‘Utterly absorbing … It’s a sprawlingly multifaceted subject, and India’s War captures it more fully and more authoritatively than any other single volume of popular history has yet managed … This is a panoramic and richly researched history of the first order, not to be missed by any student of India’s history’ Steve Donoghue, The National
‘Absorbing and important’ Philip Hensher, Spectator
‘A highly readable account of one of the more complex – and ignored – phases of World War II’ Joseph C. Goulden, Washington Times
‘A panoramic work, spanning the deliberations of the highest Allied councils of war to the febrile mood on the streets of Kolkata … An important story … Raghavan’s splendid history is a reminder not just of India’s historic contribution to the defeat of fascism, but also its geo-political potential throughout the Indo-pacific’ Shashank Joshi, Financial Times
‘Raghavan’s study fulfils his mission in presenting readers with intertwined narratives of military campaigns, international strategies, and the rise of the freedom struggle that was to determine the future of the subcontinent …Raghavan highlights India as a power in its own right, rather than a mere bastion of the British Empire’ Aamer Hussein, Independent
‘Contains … enormous scope and a great depth of detail’ Nigel Collett, The Diplomat
‘A fascinating account … The history he writes is inspired by the search for a wider horizon for India as a regional superpower beyond the confining frame bequeathed by World War II and the ragged end of British Empire in Asia. It is all the more important and urgent for that’ Adam Tooze, Wall Street Journal
‘Rarely does one come across a relatively young analyst being as thoughtful and erudite on questions of war, peace and national strategy, as Dr Srinath Raghavan’ G.Parthasarathy, New Indian Express
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Allen Lane 2016
Published in Penguin Books 2017
Copyright © Srinath Raghavan, 2016
Cover images © Imperial War Museum/Alamy
Author photograph © S.C. Sekhar
Cover design © Stoddart&Colaço
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-1-846-14543-8
List of Figures
List of Maps
List of Tables
List of Illustrations
Prologue
1. Politics of War
2. Defence of India
3. Competing Offers
4. Mobilizing India
5. Into Africa
6. The Oil Campaigns
7. Fox Hunting
8. Collapsing Dominoes
9. Coils of War
10. Declarations for India
11. Rumour and Revolt
12. Indian National Armies
13. Allies at War
14. War Economy
15. Around the Mediterranean
16. Preparation
17. Back to Burma
18. Post-war
Epilogue: Last Post
Illustrations
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
For Sukanya Venkatachalam
I should like to thank the staff at the following archives and libraries: National Archives of India; Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi; The National Archives, Kew; British Library, London; Imperial War Museum, London; Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London; School of Oriental and African Studies Library, London; University of Technology, Sydney; Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; and the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. My debt to the scholars upon whose work I have relied is recorded in the notes to this book. But I would like particularly to express my gratitude to the authors of the 25-volume Indian official history of the Second World War – an unfortunately neglected series of books that remains an indispensable mine of information.
In researching this book I had stellar assistance at various times from Sandeep Bhardwaj, Vipul Dutta, Sarah Khan and Swetha Murali. Several other friends and colleagues sent me materials that were difficult to access: Rakesh Ankit, Rohit Chandra, Alan Jeffreys, Madhav Khosla and Kaushik Roy. I am especially grateful to A. R. Venkatachalapathy and Heather Goodall for drawing my attention to sources of whose existence I was entirely unaware. Aditya Balasubramanian and Avinash Celestine not only shared their excellent, unpublished work on the economic history of the period but spent long hours discussing their ideas and mine.
I owe a huge debt to Pratap Bhanu Mehta and other colleagues at the Centre for Policy Research. They have not only encouraged my interest in the history of India’s global engagements but have taught me fresh ways of thinking about the subject. It is a matter of deep regret that three remarkable senior colleagues – Ramaswami Iyer, K. C. Sivaramakrishnan and B. G. Verghese – are no longer around to see this book. While writing this book, I was also affiliated with the India Institute at King’s College, London. I am extremely grateful to Sunil Khilnani for his encouragement and support over the years.
