The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  When the wireless began broadcasting news of air attacks on London and the signing of a tripartite treaty between Japan, Italy, and Germany, Hiren-da made every effort not to gloat. By October at the latest, he said quietly, it would be all over. Britain would collapse and Stalin would demand that India be freed.

  At the end of September, the assembled shouted at the sight of Shahid Suhrawardy at the door. Despite all he had undergone in the last few months, his pince-nez was still firmly secured and his coiffed pate remained as sleek as a seal’s. He began by reading a lengthy letter addressed to the adda from Basanta Kumar Mallik, now back at Oxford. The war would not distract him from committing to paper his theory of conflict, Mallik-da wrote; the work must go on. The secret diarist was impatient for Shahid to get to the real story—his escape from Nazi-occupied Paris.

  When the Wehrmacht first marched in, Shahid began, the wireless went dead, the water, electricity, and gas were shut off, and the city was enveloped in a thick black smoke from burning fuel stocks. Once the Germans were in position at the major arterial crossings the connections were promptly restored. There was absolutely no resistance. Even the traffic police stayed at their posts. It took him three days to acquire one hundred liters of petrol and make his escape. Driving at night to avoid aircraft machine-gun fire, their caravan of vehicles raced through the countryside at high speeds. They were an assortment of Russian and Indian intellectuals, British generals, French citizens and Jews, all subsisting on nothing but fine red wine until they got to Bordeaux. There Shahid boarded a British vessel already filled with Jewish refugees, each having paid handsomely for a berth.

  Shahid spared a few words of praise for the British Navy, but it was the single-minded discipline of the Wehrmacht in Paris that he found remarkable. Only one restaurant in every arrondissement was open to them and hotels were entirely off limits. He saw no looting or any show of indiscipline, remarking only on the sight of German soldiers transfixed by the department store window displays.

  Listening intently, the adda’s resident Francophile disappeared in clouds of smoke, winding his chadder even more tightly round his neck as if to throttle himself. Sudhin had already heard most of it and was quiet. The adda diarist had heard Sudhin was suffering from an obscure malaise. His mother had even made a rare appearance, arriving from Hatibagan to check on him. It was the first time the diarist had ever seen her. She was said to be very traditional. Indeed, he noted, she was careful not to come into contact with the doorway curtain in fear of caste pollution. When Sudhin assured her he was feeling better, he lifted it up so she could pass through cleanly.

  October passed and still England hung on and there was not a peep from Stalin on the subject of India’s freedom. When someone ventured to speculate on Stalin’s motives, Hiren-da laughed.

  “Okay, fine,” Sudhin said sharply. “Why don’t you enlighten us?”

  Where Susobhan argued that Stalin was simply using his pact with Hitler to buy time to prepare Russia for war with Germany, Hiren-da believed England was Soviet Russia’s real enemy and India her natural ally. If Stalin hadn’t as yet demanded India’s freedom, Hiren-da supposed it was only because he didn’t want to impugn India’s self-respect.

  “Stalin knows that Britain’s hold on its colonies can be loosened only by attacking London. Oppressed people everywhere are fed up and desperate. Any opening will create opportunities for socialism to flourish.” The adda diarist looked at Sudhin for his reply.

  “It is absurd to think that the people of India will tolerate Soviet Communism,” Sudhin said. Apurba piped up, red faced and indignant.

  “Do you think our rulers are any less cruel and ruthless than the Nazis?”

  “There is nothing as barbaric as Nazi brutality in the whole of human history,” Sudhin said, his voice breaking into a high pitch. “What can be more heartless than indiscriminately eliminating a large section of people who have built up the nation over the centuries, just because they are Jews?” Boatloads of Jews had arrived in Calcutta with Shahid Suhrawardy, their faces worn with exhaustion. “I will take you to a man in this city, a peaceful, learned man who never had anything to do with politics and whose only luxury was collecting art. They seized ten of his paintings and forced him to leave Germany destitute! What can be more barbaric than this?”

