In these two books for the first time the quite independent influence of the war itself on India's future has been assessed. Often it has just been the context for exploring the Bengal famine, the Quit India movement and the mounting communal divide that led to partition. It may be morally uncomfortable to see war as the catalyst for change. But it was certainly so for the Welfare state in Britain and Yasmin Khan makes a similarly persuasive case that it was for India's independence and its belated modernisation under Nehru.
Khan's is a study of the way in which India was mobilised for total war, concentrating on the subcontinent itself and the Burma campaign, though taking in the role of the Indian army in North Africa, and even reminding us of Krishna Menon and the India League in London. If rightly seen as history from below, it is equally concerned with policies of state. Karnad's is a family memoir of four children of the Parsi family, the Megaseths from Calicut—of Bobby and his army career, of his elder sister Subur and her marriage to journalist and future distinguished diplomat, Gopalaswami Parthasarathi (though his is not strictly a war story), of Nargesh (Nugs) who married Kondadera Ganapaty, who joined the Army Medical Corps, only to die early on from bronchitis in the fortress of Thar on the North West Frontier, and of Khorshed who married Bobby's Parsi friend, Marek Dadabhoy, who joined the fledgling India Air Force, likewise fought on the North West Frontier but was to crash on a return flight from a sortie deep into Burma. Only Bobby was to last long into the war though the account of his military career is often overshadowed by that of his fellow officer John Wright, and in some ways the family story is but a peg to look at the war more generally. The author is Nug's child.
Centre stage is the Indian army, its “vast, almost unfathomable expansion” (Khan, p. 22), from—to use Karnad's language—the world's largest mercenary army to its largest volunteer. By late 1940 it was attracting 20,000 new recruits monthly. Many did so just to get a good meal. It was to reach 2.5 million. Down to 1939 60% had been drawn from the Punjab but now it was open to all comers: “the three services opened their arms to all the runt races formerly deemed unfit for service” (Karnad, p. 89). The Indianisation of the officer class was stepped up. Here was one means of upward mobilisation for the Indian middle class, nationalist and progressive: in Karnad's pithy words, “young men traded one uniform for another, khadi for khaki” (p. 287). And many British officers shared this outlook, accepting India's future independence. Here were the makings of the 14th Army to win the Burma campaign. But there was a paradox about this phenomenal fighting force. It was no longer the military presence on which the Raj had always relied as the ultimate sanction for law and order. As Karnad puts it, “rarely has an army been entrusted with so much while being distrusted so much” (p. 158).
The Raj arrogated huge powers under the Defence of India Act: “defence and power had become synonymous in India” (Karnad, p. 124). It becomes obvious why holding the Defence portfolio became the key issue in the ongoing conflict between Raj and Congress. But beyond mere power the Raj was desperate to mobilise Indian public opinion behind the war. It all but blackmailed—certainly bribed—Indians to contribute to the War fund. Some 55 million rupees were collected by the end of 1941.There was the separate Viceroy's War Purposes Fund. Many civil servants salved their consciences at not serving in the European war by being active in raising funds. But there was also, as in the Army, a new mood in the ICS, with officials such as Malcolm Darling and Penderel Moon “reflexive about their own purpose and the moral propriety of empire” (Khan, p. 55). And this propaganda drive largely failed. The Raj could not turn an imperial war into a people's war. And here in Khan's analysis lies the seeds of independence: “the foundations of the old order faced steady erosion” (p. 58).
The rot set in with the retreat from Burma. Not only was there Indian anger at a privileged European withdrawal but the sight of haggard Indian refugees heightened a sense of imperial breakdown. We forget that Indians were so numerous in Burma, half the population of Rangoon. Some 600,000 fled, “at the time the largest human migration in history” (Karnad, p. 52). Some 80,000 died. The hammer blow had of course been the surrender at Singapore, with a third of India's pre-war army, some 70,000: “never in its history had the British Empire surrendered so many troops en masse”. (Karnad, p. 50). Then, with the appearance of the Japanese navy off the eastern coast, the Raj panicked in the south. Madras was all but evacuated. Only Rajagopalachari—and it is good to see in Karnad's account recognition of the stand he took on the war—insisted that citizens stay on to fight a people's war. All this further compounded a sense that the Raj had lost control. “By mid- 1941 the reality of the war, its severity and extension were becoming clearer” (Karnad, p. 90): it was “no coincidence that 1942 would be a year of extraordinary dislocation and unrest in India” (Khan, p. 93). By 1942 the credibility of the state had collapsed, “a widespread loss of faith in even the most basic functions of the imperial state” (Khan, p. 121).