Thanks are also due to Mahesh Rangarajan, Rudra Chaudhuri, Venu Madhav Govindu, Jahnavi Phalkey, Pallavi Raghavan and Pranay Sharma for indulging my interest in India’s role in the Second World War. For opportunities to present the arguments of this book and receive useful feedback, I am grateful to: David Edgerton at the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War, King’s College, London; Devesh Kapur at the Center for Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania; Karuna Mantena at the South Asia Studies Colloquium, Yale University.
The manuscript in draft was read by David Gilmour, Ramachandra Guha and Nandini Mehta. Their detailed and perceptive comments on substance and style immensely improved the book. The penultimate draft was read closely by Keshava Guha, and his suggestions were extremely useful in knocking the text into final shape. I am most grateful to all of them for taking the time out of their own projects to help me with this book.
My agent, Gill Coleridge, was instrumental in persuading me to embark on this work. Her tact, patience and advice have been indispensable during the course of writing it. Gill’s colleague, Melanie Jackson, was very helpful in placing the book in North America. My thanks also go to Cara Jones of Rogers, Coleridge and White.
It was a huge privilege to work with my editors Simon Winder at Penguin Books and Lara Heimart at Basic Books. Their formidable knowledge of the Second World War helped me frame India’s experience in a wide context and their suggestions were incredibly useful in thinking through and presenting my arguments. Meru Gokhale at Penguin Random House India came to the book in its later stages but with a burst of enthusiasm.
Richard Duguid was marvellously efficient in keeping the various parts of the book together. Charlotte Ridings did a superb job as copy-editor. Octavia Lamb was untiring in her research for the pictures. Jeff Edwards drew the maps. The index was compiled by Dave Cradduck. For their varied contributions to the making of this book, I am also grateful to Emma Bal and Maria Bedford at Penguin, and Leah Stecher and Alia Massoud at Basic.
As ever, this book could not have been written without the love and support of my family. My wife, Pritha, has been magnificently supportive of my obsession with yet another war. Our children, Kavya and Dhruv, have been cheerful despite my long absences. My parents, Geetha and K. S. Raghavan, provided much needed support at home during a crucial phase in the writing of this book. My mother-in-law, Sukanya Venkatachalam, has been a quiet source of encouragement for nearly fifteen years now. None of my books would have been written but for her solidarity, and this one is no exception. This book is for her – as a token of my gratitude and affection.
A viceregal broadcast on a Sunday evening was rather unusual. Yet at 8.30 p.m. on 3 September 1939, the All India Radio stood by for a message from Lord Linlithgow. Speaking from his summer eyrie in Simla, the viceroy tersely announced that His Majesty’s Government was at war with Germany – and so was India. ‘I am confident’, he solemnly declared, ‘that India will make her contribution on the side of human freedom as against the rule of force.’1 That was all. In taking this decision, the viceroy had consulted neither his Executive Council, nor the Central Legislative Assembly, nor yet any Indian leader. To him it was a foregone conclusion. And so began India’s Second World War.
When the war ended six years later, India stood among the victors. Indian soldiers had fought in a stunning range of places: Hong Kong and Singapore; Malaya and Burma; Iraq, Iran and Syria; North and East Africa; Sicily and mainland Italy. The Indian army had raised, trained and deployed some 2.5 million men. Even at the time, this was recognized as the largest volunteer army in history. Nearly 90,000 of these men were killed or maimed. Many more millions of Indians were pulled into the vortex of the Second World War – as industrial, agricultural and military labour. India’s material and financial contribution to the war was equally significant. India emerged as a major military-industrial and logistical base for Allied operations in South-East Asia and the Middle East, and the country was also among the largest wartime creditors of Britain. Such extraordinary economic mobilization was made possible only by imposing terrible privations on a population that barely skirted the edge of subsistence. The human toll on the Indian home front must be counted in millions.
And yet, the story of India’s war is only dimly remembered.
Just over five decades after the end of the war, I joined the Officers Training Academy of the Indian army. Soon after our arrival, we were corralled in the drill square to be divided into training companies. As I awaited my turn, nervously sweltering in the late summer sun, the Subedar Major tipped his regimental cane towards me and said, ‘Meiktila.’ It took me a moment to realize that ‘Meiktila’ was the name of the company to which I was assigned. And it took me much longer to understand the significance of the name. The names of the other companies sounded equally strange. ‘Jessami’ rang no bell, while I knew ‘Kohima’ only as the capital of the Indian state of Nagaland. Back in our barracks, I found that my fellow cadets were quite as bemused. Those who had friends training in the Indian Military Academy trotted out names of some companies there: Keren and Cassino, Alamein and Sangro – almost all were unfamiliar to our ears.
