Through 1940 and 1941, recruitment officers worked their way across the regions of northern India that had traditionally provided troops for the British empire. Indian soldiers had contributed the manpower for maintaining and extending the realm of the king-emperor in faraway London for many decades. Now they would be called on to defend that empire in an hour of existential threat.
The officers soon exhausted the Punjab, the north-west frontier and Rajasthan and headed south, to the very tip of the Indian peninsula. Others worked the high valleys of Nepal, stripping much needed able-bodied men from the mountain communities that were generically, and inaccurately, labelled Gurkhas. A vast force was assembled and sent west into Africa and the Middle East to fight Germans, Italians and their allies, and then to the far east, to combat the Japanese, who dismembered the British empire there in a matter of months in early 1942.
Yasmin Khan has already published an acclaimed work, The Great Partition, on the bloody partition of the British subcontinental empire into India and Pakistan after the second world war. In The Raj at War, she brings the same forensic clarity and even-handed sensitivity to the experience of British India and its vast and varied population during the seven or eight years that preceded independence in 1947.
The role of India in the second world war has rarely been examined, let alone recounted so fully. For a long time, it was almost entirely forgotten. In India, the fact that millions of people volunteered to fight for their imperial masters does not sit well with a nationalist narrative of universal opposition to the Raj. On the British side, too, the role of the empire in the conflict is difficult to integrate into the story of the solitary stand of a blitz-battered nation against the Nazis.
This marvellous book is far more than a history of the military exploits or otherwise of the 2 million men from India who fought in the conflict, however, even if Khan’s vivid descriptions of the East African campaign, battles in Burma and campaigns in north-east India are powerful and important. It also brilliantly describes how the experience of the war for civilian and soldier alike, as well as the social and political changes the conflict wreaked, contributed to the process of casting off imperial rule at the conflict’s end. It would have been easy to have done this through studying the vast number of official documents or the memoirs of powerful men. But Khan is interested in the lived experience of the conflict for peasant women, interned European communists, Muslim businessmen, minor politicians, merchant seamen, activists, brothel owners, incoming American infantrymen, outgoing English memsahibs, escaping Italian POWs and many others. The result is a narrative that, despite the restrained academic style, is as riotous with colour as the markets and railway stations around my home in Delhi. Such colour is not particularly picturesque, but is fascinating and revealing.
There are moving passages: a mother sits beside her sleeping son, hours after he has returned from years of fighting, and touches him to reassure herself that he is truly there; a grieving father tells the British officer who comes to his small village to explain how his son had died in Greece that “on the whole he was all right” but at night “it troubles me”; a widow in Nepal, who has spent only weeks with her young husband and who never sees him again, guards his medals and a picture all her life.
Khan points out “the untranslatable distance” between the British officers and their men and how British officers relied on caste and tribe stereotypes, and clichés about the fatalism and loyalism of the Indian soldier. But there are stories of genuine solidarity and affection too. The institutionalised racism of the War Office in London is amply demonstrated. She also tackles the vexed question of the Bengal famine of 1943, in which millions died. In India, this is usually blamed almost entirely on Winston Churchill’s refusal to spare scarce shipping to get more grain to India. In The Raj at War, a range of intersecting factors is unpicked: a cyclone, the exigencies of the war economy, the pre-emptive “scorched earth” policy of the local administration in the face of a potential Japanese invasion, the incompetence of British officials, hoarding and other distortions of the market, as well as the callous indifference of London to the plight of starving, but dark-skinned, imperial subjects.
It was not just the Bengal famine that exposed the myths of the Raj. There was the discriminatory treatment of refugees fleeing Burma and of serving soldiers; the increasingly harsh conditions in Indian factories as workers struggled with impossible production targets in support of the efforts of Britain not only to fight Nazism, but also to preserve its empire and influence. Veterans came back from battle with new skills, literacy and perspectives. And, Khan argues, even if most of the soldiers returned peacefully to their earlier existences as agricultural labourers, protest was burning with a new fervour. In the Punjab, soon to see the horrific violence of partition, many veterans began to see their wartime service in a new light. There was a naval mutiny in Bombay in 1946 and other outbreaks of resistance. In Nepal, too, there was postwar unrest. An amazing 200,000 Nepalese fought for the British in the war and their return – aware of the outside world in a very new way – posed an evident threat to the shaky rulers of the previously isolated mountain kingdom. Soon there were strikes and marches in Kathmandu. In Britain, soldiers and sailors who had fought or kept the crucial maritime convoys running comprised the vanguard of the new immigrants in the postwar world, fulfilling in part the desperate need for labour of the British economy. Some ran basic canteens that turned into restaurants and today’s curry houses. By 1946 there were around 20 “Indian” restaurants in London, largely owned by immigrants from Sylhet, in what would eventually become Bangladesh.
What this important book makes clear is that India’s experience of war showed hundreds of millions of people that the British were in the country for their own benefit. Many had never doubted this, of course, but its obvious demonstration on such a vast scale made the postwar continuation of the Raj an impossibility. Visiting British politicians and local diplomats today invoke the “shared historical ties” of the two nations. The Raj at War might prompt them to think more deeply about what those ties really mean.
The Raj at War is published by Bodley Head (£25). Click here to buy it for £20
