The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  Throughout the 1930s, psychiatry and psychoanalysis had been gaining wider acceptance among medical professionals in India, and Jung had made an extensive tour of India in 1937–8. In October 1942, Edward Bennett, a highly respected Jungian analyst, arrived in Delhi to advise the military from the progressive environment of London’s Tavistock Clinic. The number of qualified psychiatrists serving the Indian Army increased from four to eighty-six during the war, including some Jewish refugee doctors, and a number of junior medical officers also received training in psychiatric care. Specialist wards were developed in General Hospitals like Ranchi, Moradabad, Poona and Comilla. Nurses were reading the latest works on psychoanalysis, pavement bookstalls sold the works of Jung and Freud, and the role of domestic, emotional and childhood neuroses and their contribution to an individual’s ability to withstand the tensions of battle all became more thoroughly understood.

  Needless to say, Indian soldiers did not benefit from these medical innovations in psychiatric care to the same extent as their British comrades, despite psychiatric cases accounting for 10 to 15 per cent of all casualties in the Indian Army. In the forward areas of North Africa and the Western Desert, neuroses ranged from exhaustion and homesickness to fear of battle. The Indian Army’s approach was less nuanced and responsive than the British Army’s. The ‘trick-cyclists’ of the psychiatric profession still tended to believe people had predilections towards certain mental illnesses; this might be because of an individual’s background or childhood but might also be predetermined by ethnicity or by race. The idea persisted that Indians were peculiarly predisposed to certain types of mental ill-health, particularly hysteria. This idea had gained currency in the First World War and continued to inform the treatment of Indian soldiers, even among the more liberal and progressive psychiatrists.26

  Wilfred Abse, an eminent psychiatrist from Cardiff, worked with patients suffering from mental health issues in the Indian Military Hospital in Delhi. He wrote emphatically about the differences in hysteria between Indians and westerners, convinced that it was a peculiarly Indian phenomenon, and something to which Bengalis were particularly prone; indeed, he argued, it was the illness ‘second only to malaria in Bengal’.27 There had been a long suspicion that Indian soldiers had a particular susceptibility to hysteria and among the nervous disorders Abse saw in Delhi, he detected hundreds of cases of hysteria – convulsions, paralysis and sensory disturbances – among Indian soldiers who had been hospitalised. Psychiatrists from Europe rarely knew Indian vernaculars and they had to interview patients using a translator, often failing to grasp the subtleties of the social and economic strains on the Indian soldier.

  Wilfred Abse included photographs in his case-notes of patients manifesting physical symptoms because of their mental distress. One patient’s limbs had been studded with thorns (‘Hysterical anaesthesia of legs. Thorns plunged into the skin were ignored by patient’), other sepoys were pictured with bloated stomachs or bent perpendicular with bad backs. He saw convulsive attacks as ‘frequent manifestations of hysteria in Indian soldiers’ in addition to amnesia and abdominal pains. In one case, a soldier had not been able to sleep for two months and his insomnia was so severe that he had been hospitalised. Abse’s notes give a slender glimpse into the multifarious tensions weighing on some Indian soldiers and in particular their strong sense of responsibility towards their kin and the burden of responsibilities back home. In the case of the insomniac soldier, ‘Questioning revealed that two months earlier his mother had died. Owing to his absence from home in the Army, he had been unable to carry out the appropriate religious ceremonies. He felt that he had insulted his mother and that in consequence the divine power had rendered him incapable of sleep.’28 In this instance the patient responded well to sympathetic discussion of his concerns and to the use of hypnosis but also, not remarkably, to some home leave.

  In another case a sepoy, identified only as a twenty-five-year-old Muslim soldier, was under observation in hospital for muteness. He did not utter a sound for two months but the doctors could find no physical explanation. The patient scribbled in notes that the cause was the intervention of a malignant spirit and that he could only be cured by returning home and seeing the local hakim, ‘though he thought even this would take a long time’.29 When he was told firmly that he would have to stay in hospital until he spoke, the patient continued to beseech for release in his handwritten notes, before he finally began speaking. While the doctor found a convoluted explanation for the muteness as ‘a fear of the homosexual instinct’, the modern reader is tempted to wonder if the sepoy was using desperate measures to try to acquire home leave. Dr Abse stayed alert to the fact that his patients often felt homesick, missed their wives and grieved over lost parents whom they had not been able to see. However, he was unable to fully articulate the difference of the Indian sepoy’s experience of war, or to fully navigate his way to understanding the complex social pressures on the shoulders of many sepoys.

