by Yasmin Khan
In response to Gandhi’s release, the film producer and writer K. A. Abbas published a book entitled A Report to Gandhiji: A Survey of Indian and World Events during the 21 Months of Gandhi’s Incarceration. Drawing on newspaper clippings, acerbic cartoons and his own experiences, the ‘report’ was also a testament to Abbas’s own conflicted feelings and confusion about the war. A vocal opponent of fascism, he wanted to make Gandhi ‘an ally of the Allies’. He strongly supported the ideological basis for the war and believed in the need to defeat the Japanese, but he was also bitterly exhausted and fed up with the imperial power. He tried to summarise the general feeling in the country:
The Government of India have created a desert in India and call it peace. In her new Avatar, Pax Britannica is known as the Defence of India rules! Politically we are supposed to be in cold storage; mentally we live in a furnace!3
Abbas also evoked the changes that had taken place in the months since the Congress leaders had been jailed and the rapid transformation of the Raj:
The Yankees have been with us these two years. A Chinese force has been training in India. Recently even West Africans have been brought over to fight for us. The entire civil administration is subordinated to the military needs. The Indian Army – a voluntary army, it is rubbed in again and again! – has passed the two million mark … A Field-Marshal has been installed in the Gadi [throne] of the Grand Moghul in New Delhi.4
Abbas struggled to articulate a way in which anti-imperialism and pro-war feelings could be maintained, and how these two positions might coexist in the changed climate. Massive social and economic changes were evident to those who lived through them, and not simply confined to the front line of war or to the provinces of Bengal and Assam. Transformation had occurred all over India. The world that you are being released into, Abbas was telling Gandhi, is not the same one that you left when you entered jail.
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‘What every official in Orissa really needs is some leave – hardly anyone has had any for four years which probably explains the general dopiness which seems to surround high official quarters.’5 Since Ian Macdonald wrote this, the situation had only become more strenuous for the British ICS. Many men complained of nervous strain and anxiety. Many officials felt run into the ground; they had been moved around repeatedly from post to post to fill gaps in the state functions as the state overreached itself and expanded its hold on food committees and distribution, and controlled rationing (which commenced in 1944), censorship, policing and surveillance. There had been few British or Indian recruits into the ICS since the start of the war and the existing officials had been forced to work extremely long hours without rest.
There was also the persistent feeling of being left out of the war, a sort of mild survivor’s guilt, as contemporaries took part in the historic battles in Europe.6 The sense of distance from the metropolis was heightened by the long postal delays and the shortage of shipping. When memsahibs met new nurses coming out from Britain they longed to know about the latest fashions in Britain, examining even the most modest dresses to see if they could get the local tailor to copy them, and ‘they cross-questioned us closely about all the happenings in war-time, anxious to hear any items of news, no matter how trivial, even though we protested that the information was already three months out of date’.7 Criticism voiced in the House of Lords in early 1945 of British memsahibs, implying shirking of their responsibilities during wartime, stung deeply and compounded this sense of neglect for British administrators who had struggled under testing circumstances, and had often achieved more than was recognised. As the military prepared to recapture Burma, the Allies gradually learned to co-ordinate their complex organisations. But despite the misgivings of the ICS officials, there was no longer any doubt that India was a war zone: a garrison, gargantuan supply depot, training ground and labour exchange.
The Indian state had expanded beyond recognition. All the offices of the state, high and humble, now employed many more people and had extended their coverage, from post offices to police stations, revenue offices to information ministries. This had created vast opportunities for employment but also for privileging certain applications, giving advantages to people who were well connected to municipal or provincial councils. This more extensive and interventionist state appeared more bureaucratic and labyrinthine than ever before. For many people who had lived through the repercussions of the war and the way that it had rebounded in India, price rises, famine and a general deterioration in the everyday working of life had become commonplace. Privileged access to goods was a very valuable asset. Corruption, which is so often cited as part of the democratic post-war order, was well embedded by the rapid expansion of the wartime state.8
Indians fully recognised this. In July 1944, emulating the Mass Observation Survey in Britain, which detailed the mundane but critical aspects of people’s everyday lives, a survey was circulated in Calcutta. Members of the public answered questions about their daily lives and their encounters with the state, for example, ‘Is it your personal experience that you have to offer bribes to public servants, Government, railway or municipal?’ The results were conclusive: of 1,564 people questioned, 1,169 said yes and the remainder said that they knew it occurred even if they had not personally paid a bribe. ‘It was universally agreed that corruption is rampant in virtually every dept. of Government with the possible exception of Education and Post Office. Very few people, however, appear to condemn it but content themselves with saying that it is inevitable on account of the low salaries earned by the average public servant.’9
The picture that this survey painted of the wartime state was not appealing. People paid bribes for gun licences, for marriage licences, to get contracts with government departments and the military, to get cases through the courts or to shake off criminal charges, to secure driving licences, to ensure packages reached their destination, to collect goods from the post offices and to acquire ration cards. Taxi and tonga wallahs (cart drivers) complained about police harassment for petty fines; passengers complained about ticket inspectors on trains taking their share. Even air raid wardens took a cut, a businessman from Barra Bazaar commenting: ‘The other day two ARP wardens demanded from me threatening me that they would report against me for violating the Lighting Restriction order and I had to give them Rs. 10.’10 Even people with middling jobs, such as clerks or policemen, had to supplement their income at a time of great scarcity. Many people agreed that things had got worse during the war, that corruption was becoming more demanding and that the imperial state, overstretched and underfunded, was rotten.
