By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Histories of modern
processes of economic globalization have tended to concentrate on the role of
European and American capitalists. Yet there was no dearth of Asian capitalists
with supralocal, if not global, ambitions. There were, for example, two
networks of traders from Sind in colonial India whose business operations had a
global scope. The landbased network of financiers
and bankers from Shikarpur, which stretched northward through Kandahar to
Central Asia and Iran, had roots going back to the Durrani
empire of the eighteenth century. The sea-based network of Sindwork
traders and merchants of Hyderabad, by contrast, forged its eventual worldwide
web by initially taking advantage of the British colonial link between Sind and
Bombay and then across the western Indian ocean between Bombay and Egypt.
Indeed, an impressive array of evidence has been adduced to show how
"South Asian merchant networks could operate with a certain degree of
independence vis-a-vis European capital, although not in opposition to it.1
In terms of sheer
geographical dispersion of Indian merchants and financiers, it may be tempting
to align their story seamlessly with contemporary preoccupations about ties
between the global and the local. "Local history" is "combined
with world history" in Markovits's study while
the level of "national history," which the author contends is
"largely meaningless in this case," is deliberately
"ignored."2
Yet between the
global and local milieus of influence and activity lay the overland and oceanic
interregional arenas, which were the key spheres of operation of even the Sind
traders despite their presence as far afield as Panama. So far as the large
majority of Asian capitalists were concerned, Ray convincingly portrays
"an encounter between a global system of credit and trade centred on Europe and an Indian Ocean financial nexus
dealing in negotiable credit instruments on principles that had evolved
independently of those of the Western banks." Only one Baghdadi Jewish
mercantile family, the Sassoons, who had established
themselves in Bombay in the 1830’s, were able to penetrate the echelons of high
finance in London from the mid-1850’s onward. Most Indian, Chinese, and
Baghdadi Jewish capitalists could at best aspire to dominate the bazaar econ omy of the Indian Ocean interregional arena that stretched
from the East African coast to the shores of Southeast Asia. The Indian
intermediary capitalists tended to be drawn from a number of communities in
particular regions and localities of India. Capital and community, far from
being in an antagonistic relationship, as is often supposed in studies of
global capitalism, were intimately bound. In the western Indian Ocean the Bhatias and Memons of Kutch and the Bohras
and Khojas from elsewhere in Gujarat came to the fore in three contiguous
zones-the Gulf with its primary base in Muscat, the Red Sea radiating out of
the British outpost in Aden, and East Africa, having its economic node on the
bustling island of Zanzibar. The rise of Gujarati capitalists occurred in
partnership with the Arabs from the turn of the nineteenth century and preceded
the European penetration of Africa. By contrast, the expansion of the Nattukottai Chettiar capitalists
of Tamil Nadu in the eastern Indian Ocean was much more closely enmeshed with
European colonial conquest. Here too there were three primary zones-Ceylon,
Burma, and the Malay peninsulathat came under
British colonial rule, even though Chettiar economic
activities extended to French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, the U.S. colony
of the Philippines, and the formally independent Thailand.
In the period before
World War I, British and Indian commercial interests had eyed Russian, German,
and Turkish rivals with suspicion. After the war, too, the establishment of
economic autonomy in Persia was seen to "impair" British influence in
that country. The situation was counterbalanced, however, by the
"extinction of Turkish sovereignty in all the regions of the Persian Gulf
and ascendancy of British influence in Iraq." In addition, developments in
the oilfields of Persia weighed in on the British side of the scale, and the
danger posed by the German Drang nach
Osten (drive toward the east) was deemed to be over.
Given the well-established British influence in Baghdad, a railway line from
there to Haifa was considered, in order to develop "the trade between the
Middle East and India on the one hand and Central Europe and the Mediterranean
countries on the other." What was more, Britain and India had by the early
I920S turned the tables on Russia regarding trade with Persia. In I9I3-I9I4
only 22 percent of Persia's trade was with the British Empire, including India,
while Russia commanded the lion's share, Go percent. Ten years later, in
1923-1924, it was the British Empire that had cornered 57 percent of Persia's
trade, leaving Russia with a mere 18 percent.
