The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  Other Indians in Britain had also been transformed by wartime. Menon would eventually settle back in South Asia, but many of his compatriots would not. Lascars and soldiers who had been brought to Britain for wartime service comprised the vanguard of the new settlers in the post-war world, serving the demands of post-war British industry. They laboured in the foundries of the Midlands, the warehouses around Heathrow Airport and the new NHS hospitals being raised in the 1950s. Entrepreneurial Lascars invested in turning their basic canteens into the restaurants serving masalas around the land. Some Punjabis – Sikh, Muslim and Hindu – found their villages had been lost or sundered by the Partition and decided to try their luck in Britain. The ability to speak English that many had learned in the Indian Army was an asset. British officers often became the link in the chain, giving a hand to former soldiers that they had commanded, offering a foothold in a firm or sponsoring an application. The war was a portal for global settlement and travel, the upheaval that it caused generating new patterns of migration, new ideas about what life might be like. On occasion, just proving that one had been in uniform for the Allies was enough to change attitudes. Respect for the Indian Army’s role in the war persisted among those who had served with the sepoys. In the 1960s, Rajinder Singh Dhatt, newly arrived in England, found that talking about his war service with factory managers was a way to get an interview. At a foundry in Birmingham, he was told by a manager to mention his war service at every opportunity. ‘He asked me, “which army you joined?” I told [him the] Indian Army when British were ruling at that time. “In which year?” I told [him] in 1940. “Oh! You were in the Second World War.” Because he was also, he also fought in the Second World War.’19 This worked and he finally found work at an engineering company in Feltham weeks later, after a manager thoroughly checked his wartime credentials; ‘He said, “We haven’t got a job but we will take you.”’

  Many men found their way to Britain. In the first ten years after Independence, thousands of South Asians migrated to Britain in the shadow of war, often building on networks established during wartime. By 1946 there were around twenty Indian restaurants in London, mainly Sylheti-owned, many serving a double function as a meeting place, and exchange for news on work and accommodation. Two brothers from Sylhet opened Oxford’s first Indian restaurant on Turl Street in 1945, along with a string of other restaurants staffed by former Lascars.20 Many settled communities of several generations were already established in cities such as Cardiff and Coventry. As the demand for wartime and post-war labour grew, unskilled work could be found in the docks, factories and aerodromes. The community in Liverpool included men like Miralam, Baijneth Randev and Bahadur Singh Chand, who had arrived in the UK in 1939 and served with the British Army during the Second World War. The Indian community in Birmingham had grown from a hundred to over a thousand people during the Second World War. By early June 1945, approximately 9,460 Indian POWs had arrived in the UK on their way back to India. Many had been held in Italy earlier in the war, then moved on to Germany and now passed through Britain after liberation from camps.

  As the dust settled on Independence and Partition in 1947, Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck sat at his desk at his home in London. The former Commander-in-Chief of India was thinking about the past. Now he penned a letter by hand to the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. Auchinleck pressed for a monument or a memorial in central London to mark the role of Indian Army in the Second World War. The general suggested it would be ‘a mark of gratitude from the British people to those soldiers who served Britain and the Empire for 200 years’, for men who, ‘putting their trust in us, fought and fell in our wars all over the Old World’.21 A statue of a sepoy was proposed, or, potentially, a series of orientalised figures, modelled on the ‘chief classes enlisted in the old Indian army’.22 The space that Auchinleck suggested was Green Park, but the Minister of Works suggested the South Bank in London. The site then under construction was part of Britain’s post-war reinvention, and the place where the Festival of Britain would be launched in 1951. The Cabinet cast an eye over the proposal, and the governments of India and Pakistan were agreeable, as long as they were consulted on the design. But the British government decided not to formally back the plan and as no committee was formed, no funds were raised. The site for the memorial remained undecided and without more sustained backing, the general’s idea fizzled out and the file was closed in 1949.

  In Britain, post-war reconstruction and regeneration quietly erased the Indian contribution which was at odds with the story of plucky small-island British heroism and outdated in the heady days of post-war British modernism and architectural innovation. In post-war Britain, certain war stories became amplified and mythologised, became part of the curriculum, and made into films, while others slipped away from view. Everyone remembered the Blitz, but fewer remembered the Asian merchant sailors who had kept the British ports going. Everyone remembered the major battles – Imphal, Kohima, Monte Cassino – but fewer knew about those who had fought there from African and Asian colonies.

