The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  Sometimes it was no longer possible to ascertain who people were at all. As the density of servicemen increased in India, so, too, did the number of runaways and deserters who cropped up in Indian cities. One such case was Stafford Wilkie Palmer, a seventeen-year-old who said he was born in Houston and had been living in hotels, at military camps and then among the poor on the streets of Bombay until he turned up at the American Consulate asking for a passage back to America in 1945. He was wearing an outfit assembled from bits of military uniform marked with a variety of serial numbers and was suspected of going AWOL from the army. He denied having joined up. Was he a stowaway, boy soldier, identity fraudster or deserter? He claimed he had smuggled himself aboard a ship to India from New York. He had been living on the streets of Bombay in 1945, carrying his few possessions in a gas mask. In his statement, he told police how he had reached India and also gave insights into his life on the run:

  At the port of embarkation in New York I cleverly managed to git on boat with colored GIs. Because I was very anxious to git Overseas as I thought the whole world was just like the United States with colored people too living in them … We were two colored boys that came over from the States the same way. And I sure Bernard Shaw, the other guy is killed by the Indians as he was trying to fok with them gals at Karachi. It is hunger, suffering and fear that forced me to come to report to US consul at Bombay the last two days I stayin in Bombay was without dam food and I was sleepin in the street.21

  Police questioned the man he described as his father, Lacy Palmer, in Houston. On oath, Lacy Palmer said he’d met the man in the photograph once, when he was based in India, but he had no idea if he was an African, an American, a soldier or a civilian. He swore on his life that the young man was most definitely not his son. The home address that Stafford Palmer provided did not exist. Stafford Wilkie Palmer was kept in the stockade for the remainder of the war.

  Among sepoys, too, deserters could be found roaming in India in the later years of the war. Desertion was a desperate act, often only a fantasy if a soldier was based miles from home in North Africa or Italy. Getting back home from the theatres of Burma, or from training in India, was more tempting. The self-mutilations of the First World War to secure home leave were rare and sepoys tended to find more imaginative ways to strike off, failing to return from leave on the grounds of sickness or absenting themselves because of a family crisis, never to be seen again.22 The highest numbers of desertions tallied neatly with peak moments of food shortage and political crunch points. In Bengal in 1944 every fortnight there were fifty to a hundred deserters, about half of them caught and the rest left to dissolve into the countryside.23 Nobody wanted to draw too much public attention to the issue and so often deserters were not pursued ruthlessly. The army did not have the time or the resources to track down individuals and provincial governors did not want military deserters adding to their crammed civilian jail populations. Occasionally these desertions were in order to join the INA: a platoon from the 1/15 Punjab Regiment vanished while on patrol one day and turned up many weeks later as part of the INA near Kalewa on the Chindwin River. Weekly disappearances, often by men carrying arms, continued to irritate the army chiefs: ‘[R]ecent desertions with arms include two parties of Mazbhi Sikhs, three from 10 Mule Company Bareilly and two from Indian Engineer Battalion Poona.’24 Yet the ability to keep restocking and remanning the gargantuan army from India, and the care taken to cultivate the well-being of officers and their infantry units, provided a buffer against any real erosion of the Indian Army’s effectiveness.

  Some deserters found they could roam India undetected for months. Numerous people crafted new autobiographies for themselves in wartime, or fell through the gaps in the new nation-states that would soon be emerging. In Europe too, a number of Indians found themselves stranded or caught up between the warring powers. One unidentified Indian, for instance, found at Ilag Kreuzberg Camp in Germany towards the end of the war, was mystifying the authorities: he claimed to be a circus performer born in the Himalayas. The man, who said his name was Joseph Kandou, had been imprisoned as a civilian internee. He spoke a little French, German and English, could read Marathi and was requesting rice, ‘Indian smokes’ and some Marathi books. ‘Poor chap,’ the Red Cross worker trying to solve his case wrote in a letter to the India Office, ‘he has no one to send him anything privately.’25 Such stories reflect the porous nature of borders and nationalities in the tumultuous years as the end of the war approached and decolonisation loomed.