  “You have no idea of the sort of torture practiced by our civilized rulers on the Chittagong revolutionaries,” Apurba replied heatedly. “They are the real barbarians—do you know how much pleasure they derived from tying up people’s hands and feet and inserting chilies into their orifices? Have you heard of how, in village after village, the young and old, whether human or animal, were locked up in their homes and burnt alive?”

  “Whatever you may say, I am talking about a people uprooted wholesale from their homeland.”

  However much he despaired over the state of Calcutta, Sudhin Datta could not imagine a worse fate than exile. Granted, the British were obtuse fools. What would it have cost them to acknowledge India’s right to self-rule? Nothing. But he was now deeply concerned about Jinnah’s designs on Bengal. He hoped Gandhi’s call for a return to satyagraha would cut the ground from under the Muslim League. Chosen individuals had been enlisted to read out seditious statements to court imprisonment; Nehru was one of the first to be arrested. He had just begun a four-year prison sentence.

  “Muslims in Madras are doing satyagraha now,” Sudhin said. Any expression of solidarity from Muslims was a sign of hope.

  “Gandhi will lose his nerve,” Hiren-da predicted. A number of his Communist comrades were signing the satyagraha pledge with the sole intention of exposing Gandhi’s nonviolent strategy as toothless. Muslims might well be doing the same.

  Sudhin had it from a reliable source that Germany intended to apply more economic pressure on England before attempting an invasion. He prayed England could hold them off.

  “It won’t be easy to separate England from its empire and its enormous resources spread all across the globe,” Hiren-da responded, impressed despite himself that England was still standing, three months into the Blitz.

  Nether Worton House, Worton, Oxfordshire,

  Spring 1941

  At first glance a pocket stereoscope looks like a pair of metal spectacles standing upright like a tiny table, on four stems rather than two. Two round apertures are fitted with magnifying lenses; an indentation accommodates a nose. The device would be placed on a desk over a pair of images. A photographic interpreter would then hunch over to peer through the lenses, manipulating the images with his hands until that moment when the two views of the object of interest, taken from two slightly different bases, pop up in three dimensions.

  Here one has to pull back and imagine a far larger stereoscope, one fitted with lenses of a magnifying power as yet unknown, so as to square London’s view of the war with Calcutta’s. This would require a photograph of the war be taken from each city and placed under the stereoscope so as to obtain a three-dimensional view. In the spring of 1941 Michael Spender’s uncle, Sir George Ernest Schuster MP, had a similar idea.

  India’s former finance minister was then in the feverish throes of completing his magnum opus, India and Democracy. The Times and the Spectator carried his editorials on how to break the viceroy’s deadlock with Congress. His pet proposal addressed just this misalignment of Indian and English views. A representative Indian, he suggested, should be invited to London to witness the courageous spirit awakened by the Blitz. By seeing the British people and the war they were fighting from nearly the same angle as George Schuster saw it, such an Indian might better convey to India that England, and all it stood for, was worth fighting for.

  And what did England stand for? The image of London’s elegant terraced streets reduced to rubble had wholly eclipsed the shame of the Munich Agreement. For the Ministry of Information there was no better propaganda for visiting American dignitaries apt to question the legitimacy of the British Empire than a night of bombing. Those envoys
to Berlin who, two years before, had treated the Reich Chancellor’s designs on Austria and Czechoslovakia as not entirely illegitimate, those statesmen who had proposed bartering a French or Portuguese colony here or there in exchange for business as usual, were never mentioned. Winston Churchill was the man of the hour. If only India would see it.

  Upon his appointment as viceroy Linlithgow had received a lecture from a cranky backbencher whose political career was said to be finished. Any effort to open channels between the Congress Party and the Muslim League, this MP said, was to his mind “distressing and repugnant in the last degree.” Winston Churchill hadn’t been setting India policy then. Now he was and for him, the solemn promise of Commonwealth status for India was one that might be endlessly deferred. “As you have laid it down yourself,” Amery reminded him, the basis of British policy was to insist “Indian divisions and not our refusal to surrender authority [was] holding back India’s march towards the ‘declared goal.’” Amery assured him he could hold the line.

