The Indian Army and the End of the Raj

Title: The Indian Army and the End of the Raj

Author: Daniel Marston

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (First published 2014)

ISBN: 9781107067578

Pages: 386

 

The most surprising thing about the British occupation of India was that it was brought about by Indian mercenary soldiers commanded by a few thousands of British officers and administered by a few hundreds of British bureaucrats who in turn controlled tens of thousands of Indians working in lower levels. The British Indian army was undoubtedly the backbone of the system with the bureaucracy as its nervous system. The British used this massive fighting force to combat the dirty wars of the Empire in the two world wars. It was used even to reclaim colonies of British allies like France and Holland in Southeast Asia after the Japanese surrender. The army was also constantly used as ‘Aid to the Civil Power’ in suppressing communal riots which sprang out unexpectedly but with unfailing regularity. In the last days of the Raj, the entire endeavor to broker independence rested on the loyalty and stability of the army. It went through a period of instability that could have destroyed any military organisation. The army’s experience in the events surrounding independence and partition is unique in the annals of military history. This book is about the last decade of the British Indian Army which successfully fought a world war, was tasked with suppressing nationalist forces in other distant colonies, had to undertake internal security duty to fight sectarian forces and finally had to undergo a painful division of itself into the regular forces of two sovereign nations. Daniel Marston is Professor of Military Studies at the Australian National University. His first book, ‘Phoenix from the Ashes’ is an in-depth assessment of how the Indian army turned defeat into victory in the Burma campaign of World War II.

 

The representation of various provinces – or races, if you prefer – in the army was not evenly distributed. The British favoured the Martial Race Theory for recruitment. The Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims and Pathans were given undue opportunities to enroll as soldiers. The British presumed that only these people showed martial qualities. Even though Marston does not look deep into this hypothesis, we know that this theory developed after the 1857 Rebellion when the British started restricting military ranks only to those groups which sided with them in the rebellion. Bengalis and numerous groups from south India were deemed non-martial and kept away. People who lived in urban areas were not considered for entry. By 1914, 75 per cent of the army was recruited from the so-called martial races. During World War I, the requirement of more hands forced the authorities to overlook the martial race theory and open the window of enrolment up to other societies, and they fought remarkably well in the battlefields. But they were insensibly retrenched after the war and the martial race theory again took hold. But these races were not fit for becoming officers as they were mostly dumb intellectually. The Simon Commission’s report of 1930 stated that ‘broadly speaking, those races which furnish the best sepoys are emphatically not those which exhibit the greatest accomplishments of mind in an examination’. Punjab itself contributed 54 per cent of the total troops. However, the theory came to an end by World War II and the British finally acknowledged the fighting spirit of all classes and races of people.

 

By the end-1920s, it was widely felt that India would sooner or later be turned into a dominion or a fully independent nation with self-rule. This required an indigenous army which will be manned by Indians as ordinary troops and at all levels as officers. As noted earlier, there was considerable difficulty in selecting cadets from martial races as they lacked the educational qualifications. The Indian Military Academy was set up at Dehradun in 1932. However, the Indian officers who graduated from this institution could command only Indian troops. Their powers and wages were also less than that of British officers of the same rank. Their plight changed for the better after their remarkable performance in World War II. Even though the columns officered by Indians suffered defeat in the early days of the War, it bounced back in the latter half. The army expanded from 200,000 men and officers to more than one million between 1939 and 1941. The training given to the new officers before deploying them to foreign theatres of war was meagre which explains their initial defeat. This was soon rectified and the Indian army reaped the benefits. It destroyed the Japanese army in Burma and played significant supporting roles in defeating Italian and French forces in north and east Africa and Italy. Indian army landed in Kuwait and captured Baghdad in 1941. Later, it attacked Iran. All these happened while the army at home was carrying out frontier defence of NWFP and support to the civil power. At the end of 1945, there was no Indian officer above the Brigadier rank. Government then estimated that it would take a decade to educate and train enough senior officers to take over the higher levels and 20 years for complete Indianisation to occur. In the end, it took only a few years for this to come about!