The mid-1920S marked
the high point of Indo-Gulf trading links. The British Empire and British India
supplied between Go percent and 70 percent of the imports of Persia in the
period 1925-1927, while in the same three years the United Kingdom and India
consistently supplied well over 5o percent of the imports of Iraq. Muscat's
trade during these years was "almost wholly with India." The chief
imports from India and living conditions on the plantations led some historians
to believe that indenture and its associated forms of labor were no better than
"a new system of slavery."3
Aspects of this view
have been effectively called into question. The depiction of women migrants,
for example, as a "sorry sisterhood" of "single broken
creatures" has been shown to be "simply a parody of the colonial
discourse" on the social ills afflicting Indian society.4
Yet there seem to be
no reasonable grounds for accepting an opposing claim that Indian indentured
labor migration was more akin to the movement of free white labor to the
dominions than it was to the journey of African slaves to the New World.5
Mortality rates on
oceanic journeys were much higher for indentured Indian laborers than for free
white labor but lower compared to those for African slaves.6 The prospect of real freedom following the term of
the indenture contract was also severely constrained. In an effort to keep
workers tied to the plantation system, the planters executed a strategy of
threatening the livelihoods of the ex-indentured market gardeners and hawkers,
and organizing a new migrant stream to diminish the bargaining power of the
existing plantation workforce.
But as with the
movement of Indian capital, it is necessary to probe how significant the Indian
Ocean interregional arena was at a time when migrant Indian labor traveled as
far as the Atlantic and the Pacific. Within the Indian Ocean arena streams of
colonially regulated Indian laborers were exported in the century spanning the
1830’s to the 1930’s. In particular, these countries received approximately the
following numbers of workers: Ceylon, 2,321,000; Malaya, 1,911,000; Burma,
1,164,000.
It was only in the
late 1930’s that a rising oil economy began to offset the effects of the
collapse in the commodities trade and the tightening of credit flows by
creating a new sort of market for South Asian products, skills, and labor. The
oil factor made the fundamental difference in the stories of interregional
linkages between South and Southeast Asia, and South Asia and the Middle East,
in both the eastern and western zones of the Indian Ocean. As early as 1935,
Gamble had reported that "the loss of prosperity occasioned by the
decline in the Bahrain pearl industry" had to some extent been alleviated
by the high-wage employment given to many residents. The Bahrain Petroleum
Company, a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of California, had made its
first shipment of 25,000 barrels in June 1934.
That same year, the
sheikh of Kuwait signed an oil concession with an Anglo-American conglomerate.
On the eve of World War II, Alan Villiers found Al-Kuwait "to be composed
of some eight thousand houses and perhaps 70,000 or 80,000 people. Its roads
were unmade (except for a brief mile or so running to the Sheikh's town
palace, at the eastern end): its narrow streets a windy, sanded maze, threading
in and out among the low-walled houses and the roofed bazaars." But, he
noted, "half the sheikhdom swam upon a vast underground lake of oil."
On November 16, 1939, the political agent of Kuwait wrote that the town and
its hinterland had "been at a subsistence level since time
immemorial" but was now going through the throes of “a fundamental
change." He continued: "As this port has always looked to India as
its natural market both for buying and selling, it follows that now its importance
to India is greater than ever before and is likely to become still more
so."
Responding to a
statement by the Indian government that Indian interests in the Persian Gulf
had declined and were still waning, the political resident maintained in 1938
that it was true for the Persian side but not for the Arabian side. In addition
to the importance to India of the new air route and oil, he pointed to "an
increasing market for Indian products and a small but potentially increasing
field of employment for Indians." Developments in the oilfields of
Bahrain, Hasa, Kuwait, and Qatar suggested the
likelihood of "important new markets" in the next two to three
years, "possibly supplemented later by 'oil-begotten' markets on the
Trucial Coast and in Muscat." He foresaw a "fair amount of scope in
the oilfields for Indians with some mechanical training." On April 21,
1938, he also shot off an enthusiastic letter to the master of Corpus Christi
College, his aim a mater, seeking help to "get first class Cambridge men
into this American oil company."
