Review: India in the Second World War: An Emotional History by Diya Gupta

What was happening in India when the Second World War was raging? Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British, whose account is blurred first by a Eurocentric memory of the war in the UK, and next overshadowed by nationalist histories of independence from the British Empire in South Asia. Diya Gupta not only recovers the emotional history of India in the Second World War, but also salvages it. She argues that “colonialism and imperialism are as implicated as fascism” and unfolds India’s conflicted involvement as being torn between the twin imperatives of fighting against colonialism at home and fascism at large. “While nationalism contested colonialism and therefore challenged participation in an imperial war…” she writes, “India could not be partitioned into those who supported and those who opposed the war; neither did such political positions remain fixed for the duration of the war”.

Indians felt as ruptured as the British Raj. Should they support the British in the transnational fight against fascism? Or should they join hands with nationalists? The British, on their part, were divided: threatened abroad by imperialist ambitions of the Axis powers and in India by rising nationalist forces. In September 1939, the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow declared India a belligerent state. That same month, Hitler invaded Poland and the global war gathered a momentum of its own.

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The narrative is tortuous and more complicated than the account of Indian participation in World War I. In the First World War, more than one million Indian soldiers were drafted to fight on behalf of the British Empire. They fought in France and Belgium, Egypt and East Africa, Gallipoli, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. By 1918, the Indian Army had transformed into an effective tool of British imperial expansion and contributed decisively to Britain’s final victory over Ottoman Turkey. In the spring of 1919, following protests against the Rowlatt Act, soldiers from the same Indian Army, under the command of Colonel Reginald Dyer, fired into a crowd of hundreds of unarmed Indians.

The Second World War delivered decolonisation and the Partition of 1947 — neither of which were foreseen in 1939. On the one hand, an extraordinarily diverse and international cast of men from the continents of Australasia, Africa, North America and Asia made the “British” victories at El Alamein, Monte Cassino and Kohima possible, while the “British” Indian Army fought in Ethiopia against the Italian Army, in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria against both the Italian and German armies. On the other, a different social history – the arrival in India of soldiers and nurses from around the world, the recruitment and overseas service of thousands of Indian soldiers, the employment of millions of labourers, the panic and rumours about possible Japanese invasion and the profound economic hardship (or windfall profit for some) – remained outside the loop of South Asian history writing. History duly takes note of the death of six million people in Europe under fascist terror during the Second World War. However, the fact that three million civilians in undivided Bengal, India, were made to die during the shorter sub-period of the war (1943 to 1944) in what came to be known as the Bengal Famine has largely escaped international scrutiny. Books on the famine and its aftermath are yet to match the grander scale of European historiography. Some aspects of the war relating to India – especially the Burma campaign — have, however, received more sustained attention.

Diya Gupta’s book is a fair register of the emotions of such troubled times and of “the contested social and political history of 1930s and 1940s”. It offers a clue to the social churn and alongside tales of disgust, heartbreak and fear, there are tales of loyalty, betrayal and nationalism. She sources them from a wide array of people – combatants and non-combatants, civilians and prisoners-of-war, poets, novelists and intellectuals – taking varied and often overlapping stands in relation to Indian involvement in the Second World War as a British colony. The emotional world is prised open through the Second World War letter extracts documented in the censorship reports, where a typical Indian soldier talks of Hitler, expresses wonder and pleasure on seeing Europe for the first time, and describes the hardships of life in the desert. The letters talk of the range of entertainment offered by mobile Indian cinemas, the joys of gorging on a big feast, the “annoying” lack of cigarettes, the changes wrought by the Quit India movement in the country, the extreme difficulties in procuring leave from colonial authorities, and hardships in India resulting from the 1943 Bengal Famine. The contemporary reader notices a form of self-censorship, and soldiers aware of the colonial censor’s gaze, do not document emotional responses to combat experiences, express political opinions or even physical longings or sexual desires in letters home.

Gupta extensively draws upon Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), novelist Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004), diasporic Tamil poet MJ Tambimuttu (1915–1983), novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1894–1950), communist poets Sukanta Bhattacharya (1926–1947) and Samar Sen (1916–1987), social reformer and poet Tara Ali Baig (1916–1989), educationist and poet Muriel Wasi (1912–1995) and soldier-novelist Baren Basu (author, Rongrut, translated from the original Bengali as The Recruit in 1950) for insights into the turbulent zeitgeist. In passing, she also refers to Nawazish Ali Mushtaq, whose Jangi Safarnama (Journey Through War, 1944), a Punjabi poem written in the Shahmukhi script, captures his battlefront experiences in Burma and showcases several themes germane to the book: “the pain endured by the body; the emotions associated with home and the anxieties surrounding its loss; and the role of testimony in the empathic portrayal of another’s suffering”.

Mulk Raj Anand’s trilogy is a bildungsroman of the main character Lalu who captures the changing phases of India, as it courses through pre-colonial to colonial times. The first volume in the trilogy, The Village (1939), highlights the feudal order prevalent in the rural community to which Lalu belongs and the authoritarian extortions of the zamindari system. The second, Across the Black Waters (1940) is a poignant depiction of Indian soldiers recruited for the War. To escape rural feudalism, Lalu, joins the army, much like the protagonist of Barun Basu’s novel. In the final volume, The Sword and the Sickle (1942), Lalu confronts the “system” by joining a revolutionary group which fights against the twin pillars of domination in India — feudalism and colonialism.

Gupta brings the poetic and philosophical writings of Rabindranath Tagore and the late modernist poetry of MJ Tambimuttu to bear upon the wartime savagery that strikes at Europe and the emotional turmoil caused by the London Blitz. Gupta has also pored over the India Office Records at the British Library, photographs and private papers from the Imperial War Museum, INA records from the Netaji Research Bureau in Kolkata, memoirs, private papers and newspaper records from the National Archives of India in Delhi and the National Library in Kolkata.

In India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia, Srinath Raghavan stated that the mountain of monographs on Indian history in the decade preceding 1947 treat the Second World War “as little more than mood music in the drama of India’s advance towards independence and partition”. They wearily harp on 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, and Independence with Partition in August 1947. Gupta’s emotional history, which goes much beyond this, is a departure from the trodden path.

Prasenjit Chowdhury is an independent writer. He lives in Kolkata

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