The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-1945 0472101269, 9780472101269

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The last days of the Raj bring to mind Gandhi’s nonviolence and Nehru’s diplomacy. These associations ob¬ scure another reality: that an army of Indian men and women tried to throw the British off the subcontinent. Now The Forgotten Army brings to life for the first time the story of how Subhas Chandra Bose, a charismatic Bengali, attempted to liberate India with an army of former British Indian sol¬ diers—the Indian National Army (INA). The story begins with the British Indian Army fighting a heroic rearguard action against the invading Japanese down the Malaysian penin¬ sula, loyally holding out until the fall of Singapore, and ends with many of these same soldiers defeated in their effort to invade India as allies of Japan. Peter Ward Fay intertwines powerful descriptions of military action with a unique knowledge of how the INA was formed and its role in the broader struggle for Indian independence. The author incorporates the personal reminiscences of Prem Sahgal, a senior officer in the INA, and Lakshmi Swaminadhan Sahgal, leader of its women’s sections, to help the reader understand the motivations of those who took part. Their experiences offer an engagingly personal element to the political and military history. (Continued on back flap.)

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The Forgotten Army

The Forgotten Army India's armed struggle for independence

1942—1945

Peter Ward Fay

ANN ARBOR

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 1993 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America 1996

1995

1994

1993

4321

The photographs that appear in this book are courtesy of Prem and Lakshmi Sahgal, and Netaji Bhawan.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fay, Peter Ward, 1924The forgotten army: India’s armed struggle for independence, 1942—1945/Peter Ward Fay. p. CM. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-10126-9 (alk. paper)

1. Indian National Army—History—World War, 1939-1945. 2. India—History—Autonomy and independence movements.

3. World War, 1939-1945—India. D767.63.F39

1993

954.03*59—DC20

I. Title. 93-6005

CIP

Contents

Preface

I

vii

Introduction

i

Prem's Youth

ii

2

Lakshmi’s Youth

33

3

The Fall of Malaya

4

Farrer Park

5

The Beginning of the

6

“Quit India!"

7

Waiting for a Leader

137

8

Subhas Chandra Bose

153

9

Congress Rebel

51

73

INA

87

113

171

io

A

ii

“And They Were All My Brothers"

12

High Hopes in Burma

H

Disaster at Imphal

H

“Blood! Blood! Blood!"

i5

Mount Popa

16

The Leader Lost

17

Let India Learn

Fresh Start

201

239 273

325 361 387

305

223

VI

CONTENTS

18

Jiffs

409

19

Auchinleck’s Dilemma

439

20

Trial at the Red Fort

465

21

The Triumph of the INA Appendix

525

Notes

527

Glossary

549

A Note on Sources Index

493

553

565

Maps India and Burma Singapore Malaya

15

45 53

Burma and Malaya North Central Burma North Burma The Chindwin

97 267

277 289

South Central Burma

331

Preface

Many people have lent a hand with this book.Victoria Mason managed it most capably in its manuscript stage, Lorrie Lejeune the same when it went to press. Susan Haldane made the maps. Suresht Bald, Graham Burnett, Nick Dirks, Joyce Evans, Paul Greenough, Bob Hack, Will Jones, Gita Mithal, Gyan Prakash, Robert Rosenstone, P. P. Sharma, Amita Shastri, Asiya Siddiqui, and one dear friend who prefers to re¬ main anonymous, read parts of it and gave me their comments. My wife Mariette has read it all. I am particularly grateful to the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the California Institute of Technology, and to its chairman David Grether, for the time off and financial assistance that enabled me to go to India more often than I otherwise could have; to Will Jones for compelling me so frequently to moderate my views; and to Nick Dirks for shaking me out of my unconsciously ethnocentric attitudes—and for introducing me to Cohn Day, the director of the University of Michigan Press. The book might not exist at all had Colin not read and liked it, offered many suggestions for its improvement, encouraged me to get on with it, and reproached me delicately for the slowness with which I did. Joyce Lebra has helped enormously over a period of years, with talk and correspondence, by reading chapters, and not least through what she has published about the Japanese and my subject. Hugh Toye has been very generous with information, much of it based on his personal recollections as a British intelligence officer in India-Burma-Malaya toward the end of the war. I am grateful to him for an extensive correspondence (from which, however, I may not quote), and for hours of conversation. Though we differ sharply on some matters of inter¬ pretation and even on some matters of fact, Hugh will perhaps find that

