The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  Notes

  Prologue

  1 N. Mansergh and E. W. R. Lumby (eds), Constitutional Relations Between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power, 1942–7 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970–1983) [hereafter TOP], vol. 6, pp. 554–6. Wavell to Pethick-Lawrence, 27 Nov. 1945.

  2 Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, From My Bones: Memoirs of Col. Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon of the Indian National Army, including 1945 Red Fort Trial (New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 1998), p. 509.

  3 Malcolm Darling, At Freedom’s Door (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 17.

  4 The Times, 25 Aug. 1939.

  5 Jawaharlal Nehru, 15 May 1961, quoted in G. N. S. Raghavan (ed.), M. Asaf Ali’s Memoirs: the Emergence of Modern India (Delhi: Ajanta, 1994), p. 246.

  6 See in particular Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin, 2005); Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance: State and Class in India 1939–1945’, Past and Present no. 176 (2002): 187–221; Kaushik Roy (ed.), War and Society in Colonial India, 1807–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2006); Daniel Marston, The Indian Army and the End of the Raj: Decolonising the Subcontinent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Benjamin Zachariah, ‘The Creativity of Destruction: Wartime Imaginings of Development and Social Policy, c. 1942–1946’, in Heike Liebau et al. (eds), The World in the World Wars (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 547–78.

  1 An Empire Committed

  1 IOR MSS F309/1 Ralli Diary, 8 Sept., 12 Sept. and 19 Sept. 1939.

  2 Desmond Young, Try Anything Twice (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), p. 265.

  3 IOR MSS Eur C808 Memoir of Margaret Stavridi.

  4 IOR MSS F309/1 Ralli Diary, 19 Sept. 1939.

  5 IOR MSS E360/14 I. H. Macdonald, letter to parents, 14 May 1941.

  6 Ibid., 19 May 1941.

  7 Santha Rama Rau, Home to India (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), p. 56.

  8 In the ICS there had been a deliberate policy of ‘Indianisation’ – increasing the ratio of Indians holding posts – since the early 1920s and by 1939 of 1,299 posts in the ICS, 540 were held by Indians. Maintaining a European presence in the ICS became a struggle for the Indian Government during the war and ICS recruitment in Britain ceased in 1943. In the Indian Army, positions for Indian officers had been opening up since the 1920s, with ten reserved places at Sandhurst for Indian officers in the 1920s and the Indian Military Academy for officer training opened in 1932. By Jan. 1941 the ratio of Indian to British officers was 12:1.

  9 These changes and differences within the ICS are discussed in more depth in Chapter Five.

  10 J. Nehru, The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1960), p. 446.

  11 John Glendevon, The Viceroy at Bay: Lord Linlithgow in India, 1936–1943 (London: Collins, 1971), p. 161. This account is by Linlithgow’s son.

  12 IOR MSS Eur D609/18 Letters from Linlithgow to the Secretary of State for India, July–Dec. 1939.

  13 IOR MSS Eur D609/18 Linlithgow to the Secretary of State for India, 14 Sept. 1939.

  14 Ibid.

  15 IOR MSS Eur D609/18 Linlithgow to the Secretary of State for India, 4 Sept. 1939.

  16 Francis Tuker, Gorkha: the Story of the Gurkhas of Nepal (London: Constable & Company, 1957), p. 215.

  17 A. K. Azad, India Wins Freedom (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1959; new edn, 1988), p. 29.

  18 B. R. Nanda (ed.), Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), vol. 8, p. 466. Nehru to G. B. Pant, 8 Dec. 1938. Indian nationalists and the Indian nationalist press vocally denounced anti-Semitism from early in the war, but the Indian public at large was far more divided about Jewish refugee settlement and later about Zionism and the creation of Israel. For further discussion see Yulia Egorova, Jews and India: Perceptions and Image (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 31–60.

  19 S. Gopal (ed.), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1972–1982) [hereafter SWJN], vol. 11, p. 31. To Rajendra Prasad, 16 May 1940.

  20 P. R. Lele, War and India’s Freedom (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1940), p. 32. Gandhi’s statement at Simla, 5 Sept. 1939.