  The state had the ability to crush dissent, but was also mortally weak in areas such as everyday surveillance, policing and border control. Around the country, the interned and prisoners of war seized their chances, kept close watch on indolent or distracted guards and fingered the meshed grilles around their camps. Among European prisoners of war several audacious escapes took place from Indian camps in the 1940s.26 The police were under strain and could not apprehend the majority of escapers. Local villagers, sympathetic or at least hospitable, gave freely of directions, water and goodwill to strangers on the run.

  Italian and German prisoners of war in India fantasised about escape and some of them made it. Elios Toschi, an Italian submariner, shipped to India as a prisoner of war, claimed to have made three different escapes. Before his first attempt he applied himself to plotting his flight. Along with his friends, Camillo and Faggioni, he studied Hindi and the intricacies of Indian society for months while interned. In the manner of a self-appointed orientalist he questioned sweepers at the camp and watched the mannerisms, gestures and deportment of all the Indians that he encountered. ‘I spent my days drawing, calculating scales and dimensions, constructing networks of meridians and parallels, writing out, rewriting, thousands of times, the names of cities or villages’, he later recalled. ‘India gradually became familiar to me, more familiar even than Italy.’27 When he and his friends did manage to escape from the camp in Kangra in the Himalayan foothills, he lived for some time in a mountain hut, with the help of a local shepherd called Kalah and his family. Passing themselves off as locals in turbans, with long beards and woollen smocks, Toschi was under no illusions about their disguise, and admitted that it was clear that ‘down below on the plain, in the villages and isolated houses everyone knew of our presence up here’.28 As Toschi made his way up into the higher Himalayas his presence was an open secret and villagers offered extravagantly generous meals that they could ill afford, opened their homes and ran errands for the runaway POWs, even producing a prized railway timetable. Twice, Toschi was captured and reinterned but on his third and final escape, again with the connivance of locals, he made it to the tip of the Gujarati peninsula, to the Portuguese protectorate of Diu, where he remained a free man.

  Among Indian POWs there were also problems with information, record-keeping and poor knowledge about who was captured and where. Indian prisoners of war in Europe and in South-East Asia could have been anywhere across a wide arc of territory. They may not have been captured at all, might have joined the INA, begun trekking back to India after melting into the jungle border regions, died or been held captive in POW camps. Even the basic names, or details of who had been captured, when and where, remained elusive. Everywhere in the world, loved ones cherished information about those declared ‘missing’. The ‘delay in receiving news caused many thousands of anxious relatives and friends to wonder if everything possible was being done’.29

  Poor documentation exacerbated the problem but also the haste with which recruitment had often been carried out. ‘About half the men who fought in Malaya and Burma were not on any Indian recording system; so that no authority in this country had any idea as to who was missing or from what unit.’30 Local corps, hurriedly formed during the Japanese invasion, had been swept up in the Japanese mopping-up operations. From Malaya, the majority of reports about POWs concerned Europeans; ‘in spite of efforts by the Indian war organisation to ascertain conditions of the Indian POWs’, the information received was �
�very scanty’, leaving many families in suspended anxiety for years on end.31 The Japanese did release some names of Indian prisoners in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Bangkok but only a small proportion of the 70,000 or so that it was believed had been seized in the Japanese occupation.

