She was still there on 15 February 1942, when Singapore was lost – and not only lost, but abjectly surrendered. Nugs tried not to wonder if Lakshmi was alive or dead. Hearing the stories of what the Japanese did to women, she didn’t know which was worse. Along with the city, nearly 70,000 Indian troops concentrated there – a third of the entire strength of the pre-war Indian Army – were handed over as prisoners, along with 15,000 British and Australians. One entire division had marched down onto the docks just in time to be made captive. Never in its history had the British Empire surrendered so many troops en masse: troops who were still needed to defend Burma, or if Burma fell, to defend their own homeland.
India had felt numb pains of distant war creeping up its limb, but with the loss of Rangoon, they burst open as a weeping wound. Until 1935, India and Burma had been a single colonial state, and for long Burma was seen as a green field of opportunity for Indians of all classes: Tamil plantation labour, Anglo-Indian railwaymen, Oriya stevedores, Muslim petty traders, Bihari landlords with whole indentured villages in train. In Rangoon, more than half the population was Indian. When the Japanese invasion began, not only was the Empire unable to defend them, it had no plan to help them escape.
The city was invaded first by rats and bombs; then by fire, as the air-raid defences collapsed. Weeks before the Japanese marched in, parts of the city were in anarchy. Looters, even White soldiers, sacked the shops along the boulevards. Officials had recognised the impossibility of defending Rangoon at least a month earlier, but its residents were given only forty-eight hours’ notice, after which, they were told, neither trains nor petrol would be available. The last boats left the docks at Taungyup and Akyab, and those left behind were stripped of any choice but one: to cross the remaining length of the country, and reach India on foot.
The retreating Army crossed over in good order, with few deaths, though stricken with malaria and harassed by Burmese bandits. For them it was merely ‘the Dunkirk of the East’. Behind the Army was a river of pathetic civilians, straggling down the open road. And behind them came the Mitsubishis, some ploughing the column with cannon fire; some filling the air with thousands of fluttering leaflets. These were propaganda cartoons, gaudy and shocking, depicting starving Indians ground under the heels of fat imperialists, or turbaned jawans being kicked out of evacuation lorries by blond-haired Tommies. In Hindustani or in Urdu, they said, ‘The Englishmen are just not bothered about you. You will see this scene wherever you look.’5
The centre of ancient Mandalay became an immense refugee camp, until the bombers reduced it to acres of ash and cinders. The refugees moved on, into northern Burma, where the British roads gave way to hill tracks, and the tracks gave way to long smears of mud, monsoon downpour and human waste. Cholera spread through the camps and contaminated nearby water sources. On the most exposed segment, the 130 miles between Monywa and Palel on the border, the roadside was littered with families too drained to walk. Sometimes a parent or child was still able to move on all fours, to reach a nearby water body and find it, invariably, already fouled.
Six hundred thousand attempted the gruesome march: at the time, the largest human migration in history. Eighty thousand died, in the transit camps and in the undergrowth by the sides of the route. Many left parents or children to die. At Palel and Imphal, there were field hospitals and well-stocked camps, and Army convoys to the railhead. But even there the planes came, above the fluttering Red Cross flags, to draw the harrow over them one last time.
Never before had the Empire, and the men who commanded it, been so disgraced. In the First World War, Indians on the Western Front had first seen the forbidden sight of White men afraid, wailing, soiled, like regular men. But that was on a distant continent. In 1942 the humiliation took place in India’s backyard, and its evidence streamed through Assam and Bengal and all the way to Madras.
At Madras Medical College, where Nugs and Ganny were now house officers, ward after ward filled with refugees. Many had been stretched to their last fibres by starvation, and exposure, malaria, dysentery. Nearly all had cholera. Blue-white faeces gushed out of them. The staff cut holes in the ward bedding, and stitched sleeves of waxed fabric between the holes and buckets on the floor. Nugs and Ganny monitored how much liquid the patients lost every hour, then the ward boys collected the buckets and sloshed the ‘rice water’ into the gutter.
