The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  Mecca was also accessible now that the war had ended and the haj could resume again. The centre of the Muslim world had started its shift westward, and the growth of air transport would transform links between Asia and the Middle East over the coming decade. A Saudi Arabian minister in London suggested that the British government ‘should encourage Indian soldiers now serving in Egypt or elsewhere to make the pilgrimage to Mecca’, which would be both ‘good British propaganda’ and also useful for Saudi revenues.32 In Britain, the London Central Mosque (which had been initiated in 1940 and authorised by Churchill’s War Cabinet) served the burgeoning communities of South Asians and was also a gift of the state to thank Muslims for their notable contributions to fighting the war.

  Indian Independence, although certain to take place, still looked likely to face potential delays. ‘In many people’s minds there is a vague assumption’ – particularly if the different Indian parties did not come to a consensus about the constitution – ‘that there will be a continuance in some form of British control,’ wrote Penderel Moon in 1945, ‘unless English people clearly grasp that the time has come for them to divest themselves once and for all of political power in India.’33

  In the uncertain, transformed world after the war in India, the political future had started to cleave along religious lines and the growth of the Muslim League had been badly underestimated by the Congress leadership. At the provincial and local level, nationalist parties were now drawing heavily on the power of religious iconography in anticipation of a general election. This election was announced in 1946 as a quasi-referendum, as a way of testing the relative support of the various parties in the country. The severing of the ties between soldiers of different religious backgrounds would take place in 1947 when the Indian Army was split into the two national armies of India and Pakistan, but already at the end of war, tensions and problems had irrevocably altered the political possibilities for a future settlement.

  23

  The Sepoy’s Return

  BY 1945, THERE had been 89,000 Indian casualties in the war. Frequently, news had not reached home to confirm who had survived. For prisoners of war and families of members of the INA, the end of the war was also a time of angst. Mothers and wives waited nervously for news. Ramesh Benegal was reunited with his mother in Poona after four years: ‘What a reunion it was! … After a dinner that I don’t remember eating, I passed into a deep sleep. I heard that my mother sat beside me all night, and touched me now and then to make sure that she wasn’t dreaming, and that this was really her son, come back to life.’1 Fate afflicted families randomly. Benegal’s friend, Gandhi Das, had survived with him through ordeals in the jungles of Burma and Thailand and had been one of only a small number of survivors when his ship was torpedoed in the South China Sea. He then contracted an illness soon after the end of the war, when safely back in India, but before he could see his parents again. ‘After all this he died in obscurity in a village in Madurai district, not from enemy action or world calamity, but typhoid’, wrote his closest friend, who had been alongside him every step of the way, ‘I could not understand it.’2 In Rajinder Dhatt’s family two brothers came back from war safely but the third, whom their mother had not permitted to leave home for fear of his death in battle, stayed behind and died of typhoid.

  Officers felt the responsibility of trying to explain to families – in letters or in person – what had happened to their sons. H. M. Close toured the small villages on the frontier, from where his company had been recruited, and met the father of a man he had seen shot by a German gun in Greece.

  Mian Dad and I went together to Nasrullah’s village and met his father. I gathered that Nasrullah, though not the only son, had been the favourite and the hope of the family. I told how well he had died. “On the whole I’m alright,” his father said to me – a kindly, charming old man – “but sometimes at night when I’m on my bed I think of Nasrullah and then it troubles me.”3

  The overwhelming pattern was one of private, quiet grief and contemplation. ‘The philosophical question of the innocent casualties of war troubled him all his life’, wrote the daughter of Victoria Cross winner Premindra Singh Bhagat. ‘Like all soldiers, he would spend his life preparing for war but always think of it as damaging and evil.’4 Others kept captured weapons and souvenirs as trophies. Japanese swords and Gurkha kukris were popular with both Indian and British soldiers. Gian Singh took a silver ring from a Japanese soldier in the jungle who had nearly killed him: ‘As soon as I saw it, I knew I was going to have it, even if I had to cut off his finger … I took it off and put it on my finger.’5 Trophies and war souvenirs were ways of remembering the war for those who found it too difficult to recall in words the battles that they had experienced.