VIII

PREFACE

his efforts to make me see things as he sees them have not been without effect. Philip Mason responded frankly and most usefully to an extended inquiry I sent him about the Red Fort trials. Leonard Gordon introduced me to Netaji Bhawan.There Sisir Bose and his wife Krishna have been repeatedly kind and helpful; several of the photographs in this book were supplied by them. Colonel Rashid Asuf Ali, Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, and J. Athi Nahappan (Janaki Davar) each told me what they could remember about particular pieces of the army’s story. But two persons have passed well beyond the provision of encouragement, information, and advice. Mariette and I met Prem and Lakshmi when in 1964 we went to live in Kanpur (or Cawnpore, as the British called it), on the Ganges 250 miles southeast of Delhi. She had an obstetrical practice. Fie managed a mill. At the time we knew nothing about how India had obtained her independence beyond the seemingly obvious: no fighting, at least no fighting with the British, and no need for any. But in the course of two years’ growing acquaintance, we learned enough about what these two had done before they married to see that there had been more to the independence process than the seemingly obvious— a whole other side to it, a body of men and women who had fought. And we came to realize that Prem Kumar Sahgal, and Lakshmi Swaminadhan (as she then was), had not simply participated.They had been principal figures. Prem, we discovered, had been a captain with an Indian Army infantry battalion in Malaya when late in 1941, one calendar day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked. He fought the length of the peninsula, surrendered at Singapore along with everybody else, and after an interval joined the Indian National Army—the “forgotten army” of this book. Moving to Burma, he served as military secretary to the army’s leader Subhas Chandra Bose. Subsequently he took command of a regiment in the field. Cornered on the Irrawaddy in late April of 1945 by a British brigade rushing for Rangoon, he became some months later the leading defendant in the first Red Fort, the trial that threw India into an uproar. Lakshmi was also in Malaya, practicing medicine, when the Japanese attacked. She, too, became one of Bose’s chief lieutenants, the only woman who did. She raised a regiment of women, took it to Burma, was captured several months after Prem—

PREFACE

IX

and when at last she was brought home, made it her business to let the Indian public know what this army and its leader had been all about. No less than Prem, Lakshmi speaks with great authority to the memory of the movement. And so we listened. This book, begun much later and completed much later still, is the result. It owes a great deal to Mariette, for we have returned to Kanpur often, she knows Prem and Lakshmi as well as I do, and she has a feeling for things Indian that I cannot match. In form it is not Prem and Lakshmi’s story at all. It is the story of Bose and his army, a story often involving persons and things—Quit India for example, or the beginnings of the Burmese independence move¬ ment—with which Prem and Lakshmi had nothing to do. But they were in the army from the beginning, and in the very front rank at the end. What they remember has enabled me to place them in it accurately and in considerable detail. And it is always interesting to discover how people of some significance in public life come to do what they do. So the chapters that follow begin with them, end with them, and often invite them to speak directly to the reader (I have put what they have to say, and what members of their families have to say, in italics). Their absence from long stretches of the narrative is, in any case, more apparent than real. In one sense they are always present. For it has been their willingness to talk to me that has made the writing possible. The book is for them.

Introduction

Halfway through the Second World War there appeared quite unex¬ pectedly in Southeast Asia an army; an Indian army; an army with an adored and indomitable leader by training not a military man at all; an army that using Malaya as a base, Burma as a launching pad, and Japan as a helpmate, tried—even as the war in that part of the world wound towards its by then inevitable close—to throw the British out of India. It did not succeed. Indeed, looked at from one point of view it may be said to have utterly failed. When on the 15th of August, 1945, Emperor Hirohito told his people that Japan could no longer go on with the war, not one inch of Indian soil was free.The army in question lay defeated, scattered, caged. Its leader had fled, and in three days would be dead. Britain’s grip upon the subcontinent was outwardly as firm as it had ever been. And when, on another 15th of August two years later, India did become free, such were the auspices under which she received her independence, such was the manner in which she reached this happy state, that the army in question, though it had only recently been much in the public consciousness, was already beginning to fade. It is a process that continues to this day. Particularly outside India, particularly in North America—though with us it is a matter less, perhaps, of forgetting than of preferring not to know. We have never wanted to be told that independence was something many Indians thought they could obtain only by fighting. We have never been anxious to admit it was reasonable of Indians to take up arms against the British. And we certainly have not wanted to admit that it was reasonable of them to do so in wartime, at a moment of great difficulty and peril for Britain elsewhere in the world. These admissions are painful. To make them is to concede the possibility that

