India At War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War, by Yasmin Khan
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India At War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War, by Yasmin Khan
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World War II was a global catastrophe. Far broader than just the critical struggle between Allies and Axis, its ramifications were felt throughout the world. It was a time of social relocation, reorienting ideas of patriotism and geographical attachment, and forcing the movement of people across oceans and continents. In India at War, Yasmin Khan offers an account of India's role in the conflict, one that takes into consideration the social, economic, and cultural changes that occurred in South Asia between 1939 and 1945-and reveals how vital the Commonwealth's contribution was to the war effort. Khan's sweeping work centers on the lives of ordinary Indian people, exploring the ways they were affected by a cataclysmic war with origins far beyond Indian shores. In manpower alone, India's contribution was staggering; it produced the largest volunteer army in world history, with 2.5 million men. Indians were engaged in making the raw materials and food stuffs needed by the Allies, and became involved in the construction of airstrips, barracks, hospitals, internee camps, roads and railways. Their lives were also profoundly affected by the presence of the large Allied army in the region, including not only British but American, African, and Chinese troops. Madras was bombed by the Japanese and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were occupied, while the Bengal famine of 1943-in which perhaps three million Bengalis died-was a man-made disaster precipitated by the effects of the war. This authoritative account offers a critically important look at the contributions of colonial manpower and resources essential to sustaining the war, and emphasizes the significant ways in which the conflict shaped modern India.
India At War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War, by Yasmin Khan- Amazon Sales Rank: #58355 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.40" h x 1.20" w x 9.30" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 432 pages
Review "Superlative.... India at War breaks new ground on almost every page.... Written in beautifully polished and often moving prose, Khan's book is the first detailed study. It succeeds brilliantly.... Her work has the detailed research, economic rigour and theoretical superstructure of heavyweight academic history; yet it also has the narrative momentum, prose style and humanistic and biographical insights of a more literary work." --William Dalrymple, Spectator
"Wonderfully detailed and original.... Khan achieves almost complete success: India at War is a striking example of people's history, packed with anecdotes, memories and information about a shared but largely unwritten global past." --The Guardian "Khan...balances analysis, history and human compassion in a narrative that leaves one shaken." --Daily Telegraph "Splendid.... Khan's richly readable book takes apart and rewrites the conventional narratives of imperial historians.... Democratic in her approach and largely suspicious of grand narratives, Khan tells her stories from the ground upwards.... [H]er chronicle is, in the main, tragic in this seminal and timely book." --The Independent "[Khan's] new work makes salutary but unpalatable fare for any remotely sensitive modern British reader.... [Khan] tells a host of stories about India's wartime travails that should be known to a wider western audience." --Max Hastings, Sunday Times "The value of Yasmin Khan's fine book is to tell us something of what the war did to India...." --Financial Times "This is a much-needed general treatment of the Indian Empire's last war."--ChoiceAbout the Author Yasmin Khan is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Kellogg College. Her first book, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, won the Gladstone Prize for History from the Royal Historical Society.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful. Powerful By Autamme_dot_com This book managed to shame this reviewer; you might reasonably expect a Briton to know something about one of the largest wars that Great Britain has been involved in and understand how members of its then-Empire contributed. No excuses can be given and whilst one was aware that British forces were active in India and other Empire countries, the scope of their contribution and involvement to the war effort was not so known. This book changed that.So much changed because of the war. Maybe change was inevitable in any case, at least as far as India’s relationship to the Empire was concerned, yet when the call came it was prepared to help and sought to do its bit for the war effort. It did a lot more than “a bit” too: viewed in isolation it produced the world’s largest volunteer army in world history with over 2.5 million men. The country also contributed heavily to the war’s logistics chain. India wasn’t unscathed; it had to change a lot to provide the help and by the end of the war quite a lot of lives had been lost both in battle and because of it.The author packs a lot of powerful history into this sensitive, authoritative work. An admirable level of academic neutrality is deployed to let the story tell itself. This is more than just a war history; the author seeks to consider how the Indian subcontinent itself was reshaped by the war as its impact shuddered throughout the country. Was all change good and for whom? What about those who didn’t jump on-board and wholeheartedly want to support someone else’s war?Some of the claims made are shocking to this reader (even if more informed people were aware of it): racial division and segregation was actively practiced in some areas to protect the prestige of the European community. This massive book features an extensive bibliography and index so the reader can dig in as deep as they want, even following the sources if they so require.This book is positively overwhelming. A pleasurable immersion into a subject that is hardly pleasant at its core, yet the underlying stories and actions that came about due to it makes for a fascinating read. A highly recommended book, even if you tend to shy away from war and history titles.