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By Root 1087 0

Writer Samad Ismail wrote wearily in 1944: ‘Everyone feels affection for tapioca; embraces, exalts and extols tapioca; there is nothing else they discuss other than tapioca, in the kitchen, on the tram, in a wedding gathering – always tapioca, tapioca and tapioca.’ But while a tapioca diet provided some bulk, it did nothing to reverse the chronic vitamin deficiency that became endemic in Japanese-occupied societies. Hunger did more than anything else to alienate the subject peoples of Tokyo’s Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, however strong their dislike of their former European overlords.

2 THE RAJ: UNFINEST HOUR

British-occupied India, as nationalists regarded the subcontinent, experienced bitter wartime upheavals and distress. The jewel in the crown of Britain’s empire, second only to China as the largest and most populous land mass in Asia, became a huge supplier of textiles and equipment to the Allies. It manufactured a million blankets for the British Army – the wool clip of sixty million sheep – together with forty-one million items of military uniform, two million parachutes and sixteen million pairs of boots. It was a source of fury to Churchill that India’s sterling balances – the debt owed by Britain to the subcontinent in payment for goods supplied – soared on the strength of this output. ‘Winston burbled away endlessly,’ wrote India secretary Leo Amery on 16 September 1942, ‘that it was monstrous to expect that we should not only defend India and then have to clear out, but be left to pay hundreds of millions for the privilege.’

But could Indians refuse to be defended? Before the conflict began, nationalist demands for self-government and independence had become clamorous, enjoying overwhelming enthusiasm from the Hindu majority except in the so-called princely states. The maharajahs’ territories survived as feudal fiefdoms, whose rulers knew that once Indians ruled their own country, their privileges would be swept away. They provided islands of support for British hegemony, because they thus preserved their own. Elsewhere, however, almost every educated Hindu wanted the British to go. The question was when: the onset of war caused some influential figures to argue that the independence struggle should be postponed until the greater evil of fascism was defeated. Veer Damodar Savarkar, though a nationalist, suggested pragmatically that his people should exploit the opportunity to acquire military and industrial skills which would be priceless to a free India.

The League of Radical Congressmen urged that active participation in the war would ‘not be thereby helping British imperialism, but on the contrary weakening it, by developing and strengthening the anti-fascist forces in England and Europe’. Likewise M.N. Roy: ‘The present is not England’s war. It is a war for the future of the world. If the British government happens to be a party to the war, why should the fighters for human liberty be ashamed of congratulating it for this meritorious deed? The old saying that adversity brings strange bedfellows is not altogether meaningless. If it was justifiable for the Soviet government to make the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, why should it not be equally permissible for the fighters for Indian freedom to support the British government so long as it is engaged in war against fascism?’ Some of his compatriots adopted the view of Lt. A.M. Bose, nephew of India’s most famous scientist and himself a cosmopolitan who had travelled widely in Europe. Bose wrote to a British friend: ‘I am now in the army since three years as I wanted to do my bit to fight the Nazis.’

Several hundred Indians, boasting such exotic names as ‘Tiger’ Jaswal Singh, Piloo Reporter, ‘Jumbo’ Majundan and Miroo Engineer, flew for the Indian Air Force; Engineer, one of four flying brothers, once took a girlfriend into the air in his Hurricane. But though Indian fliers wore the same uniforms and adopted the same slang as their RAF brethren, they sometimes suffered the casual racism of British officers, who called them ‘blackies