  The Commonwealth War Graves Commission had further intentions to memorialise the war. In 1949, both the Indian and the Pakistani governments agreed to centralised memorials in their capital cities. In time, monuments were erected in Delhi and Karachi and also in Chittagong and Bombay to commemorate the Royal Indian Navy and seafarers. As these designs came to fruition, the officers of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission who were involved in planning and erecting these monuments debated whether the memorial books listing the names of the dead, which would accompany the monuments, should be accessible to the people. It did not really matter, it was argued, the books should not be handled by the public as they might be damaged, and who would care to see them in any case? By this time, India’s war was passing from South Asian memory, replaced by new national myths and stories in India and Pakistan centred around Independence and Partition. As a member of the commission wrote candidly in 1955, ‘It is anticipated that the numbers of visitors who will wish to see the names will be infinitesimal. The relatives of the greater number of those commemorated will be too poor to afford the trip to either cemetery, and, in fact, will know nothing about the Memorial.’23

  In South Asia, 1947 became a byword for the pain of Partition but also for the joy of Independence. In her old age, Aruna Asaf Ali, whose own life was changed irrevocably by the war, reflected on those momentous years of her youth: ‘Wars, ancient and modern are curious phenomena, while they bring death and desolation to many they also unshackle millions.’24 The war was certainly the catalyst for the unshackling of south Asians from imperial rule, and made the granting of immediate Independence unavoidable. Nationalist historians in India and Pakistan recast the events of the 1940s as stepping stones, leading towards liberation. The new monuments and museums of the post-colonial states placed the patriarchs and freedom fighters of the early twentieth century at their core. They lionised the great sweep of political struggle and long years of persistence through the 1920s and 1930s, which finally resulted in the downfall of the Raj.

  Midnight’s children wanted to build up a new world and looked to the future development of the state, the construction of power plants, dams and military hardware. The story of the war did not sit easily with this new era. It belonged to the old colonial world: archaic, illegitimate and even irrelevant. A British author, Compton Mackenzie, who had been commissioned to write a work on the Indian experience of the war, was taken aback when meeting a Congress minister in Madras, Raghavan Menon, in 1946. ‘He said at once that he was not interested in the book because he and his party had not considered it their war.’25 The minister was right: it was not India’s war, it was the British Empire’s. The war grievously lacked legitimacy with colonial subjects in South Asia. But this does not foreclose the possibility of greater historical enquiry or the writing of new books on the subject.

  Sepoy or prince, magistrate or mother, rebel or British soldier: the 1940s in India left a deep imprint on
millions of lives. The war forced terrible decisions, produced strange juxtapositions and unforeseen consequences. Our own understanding of this global war, and appreciation of its severity, is enhanced by realising its fullest extent. There is still much more to be said about the ways in which the inhabitants of the British Empire served and suffered through the 1940s, and still much more to be understood about the demands of war on many different kinds of people.

  British tanks during riots in the North-West Frontier Province, 1935. At the outbreak of war the focus was on India's north-western border and the fear of war with Russia rather than the Japanese.

  British soldiers at Chitral on the Afghan border with khassadars, or locally raised militias in 1940. One third of the Indian Army was stationed on the North-West Frontier at the start of the war.

  A propaganda poster used in Britain to reassure people of the unity of the British Empire and Commonwealth. Canada, Australia, Britain, South Africa, New Zealand, India, and South Africa are represented.

  Three stokes on board the Royal Indian Navy sloop, HMS Sutlej, 1944. In addition to navy seafarers, Lascars or Indian merchant seamen were critical to the war and over 6,600 lost their lives.

  Recently enlisted recruits at an Indian Army Training Centre. By late 1940, 20,000 a month were joining up at the end of the war the Indian Army was over 2 million men strong.

  A Recruiting Officer inspects a potential recruit in Northern India. There was no conscription in India but men joined up for many reasons often seeking the chance for a regular income and more plentiful food.

  Men of the 4th Indian Division with a captured German flag at Sidi Omar, close to the Egyptian-Libian border, part of the North African campaign of 1941.

  An Indian fighter pilot of the Royal Indian Air Force. South Asian pilots also joined the RAF in Britain.

  Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in Germany in early 1941, after he escaped house arrest in Calcutta, and held meetings with the senior Nazi leadership including Heinrich Himmler.

  Indians living in Burma evacuate Rangoon in fear of the advancing Japanese army in 1942. At least 600,000 Indians are believed to have fled Burma after the Japanese invasion.

  Subhas Chandra Bose delivering a speech in Japanese occupied Asia as part of the Indian National Army programme, c. 1943.

  A propagand poster showing South Asians rubber tapping. Ceylon, Malaya and Burma were all important producers of wartime rubber. Posters such as this one circulated in many local languages.

  Malaria was a major threat to the Fourteenth Army in the Burma campaign and invalided many more soldiers than combat. This poster, printed in Bombay in 1940, was circulated by the British Army in India.