2

INTRODUCTION

when the Second World War began, a sovereign and independent India was not, as we had supposed, safely in sight. That, in turn, obliges us to recast our image of India in its British period. It is an exercise we are not keen to undertake. For we Americans are fond of British India, almost as fond as Englishmen can be. The more it recedes in time, the more we regard it with nostalgia, vicarious of course, piling our bookshelves with its recollections actual or fictional—plain and not so plain tales from the Raj. Somewhere Salman Rushdie, the novelist, calls these tales the twitchings of an amputated limb. By all the evidence they have more life to them than that. And among these tales there is one we particularly like, one we never tire of hearing: the last tale, the tale of how the Raj came to an end, the tale of Mountbatten and Nehru and “freedom at midnight.” What pleases us so much about this tale is its happy atmosphere, the good feeling that radiates from it, the absence of rancor—these, and the absence of bloodshed. There will be plenty of blood—Muslim, Sikh, Hindu blood—spilled at partition. There will be enormous carnage when Pakistan goes its separate way. But it will happen later, and be the result (a distinction most comforting to us) of violence offered by Indians to Indians, not violence offered by Indians to Englishmen or by Englishmen to Indians. At one minute past midnight on the 15th of August, 1947 (so goes the tale), India’s independence arrived without any disfigurement of that sort. It was not fought for, patriots did not die upon the barricades to bring it about. Power was granted—or, to use the more familiar word, power was transferred. Power transferred. It is the theme, the common thread, of twelve fat volumes you will find in every good university library and in the private study of any India buff who takes his avocation seriously and has a few hundred dollars to spare. These twelve volumes, running over three feet on the shelf, contain the more important parts of the correspondence, minutes, and other papers produced by Great Britain’s terminal relationship with India. The twelfth ends, naturally, with the 15th of August, 1947. The first begins with the first day of 1942. That choice of year is somewhat arbitrary, however, for it is plain from the foreword that the editors would have been happy, if given time and print, to begin with 1940; with 1939 or 1937; even with 1919. And the

INTRODUCTION

JXt*

3

arrangement within the twelve is not topical, though that had been the rule in previous official histories of Britain’s external relations. It is chronological. It is chronological because, the editors tell us,1 in those years major questions of India policy were “in substance so closely interrelated” that they were considered by the persons who had to deal with them “not as several and separate problems but as parts of one common, underlying problem, . . . one overriding question.” Government ser¬ vants whose business was India had one thing on their minds. One thing preoccupied them and drew everything else in its train. And what was this poser in England’s relations with India, this problem the resolution of which—as Prime Minister Harold Wilson explained when he announced the projected publication in the House of Commons on a June evening in 1967—these twelve volumes were supposed to document and trace? Not how to hang on in India. Not how to chuck everything and run. Something in between, something neither aggres¬ sive nor supine—a positive, constructive something that should be the capstone to England’s imperial achievement on the subcontinent. What Wilson’s predecessors worked steadily to effect, these twelve volumes assure us, was not the surrender of India but her conveyance, a planned and calculated conveyance, with all that this implies in prior purpose, studied management, and mutual consent. A measured delivery to Indians of the instruments of governance, in the manner of the father handing the car keys to his son. So there could be only one title for these twelve volumes, and it is there, in large gold letters upon the blue of each spine—India: The Transfer of Power. Words and notion are pleasantly reassuring. At the same time, however, there is something odd about them. They do not altogether accord with what one expects of independence movements. Do they fit what actually occurred under the Raj? No one, after all, applies the term transfer of power to the process by which Algeria obtained her freedom from the French. No one subsumes Ireland’s experience under that rubric, or America’s when we were thirteen colonies and wanted King George off our backs. Even the accumulated documents for Burma, right next door, have quite a different handle. On the spines of the Burma volumes (there are only two, as if the Burmese had been in a hurry) you read Burma: The