By September 1939 it
was believed that "a very substantial expansion in employment and trade,
particularly in Bahrain and Kuwait, had taken place." Once all the facts
and figures had been collected from the political adviser, Bahrain Petroleum
Company (Bapco), PCL, Eastern Bank, Gray MacKenzie, Mission, Imperial Airways, and Cable and
Wireless Ltd., the value of the Arab side of the Gulf to India was found to be
"startling." From employment of various sorts in this Arabian part of
the Gulf, except through sources related to the government of India, Indian
nationals earned roughly 1.35 million rupees a year. (This included 200,000
rupees in wages for Indians of the oil company in Hasa,
which fell "very much within the Bahrain orbit.") Indian merchants in
Bahrain proper earned 1.0 to 1.2 million rupees annually, and Indian nationals
living in or on the border of Bahrain earned roughly 2.5 million rupees a year.
These figures did not include in any way profits made in India on exports to
the area. Exports to Bahrain alone from India had risen from 4.2 million rupees
in 1933-1934 to 6.4 million rupees in 1938-1939. (The figure reached 7 million
rupees in 1937-1938, but this spike was due in part to a rather favorable flow
of precious metals.) These figures did not take into account the value of
exports to the Trucial Coast or the goods reexported from Dubai and other
Trucial Coast ports from India to Iran.The estimates
of earnings for Bahrain seemed to be substantiated by the volume of remittances
to India through the bank and the post office. From January 1938 to September
1939, the Eastern Bank had remitted to India just over 10 million rupees, and
money orders issued by the post office to India averaged well over 400,000
rupees a year. The number of British Indians registered with the political
agency in Bahrain increased from 450 in 1930 to 1,550 in 1938. The number was
likely to increase. Oil prospects in Qatar looked promising, while there were
bound to be new oil developments along the Trucial Coast at war's end. These
developments translated into increased opportunities for the employment of
Indians. Soon after independence and partition, 215 shops in Manama bazaars
were owned by South Asians, of whom II9 were Pakistani and 96 Indian. The
economic ruptures caused by the depression between South and Southeast Asia,
took decades to repair fully. lndo-Gulf links of
commerce and commodities suffered in the first half of the depression decade
until the black gold began to forge new kinds of connections. On the placid
waters of the Gulf, the era of the depression came to an end with at least a
tiny wave of prosperity visible in the distance.
In addition to
capitalists and laborers, Indian soldiers formed an important population of
South Asians who followed the British imperial flag across the globe and around
the Indian Ocean rim.The Indian company's Bengal Army
was deployed overseas in Ceylon, Java, and the Red Sea area. As a mercenary
army, its loyalty was occasionally strained and sporadic mutinies took place.
The refusal of some units to fight in Burma in 1852 led to the formal passage
of the General Service Enlistment Act of 1856, which required recruits to serve
abroad or, as many soldiers saw it, across the forbidding black waters.
There was also the
Sepoys' Mutiny that originated with greased cartridges in which cow's and
swine's grease was believed to be mixed. But Islamic law not only permits a
Muslim to "take swine's flesh if he is, in case of refusal, threatened
with death; but lays it down that he would die a sinner if he refused it; but,
if he is threatened with death unless he slay another Muslim, he must refuse.
He may in like circumstances even recant Islam, if he continues to be a
believer at heart but he must not slay a Muslim. (We already covered the Sepoy
mutiny in our Critical History of S.Asia
Project on this website.)
