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By Root 1099 0

in Midnapore, for instance, a procession led by a seventy-three-year-old woman named Matongini Hazra converged on Tamluk’s courthouse. An ardent follower of Gandhi, she had already served six months’ imprisonment for demonstrating in front of the Viceroy. Now, accompanied by several women blowing conches, she advanced on the police and army cordon securing the courthouse, carrying a flag. When the security forces opened fire, a bullet struck her left hand, causing her to transfer the flag to the right. She was hit again before a third bullet struck her full in the temple. Three teenage boys were among others killed before the demonstrators fled.

In the short term, repression was successful in restoring order. The Indian Army remained almost entirely staunch. But all save the most myopic British imperialists recognised that their rule had lost the consent of the governed. It was a source of embarrassment to thoughtful politicians that in 1942, in the midst of a war against tyranny, some fifty battalions of troops – more than were then committed against the Japanese – had to be deployed to maintain internal control of India. It may be argued that there were overwhelming practical objections against surrendering power to Congress when the Japanese army stood at the gates. But it was among the ugliest aspects of British conduct of the war that in order to hold India, it was necessary not merely to repulse external invaders, but also to administer the country under emergency powers, as an occupied nation rather than a willing co-belligerent. Some of the repressive measures adopted in India were similar in kind, if not in scale, to those used by the Axis in occupied countries. Reports of excesses by the security forces were suppressed by military censorship.

The British in India displayed a casual racism, and sometimes brutality, which caused sensitive witnesses to recoil. Troop-Sergeant Clive Branson was a peacetime artist born in the subcontinent, a former member of the communist International Brigade in Spain. He wrote of his compatriots’ behaviour: ‘Those bloody idiots in the regular army … treat the Indians in such a way which not only makes one tremble for the future, but which makes one ashamed of being one of them … Never will any of us … forget the unbelievable, indescribable poverty in which we have found people living wherever we went.’ If those at home knew the truth, said Branson, ‘there would be a hell of a row – because these conditions are maintained in the name of the British’.

There were grievances in the ranks of the Indian Army, mostly about soldiers’ inferior conditions of service compared to those of their British counterparts. One group of men wrote jointly to their commanding officer: ‘In the eyes of Mahatma Gandhi all are equal but you pay a British soldier Rs75/-and to an Indian soldier you pay Rs18/-only.’ Another man complained: ‘An Indian subadar salutes a British soldier, but the British soldier does not salute an Indian subadar. Why is this so?’ Nor were Indians the only victims of the Raj’s harsh governance: in December 1942, 2,115 Japanese civilian internees were held by the British at Purama Quila camp outside Delhi in scandalous conditions of squalor and privation; by the year’s end 106 of them had died, some of beriberi and dysentery. The Japanese empire presided over many worse things, on a vastly greater scale; but the deaths at Purama Quila reflected deplorably on British competence as well as humanity.

Americans, from their president downwards, never entirely forgave Churchill and his nation for the manner in which the peoples of the subcontinent were excluded from the ringing promises of freedom enshrined in the Atlantic Charter. Americans serving in India – performing liaison and logistical tasks, training Chinese soldiers and flying bomber operations against the Japanese – recoiled from British treatment of its inhabitants, and believed their own behaviour more sympathetic. Indians were less convinced: a letter-writer to the Statesman newspaper denounced the conduct of the Americans