4

INTRODUCTION

Struggle for Independence. This is not to distinguish the Burma volumes from the India set. That has already been accomplished by dressing the Burma volumes in black. The titles differ because the British look at Burma differently. Or at least Hugh Tinker, the editor of the two volumes, does. Tinker does not see Burma as having obtained her freedom through

management from above. “Power was

surrendered,” he

writes2—the British gave in to pressure from below. Clear through the period of colonial rule there was restiveness and incipient violence among the Burmese, and toward the end an open willingness to fight. That is how Tinker sees it, that is how the Burmese see it: in Burma’s independence myth the patriot with the gun stands heroic and alone at the center of the stage. But in the Indian equivalent he is half lost among actors of a different cast, and in the prevailing western version of India’s independence story he does not appear at all, or is handed a distinctly disreputable role. For armed struggle, the twelve volumes of The Transfer of Power (and much else) announce, was quite unnecessary, freedom being safe and certain by another route. And if struggle was nevertheless attempted, in particular if struggle imperiled England at a moment when she fought the forces of darkness elsewhere in the world—why, then, struggle was worse

than

unnecessary, it was

unconscionable, it was almost a criminal act. This, I think, is why Granada, the British television outfit, did what it did some years ago with the army and the leader I have mentioned. With the Indian National Army, and Subhas Chandra Bose.

It was in the early 1980s. Granada was preparing to release The fewel in the Crown, its long and superbly acted television version of the Raj Quartet, Paul Scott’s four linked novels about British India in the middle 1940s. Now, the Raj Quartet is not a war story. Its principal scenes occur well away from any front. Scott’s men—and women, the quartet is very much about European women in the twilight of the Raj—are not so much in the war as they are affected by it. But Scott does allow the fighting on India’s eastern border to figure in his tale. There soldiers of the Indian Army, the proper Indian Army so to speak, battle not just Japanese but fellow Indians. And this has consequences, consequences essential to the plot.

INTRODUCTION

5

“You know about the Jiffs?” Merrick asks Sarah from his hospital bed. “Jiffs?” “They’re what we call Indian soldiers who were once prisoners of the Japanese in Burma and Malaya, chaps who turned coat and formed themselves into army formations to help the enemy. There were a lot of them in the attempt the Japanese made to invade India through Imphal.” “Yes, I’ve heard of them. Were there really a lot?” “I’m afraid so. And officers like Teddie took it to heart. They couldn’t believe Indian soldiers who’d eaten the King’s salt and been proud to serve in the army generation after generation could be suborned like that, buy their way out of prison camp by turning coat, come armed hand in hand with the Japs to fight their own countrymen, fight the very officers who had trained them, cared for them and earned their respect. Well, you know. The regimental mystique. It goes deep. Teddie was always afraid of finding there were old Muzzy Guides among them. And of course that’s what he did find.” It is because Teddie Bingham, Sarah Layton’s brother-in-law, has been so confident he can bring the turncoats back to their true allegiance by finding them and calling them by name, that he is dead now—and Merrick talks to Sarah swathed in bandages up to the eyes. It is because Merrick subsequently pursues repatriated Jiffs with such cold-blooded intensity that we lose what little sympathy for him we have, judging him to be as twisted in mind and character as he is disfigured in the flesh. We do not meet the Indian National Army as such in Scott’s pages, only stragglers and survivors. Bose does not appear at all. Both, however, make themselves felt. They are present in the wings. And so Granada put them into The Jewel in the Crown. But first it produced and televised a documentary film that would, it hoped, not only identify Bose and his army but lift them—and with them the entire militant wing of India’s independence movement—out of a prolonged and quite undeserved obscurity. Nehru and Gandhi do not require such treatment. Most of us are thoroughly familiar with these two. Indeed, the British have put them into their Dictionary of National Biography along with several maharajas, Rabindranath Tagore, and the third Aga Khan. We admire the elegance