From then on, the
British were by and large successful in keeping their Indian Army insulated
from even the swirling currents of anticolonial nationalism until well into
World War I. It was not until November 1945 that a Muslim officer along with
two of his Hindu and Sikh comrades were put on trial, not for withdraw ing from the army but for actually waging war against the
king-emperor. They were part of an approximately 43,000strong Indian National
Army that had been raised in Southeast Asia to fight against the British.7
And yet a Government
which is so tender as to ask soldiers before enlistment whether they object to
vaccination or re-vaccination, would compel a Muslim to do something worse
than apostatize or eat pork. If there is any value in the boast of toleration
and in the Proclamations of three sovereigns, then we have performed a
religious and legal duty in calling upon Muslim soldiers in these circumstances
to withdraw from the army, and are neither sinners nor criminals.8
The Crown raj
recruited these hired soldiers particularly from among Sikhs, Gurkhas, Punjabi
Muslims, and Pathans. They also organized the regiments in such a way that, as
the secretary of state put it in 1862, "Sikh might fire into Hindu, Gurkha
into either, without any scruple in case of need." By 1875 as many as half
of the army's soldiers came from the Punjab alone. The new recruitment
patterns of the colonial masters were buttressed by an elaborate, if spurious,
anthropological theory of martial castes and races.9
During the high noon
of colonialism in the late nineteenth century, the Indian Army protected
Britain's far-flung imperial interests worldwide, but with a special emphasis
on the belt that stretched from North Africa to East Asia. It helped put down
the Mahdi uprisings of 1885-1886 and 1896 in the Sudan and the Boxer Rebellion
of 1899-1900 in China. Indian troops were used in Britain's intervention in
Egypt in 1882, which triggered the European rivalries culminating in the partition
of Africa. Closer to the subcontinent, the British Indian Army was used in the
Afghan war of the late 1870S and early 1880s, for the final conquest of Burma
and the crushing of guerilla resistance there in the late 1880s, to impose
British influence in Tibet in 1902-1903, and to bolster British influence in
the Persian Gulf region in the early twentieth century.
With the outbreak of
war in 1914, the 1:2 ratio of British and Indian troops in the army could no
longer be maintained. A new policy of large-scale recruitment resulted in the
expansion of the army to 1.2 million men by war's end. More than 350,000 men were
induced to join up in the Punjab alone. Even Gandhi lent a helping hand to the
recruitment efforts upon his return from South Africa, hoping that Indian
participation would induce the British to grant concessions to the nationalist
cause at war's end. The Indian troops supplied the cannon fodder for General
Townshend's ill-fated Mesopotamian campaign of 1915, which ended in the ignominious
surrender at Kut in April 1916. Punjabi and Gurkha
regiments were at the forefront of the columns that marched into Baghdad in
March 1917 commanded by General Stanley Maude. Indian infantry brigades also
saw action in the battlefields of France.
While historians have
speculated on the extent to which Indians were coaxed, cajoled, or coerced
into fighting for Britain, rarely has the spotlight been turned on the motives
and experiences of Indian soldiers who fought in the Middle East in the battle
of Singapore on February 13, 14, and 15, until he was ordered to surrender. On
the night of February 15-16, 1942, the "black pepper" was sorted out
from the "red pepper." All Indians, including the king's
commissioned officers, were asked to gather at Farrer Park on February 17,
while the British officers and other ranks were to assemble at Changi. Shah N awaz felt that that they were being left in the lurch and
bristled "at being handed over like cattle by the British."10
Shah Nawaz remained
for the moment one of the small minority of nonvolunteers
who did not respond to the invitation of Major Fujiwara and Captain Mohan Singh
to join a national army. According to estimates later made by British
intelligence, of 45,000 Indian soldiers gathered at Farrer Park on February 17,
1942, only 5,000 remained nonvolunteers.11
Nawaz divided his
wartime role into three distinct phases. From February 15, 1942, until the end
of May 1942, "the element of traditional loyalty to the King
triumphed" and he refused to join the Indian National Army (INA). From
June 1942 to July 1943 he chose in the interests of his men to volunteer for
the INA, having determined "to sabotage it from within the moment [he]
felt it would submit to Japanese exploitation." And from July 1943 to May
1945 he became "fully convinced that it was a genuine army of
liberation."12
The first INA (as we
already seen in detail elsewhere on this website) formed in 1942 in fact
disintegrated because of differences with the Japanese. Shah Nawaz agreed to
join the second INA in February 1943 on being assured that Netaji Subhas
Chandra Bose, a former president of the Indian National Congress, would come to
lead it. "When Netaji arrived in Singapore," he stated, "I
watched him very keenly I heard a number of his public speeches, which had a
profound effect on me. It will not be wrong to say that I was hypnotized by his
personality and his speeches.