  21 IOR MSS Eur D609/18 Linlithgow–Zetland Correspondence, 4 Sept. 1939.

  22 Quoted in Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 169.

  23 Young, Try Anything Twice, p. 265.

  24 IOR MSS E360/14 I. H. Macdonald, letter to parents, 17 Jan. 1941.

  25 SWJN, vol. 11, p. 31 and pp. 22–3. To Krishna Menon, 27 April 1940, and to Rajendra Prasad, 6 May 1940.

  26 IOR MSS E360/14 I. H. Macdonald, letter to parents, 8 Sept. 1942.

  27 India. Legislation and Orders Relating to the War (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1942).

  28 Young, Try Anything Twice, p. 250.

  29 IOR MSS F309/1 Ralli Diary. Anglo-Indians – people of Eurasian or mixed heritage – were the descendants of mixed marriages dating back to the age of British conquest in the eighteenth century, when many early pioneers of empire had taken local wives. Their white descendants often quietly erased these mixed births from their family tree but small communities of Anglo-Indians lived on, often finding a niche in Raj employment, particularly on the railways. Enumerated in the 1941 census at only 140,422 people, Anglo-Indians were a small but critically important group in wartime, as many gravitated to the war services, regarded as much-needed ‘loyalists’ by the British.

  30 Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet (London: HarperCollins Perennial, 2005), pp. 1–2.

  31 Muhammad Asad, This Law of Ours and Other Essays (Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1987), p. 1.

  32 National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC [hereafter NARA], NARA Calcutta Consulate General Records 1944: File 820.08, Box 143. Letter from A. Joschkowitz to the American Consulate in India, 11 Jan. 1944.

  33 IOR L/PJ/7/4794 Letter addressed to Churchill, Sept. 1941.

  34 Interview at SOAS with Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf in 1996, https://www.soas.ac.uk/fure­r-haimendorf/biography/intervi­ew-with-christoph-von-f­urerhaimendorf.html.

  35 IOR MSS Eur 272 Philip Finney papers, memoir dated 1979.

  36 Ibid.

  37 IOR L/PJ/5/238 Fortnightly Report [hereafter FNR], Punjab, Sept. and Aug., 1940. These are just some examples of action taken under the Defence of India Act; for instance, there were some forty-four cases in the first two weeks of Sept. 1940 in Punjab.

  38 Ibid.

  2 Peasants into Soldiers

  1 Mulk Raj Anand, Across the Black Waters (Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 2000 [1939]), p. 1.

  2 IOR L/PO/5/32 memorandum by the Viceroy on frontier policy, Oct. 1939.

  3 IOR L/PO/5/32 Cunningham to Viceroy. Frustration with the frontier and the uncertainty of events on the border was a perennial worry for viceroys. At the start of the century Lord Curzon had said, ‘I do not prophesy about the future. No man who has read a page of Indian history will ever prophesy about the Frontier.’ See also L/WS/1/298 and L/WS/1/1007 on the North-West Frontier.

  4 National Archives, Kew, WO/106/3643, messages between the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army and the War Office, 1939–40.

  5 Lionel Carter (ed.), Punjab Politics 1936–1939: The Start of Provincial Autonomy; Governor’s Fortnightly Reports and Other Key Documents (Delhi: Manohar, 2004), p. 67. Craik to Linlithgow, 25 Nov. 1938.

  6 Shah Nawaz Khan, later of the INA, recalled in his autobiography that ‘every able-bodied member of my family joined the army’ and that sixty-two members of his family were serving as officers in the Indian Army by 1945. The INA Heroes: Autobiographies (Lahore: Hero Publications, 1946), p. 13.

>   7 SWJN, vol. 11, p. 245, 17 Oct. 1940.

  8 IOR R/2/593/50 Recruitment of Rajputs, 1940.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid.

  11 B. L. Cole, The Recruiting Handbook for the Rajputana Classes (Simla: Government of India, 1922). For further discussion of these handbooks see the work of Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers: Between Self and Sepoy (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), Kaushik Roy (ed.), War and Society in Colonial India, 1807–1945 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Tarak Barkawi, ‘Culture and Combat in the Colonies: the Indian Army in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 2 (1 April 2006): 325–55.

  12 J. Evatt, Garhwalis Handbook (Calcutta: Government of India, 1924).

  13 Cole, The Recruiting Handbook for the Rajputana Classes.

  14 ‘Memoirs of an old Koi Hai’ (John Ffrench, unpubd manuscript, National Army Museum), Ref. 9507–79. Written in 1989.