 

The British used the Indian army to fight the colonial empire’s dirty battles. When the world war ended, a peculiar situation developed in Southeast Asia. The French and the Dutch – the colonists in that part of the world – had fled and evacuated their possessions when the Japanese army steamrolled them. After the Japanese were defeated, they wanted to reclaim their colonies. But the natives of these countries had taken up arms against them in the meanwhile with generous Japanese assistance in training and materiel. After the War, Indian troops were assigned occupation duties in the British colonies of Burma and Malaya, French Indo-China (Vietnam) and Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia). They had to fight the local nationalists in end-1945 and 1946 and these pointless battles had nothing to do with India or the British Empire. The European troops refused to join these fights and wanted to reunite with their families. Britain found Indian troops expendable. In a discussion of the battle plans and probable casualties, Lord Mountbatten made a specific request that Indian troops be used, saying that he did not want to see British wives widowed so long after the war’s official end (p.193). And you know one thing? Mountbatten was the most sympathetic to Indian causes among all the British functionaries who ruled over India. The demonic nature of the others can only be imagined!

 

Marston explains the farcical nature of the criminal trial of INA officers captured during the war. As the days went by, political pressure forced the British to grant more and more concessions to the prisoners at the cost of bitter resentment of white army officers. Eventually, they were let go without punishment. Discipline also suffered badly, leading to the Naval Mutiny of 1946 and several minor disorders. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of the military had to be demobilized at the end of the war as there was no requirement of such a huge number of soldiers to be maintained in peacetime. The demobilized soldiers and INA volunteers eventually ended up in communal militias and took part in communal riots. Their discipline and high level of organisation escalated their conflicts with police and army to the level of guerilla warfare. A large part of the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Noakhali was the handiwork of these former soldiers, encouraged by the Muslim League which was ruling the province of Bengal. This issue was especially troublesome in Punjab which had the largest number of ex-soldiers as most of the recruitment to the army was from there.

 

This book also provides the details of the division of military assets that took place. Stores, factories, vehicles and so forth were divided in the ratio of 30 to Pakistan and 70 to India. 140,000 out of 410,000 soldiers of the army (34 per cent) and 40 per cent of the navy and 30 per cent of the air force personnel were given to Pakistan. Here, we must pause to consider another statistic. The entire Muslim population in India in 1947 constituted only 24.3 per cent of the total, which included those Muslims who stayed behind in India. But the partitioned state was awarded more than 30 per cent when all else is factored in. So, this was a clean cut on the basis of religion, justifying exchange of populations. The author specifies that H S Suhrawardy, the premier of Bengal and Muslim League leader, recruited 600 Punjabi Muslims to Bengal police to offset the 1000 Gurkha policemen (p.290). Most brutal violence occurred in the Punjab while civil police ceased to function and law and order was ineffectually maintained by the newly constituted Punjab Boundary Force. The army of both the new nations was under the supreme command of Claude Auchinleck, but when India strongly objected to his partiality to Pakistan, he was removed from the post.

 

Even though the author fails to mention it specifically, the worst examples of colonial prejudice and supposed racial superiority fill up every chapter of the book. The numerous episodes of colonial occupation are saturated with racism like lichen sticking to an old wall. This wicked spirit so densely permeates the atmosphere and probably that may be the reason why Marston is unable to notice it. When native officers were introduced for the first time, they had no power of punishment over their subordinate British soldiers. His Majesty’s Government categorically stated that Indians should not have power of punishment over white men (p.91). This was partially lifted towards the later stages of World War II when Indian officers proved their mettle in the battlefields. Loss of rice-producing colonies like Burma to the Japanese and scarcity of vessels to transport the crucial cereal resulted in the Great Famine of Bengal in 1943 in which 3.5 million Indians died. Still, Churchill was reluctant to offer relief to the starving millions, saying that “starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks” (p.109) and he directed the aid to Greece. The book also includes some pompous and condescending remarks of British officers of exalted rank who in fact did not comprehend how India worked. Fearing violence erupting in Punjab from which the major recruitment took place, one senior officer remarked: “if the Punjab burst, the chances were that the mixed unity of the Indian army would also burst and that all of India would collapse” (p.236). Another officer worried that ‘Indian officers are drunk with the prospects of early promotions and that the Indian army is due for imminent disintegration if India is divided” (p.254). In the end, India was divided, the Punjab did burst, but the Indian army and the people determinedly braved the deluge.

 

Even though parts of the book looks like an academic paper with footnotes sometimes reaching half of a page, it is eminently readable and nicely written. The Indian army had suffered heavily in both the world wars – In World War II alone, 24000 of its soldiers were killed, 64000 wounded, 60000 captured and 11000 went missing in action. The sad fact is that this valorous episode is seldom mentioned in India where the World War II is wholly submerged in the Quit India Movement which had a flawed start in August 1942 and dissipated a few weeks later. This book rectifies the shortcoming and makes it crystal clear that India was inexorably moving towards independence by the end of the War. The only uncertain thing was whether it would preserve its integrity or be divided into two or more units on religious lines. The sources of this book are from Britain which provides a focal point unfamiliar to Indians, but serves to explain the subject in full.