  Nonetheless, treatment was more successful than during the First World War and about a quarter of psychiatric casualties in the Indian Army returned to active duty. There was far more recognition of how physical and mental symptoms might be interwoven and how soldiers with malaria or dysentery might fall into a depressed state. There was greater understanding of the mental impact on soldiers in Burma who saw their comrades killed or injured or who endured long weeks of uncertainty, waiting for the apparently indefatigable Japanese, struggling with the heat, mosquitoes, monotony and alienation of the war. Sepoys on the Burmese front were anxious about injury and apprehensive of the peculiar cruelties and persistence attributed to the enemy. On one three-day boat-trip from Gauhauti to Dacca on a medical steamer of 172 Indian casualties, half of the passengers were classified as pagals – or mentally ill sepoys.30 ‘Most were sad quiet men suffering from depression’, recorded the nurse Angela Bolton, who was charged with accompanying the hospital ship as it slowly navigated the river. ‘Those who were a danger to themselves or others occupied the large wire-mesh cage at one end of the deck which was otherwise used for prisoners of war.’31

  19

  The Man-a-Mile Road

  ‘LEDO, IN DECEMBER 1943, seemed rather like the end of the world’, remembered Field Marshal Slim.1 The immense strategic problems caused by the complex geography of the terrain in north-east India had dominated the response of the Allies to the war in India. The questions were, how to get goods to China, how to build roads in order to enable a reconquest of Burma that could be supplied from the towns in Assam? The efficient unloading of vast supplies at docks in Calcutta, well-co-ordinated internal supply chains and the provisioning of men had now become more slick, but the 14th Army was supplied along a 700-mile front from the Chinese frontier to the Bay of Bengal.

  Up in Assam, bordering Burma, the world of the hills, the tea plantations and lives of local people, both in the Patkai hills and the Brahmaputra valley, had been thrown into turmoil by the war since 1942. The massive influx of jeeps, bulldozers, aeroplanes and men, widespread seizure of land, the upheaval of labourers and the sudden hacking of giant roads out of pristine forest and through quiet paddy fields and backwaters, had all been taking place. The Allied war machine steamed onwards. But much of this created transformations for those caught in the middle.

  At the end of December 1942 the British had agreed to support a project initiated by the Americans and the Chinese to build an immense road which would connect India and China via Myitkyina and provide an overland supply line to China. This would be an alternative route to ‘the Hump’ while China was being precariously supported by airlifts over the Himalayas. The road would be over 465 miles long and reach up into previously untrammelled mountains. The terrain was forbidding and the plan divided military planners in the China–Burma–India (CBI) theatre, who doubted if building the road was possible, even if it was desirable. The Government of Assam looked on with scepticism, regarding the plan as potentially impossible to implement.2 The shee
r chutzpah of even contemplating building a road that would cut through from India to China via North Burma, through some of the highest passes, jungle and Japanese-occupied terrain, left many doubting that the results would reward the effort. The road, imagined as the solution to China’s supply problems and a way of rewarding Chiang Kai-shek, was also a trophy project for Stilwell. He was determined to avenge his routing in Burma, march his men back in along his road (it eventually took his name) and recapture the country.

  The most ominous nickname for the Ledo Road was the man-a-mile road. The road’s construction rested on a bedrock of Asian labour and meant a never-ending supply of work, but also extreme risks. Particularly in the early days of the road, when accommodation and supplies had been barely assembled, the risk of death for taking on the work was high. From early 1943, barefooted, men and women heaved baskets of rocks and building materials on their heads and broke rocks with pickaxes. Slim remembered them at work, ‘pick, shovel and basket roads, made by human labour with an almost laughable lack of machinery’.3Male labourers thrashed through the jungle with hoes called khodalies and long knives called dahs.

  Wages and the promise of rations magnetically pulled in labour from around India. Marathas, Madrasis, Bengalis, Punjabis, Oriyas, Biharis, Nepalis, low castes, dalits and adivasis all worked side by side on the road: ‘An anthropologist’s dream but a mess sergeant’s nightmare.’ In the 14th Army there were thirty different ration scales, based on religious dietary requirements but also conditions of contract.4 American troops gathered strength in Ledo and black American GIs shovelled grit on the road alongside the Indians. An American supply surgeon, John Tamraz, hiked through the jungle from Hellgate to the Tagung River in late February 1943. He was shocked by what he found. If the labourers stay up here building the road through the monsoon, he warned, the sickness rate could reach over 75 per cent.5

  By 1944, the work on the road was becoming more orderly; for instance, labourers might be given inoculations by military medics. But for the Indian workers the main tools remained the humble pickaxe and shovel. The Indian government was insisting that workers should be allowed home during the rainy months. Men were brought in by the Tea Association but also through other gang-masters, word of mouth and labour contractors. So many labourers moved into the hills from the brick-kilns and coal mines on the plains of Bihar and central India, attracted by the prospect of these rumoured wages, that work in coal mines in eastern India was threatened. (The solution to labour shortages in the mines was to permit women to work underground again. The Government of India had banned this in 1943 but lifted the ban again as the war progressed.) Initially, the Americans fixed pay rates but soon returned to paying for days worked when sickness rates shot up. In return the labourers gambled with their own lives. Different contractors tussled to get hold of the best men.