  British officers felt the deaths of men in their companies acutely. J. H. Voice’s memories of the battle at Keren are punctuated by the grief for a dead friend:

  At about 10:00 I heard that our mortars had received a shell and that Subedar Sharin Khan had been killed. Sharin Khan, a Khattak, was a very nice man indeed, an officer and a gentleman (I don’t know how else to put it) and his death coupled with that of Stanley Wilson about ten days earlier was quite a blow to me.6

  The British officers felt responsible for their men and guilty if they were separated from them, particularly at the time of their death. John Ffrench of the Rajputana Rifles had pangs of regret later in life about the men who died at Monte Cassino. On the death of Jemadar Ghulam Hussein he wrote many years later, ‘He had only just returned from leave in India and was said to have had a premonition that he would not see India again. It was a real blow to the whole company.’ In the midst of battle, when the company needed every man, he released a subedar, Mohammad Yusuf, to perform the necessary Islamic rituals and to give Hussein a prompt and proper burial, ‘such was his esteem to the men’.7

  Later, Ffrench was wounded in the leg at Monte Cassino during a battle on Hangman’s Hill. Evacuated to hospital in Sorrento, he fretted about the fate of his Indian soldiers while he looked out over the Bay of Naples. He was reunited with them later when they all boarded a ship at Suez heading for India. ‘I was devastated to find what had happened to A company,’ he wrote on learning of the deaths of eight of the men, ‘I really felt that I had let them down by not staying with them and tried to tell them so. Being mostly fatalistic, they replied that there was nothing I could have done about it, as it was all kismet anyway.’8

  There could be a chasm between officers and men of any nationality, the untranslatable distance between elite wealth and the everyman. In the case of the Indian Army this was even wider, as the men came from villages and places that were, after a point, literally and figuratively unreachable for the British officer. The reliance on caste and tribe stereotypes and clichés about the fatalism and loyalism of the Indian soldier recur in stock images. Yet also shining through the surface are stories of real mutual affection. By the end of the war, after all that they had shared and experienced together, like men all over the world, the company, unit and regiment had become a surrogate family, bonded through new ties of adversity and experience. Written from Waziristan in November 1946, a letter from Subedar Kartar Singh, to his former British officer, expressed the nostalgia of men now separated by nation and distance.

  I am very glad to receive your kind letter. It gave me much pleasure … I cannot express in words how happy your D coy [company] is when I tell them your Ram Ram [greetings]. I am just doing roll call, everybody from D coy is present here on R call ground. They all remember you very much. The old fellow, Jem. Hari Singh has gone for release. I am applying for short-term commission … All sepoy, cook remember you very much. Would you like to come to India again, if so write me? I am very anxious to show you the villages in my district … I know that you have got true love for India and it is bad luck that she lost experienced officers like you … Good bye sir for now, kindly let me know your news. I long to hear your programme. All VCOs, NCOs and Jawans of this
Bn [battalion] and especially from your Coy send their Ram Ram to you and hope you will not forget them.9

  Many sepoys slotted back into their old lives, apparently seamlessly, picking up the plough, returning to the fields. They certainly had more money in their pockets than most of their fellow villagers and were greeted with joy. The songs of marriage parties and the aroma of feasts filled the village air. Unmarried men found themselves much in demand, mothers had already lined up suitable brides and many families fused together welcoming parties with wedding festivities. ‘These were pleasant hours that we spent in the shade of his lemon trees’, said H. M. Close, who accompanied a soldier named Umar back to his village.

  Giving the wheel a turn he would draw water from the well and gather fruit and bring sugar from the house and so make sherbet. Then perhaps we would stretch ourselves on the string beds and doze for a time. I met his brother and some of his friends and, mixing with them, he seemed still what he had been before he enlisted, a simple country lad.10

  He recalled his time there with more than a touch of romanticism.

  Gurkhas hiked back to their villages, often a long walk of many days. They carried with them gifts of Kashmiri shawls and Indian fabrics, hurricane lamps and packets of tea. They also brought with them books: on combat techniques, maths and science primers, Hindi alphabets and Hindu mythology. Often, after a brief time of celebration, rest and rejoicing, men were absorbed back into the rhythms of village life. All that they had seen and heard seemed so far away. Wives and friends began hinting that they needed extra help in the fields, and it was not long before soldiers became peasants again. Some men became noticeably prosperous, particularly officers and those who had accrued savings and could now make investments in land.