  An aerial view of the Ledo Road linking India, Burma and China. Much of the road was cut by hand by Asian labourers.

  A nurse adjusts a doctor's mask at a hospital in Calcutta. Shortages of trained nurses was a major problem during the Burma campaign and civilian hospitals lost trained staff to the war effort.

  Parsi women training on an air raid precaution course in 1942 in Bombay. As fears of a Japanese invasion of India intensified, recruitment of ARP wardens was widespread.

  Sir Stafford Cripps meets Gandhi in Delhi during his mission to reconcile the Britsh government and Indian National Congress in March 1942. Despite the smiling faces the diplomatic mission failed and Gandhi was imprisoned later in the year.

  Aruna Asaf Ali, a charasmatic leader of the underground movement during the Quit India campaign of 1942 and later a prominent politician after Independance.

  This poster suggests the dilemma of how to resolve India's constitutional gridlock at a time of war, with so many uncertainties about when Independance would arrive and the future of the constitution.

  Four unknown women, likely to be students, demonstrating against the government during the Quit India Movement, August 1942.

  Policewomen from the Women's Auxiliary Air Force purchasing fruit from a stall in Bombay.

  An aircraft plotter of the WAC (I), a force which was rapidly raised in 1942 and placed elite Indian and Anglo-Indian women on equal terms with memsahibs.

  Clearing land to make way for airfields. Over 200 new airfields were built during the war in South Asia and much of the land was requisitioned from peasant farmers.

  Construction workers at an American airfield in India. Millions of men and women laboured for the Allies on roads airfields, at docks in mines.

  Hungry children try to pierce sacks of grain along a railway line in the midst of the Bengal famine of 1943.

  A family arrives from rural Bengal to Calcutta during the devastating famine.

  A free kitchen run by the Rotary Club distributing food in Calcutta in 1943. The recently appointed Viceroy, Archibald Wavell, who was greatly disturbed by events in Bengal, stands on the centre-right, accompanied by his wife and senior members of the Indian Civil Service.

  List of Abbreviations

  AIML All India Muslim League

  ARP Air raid precautions

  ATS Auxiliary Territorial Service

  CBI China–Burma–India

  CID Criminal Investigation Department

  CSAS Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies Oral History Collection

  CWGC Commonwealth War Graves Commission

  CWMG Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi

  ENSA Entertainment National Service Association

  FNR Fortnightly Reports

  GHQ General Headquarters

  IAM CIndian Army Medical Corps

  ICS Indian Civil Service

  IGH Indian General Hospital

  INA Indian National Army

  IOR India Office Records/Indian Other Ranks

  IPTA Indian People’s Theatre Association

  IWM Imperial War Museum

  NAAFI Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes

  NAI National Archives of India

  NARA National Archives and Records Administration

  NCO Non-commissioned officer

  NWFP North-West Frontier Province

  POW Prisoner of war

  RAF Royal Air Force

  RIAF Royal Indian Air Force

  RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

  SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies

  SWJN Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru

  TOP Transfer of Power Series

  VCO Viceroy’s Commissioned Officer

  WAC (I) Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India)

  Note on Sources

  ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ are used throughout the book as shorthand terms for the inhabitants of the subcontinent before 1947. This includes people in the post-1947 countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as India. The book also refers to Nepal, Ceylon (later called Sri Lanka) and Burma, countries that were administered as separate parts of the British empire. I have used contemporary place names; many of these have changed since Independence.

  Recapturing quotidian South Asian voices from the 1940s poses particular source challenges and the generation who lived through the war are now very elderly. In the 1940s many sepoys were illiterate. In addition to my own interviews I have made extensive use of the Indian Army censorship reports found in the India Office Records of the British Library. These include invaluable snippets of letters from sepoys and their families, but these are often extracts that have been taken from letters, made anonymous, translated, collated and filtered by the colonial state and have to be handled with some caution. A number of writers including David Omissi, Santanu Das and Gajendra Singh have written about the utility of these documents but also the necessary circumspection that should be applied given the conditions of their creation in the First and Second World Wars. I have also used earlier interviews accessible on the internet, in films and documentaries and others made available through community and oral history projects.

  Most of the documents I have consulted are freely accessible in the national archives, museums and libraries of capital cities, in London, Delhi, Washington DC and beyon
d. These archives include war diaries, intelligence reports, personal memoirs, letters and diaries, party political literature and newspapers. The National Archives in Delhi and London and the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collection both contain military records documenting many details of the Indian Army and the records generated by the central and provincial Indian Civil Service. Film and visual sources are also magnificent, although usually products of the well-oiled propaganda machines they can still tell us much beyond the written word. By reading against the grain, South Asians are far more visible in the historical record than many later accounts might have us believe.