The Emden slipped into Penang harbour at dawn on 28 October using the extra funnel to disguise itself. It soon spotted an old Russian cruiser that had stopped by for repairs. The Germans opened fire before the Russians could respond and destroyed the ship. The Emden was now engaged by a number of British and French ships but managed to fight its way out, sinking a French destroyer along the way. The Penang raid added to Muller’s legend and was a big blow to the prestige of the Allies. Not only had a German ship made its way into the Malacca Straits but had also single-handedly caused so much damage before getting away. Now every warship in the Indian Ocean was pressed into looking for the Emden.
Muller now headed for the Coco Islands, south of Sumatra, where the Allies had a major wireless and cable communications station. The Germans planned to knock out the communications hub and a small party was sent ashore to destroy the equipment. Here Muller’s luck finally ran out. One of the operators on the island was able to send out an SOS message and alert an Australian naval convoy that happened to be in the vicinity before the Germans captured the station. The convoy included a state-of-the-art cruiser HMAS Sydney that could outmatch the Emden’s firepower.
The sudden appearance of Sydney forced Muller to abandon the landing party and sail out to meet the enemy. The two cruisers bombarded each other but Sydney was both faster and had heavier guns. After a couple of hours of exchanging fire, Muller realized that his ship was sinking and was forced to beach it in order to save the remaining crew.2 Sometime later he surrendered. Some of Emden’s guns were carried away as trophies and one is now displayed in Sydney’s Hyde Park.
This was not the end of this story. Remember that a German landing party had been abandoned on one of the islands. This group managed to commandeer a schooner and sailed all the way to Yemen from where they fought their way past Bedouin tribesmen before making it to Turkish-controlled territory. The Turks arranged for them to travel by rail to Istanbul where they told their remarkable story. Meanwhile, Karl von Muller was taken as a prisoner of war and held in Malta till he returned home at the end of the war to a hero’s welcome. Most of the remaining crew were held prisoners in Singapore where their arrival caused quite a flutter. A few months later they would be witness to major revolt by Indian soldiers based on the island.
The Great War
As we have seen, Indian soldiers were the foundation on which the British empire was built, but the colonial authorities were always worried that the soldiers would switch loyalties; the memories of 1857 were still fresh. Under normal circumstances, all colonial powers maintained a sizeable force of European regiments in the colonies as backup but WWI had forced the withdrawal of many of these units. The balance worsened as the British began to recruit Indian soldiers on a large scale to fight in the war. They even managed to get Indian political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi to support the recruitment drive. Gandhi would initially recruit for non-combatant roles but would later help with the recruitment of soldiers.3 Approximately 1.3 million Indian soldiers and auxiliaries would participate in the war and around 74,000 would lose their lives. It was Indian soldiers who stopped the German advance at Ypres. Thousands would die in the trenches of Europe and at Gallipoli. Sadly, their contribution is barely remembered and recognized today even in India.4 Even less remembered are the battles they fought in the Indian Ocean rim.
One of the first places where Indian soldiers were deployed was in German East Africa (now Tanzania) where they campaigned against the spirited guerrilla tactics of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Despite being cut off from supplies and reinforcements, and with British Indian troops in hot pursuit, the wily Lettow-Vorbeck and his men would keep up German resistance in Africa till the end of the war.
Recognizing the importance of India as a source for troops and supplies, the Germans and the Turks were very keen to provoke a revolt. One strategy was to instigate the Muslim population across the Middle East and the subcontinent to rise up against the British. The Ottoman Sultan’s supposed position as the ‘Caliph’ of all Muslims was played up. A German agent called Wilhelm Wassmuss slipped into the Persian Gulf to instigate the tribes of southern Iran to attack British interests in the region. He even spread rumours that the German Kaiser had converted to Islam and adopted the name ‘Haji’ Wilhelm Mohammad.5 I am not making this up!