  Ultimately liberating forces recovered 24,935 Indian POWs and internees in the Far East, but the stories of their experiences remain obscure and often barely known.32 Some, like Captain Mateen Ansari, did not live to tell the tale: kept captive and tortured in the infamous Stanley Road Jail in Hong Kong, he was executed in 1943. Indian prisoners of war in the Far East sometimes experienced the same kinds of terrible treatment as white captives. Summary executions, floggings, beatings, cruel punishments and forced labour, according to one of the few historians of the Indian POWs, ‘equivalent or worse’ to those punishments meted out to Europeans. John Baptist Crasta, a Catholic, born near Mangalore, who was imprisoned on New Guinea, wrote of a prolonged ordeal at the hands of a sadistic camp commander. He describes fellow prisoners being tied with battery wires, urinated on, beaten, made to do harsh manual work for twenty hours or more, Sikhs being forced to shave their beards off and prisoners made to stand out in the sun with their arms outstretched until faint; ‘my physical condition at this stage was extremely bad. My body had become very thin. When I walked a few yards, I felt giddy and close to fainting. My weight then could not have been more than 100 pounds.’33 During his three and a half years in confinement, Crasta received one letter. His wife heard no information about him, and for the duration of the war would not attend any party or celebration. Major Chint Singh recalled, ‘We were declared “missing” by the British Government and our kith and kin were missing to us. We were living in absolute darkness. Our hearts had become as hard as stones, our feelings were crushed.’34

  The Thai-Burma Railroad and the South Pacific Islands became hellish worlds for some. Men on New Britain and New Guinea (if they survived the gruelling journey, held in the hold of packed, insanitary ships with contaminated drinking water) faced a prolonged physical and mental ordeal that stretched over a number of years. Evidence is still patchy and contested, but it is likely that the 6,000–8,000 Indians sent there had been among those most resistant to the Japanese. Thousands of men lived without medicine, clothes, sheets or basic amenities and with little or no contact from the Red Cross. A small number were killed or injured by Allied raids on Wewak. Extreme shortages of food in 1944, when the Japanese were cut off from their own ships, left the men foraging to survive and there were strong accusations made by these prisoners against some of the Japanese guards in the later war crimes trials. When they were left wandering in the jungles and on the beaches of isolated islands, their full experiences and tactics for survival remain hazy to this day, and the Allied soldiers were often surprised to discover the Indian soldiers as they occupied the region from 1944. Disturbing photographs of Indian men, liberated in the Pacific by Australian troops, show the weak and emaciated condition of their bodies. The men had often dropped down to half their previous body weight, and their skin had become papery and dried out. The images evoke startling parallels with the famine.

  There had always been people in India from other countries, and those who did not fit into the neat categories of the Raj. Similarly, there had been a wide and heterodox Indian diaspora living, trading and travelling beyond the subcontinent for generations. However, the numbers of strangers, the ‘missing’ and the unidentified multiplied in India in the 1940s, symbolic of the uncertainty and unprecedented change that was taking place. Similarly, the failure of the state to trace or pass on information about Indian prisoners of war deeply unsettled their families and kin. Widespread corruption and the impression of a state which was less accountable and more rapacious continued to erode faith in the offices of government, and disasters such as the Bombay Docks explosion compounded the problem. By the end of 1944, the victory in Burma looked more assured but the fallout from the war on civilian life was becoming clearer. The Raj’s finely honed veneer of order and control had been ground down and the legitimacy of the colonial state had been ever more undermined.

  22

  Celebrations and Recriminations

  AS THE WAR drew to a close, rationing had finally started in India, but there was little respite from the shortages which still affected millions.1 Government shops had already acquired a reputation for poor and inedible grains, corruption and unreliable stock. By January 1945 another subsistence crisis was hitting the country, this time not just food but also cloth shortages. Many of the poor, owning only one or two saris or dhotis, usually replaced them when necessary. Now they could not even acquire cloth to dress themselves, while the better-off complained they could not find cloth for mosquito nets, towels or curtains. Even if they had the money, people just could not find cloth to buy. Lurid stories circulated with some basis in fact of dead bodies awaiting shrouds and grave-robbers taking the cloth from the recently buried. In villages, some people hid inside their homes, unable to cover their naked bodies.

  It is difficult for the modern reader to understand what this cloth shortage really meant for people and their daily lives. A member of the Friends Ambulance Unit in Bengal wrote:

  One of the major problems of the more destitute is the difficulty of replacing their worn out garments. Those who can’t, remain indoors rather than exposing themselves unclad. This means, among other things, they are unable to go about their work and the situation goes from bad to worse. Cases of suicide for want of clothing are frequently reported in the newspapers.2

  In Moradabad, some bales of cloth had to be sold by magistrates to prevent corruption and rioting. At government-controlled cloth shops police pickets were established on occasion, as crowds fought and clamoured for cloth.

