PART ONE: HOME
Chapter 1: Everybody’s Friend
1. The place was fifty years older, but not very much changed, since the time that Edward Lear visited, seeking landscapes to draw. Lear observed with an artist’s eye that it was ‘all but impossible to give any idea of these beautiful Malabar lanes, since their chief beauty consists of what cannot be readily imitated: to wit, endless detail of infinitely varied vegetation … The colour, too, of these scenes, the deep and vivid green, the red soil roads, the brilliant white and scarlet dresses of the people.’ He made note of the palmy roads, the plantain leaf – ‘Surely no leaf is lovelier!’ – and ‘the river scenery about Calicut and Mahee more lovely than any I had before imagined … All more or less qualified by the odour of stinking fish.’ From Edward Lear’s Indian journals, online at the Digital Library of India, http://maddy06.blogspot.in/2010/09/edward-lear-at-summer-isle-of-eden.html
2. In the best-known Parsi legend, their first refugees arrived at Nargol in Gujarat, where they were met on the shore by the Raja of Sanjan. There the King held up a full glass of milk, to communicate that his kingdom had no place left for foreigners. In reply, the Parsi leader poured a spoon of sugar into the brimming glass, and it did not overflow; thus answering that the Parsis would sweeten his kingdom without disturbing it.
3. To have ‘eaten someone’s salt’ is a popular idiom in many Indian languages meaning to ‘owe someone your loyalty’; in Hindi, a traitor can be called namak haram, or a violator of the salt.
4. Not all Parsis were opposed to the nationalist movement. At Navsari, the final stop of the salt satyagraha before the coast, Parsi families had paid for the electric lights and dais from which Gandhi addressed a gathering of ten thousand.
Chapter 2: Hukm Hai
1. Sankaran Nair, K., Inside I. B. and R. A. W.: A Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss, p. 44.
2. The very first pilot licensed in India was J. R. D. Tata in 1929. He was the heir to the largest Parsi industrial fortune.
3. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India 1921–1952, p. 592.
4. The Viceroy was, in reality, neither a hawk nor a British bulldog. He was a mild and sympathetic statesman, sent to India to administer the new constitution. When Britain declared war, he had been required by law to automatically follow suit. So he became a wartime viceroy who, by no will of his own, condemned the chances of a constitutional solution.
5. The castes mingled in the classrooms, but Guindy College did not dare intrude on the sanctum of Indian scruples: food. Separate messes spared the students the worst violations. Messes A–E were vegetarian canteens for Brahmin Tamils, non-Brahmin Tamils, and caste students from Andhra, Kerala and the north. Bobby patronised the others, enjoying whatever they dished out by way of grub and politics. He could breakfast at the Anglo-Indian mess, where toast and omelettes were served with cutlery, porcelain, and learned rumours of the preparation ‘at home’ for an invasion. At lunchtime, the Andhra non-veg mess had a spicy tamarind fish pulusu, and heartburn over the Tamil refusal to cede a Telugu province. The Muslim mess served up mutton curry, pulao, and hot speculation on whether the Aga Khan might come out on Hitler’s side. Non-veg D served Chettinad seafood curries to middle-caste Tamils, who argued about whether Rajaji was right to use the same sedition laws against communists that the British had once used against him.
Chapter 3: Savages of the Stone Age
1. It was here that Winston Churchill, as a newly minted subaltern, had joined the punitive expedition that became the subject of his first book. In The Story of the Malakand Field Force, young Winston described the Pashtun as a chimera of racial terror: ‘To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer … The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.’
2. In 1936, twenty-eight battalions.
3. On 23 July 1941, General Archibald Wavell, the new Commander-in-Chief of India, wrote to Air Marshal Arthur Tedder about a visit to Risalpur in India, where he found a squadron ‘training as fighter squadron with Audax machines. Most modern aircraft possessed in India. Does this not make your heart bleed? Could you not now spare some Gladiators, as many as possible, to enable pilots in this squadron to be trained in comparatively modern machines?’ Quoted in Michael Carver’s The Warlords, London, 1976, p. 223.
