Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  Once stirred in, Indian officers could not be stirred back out. In a letter to Churchill in October 1944, Wavell conveyed that it would no longer be possible to hold India by force after the war. With its racial formulae corrupted in both the ranks and command, the Indian Army of lore was no longer a trustworthy instrument. For imperial hardliners, this was a fell realisation. The Empire would have to depart, and quickly, before the army’s loyalty could be weighed in the scales against British lives.

  Many young nationalists who joined the British Indian Army had only hoped to live to someday see India’s freedom. They didn’t guess that before their thirtieth birthdays they’d be serving an independent country – let alone two separate ones. On 14 August 1947, a new state was sawn off from the shoulders of the old one, and India and Pakistan awoke to self-rule and immediate war. The ‘brother-officers’ of the old army, the army of a few weeks prior, met as enemies in Kashmir – which was the war that would be treated as the first chapter in the authorised saga of India’s military.

  More terrible still was the work of tens of thousands of demobilised soldiers in the Punjab. Auchinleck had protested the rushed schedule for demobilising Indian troops and withdrawing British ones. His concerns were overruled, with grave consequences. Many veterans would shepherd their communities across the new border, as witnessed of the Sikhs of Lyallpur by Ian Morrison in the London Times: ‘The Sikhs move in blocks of 40,000 to 60,000 and cover about twenty miles a day. It is an unforgettable sight to see one of these columns on the move. The organisation is mainly entrusted to ex-servicemen and soldiers on leave who have been caught by the disturbances. Men on horseback, armed with spears or swords, provide guards in front, behind, and on the flanks. There is a regular system of bugle calls. At night a halt is called … watch-fires are lit, and pickets are posted.’

  Yet others, hardened by encounters with Nazi SS platoons and Japanese suicide squads, turned their skill at arms against innocents in their own village lanes. As a Congress Party report on the massacres described: ‘These were not riots but deliberately organised military campaigns … The armed crowd which attacked … were led by ex-military men on horseback, armed with Tommy guns, pistols, rifles, hand-grenades, hatchets, petrol tins and some even carried field glasses.’5

  Every month that an Indian battalion had spent on the front line deepened the extent that minorities were purged from its home district.6 The intention of Sir Charles Wood, the Victorian Secretary of State for India, that Sikh may fire into Muslim, and Muslim into Hindu, ‘without scruple’, came into effect at last – just as the Empire it was meant to protect departed.

  The surrender of Japan was signed on 15 August 1945, and two years later, to the day, the British Raj was over. It was the intimacy of the two events that ensured that one or the other must be elided. In the decades after the Second World War, as its empire declined, Britain cherished evermore its image as the brave little island that had stood up to global fascism. The war was its redemption. Nazi Germany was such a monstrous regime, and Japan’s war-making so phantasmagorical, that they cast a general moral absolution back over the regimes that had held the world under force before them.

  It was preferable, almost justifiable, to forget that Germany and Japan had mainly copied and outstripped Britain’s own example. Their arguments were Britain’s own ancient argument, now wielded by maniacs instead of MPs. Hitler had always admired the British Raj, and the horrors sprung upon Europe, the bombings and concentration camps, were traditions of colonial rule unhinged by the fascist mentality and guided by ‘the lights of perverted science’. Even with the war begun, and the Abwehr conniving with rebels in the North-West Frontier, Hitler was loath to undermine something as fine as the Anglo-Saxon dominion over the Black millions. ‘The basic reason for English pride is India,’ he once said. ‘What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us.’7 In the centre and east of Europe, meanwhile, he pictured a racial colony as freely exploitable as the ones Britain founded in the New World. This war was nemesis risen from the hubris of the British world order.

  Even as it fought bravely for the freedom of nations, Britain remained the world’s colonial hegemon. And the most terrible imprint of colonialism – famine – would, before the end, tarnish all of Britain’s enlightened designs. The Bengal famine was, in Nehru’s words, ‘the final epitaph of British rule and achievement in India’. Its cost in Indian lives was ten times the cost of the whole war in British lives, military and civilian. It was the last epidemic famine in India, and its toll meant that Britain could not step off its 200-year-old throne looking noble.

