http://www.telegraphindia.com/1151205/jsp/opinion/story_56724.jsp#.VmKaO_mUdO0
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
November was Britain's month of nostalgic remembrance. It meant poppies, Queen Elizabeth in black at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and smaller but no less moving services all over the country, including St Mary Abbots Church down the road in Kensington High Street. The Whitehall ceremony was slightly abbreviated this year in deference to Her Majesty's age. But remembrance was generally more inclusive with references to the Second World War's 89,000 Indian casualties. Highlighting racial unity, attention focussed on the friendship that binds the descendants of a British officer and the Sikh batman who saved his life on the Western Front.
It was in that context that a senior public servant wondered at a dinner party in St John's Wood why there should be a separate memorial for "non-white countries". He meant the Memorial Gates the Queen unveiled on Constitution Hill in November 2002. This is not what Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck - the Auk as many called him - had in mind when he wrote to Clement Attlee in June 1949 that a monument marking the Indian army's role in the Second World War would be "a mark of gratitude from the British people to those soldiers who served Britain and the Empire for 200 years". These were men, he said, who "putting their trust in us, fought and fell in our wars all over the Old World". Auchinleck wanted the monument in Green Park. Others suggested the South Bank. Whitehall consulted India and Pakistan whose governments wanted some say in the design. Nothing happened. The file was closed and put away. Britain had other priorities then, according to Yasmin Khan's excellent new book, The Raj at War, subtitled somewhat enigmatically A People's History of India's Second World War.
What intrigues me is the motivation of the soldiers Auchinleck sought to honour. No doubt he sincerely believed in the sepoy's faith in Britain's cause and identification with it. But was this true of all those who enlisted? It was different during the First World War when leaders like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi urged Indians to enlist as a national duty in return for dominion status when peace was established. But all such illusions had gone by September 3, 1939, when the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, announced that India was at war. Convinced Britain's "moral case (was) so strong" it ought "to make an appeal to anyone who is prepared to approach it with an open mind," Linlithgow had no interest in knowing whether Indians agreed. "Heavy of body and slow of mind, solid as a rock and with almost a rock's lack of awareness", according to Jawaharlal Nehru, he had declared war without even telling any Indian.
The decision destroyed the embryonic concept of regional self-government: ministries in Bombay, the United Provinces, Orissa, the Central Provinces and the North-West Frontier Province resigned in protest. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad confessed to utter bewilderment. His autobiography mentions "a sense of expectancy and fear". Nehru flatly refused to believe there was "the slightest chance of a German or Japanese invasion of India".
Predictably, Muhammad Ali Jinnah seized his chance and promised to support the war. But it was a secret pledge. As Linlithgow reported to the secretary of state for India (the Marquess of Zetland), the Muslim League leader and Pakistan's founder "was a public man and had to think about his followers". Had the viceroy or Zetland pondered the implication of those words, they would have admitted that the war was far from popular in India. Only the princes unambiguously supported it, as they had done in 1914. Led by Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir, the rulers of Jodhpur, Bikaner, Travancore, Hyderabad, Nawanagar, Bhopal and Jaipur rallied to the viceroy. They had to. By 1939, their survival depended on Britain.
But, as Khan notes, "by mid-1940 small pockets of resistance had begun erupting all over the country". Defiance wasn't always inspired by nationalism. Dalits demanded quotas. Kisans wanted more land and protection against landlords, "people feared being sent away to fight in far-distant lands to battle against what ever more appeared to be a superior enemy". In the west, the Faqir of Ipi was pro-German; in the east, Communists resisted the war effort until the Soviet Union joined in. Intelligence reports spoke of "anti-recruitment agents travelling in trains and talking to serving soldiers and recruits." The Royal Indian Navy mutiny suggested one alternative. Subhas Chandra Bose presented another.
Yet, as Khan also records, 53,000 Indians joined up in the first eight months of the war. Official literature stressed they were volunteers and not conscripts. By late 1940, 20,000 enlisted every month. "By the end of the war the army was over two million men strong." Millions more fed, clothed, housed, equipped, transported and entertained this vast organization. Some recruits followed family tradition, some obeyed their zamindarisuperiors, and some joined under official pressure or persuasion. I doubt if anyone felt the least sense of obligation to a beleaguered England struggling to save the world from fascism. Most were probably not even aware of the legends that sustained British morale through those dark years of wartime privation. Simply put, they were landless peasants and needed jobs. But they presented such a formidably convincing presence that many years later Enoch Powell, the rebel Tory leader who served in the army in India during the war, told me he was unconscious of any discordant noises. "They were very small events!" was his dismissal of the naval mutiny, Quit India movement and Indian National Army.
India, too, nursed its myths. As time passed, we heard more and more about freedom-fighters, INA loyalists, and patriotic acts of defiance. Even officials claimed to have chipped away at the system from within or softened the raj's more rigorous orders at great personal risk. Such stories only reinforce the impression of Indians straddling every fence. I knew a barrister who wore khadi shirts but was proud of his MBE awarded for zealous recruitment. Gandhi's benefactor, G.D. Birla, might have secretly bankrolled the government's enemies but his "factories were booming with wartime contracts". Although a freedom fighter, Master Tara Singh, urged Gandhi not to do anything that would restrict Sikh recruitment to the armed forces. Indians wanted "to have it both ways", Nehru remarked. Khan may not say so, but surely the paradox explained a young British civil servant writing from Orissa that Indians "must be the most contemptible (race) on earth".
The British vision of raj loyalism and imperial solidarity produced the haunting memorial high above Patcham Down, near Brighton, dedicated "in grateful admiration and brotherly affection" to the memory of Indian soldiers "who gave their lives for their King in the Great War". That was 1921. Admiration and brotherly affection withered after 1947 as India drifted away while Pakistan seemed closer. Scrabbling for the lost "Great" in Britain's name, hoping to make something of the Commonwealth, trying to engage with Europe, the new Britain had no time for Auchinleck's generosity. Khan indicates it became necessary for the British to shore up the image of solitary wartime courage in the face of tremendous odds.
Auchinleck wanted the statue of a sepoy or a series of figures modelled on the "chief classes enlisted in the old Indian army". The Memorial Gates comprise four pillars without gates and a separate small domed pavilion like the cupolas at the four corners of the tank on Chowringhee. The inscription reads, "In memory of the five million volunteers from the Indian subcontinent, Africa and the Caribbean who fought with Britain in the two world wars." Britain isn't putting all its eggs in one basket. Khan doesn't say this but if the monument were erected today, it might even have a Chinese motif. A line from Ben Okri, the Nigerian poet, engraved on the Memorial Gates, says it all, "Our Future is Greater than our Past."
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