The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  Shahid Suhrawardy was among the adda’s Muslims. He had shared Sudhin’s hope that the Muslim leaders of the Punjab and Bengal might derail Jinnah’s call for the creation of Pakistan. If a majority of Muslims in these two provinces could be won over, Jinnah’s plan would fall on its face, it was thought. Now that seemed wishful, in large part due to his own brother.

  Sudhin blamed Shaheed Suhrawardy for actively manipulating genuine Muslim grievances to shore up his flailing political career and tighten the Muslim League’s hold on Bengal. British commercial concerns, equally invested in fanning and financing Muslim unrest, were among his patrons. The British governor appointed him to powerful positions. No one needed to be reminded of how Viceroy Curzon had purchased the support of a powerful Muslim nobleman of Dacca for the 1905 partition of Bengal with a loan of one hundred thousand pounds.

  Jinnah’s dream of Pakistan was beginning to feel inevitable.

  “It’s not as if the Muslims of India are limited to Bengal or the Punjab,” Sudhin protested; they were everywhere. “The entire notion is impractical.” Did Jinnah imagine that both provinces would be his? What would that even look like? Bengal was more than a thousand miles from the Punjab. He feared Jinnah was prepared to incite a civil war between Hindus and Muslims to get his way. The man compromised with no one, Sudhin said, neither the viceroy nor Gandhi.

  “Perhaps only communism can unite us,” another of the adda’s Muslims said, looking quite defeated.

  “If India were to become more of an industrial power than a rural one,” Sudhin said, “perhaps socialism might have a chance.” Hiren-da was quiet.

  When someone mentioned Subhas Bose, everyone wanted to know where he was hiding. After feigning illness to get out of jail, he had escaped from house arrest. Everyone at the adda was eager to speculate. Someone said he had disguised himself as a Sikh and was now in Japan raising an army to march on India. At the mention of Japan, the adda diarist piped up.

  “Our firm is giving greater importance than ever to the export of manganese and iron to Japan.” This was the last entry in what survives of his secret diary.

  And so, as late as March 18, 1941, at least one English firm in Calcutta was still selling iron and manganese to Japan. Japan was believed to be China’s problem. Even the governor of Bengal couldn’t figure out what Japan was up to. With the best Indian divisions off fighting Germans in the North African desert, or marooned in the foothills of the Hindu Kush awaiting the Russians, the real danger to the empire had yet to be divined.

  Hatibagan, 129 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta,

  December 23, 1941

  Sudhin at thirty-nine was considered too old to be eligible for military duty, so he accepted a post as deputy officer-in-charge of Air Raid Precautions (ARP), relinquishing the adda to the Communists and stepping down from the editorship of Parichay. The end of Sudhin’s adda meant that when the Blitz ended abruptly that May there was no one to note Susobhan Sarkar’s thoughts on Hitler’s decision not to invade England. And when, on June 22, the Wehrmacht suddenly began its march on Moscow, there was no one to ask Hiren-da whether Stalin still planned to come to India’s rescue. Finally, in a development too head snapping for many to absorb, when the viceroy lifted the ban on the Communist Party, Hiren-da began calling on everyone to support the Allied fight against the Fascists. The Popular Front was dead and once again Gandhi and Congress represented the voices of the petit bourgeois, the baboos.

  Nor would there be anyone to record Sudhin’s response to the death of Rabindranath Tagore on August 7, 1941. As the barbarity reached new levels in the heart of Europe, Tagore had also suffered a loss of faith. Before his death he had voiced the anguish for which Sudhin could no longer find the words.

  “I had hoped that the leaders of the British nation, who had grown apathetic to our suffering and forgetful of their own sacred trust in India … would at last, in the time of their own great trial, awake to the justice and humanity of our cause,” Tagore wrote in a letter to Bishop Foss Wescott. “It has been a most grievous disappointment to me to find that fondly cherished hope receding farther and farther from realization each day.”