 

The book is strongly recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star

 

Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism

Title: Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism 1905 – 1944

Author: K Nambi Aarooran

Publisher: Aarooran Pathippagam, 2008 (First published 1980)

ISBN: Nil

Pages: 474

 

India is constituted on the federal principle – even though you may not find it written as such in the Constitution – with several linguistically and culturally self-sustained states which are indivisible parts of the Indian whole. The state of Tamil Nadu is a really good example of how a state can develop its language and culture without feeling suffocated by the national language and ethos and without any sentiment of separation operating underneath. Tamil boasts of a lineage comparable to classical languages like Sanskrit and Greek. Besides, the people deem themselves to belong to the Dravidian race, even though scholars have convincingly proved that the appellation is applicable only to the body of languages spoken in south India. This book explains the birth and growth of Dravidian nationalism and the renaissance of the Tamil language. The time period of the work starts in 1905 when the partition of Bengal and the opposition to it provided an impetus for Swadeshi culture which in turn helped awaken the national spirit. The curtain falls in 1944 with the formation of the Dravidar Kazhagam which was fathered by E V Ramaswamy Naicker. This transformed version of the Justice Party thereafter became the vehicle of Tamil nationalism. Nambi Aarooran was the former professor and HOD of the Institute of Correspondence Courses at the Madurai Kamaraj University. This book is a thoroughly researched work with implacable objectivity.

 

Strange it may seem, but the term ‘Dravida’ itself is of Sanskritic origin. Kumarila, an eighth century CE scholar, had used the term ‘Andhra dravida bhasha’ to denote the languages of the Tamil and Telugu countries. Robert Caldwell also used it in the modern times to denote the four principal south Indian languages. The westerners – many of them Christian missionaries engaged in open proselytization work – contributed a lot to the development of Tamil, but have not spared any trick up their sleeves to sow dissent and strife among their students. Gustav Opert, a German philologist, and Herbert Risley, a British ethnographer, first used the term ‘Dravidian’ to denote a group of people. Their theory claimed that Indian society consisted of two major races – the Aryans and Dravidians. Caldwell and G U Pope – both of them Christian missionaries – hypothesized Tamils’ original religion as a modified form of Saivism where the central deity Siva differed significantly from his Hindu counterpart. The book does not specify that both were missionaries. With active British support, the missionaries tried to occupy all seats where new knowledge was being created or collected. When a committee of five scholars was constituted in 1913 for publishing a Tamil lexicon, it contained two missionaries representing India and Ceylon. They were the object of severe criticism for poor performance and more members had to be later added to the committee to make up for the loss in quality.

 

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, a strong anti-Brahmin lobby rose up in various Hindu castes which did not include Dalits. Most of them were upper castes including large zamindars holding the title of Raja, wealthy merchants, affluent lawyers and government officials retired from very high positions. This non-Brahmin movement metamorphosed over the years to become the Dravidian political movement. Tamil non-Brahmins described the Aryan civilization as caste-ridden and the Dravidian civilization as egalitarian and democratic. Aarooran proves that this was a pious wish having no relation to reality. In the Sangam literary works themselves, one finds the mention of several social divisions which became the basis of caste organisation in later times (p. 22). The earliest Tamil work Tolkappiyam speaks of the four varnas as antanar (Brahmins), aracar (rulers), vanikar (traders) and vellalas (cultivators).

 

This book beautifully catalogues the rise of non-Brahmin movement from the start and the reasons behind it. The Brahmins had occupied the lion’s share of government jobs because of their better proficiency in English. The Madras Dravidian Association was established in 1916 which started a newspaper named ‘Justice’. When this association turned into a political party, the paper’s name was co-opted as the party’s. They opposed the Home Rule Movement of the Indian National Congress, fearing that Brahmins would occupy the major share of power and sided with the British. They demanded communally separate electorates like the Muslims but were successful only in getting reserved seats within a general electorate. 28 out of the 63 seats were reserved for the non-Brahmins who enjoyed eager support from the Muslims and Christians. In return, the Justice Party supported the Khilafat Movement. At this stage, the Telugu non-Brahmins opted out of being labelled Dravidians. Kannadigas and Malayalis soon followed suit and Dravidianism has remained a Tamil fad ever since. The Dravidians’ hatred of Brahmins was legendary and showed symptoms similar to antisemitism in nature. When Annamalai University retrenched 7 out of 84 teachers during World War II as an economy measure, all of them were Brahmins. The Dravidian leaders openly justified it in public saying that it was ‘a small step in the direction of reducing their number permanently’.

