Book Review: India's WAR by Srinath Raghvan

 

India's War: The Making of Modern South Asia 1939-1945 by Srinath Raghavan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A comprehensive and lucid account of pre-independence India’s contribution to World War II in the context of the following:

Strategic dimensions of war
International dimensions of war
Domestic politics
Socio-economic dimensions
The War itself

There is a lot one learns from the narrative, the most important being the dismissive attitude of Western leaders about the capacity of Indians to rule themselves. Churchill’s views are well known:

I hate Indians, they are beastly people with a beastly religion

Hitler too had a poor opinion of Indians

If the English give India back her liberty, within twenty years India will have lost her liberty again

The War made strange bed-fellows – the US, China, UK/India ganged up against the rampaging Japanese. Geopolitics changed and now the target of Japan, the US, India, England is a resurgent China.
John Connell mentions in Auchinleck: A Biography of Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck

As long as a cat arches her back, spits and faces the dog in front of her, he will hesitate and sometimes go away: the moment she turns tail she is done for.

This prompts the author to add a flippant comment

Such were the zoological assumptions on which the defence of the Far East rested, Little wonder, it failed to survive contact with the enemy

The Japanese campaign is covered exhaustively, but the North African campaign stops at Tobruk and the decisive battle of El Alamein is described after many chapters – the thread of the narrative is lost.
The shrewd Jinnah comes across as an astute scheming politico, running circles around the Gandhi/Nehru Congress and British bureaucrats. The Chinese generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek

found Jinnah ‘dishonest’: ‘the British make use of people like this – but it’s not true that Hindus and Muslims can’t get on’

Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck, in a gloomy letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote

Jinnah, in particular, was a ‘demagogue of the most dangerous type’. He had no love for his country and was the ‘perfect tool for the Axis’.

George Orwell contributed as a BBC announcer. Here is a surprisingly prejudiced aspect of the author of 1984 and Animal Farm

The failure of Cripps’ mission, in fact, brought out Orwell’s submerged prejudices. He noted with approval Wintringham’s observation that ‘in practice the majority of Indians are inferior to Europeans, and one can’t help feeling this and, after a while, acting accordingly.

And again

Yet Orwell held that Indian nationalism was racist and xenophobic. ‘Most Indians who are politically conscious hate Britain so much’, Orwell patronizingly claimed, ‘that they have ceased to bother about the consequences of an Axis victory.’

Here is a staccato account of the evacuation of Madras in anticipation of Japanese bombing:

Hundreds of tanks came out in procession. Thousands of small explosions occurred. Bomb trenches were dug. Visiting the beach after 6 pm was prohibited. Wild animals in the Zoo were shot. Chinese restaurants opened. Dancing halls proliferated. Talcum powder became costlier… Use of electricity was restricted

A fallout of wartime shortages

Another lasting culinary consequence of the war was the rava idli - a variant of the staple south Indian breakfast that substituted semolina for the increasingly scarce rice

Such scattered nuggets make the, at times, turgid reading with statistics, tables and graphs, entertaining.
The Civil Services, railways, roads, irrigation canals apart, the British managed to unite the subcontinent into a country. John Masters wistfully remarks on the surrender of the Japanese to the Indian Army

As the tanks burst away down the road to Rangoon … (they) took possession of a the empire we built … Twenty races, a dozen religions, a score of languages passed in those trucks and tanjks. When my great-great-grandfather first went to India there had been as many nations: now there was one - India

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