  By the end of 1941, Sudhin had returned to live with the joint family at Hatibagan and threw himself into his work at Air Raid Precautions. By then England had been forcibly reminded that it had an empire to defend. Twenty light bombers were all that were on hand to meet the Japanese attack on December 10 off the coast of Malaya that left the prize battleships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, on the bottom of the South China Sea, along with a hundred thousand tons of merchant shipping. Two weeks later, Rangoon was bombed, sending a cascade of refugees towards Calcutta. Hong Kong surrendered on Christmas Day.

  “[Should India] be attacked and find herself without any of the necessary materials and equipment for defence, the political effect would be disastrous,” the newly appointed commander-in-chief of the Indian Army had warned Churchill four months before. His predecessor had requested tanks to make up at least one armored division but the prime minister had demurred, asking him, “How do you know that they wouldn’t turn and fire the wrong way?” Two million raw British recruits were sent to India instead, not to defend it, but to maintain law and order.

  Exactly one year after the viceroy’s “August Offer” of 1940, Roosevelt and Churchill had signed the Atlantic Charter. The second clause of the third point read, “Sovereign rights and self-government may be restored to those from whom it has been forcibly removed.” FDR and Churchill were thinking of those countries occupied by the Axis powers, but that was not how the Atlantic Charter was read in India. When, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt raised the question of India with him directly, Churchill threw one of those spectacular tantrums so familiar to Leo Amery. When it came to India, Amery confided to his diary, the PM was “really not quite normal.” FDR backed down.

  But the question of whether the charter applied to India could not be so easily brushed off. At the end of the year Churchill stood before the House of Commons to proclaim in language calculated to set India on fire: “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” The following morning the entire War Cabinet looked down their noses while Churchill launched into an apoplectic rant at the humiliating prospect of being kicked out of India by “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans.” He wasn’t referring to the Japanese.

  In these months of upheaval Sudhin disappeared from view, throwing himself into the task of readying bomb shelters and conducting ARP training sessions. Even in happier times his closest friends often found Sudhin inaccessible, his true feelings masked by a warm yet enigmatic smile. When his beloved father passed away and Hatibagan filled with weeping women this smile, combined with his navy blue ARP uniform, set him apart. John Auden once asked him about his grief, only to retreat when he didn’t reply. Had he trespassed upon a private reserve? Had he not tried hard enough to break through?

  He didn’t ask again.

  Nether Worton House, Worton, Oxfordshire,

  late 1941

  While Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood might have been justified leaving Chamberlain’s England, they had missed an opportunity by not returning once the Blitz began. That, at least, was Stephen Spender’s view. “We are where we are, because we believe what we believe,” he now declared. Yet when Michael had refused to recommend him for something lofty in Naval Intelligence, Stephen had become huffy at having to join the Civil Defence Corps, having divested himself fully of his communist robes. Why should he accede to the “vulgar demand” from the “mass life outside?” By his lights there was sufficient valor in having stayed put.

  Stephen eventually relented and joined the fire brigades. His duty largely confined him to a stuffy recreation room where the wireless was always tuned to the lowbrow BBC Light Programme. He lasted five months before securing a post leading civic discussion groups. Having washed his hands of all European isms, ther
e was now a virtue in being “simply English,” albeit of a superior sort. Wystan accused him of becoming his father or, worse, a literary version of his uncle.

  Uncle George was just as eager as his nephew to broadcast England’s rediscovered virtue. Amid the turmoil in the East, however, Sir George Schuster’s India and Democracy had had few takers. As India would doubtless be Japan’s next destination and target, Linlithgow didn’t feel that seeing to the proper distribution of George Schuster’s book was the business of his government. When Sir George asked the British ambassador in Washington if anything could be done to improve American sales, he received no reply.

  The Secretary of State for India did his best. Amery sent two dozen copies to the Propaganda Ministry. The Empire Division purchased 426 copies for itself and the Colonial Office. As it was quite the tome, a précis of the book’s conclusions was requested. Someone suggested the summary convey that responsible public men in England were genuinely anxious to see India succeed. The sole problem was to settle on the ways and means. Linlithgow found this fatuous.