4. Jasjit Singh, The Icon: Marshall of the Indian Air Force, Arjan Singh, DFC, pp. 19–20.
5. Before the war, there had been a massacre in Peshawar. In 1930, the government had arrested Abdul Ghaffar Khan for preaching civil disobedience. He was the leader of the Khudai Khidmatgars, ‘Servants of God’, a non-violent movement of 50,000 red-shirted Pashtuns. At the news of his arrest, the redshirts swarmed into the walled city and gathered in the Qissa Khawani Bazar, the Storytellers’ Market – but the Army would not hear any new stories that day. Being Pashtun, they met a thin-lipped British ferocity which the Congress activists had never had to face. Four hundred were shot and killed: as many as fell at Amritsar ten years before. Only a single regiment, the Royal Garhwal Rifles, had refused to open fire, resisting their officers and the provocation of the crowd. For that insubordination, 67 soldiers were court-martialled, and their NCOs received sentences of life imprisonment.
6. As both Sven Lindqvuist and David Omissi have written, the very existence of the RAF as an independent service is owed to the policy of colonial ‘air control’ – the idea that an air force could undertake colonial policing, and relieve the costs of managing the Empire’s sprawl.
Victorious in 1919, but gutted by the war, Britain had urgently needed to shed its military load. The security of the colonies had returned as the central objective, and few senior commanders saw any use for a full-fledged air force. The RAF may have been disbanded, but for a daring manoeuvre by Winston Churchill, then a young minister. Along with the first Chief of Air Staff, Hugh Trenchard, he insisted that military aviation could take the lead in securing the empire by conducting ‘policing’ actions. Churchill argued that an Empire in rebellion needed an air force; in reality, the air force needed the Empire to rebel, and give it a chance to demonstrate air control.
The Empire obliged. Popular eruptions occurred across the British Empire in 1919, and the air force was deployed in Waziristan, Somaliland, Aden, and on one occasion, Punjab. Throughout what Europe called the inter-war years, to be bombed from the air was the privilege of the colonised world. Nowhere was aerial bombing more common than in the ‘mandated’ territories of the Near East, newly annexed from the Ottoman Empire. Arabs were in mass rebellion, and the RAF seized its chance to practice new techniques of bombing human settlements. Annual campaigns in border areas kept the squadrons busy; in one case, at the end of 1923, the RAF bombed villages in the province of Samawah to enforce a new tax. In Iraq, as in the North-West Frontier, air control was routinised into ‘proscription bombing’, wherein warning notes were dropped ahead of time, to minimise killing and restore pax Britannica.
Chapter 4: The Centre of the World
1. The first two women enrolled in Guindy Engineering College, A. Lalitha and Leela George, contributed an essay to the college magazine that dwelt in part on the war. An excerpt: ‘The present war has brought the fight to our own doors – and when our men are up in the air keeping back the enemy, he comes under cover of darkness and bombs Factories, and does not spare hospitals, churches or schools. It is a war of the machines and the latter have to be produced by the stay-at-homes, viz., women. How can we produce machines if we do not know the science of engineering? Large number of women have been recruited for driving motor vehicles and piloting aero-planes. In peace time, we are only typing automatons, living components in the Telephone Exchange, showcase mannequins or dancing marionettes. But the war has compelled men to give us more urgent and important places in handling machinery. Gifted as we are with equally-sized brains – can we not learn about the principles of machinery and electricity and take our place as e
ngineers-in-charge?’ From Survey School to Tech Temple: A History of College of Engineering, Guindy 1794–1994, Madras, 1991, p. 162.
2. In 1914 the European war had become a ‘world war’ only when Japan joined the Allies, relieving the Royal Navy of escort duties in the Indian Ocean and Pacific. It expected in return, but was denied, any share of Germany’s colonies in the Far East. A special credit for foresight belongs to Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote in 1915: ‘I am almost sure that Japan has her eyes set upon India. She is hungry – she is munching Korea, she has fastened her teeth upon China, and it will be an evil day for India when Japan will have her opportunity.’ Quoted in Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, p. 233.
3. George Orwell, Orwell: The Observer Years, London, 2003, pp. 2–3.
4. Another inter-community marriage was making headlines in early 1942. Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter, Indira, was to marry a young Parsi party worker named Feroze Gandhi. Nehru, mid-stride in the national emergency, suddenly found himself tripping over offended Brahmins from his community, the Kashmiri Pandits.
