Learn more about India's wartime engagement, forgotten perspectives, and historical realities.
“Though I did not then understand the gravity of the war, the faded looks of young widows touched my tiny heart. It was indeed the epitome of Indian soldiers’ contribution in [the war].”
The above quote came from the Indian historian and author Uma Prasad Thapliyal, who described his experience in 1946 of witnessing the faded tones on the glittering sarees of those Indian widows who had lost their husbands during the Second World War. These deaths represented one example of the more than eighty-seven thousand casualties the country had suffered in the fight against the Axis Powers. India was responsible for providing the war effort with the single largest volunteer force in world history [1] – at over two and a half million strong. Yet, contrary to post-war patterns of “national narcissism” examined by Roediger et al [2], the Second World War occupies a significantly mitigated place in the Indian imagination than in Europe, as well as in Asian nations China and Japan [3]. This article will take a transnational approach to the (lack of) memory of the war in South Asia – owing to the unified nature of the Indian and Pakistani militaries at the time – and examine a paradigm shift in recent decades.
If one were to examine the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) History books for the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades, one would notice that the Second World War is discussed as if it were a supplementary rather than distinct event to those on the domestic stage. Where there is explicit mention, such as in the third chapter of the 9th-grade edition (Nazism & the Rise of Hitler), acknowledgement of Indian involvement is mainly limited to Gandhi’s famed correspondence with the chancellor himself. In each of these cases, what is largely absent is India’s military contribution to the war effort. The circumstances of India’s ambivalence of wartime memories are perhaps best exemplified by the India Gate monument in New Delhi. Paul McGarr, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham, points to the peculiar history of the gate as a memorial to the fallen soldiers of World War I flanked by a statue of King George V. Thirty years after the statue’s initial installation in 1936, it was defaced by members of the Samyukta Socialist Party (United Socialist Party), who had also left a photo of Indian National Army (INA) leader and Japanese ally Subhas Chandra Bose at the pedestal [4]. Bose, who had fought against Indian state forces, is emblematic of the localised conflict that continues to problematise the memory politics of the Second World War. This contention about India’s wartime history only became more complicated when, in 2022, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a statue commemorating Bose where King George V had once stood.
It merits mentioning that India was not a nation-state at the time of the war but rather a composite facet of an empire. Though primarily discussing the First World War, Thierry di Costanzo, a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg, emphasises the effects of this self-perception on postcolonial interpretations of the war in India. Chief among these was the prominence of concurrent events, i.e. the colony's independence and partitioning into India and Pakistan [5]. In the aftermath of events such as the Quit India Movement from 1942 to 1944 and the practice of Satyagraha, the war became a backdrop to the far more immediate issue of a potential British exit. These protests also instigated a series of violent crackdowns by the colonial government, which had entered India into the war only some years earlier without consulting local political stakeholders [6]. Activism in the aftermath of this decision varied considerably, thereby germinating another significant factor that continues to affect memories of the war – political heterogeneity.
While Jawaharlal Nehru’s Indian National Congress party opposed India’s forced entry into the war, party members and political activists continued to express their stance against fascism [7]. This contradictory outlook had been mainly moulded by a series of unkept promises following the last global conflict that India had been forced into by the colonial government, as well as events such as the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919 that had only exacerbated the divide between the populace and the government of the viceroyalty [8]. To groups such as the opposition All India Muslim League, the fact that its ethnoreligious base constituted large parts of the military gave it a bargaining chip in its quest for Muslim separatism [9]. On the other hand, for many Indians, Bose and his alliance with the supposed enemy was an entirely viable path to freedom from colonisation. Congress itself derived much of its ideological fervour from Japan’s slogan of “Asia for Asians” as early as 1905. Even the British government was aware of the general support for the INA outside the heartlands of the Northwest Frontier and Punjab, with even pessimistic outlooks on the group, seeing them as “misguided patriots” [10].
Though Bose and his compatriots found themselves posthumously rehabilitated in mainstream Indian politics, other material issues continued to haunt the Indian memory of the war – particularly the Bengal Famine. While the famine had various initial causes, the blight was further exacerbated by the colonial government’s strategic and tactical decisions to destroy supply lines and prioritise food allocation to British citizens and military personnel, leading to the death of over three million people the same year and continued perils due to disease and malnutrition well into 1944. The apathy of the British government, notably Prime Minister Winston Churchill, greatly affected Indian perceptions of the war as a moral fight against fascism. Even the British Secretary of State, Leo Amery, was forced to describe Churchill’s attitude towards the Indians as “Hitler-like” [11]. Some former combatants, such as Lieutenant General Jack Farj Rafael Jacob, did, however, express ideological, personal motivations for joining the war effort [12]. Nevertheless, for most Indians, the perceived expendability of the local population during the Bengal Famine and violent wartime suppression made the war less of an ideological struggle than a praxis of commonplace political obligation for self-preservation and the prevention of anarchy [13].