From then on, the
British were by and large successful in keeping their Indian Army insulated
from even the swirling currents of anticolonial nationalism until well into
World War I. It was not until November 1945 that a Muslim officer along with
two of his Hindu and Sikh comrades were put on trial, not for withdraw ing from the army but for actually waging war against the
king-emperor. They were part of an approximately 43,000strong Indian National
Army that had been raised in Southeast Asia to fight against the British.26 It
was an armed movement that elicited overwhelming support from the over two
million Indians living at the time in Southeast Asia.
At his Red Fort
court-martial of November 1945, Shah Nawaz Khan, an officer of the Indian
National Army, addressed the president and members of the "honourable court," whose legality he refused to
accept. He clearly meant to scale the ramparts of the fortress and reach a much
wider audience among the Indian public. "I am going to lay before
you," he stated, "very frankly, the considerations and motives that
have impelled me from the day of my surrender in Singapore on February 15,
1942, to the day of my capture by the British forces at Pegu
on May 16, 1945." Shah Nawaz was born to a family of J anjua
Rajputs in Rawalpindi. His father had been the leader
of the Janjua clan and served in the Indian Army for thirty years. During the
two world wars, all able-bodied men of his extended family had enlisted, and in
1945 there were more than eighty of them serving as officers in the Indian
Army. "I was brought up in an atmosphere," he related to the court,
"which was purely military and up to the time of my meeting with Netaji
Subhas Chandra Bose at Singapore in July 1943, I was politically almost
uneducated. I was brought up to see India through the eyes of a young British
officer, and all that I was interested in was soldiering and sport."13
On January 16, 1942,
Shah Nawaz sailed from Bombay and joined his battalion in Singapore on January 29.
He took part of India before us and for the first time in my life I saw India,
through the eyes of an Indian." Apart from the strength of character of
his leader, Shah N awaz was impressed by the enthusiasm
of Indian expatriates in Southeast Asia who "became 'Fakirs' for the sake
of their country." The mental conflict between loyalty to the raj, to
which his family owed their material well-being, and the new consciousness of
the "injustice" of colonial rule was eventually resolved in "the
greatest and most difficult decision" of his life. "I decided,"
he told the court, "to sacrifice my everything-my life, my home, my family
and its traditions. I made up my mind to fight even against my brother if he
stood in my way, and in the actual fighting that followed in 1944, we actually
fought against each other. He was wounded ... the question before me was the
King or the country. I decided to be loyal to my country and gave my word of honour to my Netaji that I would sacrifice myself for her
sake."14
Shah Nawaz then
pointed out that "the INA was raised, organized, trained and led in the
field entirely by the Indians." He fought "a straightforward and honourable fight on the battlefield, against most
overwhelming odds." During the military operations he along with his
soldiers had "marched over 3000 miles in Burma." No mercenary army in
his view could have "faced the hardships as the I.N.A. did." Having
fought for the liberation of his motherland under a duly constituted
Provisional Government of Free India, he had "committed no offence"
for which he could be tried "by a court martial or by any other
court." Indeed, the court's sentence of deportation for life could not be
implemented and the Red Fort three were released by the commander-in-chief
Claude Auchinleck in an atmosphere of intense public
pressure.
