Indian war saga

Wars have so much had a fascination for historians that the histories of countries and societies have even been told solely in terms of the wars that they fought. The World War II is likely to be the most written about war in history, and new books are written about it seven decades after the end of the war. This is not surprising because much older wars are also looked afresh every now and then. The Raj at War looks at the Second World War from an Indian perspective.

Two-and-a-half million Indians fought in that war, of whom 1,00,000 were killed or injured. The numbers are big even by today’s bloated population standards. They had a crucial role in the course of the war — at El Alamein, Kohima and elsewhere. As Yasmin Khan says, Britain did not fight the war, the British empire did. The role of those from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is often not remembered by both the British and the South Asians themselves for different reasons. Khan tells the story well as a people’s history. It is a narrative of war as it affected the lives of the people of the subcontinent, most of them commoners. Apart from soldiers, the war affected millions of others — workers, farmers, political activists, nurses, school girls, officials, merchants, prostitutes, famine victims, beggars. The book weaves a complete story told from the ground level.

Khan is a British historian who teaches at Oxford. She has expertise on India and Pakistan, having written a prize-winning book on Partition in the past. She reconstructs the war and its impact on individuals, society and politics through diaries, anecdotes and many other original sources. It is an irony that the war which was meant to protect Britain and its empire ended up, in the wake of winning it, in its dissolution. After the war Britain had no will or wherewithal to keep the empire together and control it. The involvement of millions of Indians in different ways in the war changed social structures, institutions and attitudes too, and the perceptions of both the British and Indians about themselves and each other.

There is a glimpse of the racist attitudes among the British and Winston Churchill’s hard colonialism, but the book also shows how interaction altered social and political views — Gandhi’s Congress, Subhas Chandra Bose’s INA and Jinnah’s Muslim League responded to the war in different ways. Their mutual relations also changed after the war.

But Khan excels not in delineating the political changes during and after the war. Top leaders get attention, but the next level of young leaders like Aruna Asaf Ali get more of it. She provides rich details of the lives of individuals and their actions and conduct with words, deeds and others’ accounts. Sometimes the account even seems to move into the realm of literature when personal and collective experiences are recorded movingly and emotively. She also has a language which suits both the presentation of facts and description of emotions and sentiments. Conventional and top-down history does not record all the human elements of the story at the lowest levels. It is concerned with the words and deeds of those at the top, the ebb and flow of great events and their consequences at the macro level. In Khan’s account we also get a feel of how the war affected common people like petty businessmen, labourers, wives of soldiers and others.

She says Bengal famine in which millions died was a consequence of the war, when rice stocks and boats were destroyed so that they do not fall into the hands of advancing Japanese troops. She makes a case “for integrating the dead of the Bengal famine into calculations of the global war dead, much as the casualties of Stalingrad and Hiroshima have become part of global war histories.”

There is a lot of physical hardship, mental pain and suffering that is recorded in the experiences of people. War is a terrible experience and its impact can never be pleasant. There is a sense of unhappy human condition, created by events beyond expectations and control, that runs through many descriptions in the book. There is much fresh data that has come from original research. We also see the slow decline of the Raj and its inevitable end in the moral slide of the British system, its falling administrative efficiency and its unsure political responses. It finally took the right decision to leave India, but there was no other option.

Khan rightly notes that the involvement of millions of people at multiple levels in many ways changed India’s society, ideas and perceptions radically. It was for the first time that Indians were involved in such a big world cataclysm, as players, victims and observers, on such a massive scale. She asserts, with support from facts and data ably collected and marshalled, that a better awareness of the war’s effects would help us to understand the foundations of modern South Asia. This aspect has not been adequately addressed by historians and The Raj at War fills the gap in our understanding.