I wrote off my ignorance to my training in the sciences and my unfamiliarity with anything more than high school history. And soon, I figured out that these were names of places where the Indian army had fought famous battles during the Second World War. Yet, even instructors in military history at the Academy were unable to tell me much more than that. Indeed, my instructors seemed to proceed on the premise that ‘Indian’ military history began on 25 October 1947 – with the outbreak of the First Kashmir War.
On completion of my training, I was commissioned into an infantry regiment: the Rajputana Rifles. In his welcome speech, the Colonel of the Regiment loftily reminded us that we were privileged to join the oldest and most decorated rifle regiment of the Indian army. On my first visit to the regimental officers’ mess, I was struck to note from the banners that thirteen battalions of my regiment had fought in almost every theatre of the Second World War – from Malaya to Italy, including in such seemingly exotic countries as Eritrea and Tunisia. Skimming through the soporific regimental history, I picked up some basic details about which battalion fought where and who won the Victoria Cross. I was hooked. But subalterns in the Indian army rarely have the leisure to read history – never mind trying to write it. In the event, it was my interest in Indian military history that prompted me to abandon the seductive rigours of the army for the sheltered groves of academia.
Over the years, I have come to take a more charitable view of my ignorance as a cadet. There are two large and apparently uncontrollable bodies of work that are germane to anyone interested in India’s Second World War. On the one hand, there is the unceasing outpouring of books on the war itself. In most of these, India is rarely assigned more than a walk-on part. Some aspects of the war relating to India – especially the Burma campaign – have received more sustained treatment. But these tend to be insulated from the wider context of India’s contribution to the war. On the other hand, there is a mountain of monographs on Indian history in the decade preceding 1947. Almost all of these, however, treat the Second World War as little more than mood music in the drama of India’s advance towards independence and partition. The plot and the acts are by now wearily familiar: the resignation of the Congress ministries at the outbreak of war; the Cripps Mission and the Quit India movement of 1942; the Cabinet Mission of 1946; Independence with Partition in August 1947.
To be sure, there are some fine specialized studies that throw important light on particular aspects of Indian involvement in the war: military, economic or social.2 Yet there is no comprehensive account of India’s war. Two books come close. Johannes Voigt’s Indien im Zweiten Weltkrieg was published in 1978 – an English translation appeared almost a decade later. A model of scholarly thoroughness, the book offered an as yet unsurpassed account of Indian politics and military policy during the war. And in Forgotten Armies, Chris Bayly and Tim Harper presented a brilliantly fascinating social history of the war in the ‘great crescent’ arching from Bengal to Singapore. Yet the book is not – and does not claim to be – a history of India during the Second World War. More recently, we have had Yasmin Khan’s The Raj at War, which offers an engaging ‘people’s history’ of India’s participation in the war. As with many studies of the ‘home front’ in various wars, however, the exclusion of the strategic and military dimensions results in a partial and puzzling picture. Still missing is the single volume that presents a rounded narrative, bringing in the manifold dimensions of the war.
The book in your hands attempts to provide such an integrated account. In so doing, I am interested not just in telling the story of India’s war but in explaining the course of events and exploring their consequences. The narrative that follows has five intertwined strands.
First, there is the strategic dimension of the war. It is tempting to see India merely as an appendage of the British Empire. Didn’t the viceroy unilaterally take India into the war? Of course, India was a cog in the imperial machinery. But India was also a significant power in its own right, with the Raj having a sub-imperial system of its own. India’s sphere of influence and interference stretched from Hong Kong and Singapore to Malaya and Burma, Tibet and Xinjiang, Afghanistan and southern Iran, Iraq and the Persian Gulf states, Aden and East Africa. This ‘empire of the Raj’ – to use Robert Blyth’s resonant phrase – was as variegated as the British Empire itself. Some of these territories had been directly governed by India, while others were dependencies where India’s formal and informal writ continued to run. Others still were nominally independent states in which India discerned vital interests or which were seen as useful geopolitical ‘buffers’.3 Even before the war broke out in 1939, the Raj stood ready to defend its own empire.