  15 Interview conducted with Sardar Ali by Youth Action, Blackburn and Darwen, 2012.

  16 Mohammed Khan, b. 1922. North West Sound Archive. Interviewed 7 June 2004. Ref. 2005. 0194A.

  17 Quoted in Christopher Somerville, Our War: How the British Commonwealth Fought the Second World War (London: Phoenix, 2005), p. 57. See also the transcripts of these interviews conducted by Christopher Somerville now held at the IWM.

  18 National Archives, Kew, FO 766/18. Colonel G. Betham (British minister in Nepal) to the Maharaja of Nepal, 2 Dec. 1940.

  19 Mary Des Chene, Relics of Empire: A Cultural History of the Gurkhas (PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1991), pp. 287–8.

  20 Bernard Pignede, The Gurungs (Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar, 1993), p. 253.

  21 Des Chene, Relics of Empire, p. 248.

  22 Gurkha Army Ex-Servicemen’s Organization et al., The Gurkhas: The Forgotten Veterans (Kathmandu: Gurkha Army Ex-Servicemen’s Organization, 2005), p. 50.

  23 For a general history of the Gurkhas, see Tony Gould, Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas (London: Granta Books, 1999) and Chris Bellamy, The Gurkhas: Special Force (London: John Murray, 2011). For related aspects of Nepal’s twentieth-century history, see Pratyoush Onta, The Politics of Bravery: A History of Nepali Nationalism (PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1996), and for an assessment of how Gurkhas have been depicted in the west, Lionel Caplan, Warrior Gentlemen: ‘Gurkhas’ in the Western Imagination (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995).

  24 This translation is from the Gurkha Museum, Pokhara, Nepal.

  3 Into the Middle East and North Africa

  1 Nila Kantan quoted in Christopher Somerville, Our War (London: Phoenix, 2005), p. 57.

  2 Krishna Kumar Tewari, A Soldier’s Voyage of Self-Discovery (Auroville: Tewari, 1995), p. 12.

  3 John Saville, Memoirs from the Left (Talgarth: Merlin, 2003), p. 56.

  4 ‘Memoirs of an old Koi Hai’ (John Ffrench, unpubd manuscript, National Army Museum) Ref. 9507–79. Written in 1989.

  5 Ashali Varma, The Victoria Cross: A Love Story (Delhi: Pearson, 2013), letter from Sudan, 16 Nov. 1940. This account is by his daughter and includes copies of the letters Premindra Singh Bhagat sent back to India.

  6 Indian Army Post Offices in the Second World War (New Delhi: Army Postal Service Association, 1982), p. 321.

  7 Varma, The Victoria Cross (The War in North Africa 1940–41).

  8 IOR L/Mil/17/5/2333 Matters of interest to Indian Soldiers and their families.

  9 IOR L/PJ/12/654 Censorship Reports, 5 Nov.–19 Nov. 1942.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Author’s interview with Mr Simar Narayan Singh, son of Harnarain Singh, Oct. 2011. He was a major during the war but later served as military secretary to the prime minister of India and was also military attaché in London.

  13 Bernard Pignede, The Gurungs (Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar, 1993), pp. 260–1.

  14 IOR L/PJ/5/188 FNR Twynam to Linlithgow, 12 Jan. 1940.

  15 Partha Sarathi Gupta, Radio and the Raj 1921–47 (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1995), pp. 33–5.

  16 Author’s communication with Sayeed Hasan Khan. See also Sayeed Hasan Khan, Across the Seas: Incorrigible Drift (Karachi: Ushba, 2013).

  17 IOR MSS E360/14 I. H. Macdonald, letter to parents, 28 March 1940.

  18 M. A. Quraishi, Indian Administration, Pre and Post Independence: Memoirs of an I.C.S. (Delhi: BR Publishing, 1985), pp. 86–7.

  19 IOR FNR, L/PJ/5/238 Punjab, first half of Jan. 1940.

  20 SWJN, vol. 11, p. 378. Nehru to Michael Carritt, 23 March 1940.

  21 IOR, FNR, L/PJ/5/238 Punjab, 1 Dec. 1939.

  22 Clive Branson, British Soldier in India: The Letters of Clive Branson (London: International Publishers, 1945), p. 24. Sept. 1942.

