The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  11 Thirty Months Too Late

  1 The Statesman, 16 March 1942.

  2 George Orwell, Orwell and Politics (London: Penguin, 2001), Orwell Diary, 14 March 1942; Nicholas Owen, ‘The Cripps Mission of 1942: A Reinterpretation’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 30, no. 1 (2002), p. 79. See also R. J. Moore on the Cripps Mission in Churchill, Cripps and India, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

  3 Derision of the Cripps mission on the Azad Fauj radio service may also have been influential. See Jane Robbins, ‘The Radio Battle for India’, Japan Forum 7, no. 2 (1995), p. 218.

  4 Statesman, 31 March 1942.

  5 Statesman, 12 April 1942. My analysis is in agreement with the assessment of Nicholas Owen, who also emphasises the centrality of the defence portfolio. As he writes, ‘Congress was in no position to accept the Cripps Offer unless it conceded a real and far-reaching transfer of power, sufficient to negotiate peace terms with the Japanese if it proved necessary’.

  6 Quoted in Wm Roger Louis, In the Name of God Go! (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 151.

  7 Ibid., p. 133. This article unpicks the subtle and complex relationship between Amery and Churchill but also draws attention to some of Churchill’s more extreme views about India. See also Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

  8 J. Ahmad (ed.), Speeches and Writings of Mr Jinnah, vol. 2 (Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1964), p. 245.

  9 Ibid., p. 230. Presidential address of Jinnah, March 1940.

  10 M. A. Quraishi, Indian Administration (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1985), p. 71.

  11 See, for example, Ian Talbot, ‘The Role of the Crowd in the Muslim League Struggle for Pakistan’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21, no. 2 (1993): 307–33. Also the work of Ayesha Jalal and David Gilmartin on the development of the Muslim League.

  12 Allana (ed.), Pakistan Movement: Historic Documents, p. 255. Resolution of Working Committee, 17 June 1940.

  13 See for example on the Khaksars, Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu in Mid-Twentieth-Century India and Pakistan (London: Routledge, 2006), and Markus Daechsel, ‘Scientism and its discontents: the Indo-Muslim Fascism of Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqui’, Modern Intellectual History 3, no. 3 (2006). There is an extensive literature on the development of right-wing Hindu groups including the work of Christophe Jaffrelot, Thomas Blom Hansen and William Gould. On wartime paramilitary groups and militias, there is the forthcoming work of Ali Raza and Franziska Roy.

  14 CSAS, Ram Krishna, interviewed by Uma Shanker in 1987.

  15 Figure quoted in Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 183.

  16 Life, 12 May 1941. On the economic and political transformations of Indian princely states see Ian Copland’s excellent account in The Princes of India, pp. 183–228. Also, the studies by Janaki Nair and Barbara Ramusack.

  17 TOP, vol. 2, p. 216. Amery to Linlithgow, 16 June 1942.

  18 B. L. Raina, Official History of the Indian Armed Forces in the Second World War (1939–45): Medical Services, Administration (New Delhi: Combined Inter-Services Historical Section, 1990 [first published 1953]), p. 418.

  12 Welcome to Bombay

  1 The number of British troops stationed in India rose from 43,000 in 1939 to 240,000 in 1945; while by 1943 American members of the forces in India were estimated to number 120,000.

  2 Welcome to Bombay, 1945, p. 3.

  3 John Saville, Memoirs from the Left (Talgarth: Merlin, 2003), p. 57.

  4 Thomas Ray Foltz, ‘My Life as a GI Joe in World War II’, http://cbi-theater-1.home.comcast.net.

  5 Clive Branson, British Soldier in India (London: International Publishers, 1945), p. 9. 31 May 1942.

  6 Frank Moraes, Witness to an Era (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p. 111.

  7 E. E. Prebble, ‘Venereal Disease in India’, Sexually Transmitted Infections 22, no. 2 (June 1946), pp. 55–62.

  8 See Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  9 IOR L/WS/1/1357 Morale of British troops in India.

  10 Nonetheless, some Indian politicians made direct appeals for US intervention. J. P. Narayan made a long appeal to US servicemen mentioning his own education and time spent in the USA: ‘tell folks the true state of affairs here’. See P. N. Chopra and S. R. Bakshi (eds.), Quit India Movement: British Secret Documents (New Delhi: Interprint, 1986), p. 401.

  11 On US–British relations over the Indian question during the Second World War and the details of the Johnson mission see Kenton Clymer, Quest for Freedom: The United States and India’s Independence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

  12 Quoted in Tom Pocock, Alan Moorehead (London: Pimlico/Random House, 2011). The India Office noted internally: ‘It is not an easy matter for the authorities in India to “handle” these American correspondents’ and that policy should be to ‘nurse them as much as possible’. See IOR L/I/803 American Journalists and Photographers in India, 14 Oct. 1941.