Wearied by war, barely cheered by the news that the tide was turning now in the Allies’ favour, the Indian peasant and urban worker looked to their own needs. But as K. A. Abbas argued, this was not a sign of political apathy. Cynical and suspicious of the state, those young people who lived through the war were also becoming drawn into alternative forms of politics and finding other outlets, dreaming of radical political transformation while the Congress leaders languished in jail. The onward march of the Muslim League and the success of Jinnah’s Pakistan demand, which was by now drawing in millions of passionate supporters, can be understood only in this context. Similarly, there was a rash of small private armies, routine drilling and armed militias that were attracting enthusiasts around the country, both on the left and the right, from the Khaksars and RSS to the Communist Party. They offered a refreshing and liberating vision and the promise of radical social transformation, transcending the bitter disappointments and stifled political life of the country over the past five years.
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In Bombay, on the afternoon of Friday, 14 April 1944, the heat was receding. Muezzins started their call for Friday prayers and workers began to return home. Inspector A. B. Dongre was off duty. He was at home reading his newspaper when he was hurled off his chair by an explosion. He immediately presumed, like everyone else who heard it, that it must be a bomb. ‘The whole building shook with violence.
Some of the windows came out of the hinges and the tiles of my kitchen roof fell down.’11 The inspector reached for his uniform and hurried down to the police station, where he rounded up all the men he could find, and they headed out towards the harbour. As they went down Frere Road, towards Prince’s Dock, Inspector Dongre could see people carrying out the wounded, many bloodied and missing limbs, and he stopped an empty goods lorry and put the injured men in the back. As he was doing this, a second explosion ripped through the sea-front area of Bombay and Inspector Dongre and his men cowered in a building. ‘We had to save our lives’, he recalled. The policemen’s thoughts turned to their wives and children – many of them lived in the Wadi Bunder lines where fire was breaking out – and they rushed back towards them.
Nearby, M. D. Murdeshwar, assistant manager of the docks, who had been trying to reach the scene, was forced back: ‘I laid myself flat down on the ground and crawled underneath one of the military trucks parked there unattended. I remained there until all the splinters had come off; they were coming like a hailstorm.’12
Sir Benegal Rama Rau, chairman of the Port Authority, had been looking out towards the docks from the roof of his office and saw the explosion. ‘Immediately I sent for my car. The chief engineer Mr Terry and myself got into my car and we proceeded to Victoria dock. We stood there for some time. We could not go further as the fire was blazing and we could not see the way.’ The thick smoke was blocking any path through the Victoria Dock. As they stood there, dazed and helpless, some ‘seriously injured’ firemen were carried out of the smoke. Benegal Rama Rau put five of them into his own car but did not have room for the others. A military lorry turned up but the driver did not know the way to a hospital. Despite the confusion, somehow they ferried the burned and bleeding men to hospital, where chaotic scenes unfolded, with most of the injured and dead being laid out on the verandas as the wards overflowed.
But this was not a bomb, after all. A large ship stationed in Bombay Harbour, laden with TNT, had exploded. The SS Fort Stikine had been carrying a part-cargo of cotton on top of explosives. The vessel completely disintegrated, ‘only odd pieces of ship to be seen’, reported the salvage officer days later.13 The decks of the SS Empire Indus nearby ‘buckled’ in the blast and the fires instantly jumped to other nearby ships, some of which were, lethally, storing cotton bundles and bamboo, and gutted eleven other ships. Country craft loaded with grain or cotton broke their moorings and drifted down the harbour and men jumped ship. Crew were killed by falling debris while others scrambled ashore. Glass and shards of metal rained down on dock-workers and servicemen, causing ugly injuries. Before long the fire was spreading to the surrounding bustees, bazaars and godowns directly abutting the waterside. A strong west wind fanned the flames. As labourers fled for their lives, other men tried to enter the dock area to help with moving the stocks of ammunition which would be fodder for the fire. But chaos was reigning. Padden Rowe, a Special Branch detective, fearing foul-play and sabotage, was stopping men in uniform and rescue workers from getting to the scene unless they showed security passes. It could have been sabotage, and ‘It is possible to have a uniform made at a tailor’s shop’, he later told a committee of inquiry.14
The fire was out of control. It raged on for the whole night and much of the next day, and could be seen from great distances. By the next day, 2,000 or more had been admitted to hospital and more than 300 had died, among them 23 policemen. The whole residential and commercial area of flats and bustees in downtown Bombay along the harbour stood blackened and charred. Official figures estimated 60,000–80,000 homeless. One unknown man, presumed to be a dock-worker, remarkably survived the whole night in the waters of Bombay Harbour, by wearing a life jacket and clinging to pieces of debris while the fires flickered on around him. ‘It took my men 2½ hours to bale him out and arrange for an ambulance and doctor’, reported an Indian officer who had been at the scene at nine o’clock the next morning. ‘He was crying “Hai Allah!” and somebody heard him and they all tried to help him out.’15 Religious charities, as in the aftermath of the Burmese refugee debacle, plugged the gaps in social service provision and doled out meals to the homeless. The poorest and those who had lost their ships were taken to relief camps: Lascars, khalasis, cranemen, labourers and their families.