  Avoiding these scenes, we grew accustomed to viewing the war as Western Front, Eastern Front and Pacific. To risk an anachronism, we only take a First World view of the Second World War, as if the Third World had slept. The reality, that the Second World War was a war continuous with the world order before it, was apparent in places that faced colonial suppression before and after. For societies in North and East Africa, in the Middle East and on India’s North-West Frontier, the distinction between the two world wars may have been elusive. Many had only known a continuous climate of imperial control and contestation. The reconquest of Burma, after the victory at Imphal, was for General Slim necessary as a moral and military redemption. To Churchill it was a play for the empire’s survival. This was widely realised even at the time: in some quarters, what SEAC stood for was not ‘South-East Asia Command’, but ‘Save England’s Asian Colonies’.

  Afterwards, the Second World War flowed straight back into colonial hostilities, as the winners divided and claimed their shares of territory. The strategy of propping up empire with air power, which had worked so well in the aftermath of the First World War, was attempted again after the Second. Within weeks of their own liberation, the French were bombing rebellious towns in Algeria and Syria.

  In the East, Japan’s surrender ended the fighting between states, but not between armies: many ‘forgotten armies’ remained, the seeds of free states that sprouted where the Japanese scythe had passed through colonial Asia. The terms of surrender required the Japanese Army to help restore the territories to the Allied masters. Nowhere was this more absurd than in the Dutch East Indies. In Semarang, Japanese troops were put under British command to suppress Indonesian nationalists8 – and a Japanese major was even recommended for a Distinguished Service Order. Where the Japanese were less amenable, as in Surabaya, the Indian Army fought on behalf of the Dutch empire.

  In the closing weeks of 1945, in Bombay, workers rallied at the DeLisle Road Maidan to demand that Indian troops not be used against Indonesian freedom fighters. At ports from Madras to Sydney, unionised seamen refused to work on ships carrying Dutch troops back to Java. ‘I am very eager to go to Java at the earliest opportunity, but so far passport and air travel facilities have not been granted to me,’ Nehru said, speaking from Moradabad. ‘Meanwhile, I would like to assure Dr Sukarno that the people of India stand by the Indonesian demand for independence and will give all help they can.’9 But the very day of Nehru’s statement, the 5th Indian Infantry Division entered battle in Surabaya.10 Native partisans were strafed by the RAF and shelled by destroyers off the coast. Fifteen thousand Indonesians were killed, and there were 600 Indian casualties – some of whom had served with the division all the way from Eritrea.

  Further off, in Indo-China, the 20th Indian Division was suppressing guerrillas in the outskirts of Saigon, in order that the territory could be returned to the empire of France. On their departure, SEAC left much of their military hardware to the French, including aircraft and artillery, fuelling a war of resistance that would burn for thirty more years.

  To the extent that a kind of imperial war goes on today, reverse-engineering political crises to justify new conquests, it goes on in much the same geography. British forces were back in Basra, suppressing local resistance, sixty years after Bobby left from there. The world’s current empire is still bombing tracts in Waziristan, trying
to drive new fakirs out from under their rocks. Ahmed Khel and Datta Khel, the very villages that Manek’s squadron flew out to discipline in 1941, were still being punished by Predator drones in 2013. The empires of the world, old and new, have let these places vanish from the atlas of the Second World War, so we are able to think of those years as a hiatus, rather than a climax, of the West’s imperial obsessions.

  When it comes to remembering the Indians who served in the Second World War, however, nobody could do less than India itself. Like the subcontinent’s many War Graves cemeteries, which lie in stillness behind walls of bougainvillea, the memory of those men and women rests in caches private and unvisited. Within the walls of their cantonments, Army regiments still keep a discreet communion with their exploits for the Raj. In the end they had defended India itself from invasion. But there is no notion, widely held, that that ever occurred. Their own families would eventually not know them, the brown men inexplicably saluting the Union Jack.

