Book Review – The Raj At War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War

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Yasmin Khan, an Oxford-based historian whose previous book on the making of India and Pakistan, The Great Partition, was well received, notes in her introduction that while researching the Partition she came to the awareness that the war years were critical in shaping the political conditions that would lead to negotiations for independence. She subscribes to the argument advanced by many scholars and commentators that the Congress, owing to its declared position of neutrality and its consequent banishment into the political wilderness, found itself confronting political realities at the end of the war that it could not comprehend. Jinnah openly declared that the war “proved to be a blessing in disguise”: the Muslim League found itself in the ascendant and took every opportunity to reiterate the threat of a Hindu Raj. At Aligarh Muslim University, the entire atmosphere had changed within a few years such that by 1942 the idea of Pakistan commanded wide allegiance among Muslims. But Khan avers much more than that, making bold to state that in the aftermath of the war there was a “new belief in the power of violence to release India from colonial control”, and she conveys the centrality of the war as an Indian experience with the argument that “the war delivered decolonisation and the Partition of 1947 — neither of which were inevitable or foreseen in 1939”.

Independence, as we know, did not occur overnight, and Khan recognises “the considerable achievement of the nationalists over the long duration”. The strengths of this volume, however, lie elsewhere, in the mass of material that Khan has gathered from numerous archives and hundreds of sources, and in the extraordinary stories, often juxtaposed with startling effect, which lend credence to her view that “Britain did not fight the Second World War, the British Empire did”. Her book is unprecedented in scope, peopled by a motley group of characters, and rich both in detail and in its unique insights into the socio-cultural and military history of the war years. To those who remember, for example, only the Blitz, her endeavour, in the first instance, is to underscore the signal part played by India in the war, to make visible the contributions of the “Asian merchant sailors who kept the British ports going”, not to mention the back-breaking labour of those who built the 500-mile Ledo Road through the mountains of northern Burma to link India to China.

Secondly, she strives to show the untold number of ways in which the war impacted ordinary people throughout the country: recruitment officers often made their way to the remotest villages, the “War Fund” imposed burdens on people already living on the brink of poverty, paddy fields were requisitioned — usually with inadequate compensation — to build over 200 aerodromes, and wardens patrolled the streets of major cities to ensure that blackouts were being observed. India in the war years had room enough for 10,000 Poles escaping ethnic cleansing by the Soviets and Nazis, a camp in Ramgarh, Jharkhand, where over 50,000 Chinese soldiers received training, and 22,000 American black servicemen who, already intimately familiar with racism, encountered a Calcutta where at the only service swimming pool there were “white days and black days”. Many histories have sought to convey the impression that the war barely touched India, once we leave aside Subhas Bose’s theatrics; but the effect of Khan’s narrative is to suggest the near total immersion of a society into a war in which, wrote Orwell, India had become, “it is hardly an exaggeration to say, the centre of the world”.

What lends Khan’s history poignancy is her ability to draw the reader into the lives of common people and her ear for nuance and irony. One of the most sensitive subjects for Indians was the recruitment drives, and Khan notes the moral pressure that women in a patriarchal society were able to apply “in determining whether their sons left home for the war or not”. In Rajinder Dhatt’s family, two brothers who fought for the empire returned home safely but the third, whom the mother kept close to her bosom, died of typhoid.

The Bengal Famine, with the numbing accounts of bodies littered on the streets, the proliferation of beggars who had been reduced to skeletons, the acute shortages of food and clothing, and the requisitioning and destruction of boats that eviscerated a people and their lifestyle, appears and reappears throughout Khan’s book.

The Bengal Famine Inquiry Report, Khan says, was published the same week that VE Day was announced. Even as Khan indicts the British for their cynicism and callousness, she hints at the enormity of the tragedy by quoting a British woman in Calcutta who, when shown pictures of starved concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald, commented thus: “The German atrocities apparently do not compare with the Bengal famine so the pictures don’t shock the folks out here”. While there are theoretical and historiographical questions to be asked about what exactly are the contours a “people’s history”, Khan’s history has paved the way for a more complex understanding of the Second World War as India’s war, too.

Vinay Lal is professor of history at UCLA.