Nehru was compelled to make a statement to the press, which is quoted in Tariq Ali’s An Indian Dynasty: The story of the Nehru-Gandhi family. ‘I have long held that though parents may and should advice in the matter, the choice and ultimate decision must be with the two parties concerned,’ Nehru wrote, and ended with a nimble pass: ‘Mahatma Gandhi, whose opinion I value not only in public affairs but in private matters also, gave his blessings to the proposal.’
It was then Gandhi’s (the real Gandhi’s) turn to deal with the enraged Pandits. ‘His (Feroze’s) only crime in their estimation is that he happens to be a Parsi … Such unions are bound to multiply with benefit to the society,’ Gandhi said, and called on ‘the writers of such abusive letters to shed your wrath and bless the forthcoming marriage. Their letters betray … a species of untouchability, dangerous because not so easily identified.’ Indira Nehru and Feroze Gandhi were married on 26 March 1942, with Stafford Cripps attending.
5. See Herbert A. Friedman, ‘Axis and Allied Propaganda to Indian Troops’.
6. George Orwell, ‘Not Counting Niggers’, July 1939, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, London, 1968.
Chapter 5: Madras Must Not Burn
1. Quoted in Indivar Kamtekar, ‘The Shiver of 1942’, p. 86.
2. ‘Invasion Must Be Resisted’, The Hindu, 12 April 1942.
3. From a report by the Joint Planning Staff and a Joint Intelligence Committee, titled ‘Defence of India’: ‘Direction of next Japanese drive cannot yet be established but there is no reason why she should not stage a full scale attack on India. We calculate ten divisions plus what could be spared from Burma … Air Forces would be limiting factor but calculate Japan might make 600 available for India and Ceylon excluding carrier-borne aircraft. This force possibly insufficient for advance through India from Bengal but in our opinion ample for invasion of India from East Coast or South. In this case enemy’s final objective likely to be Bombay area and would have good prospect of success.’
Under the headers ‘Enemy Invasion of Ceylon’ and ‘Enemy Attack in Madras Area’, the report continues: ‘If the situation when Ceylon falls is such that its early re-capture is unlikely, Southern INDIA should be given up, our forces withdrawing towards the Central Reserve so as to cover Japanese approaches towards Bombay, ie to, successively, Bangalore, Guntakal, Poona.’ India Command Joint Planning Staff Paper No. 15: Defence of India I, 23 April 1942, National Archives, UK, AIR 23/1967.
4. In a conversation with Canadian Air Commodore Leonard Birchall the British Embassy in Washington DC, quoted in Michael Patterson’s Battle for the Skies, p. 20.
5. ‘Keep Calm’, The Times of India, 10 April 1942.
Chapter 7: Do or Die
1. This situation provided less relief to the hapless civilian administration in India, which spent the monsoon contemplating the prospect of billeting thousands of Europeans, and building refugee camps for millions of Indians from Assam and Bengal.
2. Khanduri, C. B., Thimayya: An Amazing Life, Delhi, 2006, p. 57.
3. Because the IMS was staffed by doctors, it had been the first service to commission Indians. The concession led to anxieties about its being flooded with ‘native surgeons’, and ratios were set for Indians to Europeans, first by the Escher Committee and then the Ogilvy Committee (one-to-two, and two-to-three respectively). To maintain the ratio, the IMS paid British officers an overseas allowance that nearly doubled their total salaries over their Indian colleagues. One consequence was that the pre-war establishment of the IMS was only 364 regular officers, and fifty-five on short-service commission. With the war begun, constraints on recruiting Indian doctors were abolished, but the IMS continued to favour Europeans; in 1942, its civil wing had three times as many Whites as Indians.
4. ‘Army Medical Service Deputation to Mr N. R. Sarkar: Racial Discrimination Alleged’, The Hindu, 16 April 1942.
5. Thal was besieged, and relieved a force led by General Reginald Dyer, only a month after he ordered the firing on unarmed Sikhs in Jallianwala Bagh. Thanks to the victory at Thal, however, he retired a hero.
6. A newly discovered antibacterial compound of sulphonamide, it was used to treat Winston Churchill after he contracted bacterial pneumonia during the Tehran Conference in 1943. The prime minister later declared: ‘This admirable M&B from which I did not suffer any inconvenience, was used at the earliest moment and, after a week’s fever, the intruders were repulsed.’
