The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  American and European women in the WAC (I), Red Cross and Queen Alexandra’s Nursing Corps were in demand for attendance at every kind of social event and outing in India, and had to negotiate a sexual minefield of demands and expectations. Joan Boss, a British nurse who arrived in 1942 in her early twenties, was fully alive to the opportunities, difficulties and dangers for nurses in India during the war: ‘Usually when they looked at a girl they thought how pretty she was or what a lovely figure she had. They looked at me and thought “I bet she can sew”.’ Joan had already been asked to mend and stitch for a colonel on her journey to India. She worked in an army hospital in Secunderabad where the nurses were barred from attending the local club in uniform and had to wear evening dresses ‘which frequently cost nearly a month’s salary’.17

  The majority of the 11,500 women who joined the WAC (I) were Anglo-Indian or Anglo-Burmese and others belonged to the Indian Christian community. Some of the women came from princely families with old ties to the Raj, others found the work appealed because of an opportunity to circumvent domestic constraints, to travel and to enjoy the adventure of war. This was bringing a change in attitudes that would leave a post-war imprint in India, although one, as elsewhere in the world, shot through with ambiguities and challenges. As one Auxiliary Nursing Service advert put it, ‘Society no longer requires a girl to be a stay at home idler’.18 In Bose’s Indian National Army, a women’s regiment, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, was being raised and in political parties all over India middle-class women were becoming involved in political and social work. Just as Aruna Asaf Ali was enrapturing an audience of nationalist men and women across India, women working in war employment found new opportunities to develop their own ideas, to travel and to form new friendships. Some of them relished the emancipation from the confines of their homes and the chance to adventure into hazardous and unfamiliar landscapes, and to take pride in their work.

  But behind each one of them stood another 1,000 Indian women, working long back-breaking days employed as labourers on war contracts. The women in the coal mines of central and eastern India often worked up until shortly before childbirth, a matter that was raised in the House of Commons back in London. Women were employed thrashing through scrubland with hoes to make way for aerodromes, carrying bricks on their heads and constructing new barracks and buildings and carrying away rubble and cement from roadsides, often with children tied to their backs or playing in the building sites around them.

  * * *

  The curiously named Anglo-Indian Eglind Roze – he sometimes appears as Egland Rose – was a sixteen-year-old boy by the time the war was drawing to a close. All his years as a teenager had been spent in wartime and, as his parents’ home was on the Lower Circular Road in Calcutta, he was living in the thick of things; he would have been accustomed to seeing troops in the city, military vehicles going down the thoroughfares, and uniformed troops walking about in the town. Eglind’s parents were in their early fifties; his father had a job on the railways but was worried that he had no pension for his imminent retirement, their eldest son was unemployed and their two daughters made little money. Eglind, one of the youngest in the family, was ‘irregularly employed’ and turned over all his earnings to his mother. His parents were used to him being out and about in the streets at odd hours, taking bits of work when he could.19

  The shock of the arrival of a British policeman at their door at ten o’clock one night must have been tremendous. Mr and Mrs Roze had to go to the hospital urgently, Eglind had been shot. He was bleeding terribly and the doctors needed to operate, but would not do so without his parents’ permission; somehow the police had managed to find the right address and Mr Roze left in a hurry in the vehicle of the policeman. Along the way he learned what had happened.

  That night Eglind had noticed a US army jeep stationed outside the Great Eastern Hotel. It was tempting. Unmanned and easy to steal. Eglind had been involved in vehicle thefts in the past and he was still waiting for a court date relating to an earlier incident. He did not know that this time it was a trap set by the US Army to capture the thieves who had been plaguing them with jeep theft in Calcutta, taking out the batteries and removing parts and selling them on. As soon as Eglind started the engine, a group of soldiers immediately gave chase, some on foot, some in another jeep, swerving and careering at high speed. Eglind managed to drive for some distance until he was eventually run into the kerb, crashing into a large metal dustbin on Central Avenue. He jumped down from the jeep, ran between some buildings to get away, but, like a scene in a film, found he was in a yard with no exit. As he ducked and dived and tried to flee between the soldiers, one of them shot into the air and then, suddenly, at Eglind. The .45 calibre automatics left pistol shots in his leg and abdomen.