  At the Indo-Burmese border, weeks on end of waterlogged, back-breaking work confronted officers and labourers alike. ‘The mud that forms on the main road between Hellgate and Pangsau pass is a heavy yellow “soup” that does not drain well and must be removed by hand.’6 Red ants, leeches and lice clung to the skin and hair, and clothes stank of mildew. Tigers, disturbed in their habitat, mauled and killed a number of soldiers and labourers, and landslides roared down the mountainsides, ‘without warning anything up to 100 tons of rock would crash down on the ground’, enough to flatten a jeep.7

  The construction workers on the Ledo Road were plagued by flash floods and rockfalls. Jeeps could easily go tumbling into deep ravines below, tired drivers could make small but fatal errors of judgement on hairpin bends or be washed away by flash-flooding, and great chunks of sodden hillside could spontaneously crumble into the valleys. Over time the American organisation of the Ledo Road became more ordered, although it was always a grim and forbidding task. Bulldozers were brought in to carry out the design of the engineers, supply lines became more efficiently managed and workers rotated and were housed in bamboo and tarpaulin bashas. Alongside the labourers, GIs, predominantly black conscripts, made up the military manpower on the road, driving and handling heavy machinery but also working with spades and hoes. These drafted men often intensely resented the work. One black GI, Herman Perry, became a notorious murderer and deserter, hunted through the jungle by his officers and eventually court-martialled and hanged. Many GIs lived to tell the tale of building the Ledo Road, although the labourers who worked alongside them have barely featured in historical accounts. ‘Many of these workers were dumped in anonymous roadside graves, their impoverished families never notified’, writes the journalist Brendan Koerner in one of the few books which depicts the building of the Ledo Road.8 Indian labour provided 7,800,000 man days for building the road, the US Army engineers provided 6,618,000 and Chinese labourers another 735,000. A British engineer could point to an area on the road where ‘600 of his own coolies had died’.9

  Labourers from the South Indian coast, 1,000 miles from the work site, had been contracted for one-year terms into the Travancore State Labour Unit. One-quarter of the workers were usually unable to work because of sickness. Those who were well enough quarried gravel, thrashed through the forest and dug embankments. Indian Pioneer Companies of 400 men worked with similar casualty and sickness rates too and included Bengalis, Sikhs, Punjabis, Madrasis, Mahrattas and Chamars from central India and small detachments of armed sepoys. The Assam Civil Porter Corps enrolled 1,000 men at a time for earthwork, jungle clearance, construction of temporary bridges and huts while the Garo and Nepali porters carried their loads over water-logged trails, working for six-month terms without a break, recruited by provincial governments. Provincial governments also recruited 1,400 men at a time into Civil Pioneer teams who carried out skilled duties more akin to police work, acting as guards, handling ammunition, supply-handling and checking stocks. Contract labourers were also signed up for skilled and semi-skilled work, taking up positions as mechanics and carpenters contracted to specific jobs or as day labourers. Frank Moraes, who spent some days on the Ledo Road as a war correspondent, later recalled the ‘mosaic of races’ and described how ‘a sort of contrived Esperanto seemed to be the main medium of communication between the myriad races working on the road’. Tamil labourers had picked up fragments of American patois, declaring in English, ‘All right, let’s go.’10

  As time dragged on the Ledo Road, the military newcomers and the hill tribes found new ways to interact and learn from each other. As a new world was thrashed out of the old jungle, new consumer goods became visible and available to locals for the first time, from chewing gum to cans of beer. Food and drink were traded with locals or siphoned off from PX stores. In return, the local people knew how to protect themselves from insects and snakes, how to foretell the weather and how to eat local berries and plants. ‘Nearly everyday we find some new use for bamboo,’ one GI wrote home to his family, ‘some of it is original and the rest is from observance of how the natives or other soldiers down the line use it. You can use it for making almost every needed type of household article, including some kitchen utensils. Some parts and types are even used for food. What an item.’11 By the final months of the war, troops offered people cigarettes, locals hitched rides in jeeps, children ran after vehicles and posed for photographs. When Herman Perry escaped after murdering an officer, he was sheltered by a Naga family and married one of the daughters of the village before finally being captured a year later. The harsh and challenging environment of the Ledo Road could conjure surprises and unexpected kindnesses.

  Punishing completion targets for sections of the road looked impossible to meet. Perhaps it is unsurprising that in the first year, the Ledo Road had only progressed forty-two miles.12 Orders from the military top brass exerted pressure on the workers: ‘It was a case of catch-as-catch-can. Any organization lucky and quick enough to “acquire” laborers got its work done.’13 The labourers appear fleetingly in the historical record, slipping wordlessly into margins and footnotes. Life magazine printed a photog
raph showing faceless huddled lumps, unrecognisable as human beings, ‘like a row of strange tropical plants … natives crouched beneath rain-capes’.14

  How many labourers died building the Ledo Road? This is completely unknown, and no figure has ever been calculated. We know that 1,133 Americans lost their lives, a significant if small number in the context of global wartime tragedies, and Indian workers faced much higher risks: more exposure to the weather, poorer diets, lower body mass and less access to medicine. ‘Coolies’ did not have the chance of airlifting to a military hospital. Indian labourers did the bulk of the manual work and often completed the initial work clearing the jungle in advance of the arrival of machinery and equipped troops. They provided nearly 8 million man days, although they shared this with many black American GIs and Chinese soldiers. Once the road was finally nearing completion, in December 1944, to relieve the pressure on the military, Indian civilian drivers joined servicemen in driving the long dusty road to China.