In many ways, British India exercised greater freedom in its external relations than the Dominions of Australia, Canada and South Africa. As the viceroy of India observed in 1929, ‘Though India, unlike the Self-Governing Dominions, does not formally enjoy an independent position in the sphere of foreign policy, she is possibly more continuously and practically concerned with foreign policy than any of them.’4 India’s peculiar situation as a colonial entity but also a regional power was recognized in the international system. India was a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles after the Great War. And it was a founding-member of the League of Nations – the only non-self-governing entity in the League.5
This brings us to the second theme running through the book: the international dimension of India’s war. The Raj’s security commitments remained manageable so long as East Asia was quiescent and no European power could credibly threaten an invasion of the Middle East. The belying of these expectations led to an enormous expansion of India’s commitment during the war. India’s war was strongly shaped by the actions and choices of several major powers apart from Britain: the United States and Japan, China and Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union.
The strategic and international contexts were closely related to a third thread in the story: domestic politics. In the two decades before the onset of the war, the British government had, in response to the rising tide of nationalism, been compelled to undertake political reforms. These were designed to increase the involvement of Indians in the administration, and apparently progress India towards self-government within the British Empire. Yet the British wished neither to hand the Indians any serious power nor to hasten self-government. As war loomed, the politics of India directly impinged on strategic matters. The viceroy’s decision to join the war without consulting the Indians would considerably complicate politics during the war. And the widening political divide would also lead other great powers to intervene in the affairs of India.
Politics also had an impact on the fourth strand of our narrative: the economic and social dimensions of the war. The billowing demands on India would entail ever greater extraction of societal resources. Yet the wartime mobilization of India was contingent on securing popular support and participation, which in turn depended on co-opting Indian political parties and leaders. At the same time, the demands of war led the Raj to rely heavily on traditionally marginalized social groups, and so gave them greater political voice.
The story of the ‘home front’ can be fully understood only by relating it to the fifth concern threading through this book: the war front. After all, it was the demands of the war front that led to the wide-ranging mobilization and the ensuing transformations at home. Understanding why the military effort required such resources leads us to the terrain of military history. In focusing on the various theatres in which the Indian troops fought, I do not aim at providing a blow-by-blow – or hillock-by-hillock – account of battles. The really interesting story is the transformation of the Indian army, step by painful step, from a backward constabulary outfit into an effective and adaptable fighting force. In this story, such seemingly mundane matters as training and logistics, health and morale loom large.
Wars are ultimately waged, opposed and supported, won and lost by individuals. In the domain of ‘high’ politics and strategy there is a stellar cast of characters: Gandhi and Churchill, Nehru and Roosevelt, Jinnah and Linlithgow, Bose and Chiang Kai-shek, Wavell and Mountbatten, Auchinleck and Slim. But perspectives from ‘below’ are rarer. In particular, the voice of the Indian soldier has been rather difficult to recover. We have only slivers of letters exchanged between soldiers and their families, captured in censors’ reports and other official documents. Few soldiers wrote down or orally recorded their memories. Nevertheless, I have tried to understand what the war meant for those who fought it on the fronts and those who supported it from home.
Finally, this book is not just about what India did for the war. I also look at what the war did to India. The South Asia of today is in very many ways the product of India’s Second World War. The emergence of Pakistan and its protracted rivalry with India; the establishment of a constitutional democracy in India and the dominance of the military in Pakistan; the adoption of planning for economic development; the role of the state in the provision of social goods; the popular movements in the region fired by ideas of economic and social rights – none of these can be understood without accounting for the impact of the war. In the absence of a full reckoning with the war our understanding of modern South Asia remains deeply deficient. The Second World War is the one black hole in our historical imagination that exercises a deep gravitational pull on the region even today. By restoring the war to the centre-stage, this book challenges and revises our understanding of the making of modern South Asia.
The story of India’s war is also central to understanding the country’s rise on the world stage. India is now acknowledged to be an emerging global power – one that could buttress an open and liberal international order. Yet the rise of India was first foretold during the Second World War, when a desperately poor country mobilized to an astonishing degree and simultaneously fought for its own freedom and that of the world. As we ponder India’s emerging role on a global canvas, the story of its Second World War provides the crucial starting point.