Wassmuss told the tribes that a grand Turko-German army would soon march through Iran into India and throw out the British infidels. Reports soon began to reach Quetta that a powerful Baloch chief was already in touch with the Germans. British intelligence took this threat seriously and an expeditionary force was sent out from India to Iraq in order to pre-empt the possible invasion. They would simultaneously use their own agent, T.E. Lawrence, better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, to instigate the Arabs against the Turks.
The British Indian troops led by Major General Townshend initially won a series of easy victories in Iraq as they made their way inland. However, as they closed in on Baghdad in November 1915, the Turks put up an unexpectedly fierce resistance at Ctesiphon (once the capital of the pre-Islamic Persian empire). Townshend was forced to retreat to the town of Kut that he fortified while he waited for reinforcements. The Turks, meanwhile, surrounded the town and enforced a siege. It was a grim reminder of how Indian mercenaries fighting for the Shiite cause twelve centuries earlier had been surrounded and trapped at the battlefield of Karbala. With the evacuation of Gallipoli, the Allies suddenly found themselves in a difficult situation, and the Turks were able to fend off British relief columns that had got bogged down by floods on the Tigris. There was even a failed attempt by T.E. Lawrence to bribe the Turkish commanders.
The siege of Kut would last five agonizing months till the starving garrison finally surrendered on 29 April 1916.6 The Turkish leader Enver Pasha celebrated the victory by declaring himself a Ghazi (Holy Warrior). Around 3000 British and 6000 Indian troops were captured and force-marched to Turkey as prisoners. Although Townshend would be treated quite well in captivity, many of his men would die from disease and ill-treatment. The Haider Pasha cemetery in Istanbul contains the graves and ashes of a few of these soldiers. One of the memorial stones reads: ‘The following Hindu soldier of the Indian Army is honored here: Lance Naik Dhan Bahadur Limbu, 6th Gurkha Rifles.’
Few Indians today remember these men and their deaths in faraway lands but their stories were still fresh when civil servant and writer Dennis Kincaid wrote these words in the 1930s:
When you are wandering around in the Maratha hills you chance upon a war memorial in some tiny hamlet; and it is moving to read that, say, eleven men went from that village to serve in Irak. Many of these village lads were at Kut. Very few men, once taken prisoner, returned or were heard of again. The clean fighting Turk saw to that.7
Few residents of Mumbai will be aware that the city has a memorial to Indian sailors who died in WWI. It’s tucked away in a sailors’ hostel in the old port area and almost no one visits it. Commodore Odakkal Johnson of the Indian Navy and I tracked it down amidst torrential monsoon rain and spent an hour reading the names of these long-forgotten sailors. It told an interesting pattern of how the British of that period recruited and deployed their Indian troops—the army casualties in Kut were mostly Hindu but here the naval casualties were largely Muslim.
The events at Gallipoli and Kut had resurrected the reputation and morale of the Turkish military. The British now needed a decisive victory and a formidable force of 150,000 men was assembled. These men were put under the command of Sir Stanley Maude, one of the most experienced generals in the British empire. In early 1917, this huge army pushed towards Baghdad against determined Turkish resistance. Finally, on the night of 10 March, the British forward positions witnessed a bright glow over Baghdad. The Turks were burning everything of military or economic value before retreating. By noon the next day, General Maude’s troops had occupied the city. Despite the city’s romantic associations, they found Baghdad in shattered ruins—almost all major government bu
ildings had been burned down, shops and homes had been looted, rotting corpses lay everywhere.
The fall of Baghdad also meant that the German agent Wassmuss found himself isolated in southern Iran. Few tribesmen now believed his story of a grand Turko-German army marching to India. However, his greatest failure was not his fading ability to rouse the Tangistani tribesmen but a small error that had major consequences for the German war effort. During his adventures in southern Iran, Wassmuss had been captured on one occasion by a pro-British tribe. Although he made a daring escape, he was forced to leave behind his belongings which included the German diplomatic code book. This code book eventually made its way to ‘Room 40’—the specialist code-breaking unit in London.