6

INTRODUCTION

and breeding of the Brahmin. We applaud the saintliness and shrewd¬ ness of the Mahatma. We look to both for exemplary behavior under all manner of hard knocks, and get it. We attend Sir Richard Atten¬ borough’s cinematic life of Gandhi expecting to be touched and horrified by the police brutalities their nonresistance will provoke, and are. But very few of us are able to handle Subhas Chandra Bose. We cannot place him in Sir Richard’s film because he isn’t in it. (He isn’t in the Dictionary either, nor is George Washington, though the traitor Benedict Arnold is.) And we know nothing, or next to nothing (Granada rightly reasoned), about the Indian National Army. So, early in The War of the Springing Tiger, as the documentary is called, Granada gives us a shot of some INA men marching. As they march, the commentator’s voice tells us that this was a considerable force, some forty thousand strong.

Censored out of the

news when alive, painted like Trotsky out of the picture when dead (Granada is explicit with the analogy), these men nevertheless existed. And the fact of their existence, the commentator continues, sets at defiance our normal, comfortable view of how India achieved inde¬ pendence. We have always believed that India became free by turning the other cheek. We have always held that Indian independence was the product of Gandhian moral force operating upon the English con¬ science. In fact something else was at work, Granada tells us. These marching soldiers were at work. They were not nonresisters, they did not offer themselves up passively to lathi charges. They organized, took up arms, and fought. And at this point the commentator turns, with old film clips and stills, to the life of Subhas Chandra Bose their leader. So far so good, I thought as I watched. (Granada’s documentary was not shown in the United States, but an English friend sent me a video cassette.) Several INA veterans and Bose’s own nephew had, I knew, participated in the production. They had gone to England at Granada’s invitation, and been interviewed, photographed, and taped. With their help Granada was going to give its viewers a fair, a true, picture of Bose and his men. Surely it was. But almost at once I smelled trouble. When Granada’s commenta¬ tor introduced Subhas Chandra, he did so with the remark that this was India’s “Lost Fiihrer. "What a curious thing to say. Why Lost Fiihrer, why not Lost Hero, to borrow the title of a biography of Bose just out from

INTRODUCTION

7

a London publisher? Why pair Bose with a person whose name still evokes such feelings of anxiety, apprehension, and disgust? It is true the men and women of the INA regularly referred to Subhas as Netaji. It is true the designation was devised during his wartime European stay, and that the stem neta translates leader. But does this make Bose another Hitler? Why did a television production that had so much to cover, and just fifty minutes to cover it in, trouble to explore at such length this connection: Bose spending a great deal of time (it is implied) in Germany, Bose accepting an engraved cigarette case from Hitler’s hands, Bose taking a woman secretly to wife, a German-speaking woman, an Eva Braun no less? Were there no Garibaldis to compare him with, no Jomo Kenyattas or Mustapha Kemal Ataturks (Granada’s researchers could easily have discovered that Bose had an explicit admiration for him) to measure him by? Was it really necessary to link him so relentlessly with Der Fiihrer? Yet if you took note of certain facts, and hitched to them a par¬ ticular premise, the association was not so very surprising. The facts were these. That India had fought on England’s side against the Germans, and later against the Japanese, sending large armies considerable distances to do so. That some Indians had done just the contrary, had fought on Germany and Japan’s side. That these contrary Indians had been beaten. And the premise was this.That in the war in question England had fought not for political or material advantage, not even simply to defend herself, but to save Europe and the rest of the world from the barbarism of Nazi Germany. And that by throwing down the challenge when others hesitated, and by persisting in that chahenge though she stood alone and apparently defeated, she had made possible both the struggle and its eventual triumphant conclusion. This was the premise, this was the proposition, that had served me (and probably most of Granada’s viewers) perfectly adequately for years. Hitch it to the facts, however, and what did it do but force us to agree that any Indian who raised his hand against the British in the Second World War did more than condemn himself to lonely ineffectuality. He forfeited, by this one act, the sympathy and respect of civilized mankind. And if you protested that to allege this was beside the mark; that the said Indian, after all, was simply trying to obtain the freedom