  We search for our present selves in the mirror we call history. Looking back to the height of the freedom movement, India wants to see itself united in a single struggle. In the autobiography of a new nation state, there was no place for an army that fought for the Empire in the very hour that its countrymen fought to be rid of it. To the extent that Indians are aware of their countrymen in the Second World War, we revere the Indian National Army, which took the ultimate steps to force India’s freedom. The INA was never militarily strong; at its peak, it had 40,000 troops, against more than 2 million in the British Indian Army, and many of its volunteers only joined to escape the deadly POW camps and forced labour corps. Its power was on the imagination – mainly of British administrators, who were forced to treat Indian troops with greater care, and after the war, to accept the fact of divided feelings in the breasts of its loyal jawans.

  As history, the INA became embodied in the figure of Subhas Chandra Bose, who was either killed in an air crash or spirited into the occult only days after the Japanese surrender. What could India do with his icon, or the image of their liberators marching in step with their dreaded invaders? That was answered a few months later, when the Army decided to court-martial three INA officers: one Hindu, one Muslim and one Sikh. Nehru and his colleagues stepped forward to defend them, and thus the loose strand of the INA was braided back into the Congress epic. Bose’s valiant, violent failure would burnish the trophy of the Congress’s pacifist path.

  This wasn’t instantaneous; the rogue ambitions of Bose still rankled with Nehru, and for a generation after the war, still carried ‘a nameless aroma of treason’.11 Seven decades later, though, the INA – nevermore ‘the JIFs’ – is as well couched in the Indian national regard as the regular Army of the time is exiled from it. The INA is rarely recognised for what it was: a fallen branch of the British Indian Army, grafted onto Japan’s ambitions, but of the same genetic constitution as its parent army. The real ideological fissure did not run between the INA and the Indian Army, but ran through them both together: the dilemma of choosing loyalty or liberty, subordination or treason.

  The Second World War in Burma and India’s north-east was the British Empire’s largest and longest-lasting campaign. Yet in 1944, while the fighting was at its peak, the men there already called themselves ‘the Forgotten Army’. The prescient phrase would later be used to title books about the Allied Fourteenth Army, about the INA, and about the wide array of nationalist militias which sprang up in the crescent of Japanese-held Asia. Two books about the RAF in Asia are called The Forgotten Air Force and The Forgotten Ones. Claude Auchinleck, the champion of the wartime Indian Army, was called ‘the forgotten warrior’ in his obituaries. Each forgotten force encloses others more forgotten, whether they are the women’s regiment of the INA, or the Légions Indiennes; the East Africans or the sappers, or even the mules.

  It’s obvious that it is the preserve of neither one side nor the other – regular forces nor irregular, rebel nor royal – to be forgotten. Rather, it was a fate that awaited everyone whose service occurred too near the overlap of colonial rule and world war. In the end, the annals of the West would prefer to forget the colonial factors, and the annals of the post-colonial world would forget the war effort: each found their narrative too deeply unsettled by the other. Between the closing chapter of imperial history and the first volume of the national record, we let drop the page that had Indians fighting on both sides.

  For their own personal reasons, the bereaved and the survivors of India’s Second World War would collude with the state in forgetting those who died. The men who held on to their commissions after 1947 would go on to fight more wars, holding more senior and more admirable commands, against enemies that remain threats today. Their subaltern service to the British Empire became a quixotic memory, its political valency vague and its heroism diluted. Those who were bereaved would go on, as well, and learn to live their lives unburdened of the memory of the dead.

  Today, seventy years after the war’s end, they too are making their exit from our lives, and taking their private memories with them. Nugs, my grandmother, died in 1998, before I could ask her about Bobby and the others – before I even knew Bobby had existed. The farthest field is not just a conceit about Bobby’s death but one that applies, and at this moment, to all those Indians who were lost to the Second World War. Writing the personal story of these three men was my attempt to draw back the dead, when even their memory had passed into the shadow. The rest of this book is an attempt to keep the common story with us, as the people who lived it take their leave.

  Acknowledgements

  I feel indebted to everyone who is or was a link to what has passed, especially to those with the generosity of memory to remember Bobby. Indian veterans comprise most of the new friends I’ve made in the last three years: the late C. M. Beliappa (Dalu Uncle), General Sundara Rao, Wing Commander Hoshang Patel, Brigadier Furdoon ‘Duck’ Mehta, Air Vice Marshal Randhir Singh, Subedar Naranjan Singh, Major General Kuldip Singh Bajwa, Brigadier Dhillon, Colonel Jamsher Gill, Subedar Ram Swarup, Brigadier Sant Singh, General S. K. Sinha and Lieutenant General J. F. R. Jacob. Their patient explanations helped me understand the Indian military experience of the war.