  The next day the policeman who had accompanied the family to the hospital wrote solemnly, ‘At the time of writing of this report, the accused was still alive but not expected to live longer than another day. He had not regained consciousness since he was operated on.’20 Eglind never recovered from his operation and died the next day. The coroner’s report recording ‘culpable homicide amounting to murder’ was signed by the Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, R. E. A. Ray, who was patently furious in his reports, describing the killing as ‘quite unjustified by law’ and ‘an unwarranted and totally illegal killing’.21

  The US Army offered 1,000 rupees compensation to Eglind’s family but the Government of India persisted in asking for this to be tripled, arguing that the circumstances in which the boy met his death were ‘most deplorable and contrary to ideas of British justice’ and that the money being offered as an ex-gratia payment by the US government was ‘wholly inadequate’.22 This was argued on technical grounds, but the political context was the need to secure local goodwill. A cheque was finally despatched to Eglind’s father on 16 January 1946 for 3,000 rupees.

  * * *

  Petty conflict between soldiers, local townsmen and villagers featured routinely in newspapers by 1944, and was particularly noted as a problem in Bengal and Assam. There was a low-level but persistent potential for conflict. The effect on local communities of even one sensational murder could be damaging, undoing months of liaison work and providing plenty of ammunition for national outcry. For many people living with the changes of the past few years, such cases only confirmed their negative feelings about the war.

  Rickshaw and taxi drivers had daily encounters with troops, and sometimes fights over fares erupted. Around three o’clock in the morning one November night in 1944, at the crossing of Circular Garden Reach Road and Ram Kamal Street in Calcutta, a group of labourers and rickshaw drivers, sleeping out under the night sky in their rickshaws, were awakened by a loud bang and cries of ‘Help me!’ Some of them later claimed to have seen a black soldier rushing away in the darkness on foot. Confused, and aroused from sleep, they saw their co-worker, Dila Mia, lying on the pavement and bleeding from the neck. He had been shot. ‘During Investigation,’ the police later recorded, ‘one spent cartridge case was found lying on the pavement and one bullet was found in the hollow of the rickshaw underneath the seat. One penetrating bullet mark was found on the wooden frame of the seat and stains of blood were found on the side screen and cushion of the rickshaw.’23 The driver, Dila Mia, bleeding profusely, was carried by his mates to the local thana or police post, from where he was rushed to hospital. A month’s stay on the ward followed. The pistol shot to his neck did not kill him, but it did leave him disabled on his left side and unable to work.

  He recounted to the police how he had been jerked awake in the middle of his sleep by a soldier in uniform. He had wanted a ride somewhere and Dila Mia refused. This could have been racism (it would not be the first time Indian rickshaw wallahs refused black passengers) or merely tiredness and exhaustion. Frustrated and angry, the soldier, Captain Felix Arbolaiz, grabbed him by the neck and shot him. The soldier was drunk and acting wildly, and later also fired shots at a Sikh taxi driver down by the King
George’s docks. He was caught wandering drunk and disorientated in Calcutta, locked up and an immediate court martial was held. Felix Arbolaiz was sentenced to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment on 1 December 1944. Dila Mia, paralysed and unable to work, received a compensation payment of 4,300 rupees – an extraordinary sum.24

  Earlier the same year, in another case, an American soldier, new to the country, who had driven from the Grand Hotel to Howrah Station, had a dispute with his Sikh taxi driver over the fare, which ended with him stabbing the taxi driver in the chest. The taxi driver later died and his body was taken in procession from the Howrah General Hospital to the Shyamnagar burning ghat in Calcutta, where it was cremated. The Sikh protesters at first proposed to take their procession past the American Headquarters and to carry a banner inscribed ‘Work of Americans: Murder’ but police managed to steer the procession in another direction. The taxi drivers of Calcutta then went on strike for three days against the ‘behaviour of American soldiers’. On other occasions soldiers were court-martialled, punished or fined for smashing up shops, stabbing civilians, being drunk and disorderly in public spaces and stealing items, such as a group of soldiers who stole an idol from a temple in Calcutta the same year.25