One of the defense
witnesses at the Red Fort trial was S. A. Ayer, who in November 1940 had traveled
to Bangkok as a Reuters special correspondent and in October 1943 had become
minister of publicity and propaganda in the Provisional Government of Free
India. Soon after the end of the war, in August 1945, he was in Japan. The
world had collapsed around him with the death of his leader, Subhas Chandra
Bose, in an airplane crash on August 18. As he "sat on a bench under the
tall trees in the Omiya Park [Tokyo], day after day, with the Bible in hand, he
read and re-read the Acts." "I prayed," he wrote, "for the
strength of Peter and I prayed for an opportunity to bear humble and truthful
testimony to Netaji's miraculous achievements." His prayer was answered.
He was flown from Tokyo to Delhi and gave evidence at the Red Fort trial. Ever
since the fulfillment of his prayer at Omiya Park, he had wanted to write about
N etaji in East Asia, in a book that he considered
"a purely personal tribute from a disciple to his Master."15
As he put the
finishing touches to his book in 1951, Ayer felt that the passage of five years
since the Red Fort trial had been valuable in gaining "the right
perspective." He did not wish his book to be "a mere lifeless
narration which sounded like something distant and unrelated to the realities
of present-day India." "I worship Netaji," Ayer made clear in
his preface without the slightest hint of embarrassment.16 What he proceeded to
deliver was vivid, nonlinear narrative of Netaji and the Indian independence
movement in Southeast Asia between 1943 and 1945. He also delicately documented
his personal impressions of the relationships, diplomatic and cultural, of
Indians with the Burmese, Thais, and Japanese. In terms of a natural literary
flair, evocation of atmosphere, and eye for detail, Ayer's book stands in a
class of its own among all the participants' narratives of that struggle. Not
meant to be a critical biography, it had an emotional fervor balanced by an
honest portrayal of failures and disappointments as well as a healthy dose of
wit and wry, occasionally self-deprecating, humor.
Ayer chose to
foreground in his narrative the "historic retreat" of Netaji and the
INA from Burma to Thailand in early 1945, once the tide of the war had turned
against them. Chased by enemy planes, Netaji, senior military officers and
civilian officials, and nearly a hundred young women of the Rani of Jhansi
Regiment made a twenty-three-day trek back from Rangoon to Bangkok.
"Standing there in the open, in the bright moonlight, with fires and
explosions in the distance, and no definite news of the position of the enemy
was a peculiar sensation. We were literally living every moment of our life in
those hours. We continued our march through the burning villages of Pegu." Pages of breathtakingly evocative, thick
description are punctuated in Ayer's book by short, reflective paragraphs:
"Not only daylight; we dreaded the moonlight too, only a little less. We
felt comparatively safe on pitch dark nights ... rather primitive, do you
think? Well, quite so. Otherwise, how can shelters dug 20 or 30 feet underground
have such a fascination for man? How else can the sun and moon be objects of
horror?"17
It is remarkable that
the retreating column managed to cross the Sittang
River without being decimated on that moonlit night. "We were asked to get
ready," Ayer continues his story, "for the trek from Sittang to Moulmein en route to
Bangkok. Major General Zaman Kiani was asked to take
charge of the party. He ordered us to fall in and gave us instructions as to
how our party, including Netaji, should march and how air-raid alarm would be
given and how we should immediately disperse on either side of the road and
take cover. "Such was his spirit of discipline," General Mohammad
Zaman Kiani informs us, "that, to better arrange
the march of the column and deal with related problems, Netaji put me in
complete charge and also put himself under my command for the duration of the
march."18
Between the
participant narratives provided by Ayer and Kiani
lies the great temporal and spatial divide of the partition of the
subcontinent. Yet what is striking given the historic rupture of 1947 is the
extent to which the two texts resonate with each other both in spirit and
essential details. Kiani, commander of the 1st
Division of the INA, describes his book as a "personal account of that
movement known as the INA or Indian National Army, being written from memory
after over thirty five years of the events it relates." His motive for
writing his memoirs was simple. He felt "it would not be edifying in the
least" for him "to die without leaving a record of [his] knowledge of
this movement, which was both intimate and extensive."19
In 1931 Zaman Kiani had faced a career choice-to either go to the Olympic
hockey trials being held in Calcutta or ap pear in the examination for admission
into the new military academy at Dehra Dun. He passed the examination but the
medical officer ruled him out from being admitted to the first term of the
academy. The medical officer was a Hindu and the next man to be selected was a
Sikh. This enraged all the Muslims of the battalion, who believed "the
whole thing had been manoeuvred with a communal
bias." Fortunately Zaman was later selected and joined the academy in its
second term, which started six months later. "Little did I then
realize," writes Kiani, "that in time to
come, in a revolutionary movement ... I would be one of the strongest advocates
of inter-communal unity and harmony for the purpose of fighting against the
foreign rule of our country."20
In 1943 Kiani was one of the Muslim officers flanking Subhas
Chandra Bose at a "national demonstration" and fund-raiser at the Chettiar temple in Singapore. Bose had refused to set foot
in the temple unless his colleagues belonging to all castes and communities
could come with him. "When we came to the temple," Abid Hasan has
written, "I found it filled to capacity with the uniforms of the I.N.A.