  23 Varma, The Victoria Cross, letter dated 10 Feb. 1941.

  4 Free and Willing Human Beings

  1 IOR L/PJ/12/500; IOR L/PJ/7/1715; MSS Eur C826 (1940) Udham Singh Papers. A number of hagiographies exist such as B. S. Maighowalia Sardar, Udham Singh: A Prince amongst Patriots of India (Hoshiarpur: Chhabra Printing Press, 1969). Trial transcripts are reproduced in Navtej Singh and Avtar Singh Jouhl (eds), Emergence of the Image: Redact Documents of Udham Singh (New Delhi: National Book Organisation, 2002).

  2 IOR/L/PJ/12/500 Udham Singh: activities outside India; assassination of Sir Michael O’Dwyer; trial, appeal and execution in London.

  3 Indians took part in the Battle of Britain as fighter pilots in the RAF. An Indian contingent of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, including a unit of the Bikaner State forces, served in France during the campaign on the Western Front, and some were evacuated from Dunkirk.

  4 Savitri Chowdhary, I Made My Home in England (Laindon: Grant-West, undated), pp. 50–2.

  5 Rozina Visram, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. 253.

  6 National Archives, Kew, MT 9/3423 SS Prome.

  7 Conditions of the Lascars are discussed in a number of books, including Gopalan Balachandran, Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c. 1870–1945 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Ravi Ahuja, ‘Networks of Subordination – Networks of the Subordinated: The Ordered Spaces of South Asian Maritime Labour in an Age of Imperialism (c. 1890–1947)’, in Ashwini Tambe and Harold Fischer-Tiné (eds), The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009).

  8 National Archives, Kew, MT 9/3423.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid.

  11 I am grateful to Nick Hewitt of the IWM for this information.

  12 Quoted in Georgie Wemyss, ‘Litoral Struggles, Liminal Lives: Indian Merchant Seafarers’ Resistances’, in Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee (eds), South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858–1947 (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 48.

  5 Not a Paisa, Not a Man

  1 Amery described Churchill’s reaction in his personal diary, quoted in Wm Roger Louis, In the Name of God Go! Leo Amery and the British Empire in the Age of Churchill (New York and London: Norton, 1992), p. 133.

  2 B. R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India, 1860–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 160–61. By the end of the war Britain owed India £1.3 billion.

  3 SWJN, vol. 11, pp. 275–7. Letter to Gandhi, 19 Aug. 1940.

  4 M. A. Quraishi, Indian Administration, p. 21, p. 33.

  5 Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), p. 284.

  6 William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 37.

  7 IOR L/PJ/7/3970.

  8 IOR L/PJ/12/655 Censorship reports dated 14–27 July 1943.

  9 IOR L/PJ/7/3970 Linlithgow to Provincial Governors, 9 Oct. 1940.

  10 Ibid., Linlithgow correspondence with Provincial Governors, 9 Oct. 1940; 24 Sept. 1940.

  11 This vacancy in the
Public Works in Punjab attracted only four British applicants, of whom only three appeared for interview. ‘The only one who has accepted and has arrived in India is the son of a retail grocer in Liverpool’, Craik complained, ‘and the impression of the Chief Engineer who has seen him is that he is entirely unsuitable.’ Craik to Linlithgow, 22 Nov. 1938 in Lionel Carter (ed.), Punjab Politics 1940–1943: Strains of War: Governors’ Fortnightly Reports and Other Key Documents (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005), p. 264.

  12 For discussions about the changing nature of the ICS see among others the work of Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–1950 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London: Hambledon, 1993), David C. Potter, India’s Political Administrators, 1919–1983 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), and William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India (London: Routledge, 2010).

  13 Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [hereafter CWMG], vol. 68, pp. 332–3, 28 March 1936.

  14 ‘Should India help the Commonwealth’s war effort?’: extracts from a speech by the Hon’ble Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, law member in the Central Legislative Assembly, on 18 Nov. 1940 (Accra, 1940).

  15 The Health Survey and Development Committee Report [hereafter the Bhore Report] (New Delhi: Government of India, 1946), p. 9.

  16 Aruna Asaf Ali, Fragments from the Past: Selected Writings and Speeches of Aruna Asaf Ali (New Delhi: Patriot Publishers, 1989); Asaf Ali papers in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; IOR files on Asaf Ali IOR/L/I/1/1269.