  Legally troops were under the jurisdiction of military law but there were numerous grey areas around policing and the Allies swiftly learned that in reality if they wanted to achieve their aims on the ground then they needed to acquire leverage with local Indian power-brokers and work closely with local police and District Magistrates. A claims commission was established by the Government of India which made recommendations on all compensation cases involving military and civilians, whether the force involved was Indian, British or from the dominions. Military Police stationed in major towns worked closely with their counterparts and the CID.

  The military and civil authorities acted stringently. If a case was likely to cause a political reaction it would be handled punitively: Indian witnesses were invited into court martial hearings; compensation payments to Indians injured or who had a relative killed by military action were made publicly and with ceremony. To some extent, these cases may have been handled with more rigour (and certainly awarded higher compensation payments) than the British Indian courts would have allowed. Black soldiers who committed crimes against local Indian people should be ‘taught a lesson’, in the words of one officer, and these cases were given hard sentences. In one instance a manslaughter charge was upgraded to murder, on the grounds that the Provost Marshal recorded:

  I feel him to be guilty. There have been numerous reports of colored soldiers causing trouble in the Assam area … to try him on the lesser charge may make it appear to the local people that we view the case lightly merely because it was an Indian who was killed. This may lead to unfavourable criticism of American Forces by the Congress Party who grab at every opportunity to discredit British and American forces.26

  An obvious driving force was the need to avoid involvement in Britain’s internal political struggle with Indian nationalists and the fear of Indian public opinion and political leadership turning against Americans as co-sponsors of the war.

  Outside the cities, incidents in poorer villages received less political attention, especially when they involved women. In villages and rural areas, where prostitution tended to be less formalised, there were even more ambiguities around trafficking and exploitation. In 1944 soldiers of all nationalities became involved in clashes with villagers on a weekly basis, usually while ‘looking for’ women, particularly in Bengal and Assam but also in areas of Bihar. The typical pattern was for a lone man or a few military men to be found in a village at night and then to be rounded upon and attacked by a group of villagers and possibly to lash out in return. On one occasion four soldiers attempted to enter a woman’s house in Bankura district, failed, and set fire to the house before departing. The accusation that a ‘prostitute’ was involved was often cited as a cause or to provide immunity from prosecution, the assumption being that prostitutes themselves could not be legitimate victims of rape or violence.27

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  There was a nexus between pimps, brothels and drug peddlers; raids and undercover detection of drug rings tended inevitably to start in the brothels of Calcutta and Karachi. Bad characters who hung around the bases and camps were identified, such as one M. D. Jaffer. ‘He is a procurer for all the prostitutes around the Surendranath Banerji area’, wrote the undercover Military Policeman who trailed him. ‘I asked him if he knew where I could buy a lot of opium and he said he knew of a place.’28 Local authorities also alerted officials in America when Lascars and Chinese seamen were suspected of smuggling opium from India into North America. The Blue Funnel Line was suspected of running a racket between New York and Calcutta, masterminded and financed by Chinese residents in the USA. Newspapers featured stories of conspiracies to import and export opium and charas (cannabis) both from overseas and from the Indian provinces.29

  Servicemen could easily acquire narcotics as licensed shops could sell drugs. Karachi, for instance, was estimated to have about fifty shops selling opium, and about the same number supplying bhang (cannabis) and ganja. Shopkeepers could legally sell people small, medicinal quantities of opium (although soldiers faced stiff penalties if caught purchasing it) but it was easy enough to find locals to purchase from or to make a deal for larger quantities with obliging shopkeepers. The military feared addiction in the ranks, and sting operations, initiated from Washington DC but also taken up on the ground by officers, reported on Indian shops selling excessive quantities of drugs to servicemen. Indian police reluctantly co-operated, with some foot-dragging and grumbling.