Few survivors carried anything, except for anguished tales of their abandonment by the Raj. Lying in their cholera beds, they told of Anglo-Indian families whose darker-skinned daughters were turned away from camps for Europeans; of columns of Indian refugees held back until Europeans had passed, so the roads would be less begrimed; of elephants struggling up the slopes, hind legs quivering, as they carried mahogany desks out over the bodies of children. The most despised rumour, which travelled well in India, was that the Army enforced separate ‘White’ and ‘Black’ routes: so little did Indian lives count in the end.
Nugs and Ganny heard their stories in the wards, and a different kind of appeal outside. Officers of the Indian Medical Service had besieged the campus, bidding to recruit the senior students. Much of it was familiar, but a new enticement had sent a murmur of amazement through the class: final-year students who signed up to join the Army would receive a monthly stipend of a hundred rupees, starting right away.
Try as he might, Ganny couldn’t get the offer out of his mind. It meant he would start his life with Nugs with some savings, instead of empty pockets, as well as an assured job. Every civil department had suspended hiring at the start of the war, and in their place, graduates were invited to apply for military commissions, and promised priority in civil appointments after the victory. War service would count double for seniority. The Army Medical Corps needed thousands of doctors – one for each new fighting company, and more down the chain of evacuation: in field ambulances, at staging sections, casualty clearing stations, ambulance trains and barges, base hospitals and convalescent depots. The government was doing all it could to make it seem a sound professional decision, rather than professional suicide.
Or actual suicide, which was how Nugs saw it. There was a terrific row. To Nugs, the war was a pathological madness, undoing a thousandfold all the efforts of all the doctors in the world. She knew that Ganny thought the same. They had nationalist friends, like Lakshmi Swaminathan – who they imagined was a captive, at best, of the Japanese – and they had come to agree with them on the lunacy of the war effort. How could Ganny even think about throwing his life into that fire, for the bribe of a commission?
The newspapers said that President Roosevelt had called for a new name for the war which would ‘briefly describe it as a war for the preservation of the smaller people of the democracies of the world’. What he meant was that Europe was in peril of losing the freedom it had long denied to all other races. Churchill gave sermons about a war for freedom, but Orwell provided a sharp retort: ‘The unspoken clause is always: Not counting niggers.’6
Ganny did not argue further, but Nugs could sense his decision hardening. The prospect of a commission was something, more than just the stipend that cooled his anxiety about their future. At the very least it was a plan. If she dared confess it, the relief it gave him helped her too. And there was something else, besides. A bravery had come over him. So she helped prepare the world’s gentlest mercenary to join its greatest war.
5
Madras Must Not Burn
April 1942
April came, and every morning as the sun pulled itself from the waves, the humidity marched off the sea and into Madras like an invading force. By afternoon, the city was a hydrothermal vent. Once or twice a day, Bobby wasted a cigarette as he tilted his head down to light it and his sweat landed fatly on the paper. Sweat ran into his eyes and it burned.
There hadn’t been a war in Madras in nearly two centuries. The city sweated doubly; from the heat, as every year, and from the fear, as never before. Labourers sweated as they flung earth out of trenches
around the ports and the City Hall. Families sweated into threadbare lungis as they lined up at recruitment centres, stroking the hands of gaunt and downcast sons, hoping for reassurance about what was going to happen to them. Sweat ran down the Governor’s neck as he waited in his mansion for instructions from Delhi. At the Carnatic and Buckingham Mills, workers sweated in their picket lines as they agitated for an evacuation allowance. Their union leaders swapped street rumours: aircraft were being organised to evacuate Europeans … The Tatas were in secret talks with the Japs, to spare the steelworks in Jamshedpur from bombing … At a village fair, up north, a Japanese paratrooper descended into a crowd, spoke to them in their own tongue, and then used his parachute to jet back into the sky … Wavell had been killed.1
Families packed trunks, and the wealthiest ones had already sent servants ahead to bungalows in the Nilgiri Hills, to get things ready, just in case. The Burmese refugees who had streamed into Madras sweated in their hotel rooms and relatives’ homes, watching as Madras prepared to stream out.