 

Aarooran convincingly explains the renaissance of the Tamil language around this time. As the term implies, renaissance involves the recognition of a glorious past and its re-evaluation in consonance with the modern spirit. In the period 1905-20, archeological and epigraphical evidence provided details of the ancient kingdoms of south India which rose in fame in its heyday across the entire Southeast Asia. The Tamil language’s antiquity was also widely accepted. Politicians began to make Tamil the medium of public speech. But Tamil writers like the legendary C. Subramania Bharati took pride in the heritage of India as well as that of Tamil language and culture. Bharati was as much Tamil as he was Indian. He was very proud of the state he belonged to, but saw Tamil Nadu as an integral part of India. His outlook was nationalistic in scope. At the same time, there also arose a separatist ‘Pure Tamil’ movement which sought to dispel Sanskrit vocabulary from the language. The book also provides a very detailed story of the efforts to bring out a Tamil lexicon and establish a Tamil university.

 

The Dravidian Movement took on an anti-Hindu façade right from the start. The Self-Respect Movement of E V Ramaswamy Naicker was launched in 1925 and sought to restore the self-esteem of non-Brahmins alleged to have been denied by Brahmins. A fanatic sense of pride was cultivated in the volunteers. The British government exploited this chance to meddle in Hindu religious affairs by promulgating the Hindu Religious Endowments Act which confiscated surplus temple funds to use for public purposes benefiting all religious communities. Hindu religious texts were also criticized for supposedly discriminatory content. The monkey force in Ramayana was taken to be referring to Dravidians and the epic was alleged to contain racial insult. Self-Respect writers re-wrote the Ramayana to depict Ravana as a Dravidian hero repelling Rama. The anti-Brahmin rhetoric of EVR smacked of xenophobia which closely resembled antisemitism. EVR even opposed Brahmins joining his movement. This attitude gradually mellowed when the Self-Respect Movement made a foray into politics with the refurbished Justice Party. The political arm arranged its young members to form groups in 1935 to work under the direct leadership of the Raja of Bobbili and is reported to have derived inspiration from the Hitler Youth in Germany. EVR said the Aryans, like the Jews, came to Tamil Nadu only to exploit the Dravidians. The Dravidian Movement was anti-national too. EVR denied the applicability of the political concept of ‘nation’ to the whole of India and wanted a Tamil nation called Dravidastan to be carved out of India. He declared unconditional support to the British Raj and claimed it to be better than Brahmin Raj. He unashamedly joined hands with Mohammed Ali Jinnah and supported the demand for Pakistan. As a quid pro quo, Jinnah attended a meeting in Madras in 1941 and supported the demand for Dravidastan. Sensing that EVR had no mass support on this issue, Jinnah stayed aloof from Dravidian leaders thereafter so as not to complicate his own case. Anna Durai characterized Quit India campaign as a ‘huge hoax’ and threatened to start a Quit Aryan program.

 

The book also deals with the anti-Hindi agitation of the 1930s. Provincial elections were held in 1937 and Congress formed the ministry in Madras. With the entry of Congress, Justice Party which had won earlier elections to the provincial legislature, was wiped out electorally. The Rajaji government made Hindi a compulsory subject in the first three forms of high school in May 1938. This came at a time when even Tamil was not a compulsory subject. The Justice Party under EVR protested but their demand and agitation did not have popular support. The author claims that some of the protestors were paid cash for participation. The teaching of Hindi continued. However, the Congress ministries suddenly resigned to mark their disapproval of the government’s decision to involve India in the Second World War without consulting Indian leaders. After the native ministry resigned, the British government stepped in and stopped the teaching of Hindi. All agitators who were detained for illegal activities were also released.

 

This book is a well-balanced piece of fine research that should be a model for pure, objective analysis. In fact, I have a confession to make here. When I took this book, I was expecting it to be a collection of silly arguments of Dravidian ‘greatness’ or stupid claims about a submerged continent called Kumarikandam where Tamil reigned supreme. Instead, I found Nambi Aarooran to be an intellectually well-heeled scholar with a nice diction and an impartial observer and recorder of events related to the topic of concern. The author’s style and choice of material is highly relevant and amazingly precise without any trace of subscribing to any propaganda. It has captured the locus of Justice Party from a British stooge to an EVR-prop and shows the poor popular support it enjoyed. It also contains several chapters on Maraimalai Atikal’s religious and social thoughts. At the end of the book, the readers feel regret that the author abruptly stopped the narrative in the year 1944. He should have continued it till the ascent of the Dravidian parties to power.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star