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful. A pioneering history deserving wide readership. The writing is superb, and it establishes the huge importance of India's war. By lyndonbrecht This book deserves as many readers as possible. I can't believe mine is the first review! Khan's writing is excellent, and the book will help any reader better understand what India (in the sense of British India, including present day Pakistan) and all its peoples went through in the war. What Khan does is remarkable: she establishes that India was vital to the war and that the war is vital to understanding the rapid political evolution that resulted in independence and the 1947 split. I can't emphasize enough that this is a new and highly informative take on a part of the war, one far more complex and far more important than most American readers know.The book covers a great deal, some of it necessarily briefly, and points the way for other writers. In no particular order, this book covers the Bengal famine, two million Indian soldiers abroad, the Burma campaigns, hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the initial Japanese conquest of Burma, Japanese bombing and fear of bombing, hospitals, recruiting, the Indian National Army (under Bose, nominally fighting with the Japanese against the British), demobilization, censorship and more. The more includes black American GIs (22,000 of 150,000 total Americans in India during the war), white American racism against black Americans and black Americans finding sympathy with Indians.There's some detail I have read nowhere else. About a forth of British merchant sailors were Indian, and scandalously they were paid far less than white sailors. German propaganda aimed at Indian soldiers (in North Africa) and German broadcasts were rather more effective than the usual histories indicate, and Japanese propaganda also more adroit, of course in both cases focusing on quite real facts of racism in the Raj. There was an influx of European refugees, including thousands of Poles, and apparently there were Indians who learned Polish in the course of interactions (and the reverse of course), Thousands of poor white people seem to have acted to discredit the rigid hierarchy of the old Raj, which was shaken during the war. The account of the Bengal famine is superb, by far the best I have read. Then there's Herman Perry, an American black GI serving with troops building the Ledo Road to China, who murdered an officer and deserted; he was sheltered by a Naga family, and married a village girl in the year he was free before he was caught and hanged. There are other individuals who make Khan's history come alive.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. Britain didn't fight the War, the British Empire did By Raghu Nathan When I was in high school in India, the study of History covered India's struggle for Independence with extensive commentary on what happened during the first half of the twentieth century, leading to Freedom in 1947. However, the 1940s were marked mainly by the Congress Party's 'Quit India' movement, the disastrous famine in Bengal, the imprisonment of all the Congress leaders and the ascent of the Muslim League leading to the partition of India. There was hardly any mention of the impact of World War II on India or of Indians fighting in North and East Africa, Europe and the Middle-East for the British Empire. The Indian National Army (INA) led by Subhas Bose, fighting in SE Asia and making common cause with the Axis powers to liberate India from British rule, found some mention but the main focus was always on the non-violent struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi. Consequently, most Indians like me have little idea of the role played by Indians in the Second World War and how it impacted the struggle for Independence. One can understand the reasons for a narrative that excluded this part of Indian history because the Indian Republic was built on the idea of non-violence, democracy and secularism and India's post-independence education did not want to dwell much on the role of the World War in accelerating the exit of the British from India. On the other side of this story, in Britain, post-war reconstruction and regeneration quietly erased the Indian contribution which was at odds with the story of plucky small-island British heroism standing up to Fascism against all odds. So there was no room either in the British narrative for including the role of the soldiers from the occupied lands of the Empire. There is a need to fill this very important hole in modern Indian history and this is where this book comes in. Author Khan does a splendid job to tell us the forgotten story of undivided India's contribution in the Second World War through personal accounts of soldiers, seamen, peasants, orderlies, cooks, washermen, tailors, nurses, prostitutes - all of whose lives were turned inside out by the War. In short, the author says, "Britain did not fight the Second World War, the British Empire did".Reading the book turned out to be a revelation for me. It was a shock as well because it brought home to me how ignorant I was about such recent Indian history. For the generations of Indians who were born after Independence like me, the phrase 'India at War' simply meant the three major conflicts in 1962 (China), 1965 and 1971 (Pakistan). In these three conflicts together, India perhaps saw less than 10000 deaths. In contrast, India's role in WWII shows that as many as 2.5 million Indians fought on the side of the Empire and as many as 89000 were casualties. Indians had fought in Tobruk, in Imphal, in Eritrea and in Lebanon.Author Khan brings the irony and sadness of this undocumented story through the poignant words of a Nepali peasant woman, whose husband was drafted into the army to fight faraway in Europe. She says, "I hear the whole world was fighting but why they needed my son's father to settle it, I can't understand". The simple fact was, unlike the British and other allied European nations, Indians did not see the Second World War as a clear cut, epic ideological struggle or even as a 'just war'. Many in Britain, not just Churchill and the pro-imperialists, believed that India's opposition to the war was based on its inability to see the international picture because of its backward, irrational, uneducated and superstitious people. Little did they understand that in 1939, on the eve of the War, Indians had an average longevity of 26, a literacy rate of 12.5 %, poverty at 90% of the population and a ruinous