8

wSGu

INTRODUCTION

that is every people’s due; more facts and assumptions moved front and center to beat your protest back. Wouldn’t a world in which Germany and Japan were victorious have been hostile to democratic currents of every sort, and therefore to self-rule? Wasn’t the world that did emerge a world by and large sympathetic to that process? Wasn’t it true that India had became independent very shortly after the war was over? Wasn’t it true that India had become independent not because the war had loosened Britain’s grasp, but because the end of the war had permitted Britain to do what she had always planned to do? It was in this frame of mind, I think, that the Granada people approached their subject. It was because these facts and this premise were so much a part of their intellectual baggage that they produced, in spite of best hopes and best intentions, a film that makes Bose out to be a sort of South Asian Hitler manque, and consigns his men to the world’s great fraternity of rogues, renegades, and fools.

There was a fuss, of course, angry voices raised in India’s Parliament, a formal complaint lodged by India’s high commissioner in London—a fuss I was reminded of when, a couple of years later, two colleagues at the place where I teach began an India-through-film course with that old RKO spectacular Gunga Din. They began it tongue in cheek, of course. After Gunga Din the students received an almost uninterrupted dose of Satyajit Ray. But first we watched Cary Grant, Victor McClaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (distantly modeled, I suppose, on the trio in Kipling’s Soldiers Three) swashbuckle their way into a remote recess of the subcontinent, surprise a band of Kali-worshippers planning the deliberate revival of thuggee (“kill! kill!” the high priest commands as the strangling cloths are handed around), and destroy them with a charge—a glorious charge sent home with the full weight of the grand old Indian Army. What fun, as much now as when I first saw it! Yet in February of 1946 a Punjabi soldier was brought to the Lahore Central Jail to begin a life sentence because of this film. “It is learnt,” ran a news clipping of the day, “that Joginder Singh and some other Indians protested against the exhibition by the British military authorities of a film entitled ‘Ganga Din’ at a cinema hall in Greece. When no notice was taken of their

INTRODUCTION

„£&*

9

protest, Joginder Singh visited the cinema hall and attempted to disturb the show.”3 He did more, he tried to smash the projector, and in the melee that followed shot and killed a British guard. What for me was (and still is) lightly entertaining, for Joginder Singh was simply not endurable. For some Indians still living who remember how India got her freedom, and for many more who are too young to remember but have taken the

trouble to find out, it is simply not endurable that

independence should be so widely perceived, particularly outside India, as something scheduled, something certain to be granted, something that did not have to be fought for—and wasn’t. It is unendurable because they know that there was, in fact, a fight. They know that there were Indians who thought Britain’s professed intention grudging and the schedule sham, who believed that freedom is won not by waiting but by searching for it arms in hand, and who, finding themselves in circumstances that made such action possible, did just that. What follows is their story, the story of the Indian National Army, of the men and women who composed it, and of its leader Subhas Chandra Bose. A story, moreover, with a point. Early in the Granada documentary there is a shot of the INA veterans I have mentioned, Prem and Lakshmi among them, getting off the plane at London’s Heathrow airport on their way to be interviewed, filmed, and taped. As they disembark, the commentator remarks that these are people who fought a war of sorts for India’s independence. A war of sorts. It is a small remark, almost a chance remark, dropped lightly from the commentator’s tongue and likely to pass unnoticed. But there it is. And what is it supposed to convey? What kind of war is a war of sorts, what variety of lesser conflict, what burlesque? It is the argument of this book that the war the Indian National Army undertook was more than a war of sorts. Though these men and women did not march to the Red Fort as they had boasted they would; though they did not ignite inside India the popular rising that was to have made that march possible; they fought. They fought at India’s border, subordinate

to but alongside the much more

numerous

Japanese. When after four desperate months their attempt to break into India failed, they withdrew to the Irrawaddy where, though the British pursued them in overwhelming numbers and it was clear the war was