  In a final effort to portray relations between England and India in a more agreeable light, for the concluding chapter of India and Democracy Sir George orchestrated a debate between himself and a representative Indian, albeit an imaginary one.

  “I think it’s too late to talk as you do,” this Indian told him frankly. “We don’t trust you any more. Your proposals involve asking us to be satisfied with something less than full self-government, and to trust the British to make a final surrender in the end.”

  “Of course we have made many mistakes,” Uncle George parried, “and missed many opportunities but the fault isn’t all ours…. The ‘too late’ formula [is] an easy excuse for never being ready to take responsibility.”

  “I think you are rather too simple-minded when you talk like that,” his Indian replied.

  The worm had turned.

  A war is not a stone cairn on a mountain peak. It has neither a fixed point nor is there a fixed stance from which to view it. Even those men standing over maps laid out on tables cannot see it. Theirs is the gaze from the summit. They have mapped in advance the location of coal mines and steel mills, oil fields and airfields. They can call up a million men, a million tons of grain, at the snap of their fingers. Intelligence cables from across the globe feed their calculations. Histories written about them or by them will reenact the conflict in front of maps showing the ebb and flow of their power. All will confuse the map for the war itself. In this way history erases the nameless millions, those lives heedlessly set adrift on tides beyond their control, without even a shallow grave to mark their passing.

  Had Sudhin Datta been George Schuster’s representative Indian, he would never have seen the war the way Schuster longed for it to be seen. Whenever Sudhin immersed himself in Western books or perspectives, he was haunted by the thought that he was betraying something essential to the man he was. Yet whatever his pride as an Indian, and however highly he regarded Bengali literature or the traditions of Indian philosophy, when he explored Indian modes of thinking it was his Western mind that gave him no rest.

  Sudhin lost his voice after the fall of France. His once elliptical and passionate prose now conveyed the impression of having been written by a foreigner writing in his second or third language. He abandoned his father’s belief that Bengal had been revitalized by its marriage with English thought. In his darkest, most defeated moods he would come to suspect there was something unstable about a mind that was a compound of East and West.

  And therein lay his marital impasse. Sudhin couldn’t participate in the daily domestic life of his household because he was never wholeheartedly of it. He could never find that sweet spot where two views of the same mountain became one.

  CHAPTER 17

  An Infinite Ocean of Sorrow

  During the Great War over sixty-four thousand Indian soldiers died defending the British Empire. The cost of outfitting, arming, and employing all of them, for a cause that was unclear even to those over whose borders the war was fought, fell upon India’s treasury. India forgave £100 million of Britain’s war debt, leading to a fiscal crisis that lasted into the 1930s. In 1940 Great Britain reluctantly agreed to shoulder the lion’s share of the cost of men and military stores India exported to foreign theaters. Conceivably, at a certain point India might go from a nation in perpetual debt to Great Britain, to one in whose debt Great Britain would find itself. After that, the longer the war, the greater the debt.

  The idea of His Majesty’s Government owing India anything was an abomination to Winston Churchill. When India wasn’t the Jewel in the Crown, it was the cross “the shoulders of our small island” had to bear. The only way to halt the rise in sterling balances, Secretary of State for India Leo Amery told him, was to stop mobilizing Indian soldiers. At the war’s peak over fifty thousand recruits were being added to the Indian army every month. Linlithgow described the two and a half million sepoys who would eventually serve in Africa, the Near East, Burma, Malaya, and Europe as the “largest volunteer force in history,” as if they had all signed up in a burst of indignation at the trampled freedoms of the Poles.

  To George Schuster’s evident satisfaction, along with providing soldiers India had also begun churning out shipments of boots and blankets, millions of yards of jute for sandbags and textiles for uniforms, tents, and parachutes, as well as consignments of iron, steel, coal, and timber. With the sudden access to American financing, even “Baboo aeroplanes” began rolling out. Over two hundred aerodromes supplanted rice paddies all over Bengal and Bihar. While Nehru tended vegetables in his jail yard, every class of Indian, from the wealthiest Parsee to the lowliest munitions worker, was mobilized. This was not an expression of support for the Allies. Rather, it was a simpler calculation: there was money to be made. Great Britain’s sterling debt began to rise.