  The evangelical social reformer and Welfare Officer Frank Brayne was anxious that the soldiers should not just slip back into their bad old ways. He wanted the state to make the most of this opportunity for ‘development’ and for the soldiers to act as vectors for modernity and progress. ‘Don’t start quarrelling and litigation and don’t throw expensive parties and weddings’, he warned men as they were demobilised.11 He hoped that they would no longer tolerate unhygienic toilets or smoky, unventilated kitchens and that they would tutor their families in the lessons that they had learned while in military service. The Punjab provincial ministry published enlightening tracts on improving agricultural methods with titles such as ‘A chart of vegetables’, ‘One hundred Agricultural proverbs’ and ‘Family budgets of cultivators’ for soldiers to take home with them. All manner of schemes, from soap-making and livestock-breeding to crafting wooden toys and cricket balls and bats, were established, especially in Punjab, to ensure that the men had something useful to apply their energies to. The soldier would be, Brayne hoped, a cipher for development.12

  Underneath this return to an apparently bucolic idyll there was often an undercurrent of unease and far more violence accompanied demobilisation and the post-war transitions than idealised accounts by officers suggest. Protest was burning with a new fervour, and the unrest that was sweeping through the country caught up many demobilising men, who became caught up in the Punjabi whirlwind, often taking part in Partition riots, training and leading self-defence cadres and private militias. The danger of war was over, the British were clearly going and the country was in freefall. News was emerging about the actions of the INA and some of the truths about wartime repression and the Bengal famine started to circulate. While waiting for demobilisation many sepoys became caught up in the political cauldron. Even if they had stayed straightforwardly focused on the job in hand during the war, now they re-evaluated their own political allegiances. They wanted the uncertainty about India’s Independence to be settled and for their own conditions to be secure. A naval mutiny among young sailors in Bombay in 1946 was the most notorious example but there were outbreaks of resistance and anger showing all over the country. As B. C. Dutt, one of the Royal Indian Navy sailors who mutinied in 1946, put it:

  I was 22. I had come through a war unscathed – a war fought to end Nazi domination. I began to ask myself questions. What right had the British to rule over our country? Nationalist India had asked the British to leave Indian affairs in Indian hands. The British always proved intransigent. To nationalist India we were mere mercenaries. It was up to us, I felt, to prove this was not so. Without quite realising it, I had become a conspirator.13

  In Nepal, too, the return of so many young men was worrisome for the Rana regime. Nepal’s ancien régime looked unguarded and vulnerable now that its British allies were retreating from South Asia. Nepali political prisoners released from Indian jails picked their way back home and there was disaffection in the undernourished Nepal State Army, billeted around Kathmandu. Would the return of 200,000 young men – most without pensions, but well trained and many newly literate – be enough to destabilise the rulers altogether? Jhuddha Shumsher Rana, presciently, as if seeing the writing on the wall for his creaking autocracy, resigned in order to become a sanyasin (a Hindu holy man) in November 1945. He handed over power and retreated to live out the rest of his life meditating in the Himalayas. Nepal’s isolation from India’s political currents could no longer be preserved and Nepalis began to witness strikes and marches in the Kathmandu valley for the first time in their lives.14

  For injured and disabled sepoys in India the adjustment was also taxing. Disabled soldiers posed a special challenge in villages poorly geared towards their needs and where old prejudices about disability persisted. St Dunstan’s in Dehra Dun was a care home and rehabilitation centre for permanently blinded soldiers, some of whom also had other disabilities: it provided expert care for 328 men, including 4 African soldiers and a number of Gurkhas. The majority had lost their eyes in action involving hand grenades and mortar shells. The home attempted to rehabilitate them and to help them to adjust to a life with disability, to introduce them to Braille, fit them with artificial limbs, help build morale and restore mental order. In particular, the men were taught skills like weaving that might give them a chance of earning an income in the post-war world.