  There was a plague outbreak in South India and coal shortages were so bad that cotton mills sometimes could not function in early 1945. A shortage of yarn also meant that handloom weavers and spinners could not work. ‘A number of letters from this part of India refer to shortage of yarn, and the condition of the weavers is growing worse daily. Even at the black market rate of 40 Rs per bundle it is almost unobtainable’, described one report:

  Cattle disease is prevalent in most areas … Labourers continue to ask for very high wages and thefts and dacoities [crimes] are increasing. In most places the price of paddy and rice is still rising … Nowadays nothing is available in the market, one cannot purchase things even by offering extraordinary prices for them … the position with regard to foodstuffs is equally bad. Half the quantity of rice being supplied from the government ration shops is stones.3

  In Lucknow, cloth shops were besieged on appointed days by people fighting and struggling with each other, and were guarded by police with lathis.

  The processes of war went into reverse gear. Demobilisation of labourers on mammoth building projects like the Ledo Road was beginning. Many workers were back on the roads and trains, heading back to their villages, often with savings which would help them in the short term but with poor prospects of future work. Under-employment and unemployment would now start to afflict workers who had flocked to the slums of India and had become accustomed to finding day wages during the boom. Even those who had engaged in prostitution were now ‘demobilising’, with reports of widespread impoverishment and unemployment for women who had earned their living for the past few years as camp-followers.

  District Magistrates, charged with solving yet another grave crisis which was not of their own making and was beyond their control, were at their wit’s end and, ultimately, desperate for leave. Morale was hitting a new low and stories circulated of ship’s captains bribed for passages away from Bombay. British officials waited for news of leave or passages out of India. ‘No one seems to worry very much about the poor hardworking civilians … nearly every civilian has done 6 years or even 8 without leave and most of us have worked at top pressure nearly the whole of that time … six years away from one’s family is a big slice
of one’s life’, complained one administrator. ‘Work inside is just as plentiful as ever,’ wrote another, ‘the strain is beginning to tell, not only on the staff but on the men as well. Six years is no joke.’4

  All of this made the news of peace in Europe rather distant and academic. For people in India who had suffered the devastation of famine, it was bitter-sweet; their own war in the East was not over yet. ‘We were aware that the war had finished in Europe, but it wasn’t yet finished for us’, remembered a schoolgirl at the time, Nandita Sen.5 The end of the war was welcome but it was barely something to be celebrated. Many people in India could not share the same elation as their European contemporaries.

  The ghosts of the famine were never far from mind. In a cynical attempt to bury the story, the government published the long-awaited Bengal Famine Inquiry Report the very same week that VE Day was announced. The report was therefore eclipsed in the international radar, and in India had to jostle for column inches with stories about the fall of Berlin, the death of Hitler, the liberation of concentration camps in Europe, the Allied landings at Rangoon and the victory celebrations in London. Nonetheless, The Statesman steadfastly covered the inquiry report in full. The publication of the first photographs of the starved concentration-camp inmates from Buchenwald made, perhaps unintentionally, an eerie juxtaposition with the contents of the famine report.6 A woman from Bombay wrote to friends in England, ‘You have conveyed much of the terrible havoc that this … war has wrought amongst the peoples of Europe … The sufferings of the people have touched our hearts deeply. None the less so because of the agony of starving to death that has been the lot of enormous masses of our own people.’7 A British lady from Calcutta, reflecting on the pictures of concentration camps emerging in the press, made a comparison that sounds shocking to twenty-first-century readers: ‘The newspapers have a lot to write about … The German atrocities apparently do not compare with the Bengal famine so the pictures didn’t shock the folk out here.’8 People looked back at years of hardship and the changes that had taken place in India in five years of war and started to think about how history would record events that they had lived through.