  Alcohol was by far the more popular intoxicant with troops. Even though drugs were cheap and easily available, the moral panic about this proved unnecessary and sensationalist. Servicemen had imbibed a deep-seated fear of the dangers of opium (a fear inculcated in nineteenth-century Dickensian portrayals of the oriental opium eater) and preferred the devil that they knew, which was alcohol. Some soldiers did puff on marijuana, and in the eastern jungles some took to opium, but this never became a serious cause for concern in the Indian cities. Among Indian soldiers the use of ganja and opium was also occasional, usually on leave or during times of sickness. When the kindly and sensible nurse Angela Bolton found a sticky black lump under the pillow of one of her patients his fellow patients told her it was opium and that he would ‘die happy’. She rapidly replaced it where she had found it.

  By the latter years of the war, the nationalist press in India often complained about the relations between the military and local society, adding to the wider array of wartime frustrations. Criticisms came from all sides of the political spectrum. The Hitavada of Nagpur suggested that ‘Those who live in Calcutta will testify that the soldier coming to India for a good time has become a menace’. The communist paper The People’s War took up the story in 1945 with a leader headed ‘STOP SOLDIERS’ MISDEEDS AGAINST THE PEOPLE’. While acknowledging that only a small minority of troops behaved poorly, the paper argued that the incidents were far from stray or solitary, that the military authorities and provincial governments had not gone far enough in responding to them and that the political parties had been complicit in silencing issues, especially around crimes against women. The Raj could not sustain this kind of new challenge to its authority and prestige or maintain the pretence of racial or moral superiority in the changed circumstances of war.

  21

  Empires, Lost and Found

  ALL THIS TIME, inside Ahmednagar Fort, the weeks dragged on for Nehru, Asaf Ali and their colleagues. The men stayed up talking late into the night. Nehru mumbled and talked in his sleep. They read books and wrote; Nehru was writing a tome about history and politics, The Discovery of India, on reams of thin brown paper, which he would later dedicate to his jail-mates. They knew about the famine, but only in sketchy outline, and would only find out the full horrors long afterwards. The Congressmen debated political ideas, ta
lking over their previous political manoeuvres, their past mistakes and their relationship with Gandhi. They thought about the failure to negotiate out of the political deadlock with the British and pondered if they had made the right decisions in 1942. The Muslim League and its sudden advancement as a serious force in Indian politics was a constant concern.

  The men longed for release yet also felt apprehensive about the world they would have to face when they finally emerged. In the meantime Asaf Ali and Nehru shared a passion for gardening and dug and laid out beds and created planters and boxes. ‘We had the privilege of witnessing the first appearance of the seedlings yesterday’, wrote Asaf Ali. ‘Patel noticed it first and then Jawaharlal shouted the glad tidings to me and I felt like a child on securing his first toy.’1 Cornflowers, nasturtiums, petunias and sweet peas flowered in the prison gardens. But even the pleasures and distractions of gardening wore thin as more months went by. The men started to snipe at each other and there were times of illness and depression. Asaf Ali still worried constantly about Aruna’s location and whether she was alive or not. Every time they caught sight of a news article about her he was relieved to hear that she was still living and had not been captured.2

  * * *

  On 6 May 1944 Gandhi was released from prison because of his fragile health, to great excitement and expectation around India. The other Congress leaders in their separate jail site in Ahmednagar would stay confined for another year. Gandhi’s release was also a symptom of the new-found confidence of the Government of India in a summer of successive victories for the Allies around the world. Continental Europe was being pounded by bombs in preparation for the D-Day landings which would begin on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, with three-quarters of a million Allied troops preparing to take back France. Encircling the Axis, the Red Army was pushing towards the eastern Crimea and Sebastopol and in Italy the final push past Monte Cassino meant that the Allies could roll up to Rome in June. The signs of victory mounted. The Japanese were retreating from Imphal with very heavy losses, although in India the news from the Burmese jungle was often confused and uncertain and many anxious rumours continued to circulate. By mid-July the radio was broadcasting news of the Imphal victory and by 3 August Myitkyina was in Allied hands.