Later on the Sunday, when the fire was finally extinguished, and the water was thick with floating cotton, the recriminations began. This was the kind of news that the government seriously wanted to avoid. A news blackout on the story enraged the Indian media: the Bombay Sentinel published a blank column on its front page with the words, ‘This space should have been occupied by a report of disastrous explosions which occurred in the city docks yesterday’, and the paper was suspended as a result. Wild rumours about culpability and compensation circulated. Fifty thousand tons of grain had been lost in addition to cotton and other goods. The Indian government squeezed Lloyd’s of London for insurance claims, but the company was reluctant to take any liability. The Bombay government handed out five lakhs for distress relief and the Government of India awarded a scheme of compensation for death or disablement. Wavell personally asked the Red Cross to supply artificial limbs.16
The main battle, though, was the propaganda story and in particular combating the idea that British negligence and lack of preparedness had caused the explosion and the failure to contain it. Controversially, the proceedings of the inquiry were partly held in camera and the first report made trenchant criticisms of the government. The fire had started sometime before the first explosion. The stowing of cotton near explosives, which had been carried out in Karachi, where the ship was loaded, was of course criticised, but also the lack of warning signals to other ships once the fire began, and the sorry state of fire-fighting and water supply – trailer pumps in private possession had not been used on the fire. It all led to a damning picture of careless, poorly co-ordinated responses. The government then assigned a second committee of inquiry to try to engineer a more even-handed response, as it would not accept the strength of condemnation in the first. This was a public relations disaster and the news travelled around the globe; as far away as Midwestern America, wives of GIs wrote to their husbands in India asking about the Bombay Docks explosion.17
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The war was placing so many strains on the state by this point that the CID could freely admit that it no longer knew who was in the country, in what numbers or where they had come from. Police chiefs faced entirely new questions about stowaways, smuggled and black-market goods, escaped POWs and incoming refugees. As the war drew closer to its end, the military crisis was passing but the domestic fallout of war was just getting into full swing and the start of demobilisation would only bring new crises and questions. Military deserters, runaway prisoners of war, white women selling sex, refugees from Burma and from across South-East Asia could all be found in India. Although small in number, the presence of these different individuals was widely commented on during wartime in Indian cities. Any old pretence about clear racial differentiation, of clear blue water between rulers and ruled, had been exposed as a sham by the war.
Many Polish refugees had by now been in India for three years or more and over this time they had met local people and had often become more closely intertwined with the war effort. Gradually they overcame language difficulties; a tall and softly spoken Tamil, Benjamin Appadurai, who had escaped Japanese capture in Singapore, was employed to teach English to the refugees at the Valivade camp. Some of the young Polish men joined the British Army and some single women courted British soldiers from a nearby military camp two miles away, relationships blossoming despite attempts to block these liaisons. Mothers learned to shop in the local markets, adapting their recipes for pancakes and stews to unfamiliar ingredients, and local shopkeepers learned smatterings of Polish vocabulary. At the camp post office, as people waited for news from Russia and Germany, ‘the Indian postmaster, Mr Salokhi read out the names of the addressees in faultless Polish … He w
as pleased if there was a large post and worried if there were only a few letters.’18Local Indian women offering to wash clothes walked along the verandas of the refugee camp, calling out in pidgin Polish, and door-to-door vendors sold ice-cream, calling out ‘Warsaw ice cream, Krakow ice-cream!’ A local surrounded by flies sold pork surreptitiously outside the camp gates.19
Raj society stayed mostly aloof from the refugees, distanced by language and by the spectre of these fair-skinned but impoverished Europeans, but the refugees remembered small kindnesses from chowkidars (guards), ayahs (nannies), teachers, shopkeepers and drivers. There was a handful of marriages between Polish girls and Indian boys and some Polish women stayed on as married women after Independence, in cities like Karachi and Poona. Some Poles found creative inspiration from their new homeland. A young Polish dancer, Hanker Dytrych, left the camp and joined a famed Indian dance troupe, the Ram Gopal Ensemble, mastering classical Kathak dance and touring cities from Madras to Lahore. ‘We … carried a great theatrical wardrobe – trunks of costumes, among which were the famous “crowns” set with semi precious stones designed by Ram’, she later remembered. ‘The work was very exhausting … We often travelled by night and had to practise in the morning for several hours under the watchful eye of our Guru.’20 Although the Poles were largely unconcerned with the details of Indian politics, the general aspiration towards Independence resonated with them as they awaited the liberation of their own nation.