  13 Douglas Devaux Collection (AFC/2001/001/89168), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.

  14 Hellbird Herald, 20 Feb. 1945.

  15 Ibid.

  16 E. E. Prebble, ‘Venereal Disease in India’, Sexually Transmitted Infections 22, no. 2 (1946), p. 56.

  17 IOR L/PJ/12/654, 1942.

  18 IOR FNR L/PJ/5/205 Hope to Linlithgow, 25 Jan. 1942.

  19 Ibid.

  20 CWMG, vol. 82, p. 129. Letter to Desmond Young, 21 March 1942.

  21 IOR MSS E360/14 I. H. Macdonald, letter to parents, 25 Feb. 1943.

  22 NARA US Consulate New Delhi, Classified General Records 1943: 800–1943: 181.33, Box 9. Memorandum, 6 Feb. 1943.

  23 Nico Slate, Colored Cosmospolitanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 134.

  24 IOR L/WS/1/1433 anonymous quote from a letter by a British officer, India Internal Intelligence Summary, 10 April 1942.

  25 IOR L/WS/1/1357 Morale of British troops in India, 1943.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Ibid.

  29 National Archives, Kew, WO 32/10664, On the formation of the WAC (I). The WAC (I) had been formed in April 1942 in the midst of the crisis surrounding the fall of Burma and the bombing of India’s coastline.

  30 IOR MSS F309/1 Ralli Diary. One afternoon, on her way home from cipher work in Government House, Sydney Ralli saw a crowd at the gate outside Birla House. Above the crowd, she glimpsed Nehru standing on the bumper of a car talking to the people and stopped her car: ‘Dressed in spotless rough kaddar he was most impressive. He spoke with few small gestures. His eyes looked sunken and his face with deep troughs in it. He looked older than the numerous press photographs of him show.’

  31 IOR MSS Eur C394 Veronica Downing memoir.

  32 W. J. Slim, Defeat into Victory (London: Pan, 2009), pp. 230–1.

  33 IBT Roundup, Oct. 1942.

  34 Advertisement in The Statesman, 11 March 1942. On the career of the jazz musician Teddy Weatherford and his wartime popularity in Calcutta, see Brendan Koerner, Piano Demon (New York: The Atavist, 2011).

  35 IOR MSS E360/14 I. H. Macdonald, letter to parents, 19 May 1941.

  36 Santha Rama Rau, Home to India (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), pp. 33–4.

  37 NARA, Consul New Delhi, General Records, 1942: 820.02–1942: 830, Box 13. Correspondence between the American Consul in Karachi and Howard Donovan, US Consul, 3–16 Oct. 1942.

  38 NARA, 811.11–840.6, Box 33. The contemporary novel Coolie by Mulk Raj Anand also describes a large billboard of Marlene Dietrich in Bombay. ‘Her large eyes and long lashes seductively askance, her milk-white body naked save for a pearly bodice and a pearl loincloth.’ Coolie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 157.

  13 Plantations and Paddy Fields

  1 A. H. Pilcher, Navvies to the Fourteen
th Army (Calcutta: Private Circulation, c. 1945), p. 3.

  2 Ibid., p. 14.

  3 John Tamraz’s contemporary report quoted in Leslie Anders, The Ledo Road (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), p. 44.

  4 IOR MSS Eur F174/1309 Indian Tea Association report on the evacuation of troops and civilians from Burma by the Pangsau route, May to July 1942.

  5 Geoffrey Tyson, Forgotten Frontier (Calcutta: W. H. Targett, 1945).

  6 NARA, Records of Adjutant General, General Correspondence, 702–720, Box 87. Prohibition of cultivation at Chakulia, 21 June 1943.

  7 IOR L/PJ/5/150 FNR Bengal, 25 Feb. 1942.

  8 Vinita Damodaran, Broken Promises: Popular Protest, Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar, 1935–46 (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 212.

  9 IOR L/PJ/12/654.

  10 Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal (Delhi: Government of India, 1945), p. 27. Numerous issues over the use of land for military purposes arose in the 1940s, including the issues of ownership and rights of use, such as temples, stalls and shops encroaching on military land. See NAI, Defence Department, military indexes, 1941–5.

  11 IOR FNR L/PJ/5/149 Herbert to Linlithgow, 8 May 1942. Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (London: Hurst, forthcoming 2015), particularly chapter two on detail of denial policies in Bengal. See also, Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal (Delhi: Government of India, 1945).