  But the line wasn’t holding. Time magazine was openly skeptical. The New York Daily News was talking of “Imperialistic exploitation” and portraying Gandhi as the “greatest single man in India.” Eleanor Roosevelt, friendly with a journalist who had Gandhi’s ear, was pressing her husband on the subject. FDR’s secretary of state, in turn, pressed the British ambassador. Where was India in the “partnership of Nations”? Repeating the ritual invocation, the ambassador cited the Hindu-Muslim deadlock.

  Once blithely indifferent to the impact of the price of salt on the Bengali peasant, Sir George Schuster was now more receptive to India’s plight. England took India too much for granted, he said. He lay awake at night wondering how best to mobilize the spirit of India. He had visions of Nehru and Gandhi addressing crowds of hundreds of thousands, whipping up war enthusiasm in native hearts. “What a story that might be!”

  On top of India’s spiritual wealth, there was also the more pressing question of its material contribution. As Sir George was then working in war production, this was paramount; no one understood India’s critical importance as well as he did. Here was India’s chance to become an arsenal of democracy, to join the ranks of the great industrial powers, equal to any in the Commonwealth, including, he dared say, Great Britain. Nearly two years into the war it was a scandal that India’s total expenditures were only up 30 percent. Uncle George had this from Leo Amery. Blessed with the largest high-grade iron ore deposits in the world, India somehow had less than 1 percent of America’s industry. The manufacture of automobiles and aircraft remained a distant dream; even wireless sets and power tools had to be imported. “Can anyone be satisfied that India’s possible contribution has yet been visualised on anything approaching the full scale?” Sir George asked. What was the holdup? The Americans had wondered the same thing, eventually sending over a captain of industry to find out.

  Crisscrossing the subcontinent, John Auden was writing feasibility reports on various hydroelectric schemes, while bemoaning his rejection by the RAF. The GSI director had penned a confidential memo suggesting steel mills be constructed near coal-fired power stations, such as the one at Ranigunj. But if attached to existing reservoirs, hydroelectric power stations fed by the great rivers cascading from the Himalaya might supply electricity even more cheaply. John imagined he was working on behalf of a postwar India, but the groundwork being laid for a manifold increase in India’s industrial capacity was not for India’s defense and well-being but the empire’s.

  Sir George posed a delicate question: were British industrial interests perhaps fearful of an unfettered India? He knew very well they were. The tycoon in charge of aircraft production suspected Amery of conspiring to produce “Baboo” aeroplanes. But England was now fighting for its life, Sir George argued. Congress must be made to understand that England’s war aims were in complete accord with India’s aspirations. There was only one man who could invite India to be an equal partner. Only one man could convince Nehru and Gandhi that England was in earnest. One speech from Winston Churchill could have as catalytic an impact on India as it had on the home front.

  “He need only tell the truth,” Sir George implored, “truth as to the urgency of the peril—truth that this is India’s war as much as ours—truth as to the greatness of India’s opportunity—truth as to the British people’s desire to see India grasp this opportunity to rise to her full stature, and then take her place as one of the most powerful partners in our Commonwealth—a British Commonwealth now, but to be enlarged, it may be, to a wider family of free nations when the war is over.”

  49C Hazra Road, Ballygunj, Calcutta,

  March 18, 1941

  Sudhin was in the middle of an argument with Protap Bonnerjee when Minnie Bonnerjee arrived with M. N. Roy and his wife. Everyone rose. Roy was unshaven and disheveled, as if he hadn’t seen a barber in some time. Recent personal attacks had clearly taken a toll.

  After the fall of Paris Roy, too, had had a change of heart. Neutrality was no longer an option. He’d called for Congress to join a global mass mobilization against fascism, without preconditions. For his efforts, he was derided as a British lackey and condemned as a traitor and a quisling. Nehru stripped him of his Congress membership for a year. “How do I become less of a patriot,” he responded angrily, “less of a freedom fighter by supplying a spade to Mr. Winston Churchill, to dig the very grave of the British Empire he has sworn never to liquidate?” This was a war of attrition, he argued; England had a chance to prevail but its empire would never survive. No one was listening. He’d been away too long.