One exception in this sticky immobility was GP, who shot around town with an energy that suggested he was personally choreographing national events. Though he wasn’t yet thirty, GP was now the chief editor on foreign affairs at The Hindu. It was no more than was expected of him. The Iyengar Brahmins were past masters at reincarnating ancient privilege in the form of modern success; a balancing act in which they rarely put a foot wrong. After Oxford, while GP waited for Subur to finish, he had somehow managed to train at The Times of London, to qualify as a barrister, to play first-class cricket, and even to grow familiar with the World Socialist Movement and various Indian nationalists in London.
In the current crisis too, he was as artfully moderate as ever – quite like Rajaji, the Congress apostle in Madras and another Iyengar. With Manek away on duty, and Bobby and his sisters too hot to say much, GP used the dinner table to rehearse his editorials without interruption.
Any day now, he’d say, a new sun could rise on the horizon beyond Marina Beach. The bayonet that had drilled through all of Asia was now pointed directly at Madras. Japanese messages were coming in on the shortwave, offering friendship to Indians, but warning that if they did not surrender, it was ‘inevitable that India will receive the ravages of war’. The Commander-in-Chief in Delhi cabled Whitehall: ‘India cannot repeat cannot be held against the likely scale and method of Japanese attack.’ Brooding over the prospect, the Congress leaders had taken a hard decision: the price of their cooperation would be political freedom first.
If the war was going to be fought on Indian soil, there appeared to be two examples of how it could go. As a British colony, the example was Burma and Malaya: futile defence, whole divisions squandered, cities abandoned to the mercy of the Japanese. As a free country, the example was the Soviet Union, whose Red Army had made a heroic retreat, fighting to the last breath, scorching its own homeland, in what was rightfully being called the Great Patriotic War.
But Whitehall had different ideas. By now Neville Chamberlain had been forced to resign, handing over the government to Winston Churchill, an implacable opponent of Indian independence. To Churchill, the war was a call to redeem the imperial bond, not to dissolve it. India would need to be the principal base for Britain’s war against the Japanese, not to mention the United States’ campaign to aid China. The prime minister expected Indians to ‘kindle again the spark of hope in the breasts of hundreds of millions of downtrodden or despairing men and women throughout Europe’. Churchill despised the Congress, but knew that popular support would be essential to fight the Japanese back from India. He despatched a minister in his War Cabinet, Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labour man with sympathy for the nationalists, to obtain that support.
At the start of April 1942, GP moved Subur and their young son up to Delhi, to ensure their safety and to allow him to follow the negotiations under way there. In Delhi, Cripps was urging the Congress to accept a promise of Dominion status after the war. The Congress objected. Why not now? ‘The leaders of the people should be enabled honestly to shout to the masses,’ Rajaji pressed, ‘that this war is the people’s war.’ A genuine national government, in charge of its own defence, would give soldiers the morale of patriots, instead of the motives of mercenaries.
Cripps and the Indian leaders competed to raise the stakes of a solution. ‘Today India is the crux of the war,’ Nehru announced, at a press conference that ran to three hours. ‘The only other really important theatre is the Russian theatre … Very little else counts for the present. Every country in the world realises this, of course, except for the big people in New Delhi and Whitehall.’2 The disagreement became a deadlock.
Deprived of their personal dinner broadcast, Bobby and the others struggled to keep up with political news. The Hindu reprinted a Punch cartoon, Arms for the East, which had Cripps in dock worker’s overalls waiting to load a wooden crate onto a steamer. His one hand holds the winch ropes and the other steadies the crate, which is labelled ‘Dominion Status for India’ and stamped ‘Not to be Sent Till After the War’. Watching the reaction of his baleful supervisor – Churchill – Cripps asks: ‘How about shipping this thing now?’ On the picture pages, with each day that passed, Cripps and the Congressmen stood further apart; the Japanese drew closer.