IO

INTRODUCTION

lost, they fought again. Of all this, India at the time knew very little. It perceived only that the British were victorious in Burma, and that the army of the Raj was the instrument of that victory. But when the war was over and the survivors of this other army came back, in handcuffs as it were, India discovered who they were and what they had attempted. India discovered, too, that there was nothing like them in the freedom movement. Curiosity gave way to surprise, surprise to passionate excitement. Public opinion hardened against any constitu¬ tional arrangement for India’s future short of the complete and immediate independence these men and women had struggled to obtain. The British were weary, and anyway of two minds. Against the current of such an opinion they could not hope to stand unless they were sure of their army, the old Indian Army, and in the presence of this other army they discovered, one day, that they were not. So they let the current lift them. Let it lift them and carry them away. The war the Indian National Army undertook was, then, more than a war of sorts. It was the real thing, a true war of independence, entitled as such wars are to our attention and respect. Whether it became the decisive agent of Britain’s precipitate departure is a question that is perhaps best argued later in these pages, and will be. But something can be said with confidence at once. In India’s pantheon there is space reserved, high, ample, and honorable space, for those men and women who, when certain accidents of time and place gave them the opportunity, seized it and went out to do battle for India’s freedom.

CHAPTER I

Prem’s Youth

We

are

Punjabi Hindus, from

a village

near Jullundur called

Mehatpur. I was born in Hoshiarpur, close by, on the 25th of March, 1917, but my official birth date is two months earlier, because when I was born my father remembered that March is the month of the school¬ leaving examination.

To sit for that examination you had to be fifteen. Achhru Ram (as Prem’s father preferred to be called) calculated that unless he shifted the date of birth, his son would almost certainly lose a year. So the date was moved forward to January 25. Prem grew up in Jullundur, a pleasant manufacturing and market town on the Grand Trunk Road seventy-five miles east of Lahore. His father practiced law. From the beginning Prem was the apple of the family’s eye. My grandparents, a younger sister Raj explains, were very, very keen to have a grandson. In fact my grandfather died praying that he would see a grandson, and Prem was born just nine months after he died. So Prem was really indulged. My grandmother especially used to dote on him. And then,

without a pause, I am much younger, but as far as I can remember, even when he was a schoolboy he was being taken to Congress functions. People had all their hopes on the Congress. There was this agitation, public meetings and all. I think he was hardly ten when he would go out and address them.

In fact Prem’s memories go back to 1921, when he was four. I remember going with my father and mother to meetings in fullundur and its neighboring villages. I remember theAkalis, in their uniforms, with blue turbans and huge swords. The Akali Dal (army of immortals) had been formed

the year before to recover Sikh gurdwaras (shrines) from priests who over the years had come to regard those places as their private property.

12

CHAPTER I

Early in 1921 a large body ofAkalis trying to reoccupy the gurdwara at Nankana, birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion, had been set upon by hired thugs and massacred. The uproar that followed, which lasted several years and threw up a terrorist wing of the Akalis known as Babbar Akalis (immortal lions), ranged a large part of the Sikh community against the British, partly because the British were insensitive to the gurdwara issue and tended to side with the priests, partly because

many of the Babbars had links with the

Ghadr

movement—and during the First World War that movement (ghadr means rebellion) had tried to raise the Punjab against British rule. But of course a small boy did not sort all this out. The Babbars fascinated him. It was said they concealed gold sovereigns in a pouch in their throats like the pouch in which a monkey collects grain, and used these coins to bribe their way out of prison. It was said they fought single-handed against whole companies of police and soldiers, and defeated them; or if captured, broke free at their trials, striking the judges and escaping in spite of the guards. I used to beg my father’s clerks to take me to the court to see these supermen. But the clerks always put me off on one excuse or the other. One day I learned that a couple were actually hiding in our house. Nobody would tell me where they were, and I lay awake at night hoping I might hear some sound when they came out of hiding. But I never did. It was the time of the boycott. I remember huge bonfires of foreign goods, particularly foreign cloth. They were great fun for children. We used to go round from house to house collecting goods to be burned. Then there were revolutionary songs to be learned and sung. His mother’s favorite, in Punjabi, assured the patriot that though he might lose his life he could not be defeated. And one day Prem was witness to something much more serious, a little Amritsar Massacre almost. Our house in fullundur was near the main park, the Company Bagh. A big Congress meeting was to be held in this park and my father, who was the secretary of the city Congress Committee, was to be one of the speakers. We children were not allowed inside the park; we were playing just outside, at the junction of two roads. After the meeting had been going for a while we saw a regiment of British cavalry trotting along the road from the

