning the war became the only focal point and temporarily obliterated all other considerations. Ultimately the Japanese 15th Army lost 53,000 dead and missing, while the British (including the Indian Army) sustained 12,500 casualties at Imphal and another 4,000 casualties at Kohima. Stinking and bloated corpses literally littered the ground.3
The local people in the hills and valleys of present-day Manipur and Nagaland, in the region around Imphal and Kohima, lived through these epic battles, caught in the crossfire between the Allies and the Japanese. Their lands became battlegrounds and their lifestyles were changed irrevocably by the new contact with armies from around the world and by the massive influx of money, hardware and manpower necessary to defeat the aggressors. Many had already been affected, as we have seen, by the presence of refugees and troops, by requisitioning and by price rises. By the autumn of 1943, 20,000 homes had been requisitioned by the British in the Imphal region and many villagers now lived with friends and family. But far worse was to come.