officers and men and the black caps of the South Indian Muslims glaringly
evident."21 Between 1943 and 1945 Kiani was the
most senior field commander of a very different army from the one he had joined
early in life. when Abid Hasan, a civilian, volunteered to go to the front, he
found himself in a unit that contained Baluchis, Assamese, Kashmiris, Malayalis, Pathans, Sikhs, and Gujaratis.
The fusion of memory
and imagination is seldom the domain of the historian; instead, artists,
novelists, and filmmakers often take the lead. On the occasion of the fiftieth
anniversary of independence, Indian public television showed on its national
network Pahela Aadmi (The First Man), an old
black-and-white Hindi film made in Bombay soon after war's end by the
well-known director Bimal Roy and the INA soldier turned actor-director Nazir
Ahmed. It is a love story between the son of an Indian doctor in Burma swept
away by patriotic zeal and his conservative neighbor's daughter, neither of
whom has ever seen India. The father sends his son to the Indo-Burma front,
where he succeeds in blowing up a strategic bridge and becomes the first man to
plant the flag of freedom on Indian soil. He is wounded in the action and dies
in the base hospital run by his father. The young woman hears the news while
caring for the other injured soldiers. The last scene shows her with the Rani
of Jhansi Regiment, not in retreat, but marching resolutely toward India.
Significantly, the regiment's leader had at one time said: "We shall not
repent even if the advance of our revolutionary army to attain independence of
our homeland is completely defeated .Even if the whole army becomes only spirit
we will not stop advancing towards our homeland!"22
This mentality is not
easily understandable in terms of colonial rationality and demands to be
retold in new modes of historical narrative.From
Mesopotamia to Malaya the Indian Ocean interregional arena formed a crucial
spatial venue for Indian soldiers to rethink their identities and loyalties.
The stark choice between the global British Empire and the territorial Indian
nation with rigid borders was not necessarily the only one available to them.
Lurking in the background of the rival claims of king and country, the complex
and yet not fully understood phenomenon of a diasporic patriotism confronted
the soldiers.
When during the
winter of 1945 some prisoners of war from the INA were brought to the Red Fort
of Delhi, the veterans connected with Gandhi. Forgetting his political
differences with Bose in 1939, Gandhi now lauded him as a "prince among
patriots." And in his appraisal of the INA, Gandhi chose to emphasize the
values for which he himself had fought in South Africa at the turn of the
twentieth century and in India in the early 1920’s.
How did this spirit
of solidarity take hold among Indians overseas? One of the platoon lectures
given to INA recruits, titled "Unity of India, Past and Present,"
provides some clues. "Once the Moghul rule was established," the
recruits were told, "Hindus and Muslims lived as brothers." In more
recent times Mahatma Gandhi was deemed largely responsible for uniting the
masses of India in striving for a common cause.
