Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [135]
Eric Stokes, a British subaltern, wrote to his sister at the end of the war that, walking along a Calcutta street, he felt ‘rather like a Nazi officer must have felt walking along a Paris boulevard’.90 The hatred of the clerks and professional people for him was palpable. Whatever the politicians in London and the administrators in Delhi thought, most ordinary British soldiers and businessmen in India already knew that the game was up. In 1946 the British Raj in India died and its death lay heavily on the British in Burma and Malaya. The Raj’s obsequies were not finally said until August 1947, by which time more than a million Indians were doomed to perish in a frenzy of communal killing and many millions more had fled their homes. It was in 1946, however, that the underpinnings of British rule, which had survived even the Quit India movement of 1942 and the disillusionment of 1945, finally came apart. War’s end always brings crises. India’s huge war effort had left it exhausted. More than a million army personnel needed to be repatriated to their villages. Many of these men, particularly the officers, were convinced that self-rule should come immediately. The war had awakened them to politics. If, as they had been told, they were fighting in Southeast Asia for the self-determination of Burmese, Thais, Indonesians and others against Japanese rule, why should India not be free? If most of the Burmese villages they had seen had once had schools and clean water, why should not India’s? Economic hardship drove the point home. Inflation roared away, goods were scarce and military pay did not keep pace with prices. Simmering racial tensions damped down by fear during the war flared up. A younger generation of Indian officers and men would not now put up with casual racial abuse and disdain, especially from Johnny-come-lately British officers who had not fought through the war as they had done. In the Royal Indian Navy a full-scale mutiny broke out in February 1946, fuelled by a combination of racial tension and economic frustration. A white officer had apparently called an Indian subaltern a ‘black bastard’. The fleet went on strike off Bombay. Parties of men from the ships invaded the city centre carrying Congress flags and demanding independence.91 Local Congress volunteers joined them, and the police, already sullen and resentful because of their own lack of compensatory pay, seemed on the point of going over to the mutineers. Wavell acknowledged that the experience of the RAF strikes had encouraged the men.
The trouble quickly spread across the country with the Congress leadership now going for the kill. Tension mounted before the March provincial elections which Wavell had announced the previous autumn. Anti-British riots convulsed Calcutta, where Subhas Bose’s brother and old allies joined the communists in demonstrations of solidarity with the INA internees. Cars were burnt out. Areas such as leafy Park Street, which had been quiet even in 1942, were invaded by crowds of youths. Shop windows were smashed. When the British authorities released Sher Khan, a colonel in the INA, he received a nearly hysterical reception in Calcutta. Denizens of the august Bengal Club looked out from the veranda in dismay as he and other reprieved officers of the INA were paraded past in triumph.92 The white man’s izzat or charisma had finally evaporated. Arthur Dash, a senior Bengal civil servant, recorded that Britons and Anglo-Indians walking in Calcutta’s streets were waylaid and abused. A favourite game was to purloin their regimental or club ties and topis (pith helmets) in a sort of ritual humiliation. If they resisted, they were beaten up.93
DORMAN-SMITH’S WATERLOO
This atmosphere of crisis spread across British Asia, in part because the nationalists were aware of each other