  12 TOP, vol. 2, p. 418. Compensation arrangements for requisitioning.

  13 Quoted in Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal.

  14 NARA, Calcutta Consulate, 1943: 815.4–820.08, Box 127.

  15 IOR FNR, L/PJ/5/149.

  16 Facts about Indian ‘National’ Shipping (Bombay: Indian Annalist, 1941).

  17 NARA, Calcutta Consulate, 1943: 815.4–820.08, Box 127, Birla Brothers to Supply Department. This file contains other appeals by firms against requisitioning.

  18 CWMG, vol. 82, p. 199. Article in Harijan, 19 April 1942.

  19 IOR V/27/600/9 The American Technical Mission to India [Grady Report], Delhi, July 1942. For discussions about the British reaction to the report and decision to keep it confidential, IOR L/I/8/106. See also Henry Grady, The Memoirs of Ambassador Henry F. Grady: From the Great War to the Cold War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009).

  20 Syed Babar Ali, interviewed by Markus Daechsel in Lahore, 2007.

  21 NARA, Calcutta Consulate General Records 1944: 814.3–822B, Box 143.

  22 Reverse Lend-Lease was the granting of goods and services to US forces by the British Indian government without wartime payment, in exchange for the US military presence. While no official report has yet been received from the Government of India, our Army reports total expenditures by India for reverse lend-lease aid of approximately $56,900,000, divided as follows: Military stores and equipment $5,421,000; Transportation and communication $3,161,000; Petroleum products $13,127,000: Construction $31,413,000; Subsistence $3,778,000; Total $56,900,000. We have received aviation gasoline, motor gasoline and lubricating oil, and lesser amounts of other petroleum products from the Indian Government for use by American forces. A part of the motor fuel has been used in a number of trucks and passenger cars given our troops without payment as reverse lend-lease aid. In addition, United States Army groups have been afforded postal, telegraph, and telephone facilities, water and electric power, furnishings for buildings, and items of clothing, including mosquito- and gas-proof outfits. President Roosevelt’s Report to Congress on Reverse Lend-Lease, 11 Nov. 1943.

  23 CWMG, vol. 81, pp. 98–9. 18 Sept. 1941.

  24 NARA, Calcutta Consulate General Records 1944: 814.3–822B, Box 143.

  25 Personal recollections quoted in Gita Paramal, ‘How M. S. Oberoi became India’s Greatest Hotelier’, The Smart Manager, 21 Oct. 2005.

  26 IOR/L/E/8/1711 Establishment of an aircraft manufacturing industry in India; Pawley–Walchand Scheme, Dec. 1939–Apr. 1943. See also G. D. Khanolkar, Walchand Hirachand, pp. 360–74.

  27 Indian pilots in the RAF flew missions across France, Germany, North Africa and the Middle East.

  28 ‘Memories of No. 8 Squadron, IAF’ by T. J. Thomas (1981), http://www. bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/History­/1940s/TJThomas.html, accessed 2011.

  29 ‘My days with the IAF (1940–48)’ by V. S. C. Bonarjee (1997), http://www.bharat-r­akshak.com/IAF/History­/1940s/VSCBonarjee.html, accessed 2011.

  30 IOR, FNR, L/PJ/5/204. Madras, 23 Dec. 1941.

  31 TOP, vol. 2, p. 87. Amery to Linlithgow, 15 May 1942; p. 141, Amery to Linlithgow, 28 May 1942.

  32 Clive Branson, British Soldier in India (London: International Publishers, 1945), p. 15. 20 June 1942.

  33 Quoted in Charles Romanus and Riley Sunderland, Stilwell’s Mission to China (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1953), p. 207.

  14 Living Dangerously

  1 My account is largely based on National Archives, Kew, KV 2/2510, Security Service files on Menon. See also, Menon’s wartime writings, Why Must India Fight? (London: The India League, c. 1940) and India, Britain and Freedom. (London: The India League, 1942). Biographies include Janaki Ram, V. K. Krishna Menon: A Personal Memoir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), and T. J. S. George, Krishna Menon: A Biography (London: Cape, 1965).

  2 National Archives, Kew, KV 2/2510, Security Service files on Menon, 26 Feb. 1942.

  3 National Archives, Kew, KV 2/2510, Security Service files on Menon, 2 March 1942.

  4 National Archives, Kew, KV 2/2510, Security Service files on Menon, 18 May 1942.

  5 Indivar Kamtekar, ‘The Shiver of 1942’, Studies in History 18, no. 1 (2002), pp. 81–102.

  6 IOR, FNR, L/PJ/5/204 Hope to Linlithgow, 23 July 1942.

  7 Nehru and Azad both believed that Gandhi thought the Japanese would win in 1942.

  8 CWMG, vol. 82, p. 257. Harijan, 10 May 1942.

  9 Aruna Asaf Ali, ‘Memories of 1942’, in Aruna Asaf Ali, Fragments From the Past: Selected Writings and Speeches of Aruna Asaf Ali (New Delhi: Patriot Publishers, 1989).