PREm’s

YOUTH

13

cantonment. I had never seen cavalry before. It was magnificent. The leading squadrons rode past the gate. Then the whole regiment turned and charged the meeting. It took me a little while to realize what was happening, and when I did I ran home crying. I found my mother with a number of her friends and masses of bandages and medicines. They had set up a sort of first aid post, and soon the casualties began to arrive. Some were brought on stretchers. Others walked. We children were kept busy fetching buckets of water from a hand pump outside. When the medicines were exhausted, someone said that ashes of darai, a handwoven silk that is a specialty of fullundur, were very effective to stop bleeding and as an antiseptic. My mother went to her room, brought out a few of her beautiful darai saris, burned them, and used the ashes. His father was not among the injured, but Prem never forgot the incident. His next involvement in politics occurred at the end of 1929, when he was not quite thirteen. That year the annual national session of the Congress assembled at Lahore. Prem was taken to watch. An enormous camp blossomed on the banks of the Ravi. On the first day Jawaharlal Nehru, the new president of the Congress, passed on horseback through streets canopied with bunting, thousands of excited Congress¬ men about him, a small herd of elephants behind. And if the arrangements for the session were dramatic, the events that had led up to it were more dramatic still. Since the arrival of the Simon Commission the year before, the temperature of Indian politics had risen noticeably. Appointed to consider what should follow the first small measure of self-government granted by the

Government of India Act of 1919, the

Simon

Commission had advertised its emptiness and fatuity by failing to include a single Indian. It was received everywhere with black flags and hartals (work stoppages).The authorities responded with lathi charges. At Lucknow, Nehru was hit and bloodied; at Lahore the elderly, beloved Lala Lajpat Rai was struck across the chest, and subsequently died. Two months later the English police officer thought responsible for that outrage was shot dead. This was alleged to be the work of a certain Bhagat Singh, who some months later still entered the balcony of the Central Legislative Assembly at Delhi accompanied by a companion, scattered leaflets, and tossed a couple of bombs—not to

-a3&*

14

CHAPTER I

kill, the leaflets explained, but to make the deaf hear. The two were arrested. Searches uncovered several clandestine bomb factories. Bhagat Singh became the central figure in what came to be known as the Lahore Conspiracy Case. In September 1929 one of the accused died after a long hunger strike. His funeral procession drew angry demon¬ strators by the thousands. Nor did the violence cease, for in December, shortly before the Congress assembled at Lahore, the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, narrowly escaped death when a bomb exploded under his special train. This last affair confronted the Congress session with the question Bhagat Singh had been trying to raise, the question that regularly divided the independence movement. Should patriots pursue the path of nonviolence? Or should they turn to direct action? When Gandhi asked the delegates to express their relief at the Viceroy’s escape, he was hotly opposed; and though his motion passed, it passed narrowly—for the moment at least, Congress party was set on a militant course. In 1928, at the annual session held that year in Calcutta, it had been agreed that if India was not granted dominion status by the end of 1929, civil disobedience, which Gandhi had brought the country to the brink of six years before, would begin in earnest. Now a resolution framed by Gandhi himself, and adopted, announced civil disobedience as soon as a time and an appropriate tactic could be determined. Dominion status would no longer suffice. India must have puma swaraj, complete independence, and she must have it at once. It was therefore to a Lahore galvanized by a direct challenge to British rule that young Prem was brought. The consequence was predictable. I was so impressed by what I saw that when we returned to Jullundur I jumped right into the student movement. The dramatic steps that followed the Lahore session—the unfurling at midnight on the 31st of December, 1929, of the green, white, and saffron flag, the simultaneous reading all over India on January 26 (now Republic Day) of the declaration of independence, the mass resignations of Congress legisla¬ tors, Gandhi’s march to the sea to pick up salt—these figure in Prem’s recollections only vaguely. As for the riots at Peshawar, at the height of which two platoons of Garhwali Rifles refused to fire, press censorship may have kept him from hearing about them at all. But the Lahore Conspiracy Case was another matter. Bhagat Singh had been the leader

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