  Sudhin asked Roy if the Germans were using the confiscated wealth of the Jews to buy raw materials to sustain their war effort. Roy’s wife piped up. Loans advanced by London banks before the war enabled Germany to stockpile raw materials.

  “Let us have tea rather than talk,” her husband interrupted. “We have come here to have tea.” As if to make up for his rudeness, Roy praised the chire bhaja.

  Once again, the secret diarist wrote, the great revolutionary wasn’t going to join any serious discussion with nobodies like them. But he was pleased to get a closer look at the man. He sketched a mental cartoon; with a slight exaggeration of Roy’s teeth and his wild crop of hair, he might get a good likeness. Roy’s foreign wife switched subjects.

  “My husband is quite indifferent to a woman’s looks. He can scarcely tell one from another.”

  “That is why we are such good friends,” Minnie replied, laughing.

  Sudhin was taking a book from his bookshelf when yet another Bonnerjee sister arrived.

  “Carry on,” Anila said. “I am in a quandary over a baby bear—I can’t think of what to feed him.” Anila, like Minnie, talked too much, the diarist noted.

  “Ask Uncle Joe,” Sudhin said, nodding at Anila’s Pushkin scholar, a Stalinist, sprawled on one of the sheet-covered mattresses.

  “Or Rosa Luxemburg,” Uncle Joe parried, indicating Roy’s wife, a German Jew.

  “Why worry, when M. N. Roy is here?” someone else suggested, with shocking irreverence. The diarist was trying not to look at Roy to see if he had heard when Anila sat down next to him. He told her he had twice tried to tame bear cubs but each time they burrowed into the floor of their cages and escaped.

  But before he could continue, the geologist brother of the poet arrived with his pregnant wife. The adda was now officially overrun with women, he thought, grumpily. Lindsay Emmerson was said to have recently proposed to Minnie over the telephone. After accepting, she asked, “Who is this?” All that remained now, the diarist reflected, was for Anila to marry her Pushkin scholar. Then three out of four Bonnerjee sisters would have married Englishmen. Sheila Auden had begun the trend; he supposed babies were next.

  It had taken Sheila Bonnerjee’s departure for Bombay in November 1939 for John to think of marrying her. Her exhibition had been a great success. Her letters had been full of soirees at the homes of wealthy and cultured Parsees. There was a dance hosted by a ba
ronet and a dinner with an industrialist from the Tata family. John became haunted by the fear that she’d meet and marry a rich Parsee. Engaged just after Christmas, they were wed in February 1940.

  When John wrote his mother that he had married Sheila Bonnerjee her response was so mild he was sure she hadn’t understood. He wrote again. “I quite realized that Sheila is an Indian,” Constance Rosalie replied, telling him that people treated the subject rather differently nowadays. Though she was pleased to learn that the Bonnerjees were high-caste Brahmins, she did hope Sheila would become a Christian. As far as having children, she felt it might be better if they didn’t, but of course it was up to them. A baby was expected in May; Constance Rosalie died in her sleep not long after receiving a photograph of her granddaughter.

  “Since I began coming to this adda membership has been dwindling,” Minnie observed, when the talk turned desultory. It was true; the adda was withering away. The diarist was not alone in blaming the women for that.

  “Perhaps I should stop coming,” Minnie prodded. Silence descended.

  “We value quality over quantity,” the diarist finally said, gallantly.

  At the same time Rabindranath Tagore was dying, as if some mystical connection bound Parichay adda, Tagore, together with the fate of Bengal. Sudhin was preparing a Parichay festschrift on the poet; they were all working on essays. Even more unexpected, Sudhin had taken to praising Hiren-da, remarking that many were saying that given his rhetorical gifts he was Bengal’s only hope. Hiren-da ignored him. Privately, Sudhin was convinced the world had gone stark raving mad and even so drastic a remedy as communism couldn’t cure it. The times seemed to call for a more cosmic disruption, he told John, a large die-off like the mass extinctions evident in the geological record. With Nehru’s imprisonment, the quick collapse of Gandhi’s satyagraha, and the resurgence of the Muslim League under Shaheed in Bengal, it seemed unlikely Bengal would survive the war intact.