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had been plundered and dozens of people killed. In order to suppress the disturbances, the authorities eventually had to deploy 1,800 troops, 600 armed police, 130 unarmed police and even the Royal Air Force. By then the damage had been done; 50,000 people in the two districts were homeless. Thousands of Hindus from the surrounding villages fled into Dacca city, making its neighbourhoods yet more tense.28 Another 25,000 sought shelter in Calcutta. Hindus elsewhere sought revenge. From late October into November, Hindus to the west, in Bihar, slaughtered 25,000 of their Muslim neighbours, sparking a massive migration of Muslims towards the east. By December a single abandoned USairbase in Burdwan was playing home to more than 30,000 refugees from Bihar.29 Over the next decade as many as 4 million people would move from their ancestral homes, pursued by fear of their erstwhile neighbours. At first it was the more prosperous Hindus of east Bengal who moved off to Chandpur or Calcutta, never to return. Many had relatives and property in Calcutta and decided to cut their losses in the east. Later, poor Hindus followed them. Noakhali, even more than Calcutta, destroyed the ancient co-existence between Hindus and Muslims that had characterized much of rural Bengal. One refugee remembered: ‘The change was so sudden, you see. Even a year ago we had played Holi [a Hindu festival] together with Muslim girls. But Noakhali changed everything. As young girls we began to feel insecure.’30 The alternating waves of refugees from east and west further spread fear and hostility in the province. Hindus in the western parts of Bengal worried about the influx of Muslims fleeing from Bihar and were only too happy to see them decamp further to the east along with local Muslims.31

His perpetual gloom now deepening to despair, Wavell wrote home that British rule was on the point of dissolution. He was not getting much help from Indian politicians. During the Calcutta massacres Gandhi, refusing further concessions to Muslim League politicians, had thumped the table in front of the viceroy shouting, ‘If India wants her bloodbath, she shall have it!’32 Gandhi was in fact appalled by the violence and spent much of October and November touring affected villages in Bengal trying to encourage dialogue between Hindus and Muslims. But he could not help but compare the vigorous action of the British to suppress the Quit India movement of 1942 with their slowness and inaction now. In this he had neatly caught the viceroy’s mood. All that could be managed, Wavell concluded, was to preserve the lives of British civilians and get the army out in some kind of order. His officials agreed. After Noakhali, John Tyson, a senior official in Bengal, recorded simply: ‘I think the sooner we clear out the better.’33 At one time Wavell contemplated a ‘breakdown plan’, whereby the British would roll back from one province after another, retreating to the northeast and the northwest of the country. Privately, he called this ‘Operation Madhouse’. If order could not even be preserved in Bengal, the ancient core of the British Empire in the East, where could it be preserved? This thought was particularly sombre since the only force capable of pacifying the fractious colonies of the crescent was the Indian Army. But that army was now no more than a withered limb of the British state. Its regiments were worried, decimated by demobilization and made uneasy by the rise of Hindu–Muslim tension, as Suhrawardy had predicted. More seriously, the new quasi-independent Indian government had made it clear that Indian troops should not be used in Burma or Malaya, let alone farther afield. Congress was infuriated that Indian soldiers had died the previous winter in Indo-China and Indonesia putting down what its leaders regarded as fraternal national liberation movements. British rule seemed as precarious as it had done in the spring of 1942. Yet this time there was little to fight back with.

BRITAIN’S TERMINAL CRISIS IN BURMA

In Burma, too, events on the ground were spinning out of