Armed with Wassmuss’s code book, the cryptographers uncovered a German plan to unleash all-out submarine warfare against the Allies while simultaneously bringing Mexico and Japan into the war. The Germans had promised the Mexicans that if they entered the war, they would be helped to recover Arizona, Texas and New Mexico from the United States. The British gleefully passed this information to the Americans. On 1 March 1917, newspaper headlines across the United States revealed the story to an outraged American public.8 The sinking of American merchant ships by U-boats over the next few weeks made it clear that the United States could no longer remain neutral. On 6 April, President Wilson declared war on Germany. The fate of the Central Powers was now sealed. Thus, a small mistake by a secret agent in the Persian Gulf had a big influence on the course of world history; the flapping of a butterfly’s wings had caused a hurricane.
The Grand Conspiracy
As already mentioned, many senior leaders of Indian National Congress, including Mahatma Gandhi, opted to collaborate with the British during the First World War. There was an expectation that this would be rewarded with major political concessions after the war. However, not all Indians agreed with this approach and many felt that the war provided a golden opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke. At the forefront of this alternative effort to free India were revolutionaries who believed in using armed rebellion to defeat the British. Most conventional history books and textbooks give the impression that India’s independence movement was a uniquely peaceful one led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. The role of the revolutionaries is usually left out or mentioned as a footnote. As we shall see, they too played a very important role in how events unfolded.
Punjab and Bengal were the two main hubs of the revolutionary movement although there were several others scattered across the country, most notably Varanasi. The movement was initially made up of a number of autonomous groups working in isolation but before the outbreak of war they were already getting networked due to the efforts of Rash Behari Bose and his young lieutenant Sachindra Nath Sanyal. They were also in touch with like-minded activists among the expatriate Indians scattered around the world. One of them was Har Dayal who was studying at St John’s College, Oxford (incidentally, I would attend the same college eight decades later). While in England, Har Dayal was influenced by the ideas of Vinayak Damodar ‘Veer’ Savarkar, a revolutionary then operating out of India House in London.
Savarkar was arrested in 1910 and, despite a dramatic escape attempt in Marseilles, was sent off to prison in Port Blair in the Andamans. Recognizing the risks, Har Dayal shifted to California where he continued to organize support for revolutionary activities among the newly arrived Indian students and immigrants, especially Sikhs from Punjab. In other words, an elaborate revolutionary network was already in place before war was declared. Indeed, the revolutionaries had nearly managed to kill Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy, in December 1912 while he rode on a ceremonial elephant through Delhi’s Chandni Chowk. The Viceroy sustained severe injuries from the bomb but survived; none of the attackers were caught.
When war was declared and it became clear that the British would have to rely heavily on Indian troops, the revolutionaries immediately came up with a plan to take advantage of the situation by instigating a coordinated revolt by Indian regiments. Rash Behari Bose and Sachin Sanyal set about making elaborate arrangements on the ground. They coordinated a large number of clandestine participants—Sikhs returning from North America, revolutionaries in Bengal and regiments primed for mutiny from Punjab to Burma. The date of what would be known as the Ghadar uprising was set for 21 February 1915.
Unfortunately, the uprising unravelled before it began. It had been planned that the sequence of events would be triggered by the regiments in Mian Mir on the north-west frontier and Punjab first rising in revolt. However, just five days before the revolt, an informer called Kirpal Singh revealed the plans to the colonial authorities in Lahore. Bose now decided to bring forward the date to 19 February in order to deny the authorities time to react but by now British intelligence was already on full alert. Police raids captured several of the conspirators, and Indian guards at all armouries were replaced by British ones. The element of surprise had been totally lost. Seeing such decisive action, the soldiers lost their nerve and momentum simply melted away.
The only place that saw a full-scale revolt was Singapore where predominantly Muslim regiments mutinied on 15 February and took over large parts of the island.9 They also freed the Germans captured from Emden and asked them to join the battle but were refused. It took the authorities a full week of fighting, backed by reinforcements, to quell the uprising. Dozens of mutineers would be lined up against a wall on Outram Street and publicly executed by a firing squad.