What is less easily
recognized is that secular nationalism has slid rather easily into forms of
religious or ethnic majoritarianism. When it came to uniting people of
different backgrounds and faiths, exclusively rights-based discourses on
secular uniformity have generally failed where discourses on blood sacrifice
and blood brotherhood did not. Perhaps this success was easier to achieve in an
overseas context where the obsession with land in territorial nationalisms did
not loom large. In any event, the secret and intimate path to a cosmopolitan
anticolonialism among expatriate patriots was forged only when they were able
to combat religious prejudice without making religion the enemy of the nation.
Once the tide of oceanic anticolonialism had receded after the heady winter of
1945-1946, the politics of territorial nationalism ensured the partition
of South Asia in opposing Nation States like most recently still, Pakistan
and India. Continue to P.1:
1. Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947:
Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama. Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.
24.
2. Markovits, Global World of Indian Merchants, p. 8.
3. For the above see
Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour
Overseas, 1830-1920, Oxford University Press, 1974.
4. Marina Carter,
Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874, Oxford
University Press, 1995, p. 2.
5. For claims that
seem more optimistic than is warranted by the evidence, see David Northrup,
Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,
1995), and P. C. Emmer, "The Meek Hindu: The Recruitment of Indian Indentured
Labourers for Service Overseas, 1870--1916," in
P. C. Emmer, ed., Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour
before and after Slavery (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), pp.
187-207.
6. Ralph Shlomowitz, "Mortality of Indian Labour
on Ocean Voyages, 18431917," Studies in History 6, no. I, January 1990:
35-65.
7. See Memorandum
dated October 20, 1945, p. 369, doe. 154, in Nicholas Mansergh,
ed., India: The Transfer of Power, 1942-47, vol. 6 (London: H.M.S.O.,
1970-1983). For a fine study of the Indian National Army that weaves in
participant narratives of Prem Kumar Sahgal, one of the Red Fort trio, and
Lakshmi Swaminathan Sahgal, commander of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment of the
INA, see Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for
Independence, 1942-1945 University of Michigan Press, 1993. Plus more recently
our own study about the INA in its larger WWII context.
8. R. M. Thadani, The
Historic State Trial of the Ali Brothers, 1921, pp. 63-87.
9. See Sugata Bose
and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy,
2004., chapter 10.
10. Quotations here
are taken from Shah Nawaz Khan's statement in Moti Ram, Two Historic
Trials in Red Fort: An Authentic Account of the Trial by a General Court
Martial of Captain Shah Nawar Khan, Captain P. K.
Sahgal and Lt. G. S. Dhillon and the Trial by a European Military Commission of
Emperor Bahadur Shah, New Delhi, 1946,, pp. 104-105.
11. See Monograph no.
3, "The Incidence of Volunteers and NonVolunteers,"
compiled by Lt. Col. G. D. Anderson and his staff in May 1946, L/ WSh/45 (IOR, BL).
12. Ram, Two Historic
Trials, pp. 105-106)
13. Quotations from
Shah Nawaz Khan's statement are taken from Moti Ram, Two Historic Trials in Red
Fort: An Authentic Account of the Trial by a General Court Martial of Captain
Shah Nawaz Khan, Captain P. K. Sahgal and Lt. G. S. Dhillon and the Trial by a
European Military Commission of Emperor Bahadur Shah, New Delhi, pp. 103-Ill.
14. Ram, Two Historic
Trials, pp. 109-110.
15. S. A. Ayer, Unto
Him a Witness: The Story of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in East Asia, Bombay,
1951, p. xiv.
16. Ibid., pp. xxvi,
xxii.
17. Ibid., p. 23.
18. Mohammad Zaman Kiani, India's Freedom Struggle and the Great INA, New
Delhi, 1994.
19. Ibid., pp. xiv,
xvii.
20. Ibid., pp.
xiii-xiv.
21. Abid Hasan Safrani, The Men from Imphal, Netaji Research Bureau, 1995,
l, p. II.
22. Sisir K. Bose and
Sugata Bose, eds., Chalo Delhi: The Collected Works
of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, vol. 12, Netaji Research Bureau, 2006.
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