7. Even in 1939, Rajaji had been sorry to lose his government. In the spring he had urged Gandhi to accept Cripps’s final offer; now he was fed up with the disruptionists in Congress, and he disdained the August kranti as a ‘grievous mistake’.
8. In the end, though, there were only 295 sentences of whipping in the Madras Presidency, and only twenty-one occasions when the police had to fire on crowds (compared to 226 in Bombay). One textile strike in Ahmedabad held out until November 1942, and was praised by nationalist leaders as the ‘Stalingrad of free India’. See Gyan Pandey (ed.), The Indian Nation in 1942.
9. Nirad Chaudhuri, Thy Hand Great Anarch!, p. 567.
Chapter 8: The King’s Own
1. See Appendix 2: ‘The Army of India’.
2. Charles Wood, the Secretary of State for India in 1862, quoted in Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War, p. xiii.
3. By coincidence, this was reportedly Hitler’s favourite Hollywood movie.
4. The school was formerly St Thomason’s College, a rival of Guindy College for the title of the oldest engineering college in India. Later it would become the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.
5. In eighty years, the loyalty of the Indian Army had rarely come into question, but under the strains of war, two collective insubordinations – technically, mutinies – took place in 1940 alone. The first was by a Sikh squadron of Central Indian Horse, which was persuaded by communists to refuse to embark at Bombay to serve in an imperialist war in the Middle East. In the Middle East itself, Sikhs of the 4th Indian Division’s Ammunition Company had refused to carry ammunition boxes on their heads, saying they were not ‘coolies’. They were already disgruntled about theatre orders requiring them to carry around steel helmets, which could not go over their turbans. Both incidents led to courts martial and executions.
6. Quoted in Philip Warner, Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldier, p194.
7. Quoted in Tarak Barkawi, ‘Culture and Combat in the Colonies: The Indian Army in the Second World War’.
8. The doctrine of ‘martial races’, later euphemised as the ‘enlisted classes’, drew on an elaborate pseudo-scientific typology of castes. To some extent, the designated races were groups, like the Sikhs and Pathans, that did have martial traditions. Other criteria of a martial race, however, included phrenological measurements and questions of diet. An overarching qualification was that the regiments of that ethnic group
had remained in order during the uprising of 1857. The corollary to the list of martial races was an implicit blacklist of castes that led the uprising, such as Awadhi Brahmins. (The Bengal Sappers were the only regiment of the Indian Army that continued to recruit Awadhi Brahmins, in recognition of the role of one sapper who blew up the Kashmere Gate of besieged Delhi, allowing the Army to storm the city and crush the uprising.) Eventually, the military’s caste science allowed it to discriminate even between sub-castes, so that Jadhubansi Ahirs were treated as excellent soldiering material and Nandubansis less satisfactory, while Gwalbansis were unusable except for labour.
9. For the Mahars, an ‘Untouchable’ community of the Bombay Presidency, the tradition of Army service had been the sole route of social advancement. After the Great War, the right to re-enlist was a perennial issue for their leaders; among them an especially inspiring Congressman, Bhimrao Ambedkar. Ambedkar’s father Ramji Sakpal had been a sapper with the 106th Company, Bombay Sappers and Miners. His maternal grandfather, meanwhile, had been a subedar-major – the highest rank that could be held by an Indian. In the compressive chill after the First World War, however, these communities stood little chance of being retained. The former Madras Army was worst affected: by the 1930s, all of its combat regiments had been demobilised.
10. In the smaller towns, the Recruitment Directorate used mobile cinema units to screen recruitment films, which could be patriotic (such as Watan ki Pukaar – The Country’s Call), or more direct (Taraqqi – Promotion). Other arms of government were also on the job. Political agents soothed the Maharajas, jealous of their sovereignty, as recruitment drives nosed deeper into the princely states. Civil administration was co-opted to spread the word, tailored to regimental requirements. The chain from collectors to village patwaris (accountants) conveyed to specific neighbourhoods the need for exactly six Hindu Rajputs, or eighteen Jat Sikhs. Medical officers were instructed to admit recruits with knock-knees, goitres and varicose veins, blemishing the turn-out of the ranks. See Recruiting for the Defence Services in India, Combined Inter-Services Historical Section (India & Pakistan), Delhi, 1950.
Farthest Field Page 23