  I’m most profoundly grateful to Squadron Leader Rana Chhina of the Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research at the United Services Institute, Delhi. Gillian Wright, for introducing me to him. In Chandigarh, the generous and knowledgeable Mandeep Singh Bajwa. Narender Yadav and the staff of the Ministry of Defence History Division in Delhi. Jagan Pilarisetti of the online repository Bharat Rakshak, Mukund Murthy and Somnath Sapru, for their marvellous work chronicling Indian Air Force history.

  In Roorkee, the staff of the Bengal Engineers Group, including Captain Lakshmi and Lieutenant Colonel Bedi. Ajai Shukla for passing his expert eye over a severely inexpert manuscript.

  In Palghat, the Mukundan family: Ram, Shailaja and Aunty Padma, and the late P. Mukundan – the resilience of his affection for Bobby made it possible to tell this story. In Indore, Bomi and Shireen Heerjee. In Calicut, the Marshall family, especially Jasmine Marshall. In Anand, Gujarat, Verghese and Nirmala Kurien. In Manipur, Chitra Ahantem, Hemant Singh Katoch, Leisangthem Surjit and Mr Surchand of the Manipur Mountaineering and Trekking Association, Freddy Longleng, Grace Jajo, and the esteemed Yangmasho Shishak.

  In Bangalore, Sankaran Nair, Ramachandra Guha, Theodore Baskaran and Bhairav Acharya. In Kodagu, Gowri Monappa and Kushi Cariappa. In Madras, K. T. Ganapathy, S. Muthiah, P. Athiyaman, Kalyan Raman, T. Adhiraj, Mathangi Krishnamurthi, Anna Varki, Siddharth Varadarajan, and the staff at the Alumni Office of the College of Engineering, Guindy. Naresh Fernandes in Bombay and Kai Friese in Delhi, both writers with such erudition about the war years as I could only dream of having.

  In the United Kingdom, Gordon Graham for his blessings; Martin Pick, Denzil Fernandes and Michael Dwyer; Nigel de Lee, who interviewed John Walker Wright of the 2nd Field Company; April Philips, the niece of John Walker Wright, a
nd the many residents of Bisley village who came together to help me locate her (among them Derek Hunt, Roger Utley, John Ellis and Bob Brooks). The staffs of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the Imperial War Museum, the National Army Museum, the Royal Engineers Museum, the British Library and the National Archives at Kew.

  This manuscript was carried through the final lap by the faith and keen criticism of my agents and publishers: David Miller and Melanie Jackson, Arabella Pike, Starling Lawrence and Karthika V. K., Essie Cousins, Kate Johnson, Stephen Guise and Ajitha G. S., besides other friends in publishing, Chiki Sarkar and Nandini Mehta. For personal support: Arshia Sattar, who has encouraged my writing longer than I have been writing; my cohort at Sangam House, Lynne Fernandez and the dancers of Nrityagram, who respectively inspired and humbled me; Maria Aurora Couto and the late Alban Couto (for the use of his library), and Krishna Bisht and the staff at Aldona; Tara Kelton and the T.A.J. Residency, Bangalore; Sarita and Ramneek Bakhshi, Omesh and Anuja Kapila.

  Many friends were integral to the long process, and they include Anmol Tikoo, Andrew Stobo Sniderman and the boys of 7/10, Ajay Madiwale, Ajay Krishnan, Shruti Ravindran, Anand Vaidya and Veejay Sai. My most insightful reader and loyal friend, Tara Sapru. For all the rest, my family: especially Saraswathy Ganapathy, my mother, constant accomplice, critic and guide.

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. A single exception is the end of the chapter ‘No Heroes’. The rescue on the banks of the Chindwin did happen, but the identity of the specific pilots from No. 2 Squadron is unknown, and unclaimed.