subjugation of political rights. South Asians were mainly concerned with what the war meant for the political future of their own country and not with Fascism.What I liked most in the book is its colorful depiction of history, through the eyes and words of the many participants, which gives it a panoramic view. There aren't just the accounts of Indian peasants, mothers and businessmen but also that of American GIs, Polish refugees, Chinese soldiers in India, British memsaabs and many others. Though the book is scholarly in its approach, the author has mixed an academic style of writing with anecdotes of lived human history in an engaging manner. I liked the considerable attention in the book to the mercurial freedom fighter, Aruna Asaf Ali, and how her transformation from a Gandhian to a militant revolutionary occurred in the 1940s.Any book dealing with the 1940s in India has to contend with the horrendous Bengal famine of 1943. It is a bone of contention between Indian and British historians. Scholars like Mukherjee have laid the blame at the door of Churchill and the British administration in India. English historians have disputed the charge of wilful neglect of starving Indians in favor of British troops in SE Asia and elsewhere. Author Yasmin Khan says that this debate may never be resolved but points out certain incontrovertible facts for us to mull over. In the 1940s, there was the fear that Japan would invade India on the eastern sea side and so the colonial administration destroyed as many as 20000 boats that Bengali fishermen used normally to catch fish and move essential commodities to all those villages which are reachable only through water. As a result, the rural agrarian economy in Bengal was destroyed completely thereby laying the possible roots of the famine. Khan says that the British administration took the approach that some peoples' lives were not worth preserving and that the state should be geared to prioritizing the war at all costs above human lives. Two singularly hostile and unsympathetic leaders in Churchill and Linlithgow didn't help matters either. There is much evidence to corroborate such discrimination by what happened earlier in Burma. As many as 600000 Indians fled Burma for India on foot when the Japanese onslaught started. But 80000 of them never made it home. At crucial bottlenecks when leaving Burma, Europeans were prioritized, accessing safe passage away from the Japanese, leaving Indians stranded. The author cites the Tamu-Palel Road in Burma being closed to Indians but open for escape for the British.Such British conduct in India during the war completely removed whatever little legitimacy the colonial regime had in the eyes of Indians. The return of hundreds of thousands of sepoys from Europe, the middle-east and Africa and the inspirational courage and struggle of Subhas Bose's Indian National Army (INA) made the younger generation impatient for freedom and less inclined towards the epic non-violent struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi. The Congress Party was forced to capitalize on the mass groundswell of support for the INA. In this context, Churchill's victory speech of 'Long live freedom, Advance Britannia' sounded incongruous to Indian ears. How could the cause of freedom live alongside the advance of 'Rule Brittania'? With all the major Congress leaders in prison and those of the Muslim League outside, Gandhi and Nehru in 1944 found that Jinnah had consolidated his support for the partition of India among the Muslims of Bengal and Punjab. Author Khan says that the War simply unleashed forces in India and Britain uncontrollably to rapidly accelerate the exit of the British from India.India saw massive refugee and other influxes into the country - Jews and Poles from Europe, Indians and Brits from Burma and large internal migration from rural to urban India. There were many British and American troops coming to India as well, to train for the fight in Asia. Out of the 150000 American troops, some 22000 were black GIs. In addition, over 100000 African troops also disembarked in India along with another 100000 Chinese troops belonging to Chiang-Kai-Shek's Kuomintang.Race discrimination was a fact of life under Colonialism and war time was no different. In India, the British Military decided on training Indians in Hindustani rather than in English because 'it would be easier for ten thousand comparatively intelligent Englishmen to reach a high standard in Hindustani than to instruct a million far less intelligent Indians in English. In actuality however, many Indian sepoys ended up communicating effectively in English within a short time!Even sex was affected by race. In the Eritrean city of Asmara, soon after the fall of Keren, two sets of racially segregated brothels were established, one for Indians and one for the British.Apparently, the British administration in India was wary of so many black American GIs in India, feeling that Indians are a hierarchical and color conscious people and hence, the black soldiers may experience discrimination during their stay. The book notes that, in the end, the black GIs got on quite well with Indians but were discriminated against by their own senior officers in the US army! After all, it was still the 1940s!I think this book is a seminal contribution to modern India's history. Textbooks in India must be updated using this book to include the core details of India's participation in the War and its impact on the independence movement and how it hastened the exit of Britain. The book shows vividly how the massive scale of India's participation in the war by way of soldiers and resources had the simultaneous effect of bringing home to Indians the proof (if it was needed) that the British were there primarily to advance only their own interests at all costs, thereby making it extremely difficult for them to continue their occupation of India. It is extremely difficult to document such history, ground-up from the viewpoint of the foot soldiers, especially in a country like India in the mid-20th century, because most of them were illiterate and they do not put down any of their experiences or thoughts in writing. This has always been the problem with other Indian expatriate experiences as indentured labor in Africa, West Indies and Fiji too. But Yasmin Khan has been able to accomplish such a difficult task and craft a book that is an absorbing read.
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