  10 CSAS, Sucheta Kripalani, interviewed by Uma Shanker in 1974.

  11 Azad, India Wins Freedom, p. 88.

  12 Raghavan (ed.), M. Asaf Ali’s Memoirs, pp. 248–9. Prison diary dated 31 Aug. 1942.

  13 There is an extensive literature on the Quit India movement with many regional studies and also a great deal of published documentation. See for example, Francis Hutchins, India’s Revolution: Gandhi and the Quit India Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), Gyanendra Pandey (ed.), The Indian Nation in 1942 (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences/K.P. Bagchi, 1988), Vinita Damodaran, Broken Promises: Popular Protest, Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar, 1935–46 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Bidyut Chakrabarty, Local Politics and Indian Nationalism: Midnapur, 1919–1944 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997).

  14 Chitra P. Mehta, I Fought for My Country’s Freedom (Bombay: Hamara Hindoostan Publications, 1946).

  15 P. N. Chopra and S. R. Bakshi (eds), Quit India Movement: British Secret Documents (New Delhi: Interprint, 1986), p. 184. Interception of correspondence in Bengal, 24 Sept. 1942.

  16 Ibid., Quit India Movement: British Secret Documents, pp. 321–4. Letter of Trilochan Senapati, 2 July 1943, translated from Oriya. Senapati was arrested within a month of writing this letter but went on to become a Member of the Legislative Assembly in post-Independence Orissa.

  17 CSAS, Sucheta Kripalani, interviewed by Uma Shanker in 1974.

  18 Syamalendu Sengupta, Gautam Chatterjee, and National Archives of India, Secret Congress Broadcasts and Storming Railway Tracks during Quit India Movement (New Delhi: Navrang, 1988).

  19 Quoted in Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 367.

  20 Aruna Asaf Ali, A Life Sketch (Lahore: New India Publications, 1947), p. 18.

  21 Kudaisya, The Life and Times of G. D. Bir
la, p. 206; G. D. Khanolkar, Walchand Hirachand, p. 593.

  22 CSAS, S. M. Y. Sastri, interviewed by Arun Gandhi in 1970.

  23 CSAS, B. C. Dutt, interviewed by Arun Gandhi in 1970.

  24 CSAS, Sucheta Kripalani, interviewed by Uma Shanker in 1974.

  25 Quoted in Paul Greenough, ‘Political Mobilization and the Underground Literature of the Quit India Movement, 1942–44’, Modern Asian Studies 17, no. 03 (1983): 353–86.

  26 IOR L/PJ/12/654 Censorship Reports. Letter from a family to a Sepoy, 28 Oct. 1942.

  27 IOR L/PJ/12/654 Censorship Reports. Aug.–Sept. 1942.

  28 Examples of Japanese propaganda for use among Indian civilians and soldiers are included in IOR/L/PJ/12/480, activities of Indians in Japan and Japanese propaganda in India. See also illustrations, http://www.kingscollections.org, the cartoon in wartime propaganda, and http://www.psywarrior.com.

  29 IOR L/PJ/12/654 Censorship Reports. Aug. 1942.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Bikram Singh and Sidharth Mishra (eds), Where Gallantry is Tradition (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1997), p. 163.

  32I32IOR L/PJ/12/654 Censorship Reports. Sept.–Oct. 1942.

  33 Clive Branson, British Soldier in India, p. 19. 20 Aug. 1942.

  34 CSAS, Nilubhai Limaye interviewed by Uma Shanker in 1970.

  35 Ibid.

  36 IOR L/PJ/12/654 26 Aug.–1 Sept. 1942 inclusive.

  37 Later in the war, The Times of London would advertise a new book about the Northern Irishman John Nicolson, The Hero of Delhi, who ruthlessly suppressed the 1857 uprising, as ‘a tale to inspire England today’. The Times, 10 March 1944. And Indian nationalists also invoked the mutiny, for instance, Abdul Qayyum Khan suggesting if Gandhi died there would be disorder on the scale of 1857. See P. N. Chopra and S. R. Bakshi (eds), Quit India Movement: British Secret Documents, p. 288. The language of the INA was also suffused with references to 1857, such as the name of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment.

  38 Quoted in Taylor Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2012), p. x.

  39 Francis Hutchins, India’s Revolution, p. 177.