First there was the Bengal famine. Many factors contributed but surely Khan is right to count the famine victims amongst India's war dead. There was the fatal loss of Burmese rice exports. Then there was the military programme of denial, a scorched earth policy to pre-empt a Japanese invasion. By the end of 1942 some 20,000 country craft—the means of distributing food—had been destroyed. There was a serious cyclone in 1942. But the authorities in Calcutta would not intervene. When Wavell became Viceroy he made urgent appeals to London but these were ignored. He was keenly aware how damaged the reputation of the Raj was by the famine. Villagers in despair poured into Calcutta, some 2,000 dying every month in the city in 1943. Obscenely, war personnel were living it up in the Grand Hotel as the starving died outside. Some three million perished, “a deadly murk in the east” (Karnad, p. 167). The government chose to publish the Bengal Famine Enquiry report on VE day; as Khan concludes, “human negligence and failure to prioritise that human lives are equal was the root cause” (p. 212).
The Quit India movement takes on an entirely new look in the context of the war. Gandhi was ever more appalled by the way India was being drawn into the conflict. But I have never seen it said before that an aspect which horrified him was the rise of prostitution to cater for foreign troops, including black American personnel, raising the risk of miscegenation. Through the rise of private armies there was a kind of quasi-fascist militarism around, and Gandhi and Congress were “one step behind the public” (Khan, p. 138). But the Raj struck first and interned the entire High Command. In consequence the Quit India rebellion was carried out by a new generation, a youth protest, looking ahead to the kind of life they might expect in an independent India: this was “a generation seeking a radical rupture with the political standards of their parents” (Khan, p. 182). Khan claims that a similar search for modernisation lay behind the huge increase in Muslim League numbers. Even so, peasants and mill workers were the majority in the rebellion. Fascinatingly, many peasants joined from villages that had been destroyed by the building of aerodromes. The Raj retaliated with “the most violent crackdown since the repression of the 1857 rising” (Khan, p. 191). Significantly, sepoys were ready to join in this repression. Arguably, the Raj at this juncture felt such betrayal freed them from any moral imperative to win over Indian public opinion to the war. They could pursue it now entirely on their own terms. They came into line with the American line to adopt a far tougher approach to managing the war effort.
Meanwhile, an entirely new kind of threat appeared with the INA under Subhas Chandra Bose, a “bracing modern form of nationalism with potentially fascist overtones” (Khan, p. 217). Bose clearly stood for an inclusive Indian nationalism, merging communities within the INA and setting up a women's brigade. Civilian Indians on the Malay plantations were happy to join to escape the prospect of enforced Japanese labour, the sepoys did so more reluctantly. Some 40,000 troops, known derisively in India as JIFS (Japanese Inspired Fifth Columnists), joined. On 21 October 1943 Bose set up his Provisional Government. Its radio propaganda was widely listened to. Bose was hugely charismatic, attracted large crowds, flinging jewellery at his feet. Karnad sees him as “plainly the most esteemed Indian officer anywhere in the world” (p. 168). Yet Khan doubts if the INA was ever fully integrated into the Japanese war effort. Only 8,000 INA troops were at Kohima. But the Raj completely misread Indian opinion and its trial in the Red Fort in 1946 of three INA officers, one from each major community, became a rallying cry for Indian freedom. It had to be abandoned. Karnad comments: “Bose's valiant, violent failure would burnish the trophy of the Congress's pacifist path” (p. 241).
And all this climaxes with India's Forgotten War, with its conversion of the North East: India's overgrown and neglected backyard into a war zone, the decisive battles of Kohima and Imphal and the liberation by the 14th Army of Burma. Here the story of Bobby's war comes into its own, with a graphic account of the Japanese attempt at Kohima and Imphal to break through to Dinapur, where huge Allied supplies would answer their overstretched supply lines. Bobby was to lose his life pointlessly in a game of Russian roulette. We learn about the Chindits, who took their name from the Burmese guardian spirits, half-dragon, half-lion. Tribute is paid to General Auchinleck, without whom the 14th Army would never have been properly equipped. General Sir William Slim is an undisputed hero. We forget that the 14th Army was `the largest army ever raised by the British Empire” (Karnad, p. 156). This was “Britain's largest land campaign in the world war” (Karnad, p. 173), and it was Japan's greatest defeat. There were huge losses on both sides, the Allies 12,500 at Imphal, 4,000 at Kohima, 53,000 Japanese. Yet this victory was to be overshadowed by events in Europe and was oddly to be forgotten in newly modernising India. As Khan explains, “The story of the war did not sit easy with the new era. It belonged to the old colonial world: archaic, illegitimate and even irrelevant” (Khan, p. 321). And Karnad agrees: “the JIFs had lost and badly, but the future was on their side. Bobby's army had won but it had fought on the side of the past” (p. 211).
And there was a real tragedy to follow. Maybe the Raj was all too keen to demobilise this unwieldy unpredictable army as soon as possible But the demobilised sepoys returned, often armed, to their villages in the Punjab and in 1947–48 were to be both defendants of their own communities and murderers of their rivals.
One alternative source for this story is by the late Christopher Bayly and T N Harper, Forgotten Armies: the End of Britain's Asian Empire (Penguin, 2005).