With his plans unravelling and the authorities closing in, Bose first sought refuge in the narrow lanes of Varanasi where the Sanyal clan could use its network of family and friends to temporarily hide a fugitive. However, as police raids mounted, he decided to escape to Japan where he would keep up his efforts for the next three decades. Sachin Sanyal saw him off at Calcutta’s docks in May but stayed back to organize the remaining revolutionaries.10 They received a morale boost when they heard that the German war machine had decided to back them. A body called the Indian Revolutionary Committee was set up in Berlin and was given full embassy status. Since the United States was still neutral at this stage, the German embassy in Washington DC acquired 30,000 rifles and pistols (plus ammunition) and began to secretly arrange for them to be sent to India.11
Two vessels—a schooner called Annie Larsen and a tanker called Maverick—were hired to take the weapons across the Pacific to Asia where they would be divided into smaller vessels to be carried to India. The idea was that well-armed revolutionaries would capture Calcutta on Christmas Day, 1915. Again, things did not go according to plan. The two ships failed to make their rendezvous on the agreed date and location. Worse, a German agent named Vincent Kraft was arrested in Singapore; he agreed to tell everything in exchange for a large sum of money and being allowed to emigrate to the US under a new identity. Boats carrying weapons to India through Thailand and the Bay of Bengal were intercepted. Finally, in a series of lightning raids, 300 conspirators were arrested in Calcutta and Burma. The Christmas Day plot had been crushed.
As one can see, the Ghadar uprising and the Christmas Day plot were very large-scale plans to overthrow British colonial rule in India. Although they failed, they had both come closer to being executed than most people realize and, with a bit of luck, could well have worked. Ex ante, they were no more audacious than T.E. Lawrence’s exploits in Arabia but Lawrence succeeded while Wassmuss and Bose did not. Even allowing for possible differences in individual competence, it is an illustration of how small twists of fortune can sway the flow of history. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the dynamics set in motion by the revolutionaries did not end here but would influence events in the Second World War and eventually contribute to India gaining freedom in 1947.
Imprisoned by the Black Waters
By early 1916, the colonial government in India had managed to capture a large number of revolutionaries. Several of them were hanged while others were given long prison sentences. This included Sachindra Nath Sanyal w
ho was sentenced to life imprisonment in the dreaded Cellular Jail in Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. It was where the British held those whom they considered the most dangerous—hardened criminals as well as political prisoners considered a serious threat to the empire. It was known in India as ‘Kala Pani’ or the Black Waters.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are a string of Indian islands in the Bay of Bengal. Although separated from the mainland by a large body of water, it was somehow colonized by humans at a very early stage and some local tribes still carry the genetic imprint of the earliest human migrations. Given their location close to major maritime trade routes, it is not surprising that the islands were known to ancient and medieval mariners and are mentioned in several old texts. It is thought that the name ‘Andaman’ is derived from the Malay pronunciation of ‘Hanuman’, the Hindu monkey-god. In the eighteenth century, the Danes, of all people, came to control these islands but failed to establish an economically viable settlement. Eventually they handed over the islands to the British who decided to use it as a penal colony. The Cellular Jail complex was built for this purpose. Barindra Ghosh, younger brother of the famous spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo, would be sent there in 1909 for his revolutionary activities and would spend over a decade there. He has left us vivid descriptions of life inside the prison:12
Each room has a door closed by iron bars only, with no door leaf. On the back wall of the room, at a height of four cubits and a half, there is a small window, closed also with iron rails two inches apart. Of furniture in the room there is a low bedstead one cubit and a half wide and in one corner an earthen pot painted with tar. One must have a most vigilant sleep on such a bed, otherwise even the least careless turn would land the sleeper with a bang on the floor. And the tarred pot is a most marvelous invention to produce equanimity of the soul with regard to smell, for it is the water closet. . . .
The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History Page 25