The script for their invasion was written and only awaited its performance: the defence of Chetpet; the rout at Thambaram; amphibian landing craft crunching into the corners of the beach temples at Mahabalipuram; the carnage and the coconut groves in flames. All that would be only the beginning of a ‘Cross-India expedition’,3 a rapid advance to reach the west coast and seal the port of Bombay.
Around them, Madras prepared however it could. Twenty-two miles of trench were dug around the city. The ivory buildings of Queen Mary’s, a beachside beacon to enemy bombers, were painted over in dark grey. The college lecturers, who had taught all the Mugaseth girls, were issued with timetables and tin helmets, and patrolled the rooftops after dusk listening for the sounds of bombers. Below them, the campus was under blackout. Students walked into railings and tumbled down stairs.
The ribbon of land between Fort St George and the sea supported a shoddy façade of air defence. The beach, usually crowded with catamarans and drying nets, was bare and fringed with anti-aircraft guns, though only one gun in ten was real. The others were coconut trunks, tarred black, one solid and balanced on another split down the middle. The Madras Guard dug into positions between them. The higher ground was a decoy airstrip; ‘dummy’ fighter planes and bombers squatted on it, and a lone flight of actual Wapitis circled out and back continuously to try and maintain the illusion. The port was closed to commercial cargo, and an anti-submarine boom pushed out across the mouth of the harbour. Undermanned, the Madras Coast Battery recruited young women to run phones and the Fire Direction Tables.
At the Secretariat, the Commissioner of the City, O. Pulla Reddy, learned one morning that Governor Hope and the majority of his staff were about to depart for the Nilgiri Hills. Reddy was able to put in a call to Sir George Boag, First Adviser to the Governor, requesting instructions. ‘You can do what you like,’ Boag replied. ‘I have no time to discuss details. I have to catch the Blue Mountain Express in a few minutes.’ So it was left to Reddy, and the Commissioner of Police, Sir Lionel Gasson, to evacuate the penitentiary – and thereafter, the caged predators in Madras Zoo. To Reddy’s horror, Gasson sent in a platoon of Malabar Special Police to shoot dead the lions, tigers and panthers, as well as a single polar bear, which may alone have been grateful for it.
In the newspapers, insurance companies put out notices assuring Indian clients that ‘risks to their lives arising from enemy military operations, whether by land, sea or air, are fully covered’. Chambers of commerce demanded official guarantees that there would be no scorched-earth campaign in Madras, as was being executed in eastern Bengal, at the Burmese border. An advert for Parle Biscuits advised that the ½lb cartons were airtight and the best for emergency ratio
ns. Scanning through the new movies, between ads for Laurel and Hardy in Great Guns and Gary Cooper in Sergeant York, Bobby encountered strange surprises:
SUPPOSE:
The Enemy Raiders approach our Shores
What do you expect to happen to Madras?
THE ANSWER:
To this burning question of the hour
is thrillingly picturized in a new film
‘MADRAS MUST NOT BURN’
Another William J. Moylan Production
See Real Enemy Planes Rain Bombs on MADRAS
and see the Madras A.R.P. as Civil Defenders
Saturday, April 4 at the NEW GLOBE,
Mount Road, Madras
The headline a few days later: ‘JAP NAVAL UNITS IN THE BAY’. Admiral Nagumo had taken the Indian Ocean like a lion rampant red on a field of blue. Five of his six carriers had been in the fleet which struck Pearl Harbor, and they meant to strike as hard at the British fleet in Ceylon.
On 5 April, two Wapitis of the IAF Volunteer Reserve, puttering out over the sea, found themselves watching as a Japanese force of one battleship, one carrier, a cruiser and two destroyers pounded a merchant vessel into the sea. The same morning, Japanese planes appeared over the coast of Ceylon, and on reaching the Colombo harbour sank 80,000 tons of British merchant shipping, along with the cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall.
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