By the time Nehru met American President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, the two had very different experiences over a decade prior. When Eisenhower led the charge on D-Day in 1944, Nehru was still languishing in prison for his opposition to the colonial government’s unilateral decision to enter the war [14]. The release of Nehru and other Congress leaders in 1945 initiated what military historian Rana Tej Singh Chhina describes as the forfeiture of India’s involvement by certain sections of the political establishment who decried it as “not our war” [15]. This background and the political polarisation Nehru had witnessed informed India’s postwar policy of non-alignment and neutrality [16], thereby mitigating the need for the post-war memory politics that continued to permeate parts of Europe in the face of a communist threat [17]. The need for measures to preserve secondary memory about the war through textual and visual means was, therefore, not an ideological priority for a postcolonial India.
Returning to the India Gate monument, which was renovated through the development of the National War Memorial in 2019, the subsequent spatial domination of post-partition narratives saw the continued withering of the pre-independence war corpus as the Indian military sought to be reimagined as a national institution. This process, Bayly claimed, had already begun by the end of the Second World War. Regional engagements such as the sporadic Indo-Pak Wars between 1948 and 1971 worked to ideologically separate and entrench two parts of a military that had, until a few years prior, been facets of the same colonial force. Likewise, defensive wars against China and the invasion of Goa worked to repaint the postcolonial Indian military as an institution that served the national interest. Combined with the traumas of partition and the subsequent migration crisis, this significantly diminished the cultural relevance of primary memories of pre-independence conflicts [18].
However, some issues remain with this unofficial omission within India’s military history – particularly in foreign policy. Suvir Kaul, referencing Indian journalist Dr. C. Raj Mohan, discusses the potential for India’s recurring tendency to fall into the machinations of imperialism, particularly in pursuit of regional interests and rapprochement by the United States following the liberalisation of the 1990s [19]. On the other hand, to China, integrating India’s pre-independence military history into a global narrative of the fight against fascism would benefit its national interest [20]. The idea of official state visits to sites commemorating the war is not unheard of; more recent acts of remembrance, such as President Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam’s visit to the Phaleron War Cemetery in 2007 or Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the Australian War Memorial in 2014 and Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery in 2017 seem to indicate such desires to engage in memory politics for contemporary purposes [21]. To scholars such as Bayly, the prospect of engaging with memories of the war presents an opportunity to understand the political, social and economic change in India that led to more profound insights into Indian nationalism, socialism, and the ideology of rights via the phenomenon of “democratisation through practice” that emerged during the war effort [22]. While India’s collective wartime memory has been subject to a tumultuous series of contradictory interjections, there indeed remain benefits to a critical reevaluation of said history.
Footnotes
Resources
Bayly, C. A. “'The Nation within’: British India at War 1939–1947.” Proceedings of the British Academy 125 (2004): 265–85. https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197263242.003.0011.
Chhina, Rana. Last Post: Indian War Memorials around the World. New Delhi, India: Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research, United Service Institution of India, 2014. https://www.mea.gov.in/Uploads/PublicationDocs/23460_IWM_Book__11-06-2014_.pd. Print.
Costanzo, Thierry Di. “Memory and History of the Great(Er) War and India: From a National-Imperial to a More Global Perspective.” E-rea, no. 14.2 (June 15, 2017): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.5844.
Gupta, Arvind, Jack F. R. Jacob, Satish Nambiar, Uday Prakash Thapliyal, and Rattan T. S. Chhina. “Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses,” January 2013. https://idsa.in/system/files/IndiaWorldWarII.pdf.
Kaul, Suvir. “Indian Empire (and the Case of Kashmir).” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 11 (2011): 66–75. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41152287. Print.
McGarr, Paul M. “‘The Viceroys Are Disappearing from the Roundabouts in Delhi’: British Symbols of Power in Post-Colonial India.” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (2015): 787–831. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x14000080.
Riedel, Bruce O., and Bruce O. Riedel. “Ike and India, 1950-60.” Essay. In JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and Sino-Indian War, 7–42. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India: Harper Collins Publishers India, 2016. ISBN: 9780815727019. Print.
Roediger, Henry L., Magdalena Abel, Sharda Umanath, Ruth A. Shaffer, Beth Fairfield, Masanobu Takahashi, and James V. Wertsch. “Competing National Memories of World War II.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 34 (August 20, 2019): 16678–86. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907992116.
Wasti, Moazzam, Muhammad I. Chawla, and Farzana Arshad. “Lord Linlithgow and Muslim Politics in India: An Overview.” Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan 55, no. 1 (2018): 143–55. http://pu.edu.pk/images/journal/history/PDF-FILES/10a_55_1_18.pdf.