  Even so there was a hitch; accounts would be settled only after the war. Until then, India was as powerless to stem the outflow of money as of men. Since the viceroy was unable to impose sufficient measures to fund the war, the Government of India mostly just printed money. Before the war three billion rupees were in circulation; by the end it was twenty-two billion. More than any of the back-channel intrigues between the prime minister and his viceroy, this arrangement would dictate who the victors were when the guns went quiet, who the vanquished. In no place would this be more true than the province of Bengal.

  Memo from Intelligence Bureau, Home Dept.,

  New Delhi to Special Branch, Calcutta, March 12, 1942

  “A new station calling itself FREEDOM INDIA has recently been picked up broadcasting on 9400 KC/S in Hindustani from 16.00 to 16.15 hours BST and in English 16:15–16.30 hours BST. It has been located at a place about 75 miles south of Dresden. This Bureau would be grateful for your report on the effect of this station’s broadcasts in your jurisdiction.

  “Uses abusive language against the British and constantly describes them as ‘dogs’ or ‘jackals.’ It also recapitulates alleged horrors perpetrated by the British on Indians, extols the Axis powers to seventh heaven and exhorts Indians to rebel and throw off the shackles of slavery.”

  Reply from Special Branch,

  Lord Sinha Road, Calcutta

  “The effect of this station on the listener is not bad as they … use filthy language. No information about any other station known as Freedom India or Azad Hind could be obtained.”

  Portmore Nursing Home, Simla,

  August 8, 1942

  Sheila Auden was visiting friends in Delhi when another effort to break the impasse between the viceroy and Congress was launched. It was a tremendous tamasha. In the wake of the fall of Singapore and Burma, Sir Stafford Cripps arrived in Delhi in March 1942 bearing a new offer from His Majesty’s Government to run by Congress leadership.

  Cripps’s arrival coincided with the appearance in the Bay of Bengal of the fleet of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, carrying the squadrons that had laid waste to Pearl H
arbor four months earlier. The world press, in town to report on the Cripps proceedings, took bets. Who would get to India first: Cripps with his piece of paper or Japanese Zeros? India was wide open: there was not one armored car or tank, bomber or fighter plane, in the entire country. While Delhi was teeming with princes and politicians out to get what they could, Bengal was bracing for an air attack and a Japanese landing force; its coast was better supplied with carrier pigeons than warships.

  Everyone was violently excited, Sheila wrote John from Delhi.

  The first thing the foreign press noted was how few Englishmen they spoke to had ever even met Jinnah, Nehru, or Gandhi. And they thought it odd that during the three weeks of talks not one Congress leader was allowed to speak directly with Jinnah. It was like a game of blindman’s buff, one journalist said. Roosevelt’s envoy, there to assist in the militarization of India’s economy, was drawn into the negotiations only to see Cripps undermined by subterfuge and sophistry. To all appearances Churchill had played him.

  “Everyone was frightfully disappointed in the Cripps proposals,” Sheila wrote John when it was all over. After that she resolutely refused to read the papers. For the sake of her daughter, Anita, and the new baby she was carrying, she felt obliged to remain calm and composed, averting her eyes even from the headlines. She was glad that John was in Calcutta with Sudhin, Sushoban, Shahid, and Minnie. That is, if social life was even possible. Prices were a scandal. The cost of living was up 400 percent. Minnie was dead broke.

  Poor Minnie. She’d had no word from Lindsay since the fall of Singapore and was fretting over reports of Japanese atrocities. A part of Sheila understood how years of being mortified at the hands of Europeans might breed an insane hatred. She had frankly relished the prospect of those who had so lorded their invincibility over others being humiliated in return. She wasn’t proud of that, but there it was. John agreed that it would be unwise for her to return to Calcutta for the baby’s birth, so Sheila traveled to Simla to await the birth of her second child. Without Elinor Sinclair for company, the hill station would have been impossibly lonely.