  Many of the men arrived deeply depressed about their injuries. Havildar Kuttan Pillai was ‘typical’. He arrived at St Dunstan’s blinded, his hearing in his left ear destroyed, and his left arm amputated. ‘He was so depressed that it was with difficulty he could be persuaded to speak or eat.’15 A fellow Malayalam speaker, also blinded, extended his friendship, and eventually Kuttan Pillai started typing with one hand and learned how to use a spinning wheel. He went on to set up a shop in Trivandrum. But alongside these successful stories of rehabilitation, many of the men had experienced ‘long periods of loneliness on wards of sighted men’, or had been completely cut off from others in hospital, isolated from anyone who could speak their own language. In addition, they suffered from concerns about supporting families in the future or being rejected by fellow villagers, and anxieties about adjustment to the world after the war.16 If the medics diagnosed that the blindness or disability was not due to wartime injury, but a consequence of disease, they might lose the right to a military pension, which tipped some men into extreme worry. Everywhere pensions were a major concern, and vastly different depending on rank and length of service.

  Many other sepoys looked immediately for further employment, in the Indian or British armies. Men who had fulfilled fifteen years of service qualified for a pension and could return to their village and live relatively peacefully, and some did so – but many sepoys went back to Indian cities before long to look for work, as chowkidars, guards on the railways and policemen. This may not have always been an economic choice. It was difficult for some to shake off the routines (and comforts) of army life, to take to hard manual labour again, to find their place once more in the intimate confinement of an extended family. In one village, a retired subedar took a job on the Indian railways even though his family was relatively well-off and his wife remained behind in their village. Men found themselves torn between m
issing their families and missing the army. Over the years they had changed imperceptibly and now had to turn time back and find their old place in village hierarchies and relationships. For some, it was easier to keep moving, to leave the village behind altogether.

  * * *

  On 15 August 1947, far away from the Punjab and the gruesome massacres and refugee upheavals that were unfolding there, another group of Indians and Pakistanis celebrated Independence. In central London it was a warm summer morning. On Aldwych, cars stopped as loudspeakers broadcast from the interior of India House, celebrating Indians spilled out onto the pavements, some in white suits and bright saris, many others soldiers and sailors in uniform. Curious passers-by stopped to watch the crowds of merrymakers. Inside, Krishna Menon, the new High Commissioner, was the centre of attention as he stood under the domed roof of the library, in front of a full-length portrait of Gandhi, and welcomed people into the building. The happy crowds went out into the courtyard outside, to hoist the national flag amid cheers and anthems. Pakistanis joined them, before moving on to their own celebrations at Lancaster House – the building was loaned for the occasion by the British government as the Pakistanis did not have a building in London yet to call their own. ‘The friendliness pervading both ceremonies was widely felt to be the happiest of auguries’, commented one Times journalist.17 The Indian leaders passed through a guard of honour formed by Indian soldiers and airmen, among them the pilots who had flown aeroplanes alongside the RAF in the battles over Europe. The High Commission was Menon’s new home; the bedsits of Camden were no more.

  Krishna Menon had, in the way of postcolonial leaders, apparently been transformed from persona non grata to establishment figure almost overnight. Privately, his appointment as the new High Commissioner for India was opposed by Stafford Cripps and by the new Prime Minister Clement Attlee.18 Tracked by MI5 for years as a suspected, dangerous pseudo-communist, Menon was emerging as one of the leading diplomats of his age. Once he had dreamed of being a British Member of Parliament, but Menon’s rapprochement with his beloved Labour Party had come too late for that: in May 1945 the Labour Party had come knocking at his door again and he had been welcomed back into the party with open arms, and encouraged to stand as a candidate for Parliament once more. Menon, however, and India, had moved on. Now he was destined for diplomacy, a post at the United Nations, the front cover of many magazines, and in his old age would become a controversial Indian Defence Minister. It is difficult not to regard the war as a time of frustration and dashed hopes for Menon, and a period when he felt cut off from old friends and alienated because of Indian affairs that he felt about so deeply and cared about with such a strong sense of righteousness. It is also perhaps not too far-fetched to imagine that the more strident form of Indian nationalism that Menon promoted later in life, like so many of his fellow Congressmen, was a product of his experiences and frustrations during the war.