Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War. Raghu Karnad
with malaria and harassed by Burmese bandits. For them it was merely ‘the Dunkirk of the East’. Behind the Army was a river of pathetic civilians, straggling down the open road. And behind them came the Mitsubishis, some ploughing the column with cannon fire; some filling the air with thousands of fluttering leaflets. These were propaganda cartoons, gaudy and shocking, depicting starving Indians ground under the heels of fat imperialists, or turbaned jawans being kicked out of evacuation lorries by blond-haired Tommies. In Hindustani or in Urdu, they said, ‘The Englishmen are just not bothered about you. You will see this scene wherever you look.’5
The centre of ancient Mandalay became an immense refugee camp, until the bombers reduced it to acres of ash and cinders. The refugees moved on, into northern Burma, where the British roads gave way to hill tracks, and the tracks gave way to long smears of mud, monsoon downpour and human waste. Cholera spread through the camps and contaminated nearby water sources. On the most exposed segment, the 130 miles between Monywa and Palel on the border, the roadside was littered with families too drained to walk. Sometimes a parent or child was still able to move on all fours, to reach a nearby water body and find it, invariably, already fouled.
Six hundred thousand attempted the gruesome march: at the time, the largest human migration in history. Eighty thousand died, in the transit camps and in the undergrowth by the sides of the route. Many left parents or children to die. At Palel and Imphal, there were field hospitals and well-stocked camps, and Army convoys to the railhead. But even there the planes came, above the fluttering Red Cross flags, to draw the harrow over them one last time.
Never before had the Empire, and the men who commanded it, been so disgraced. In the First World War, Indians on the Western Front had first seen the forbidden sight of White men afraid, wailing, soiled, like regular men. But that was on a distant continent. In 1942 the humiliation took place in India’s backyard, and its evidence streamed through Assam and Bengal and all the way to Madras.
At Madras Medical College, where Nugs and Ganny were now house officers, ward after ward filled with refugees. Many had been stretched to their last fibres by starvation, and exposure, malaria, dysentery. Nearly all had cholera. Blue-white faeces gushed out of them. The staff cut holes in the ward bedding, and stitched sleeves of waxed fabric between the holes and buckets on the floor. Nugs and Ganny monitored how much liquid the patients lost every hour, then the ward boys collected the buckets and sloshed the ‘rice water’ into the gutter.
Few survivors carried anything, except for anguished tales of their abandonment by the Raj. Lying in their cholera beds, they told of Anglo-Indian families whose darker-skinned daughters were turned away from camps for Europeans; of columns of Indian refugees held back until Europeans had passed, so the roads would be less begrimed; of elephants struggling up the slopes, hind legs quivering, as they carried mahogany desks out over the bodies of children. The most despised rumour, which travelled well in India, was that the Army enforced separate ‘White’ and ‘Black’ routes: so little did Indian lives count in the end.
Nugs and Ganny heard their stories in the wards, and a different kind of appeal outside. Officers of the Indian Medical Service had besieged the campus, bidding to recruit the senior students. Much of it was familiar, but a new enticement had sent a murmur of amazement through the class: final-year students who signed up to join the Army would receive a monthly stipend of a hundred rupees, starting right away.
Try as he might, Ganny couldn’t get the offer out of his mind. It meant he would start his life with Nugs with some savings, instead of empty pockets, as well as an assured job. Every civil department had suspended hiring at the start of the war, and in their place, graduates were invited to apply for military commissions, and promised priority in civil appointments after the victory. War service would count double for seniority. The Army Medical Corps needed thousands of doctors – one for each new fighting company, and more down the chain of evacuation: in field ambulances, at staging sections, casualty clearing stations, ambulance trains and barges, base hospitals and convalescent depots. The government was doing all it could to make it seem a sound professional decision, rather than professional suicide.
Or actual suicide, which was how Nugs saw it. There was a terrific row. To Nugs, the war was a pathological madness, undoing a thousandfold all the efforts of all the doctors in the world. She knew that Ganny thought the same. They had nationalist friends, like Lakshmi Swaminathan – who they imagined was a captive, at best, of the Japanese – and they had come to agree with them on the lunacy of the war effort. How could Ganny even think about throwing his life into that fire, for the bribe of a commission?
The newspapers said that President Roosevelt had called for a new name for the war which would ‘briefly describe it as a war for the preservation of the smaller people of the democracies of the world’. What he meant was that Europe was in peril of losing the freedom it had long denied to all other races. Churchill gave sermons about a war for freedom, but Orwell provided a sharp retort: ‘The unspoken clause is always: Not counting niggers.’6
Ganny did not argue further, but Nugs could sense his decision hardening. The prospect of a commission was something, more than just the stipend that cooled his anxiety about their future. At the very least it was a plan. If she dared confess it, the relief it gave him helped her too. And there was something else, besides. A bravery had come over him. So she helped prepare the world’s gentlest mercenary to join its greatest war.
5
April 1942
April came, and every morning as the sun pulled itself from the waves, the humidity marched off the sea and into Madras like an invading force. By afternoon, the city was a hydrothermal vent. Once or twice a day, Bobby wasted a cigarette as he tilted his head down to light it and his sweat landed fatly on the paper. Sweat ran into his eyes and it burned.
There hadn’t been a war in Madras in nearly two centuries. The city sweated doubly; from the heat, as every year, and from the fear, as never before. Labourers sweated as they flung earth out of trenches around the ports and the City Hall. Families sweated into threadbare lungis as they lined up at recruitment centres, stroking the hands of gaunt and downcast sons, hoping for reassurance about what was going to happen to them. Sweat ran down the Governor’s neck as he waited in his mansion for instructions from Delhi. At the Carnatic and Buckingham Mills, workers sweated in their picket lines as they agitated for an evacuation allowance. Their union leaders swapped street rumours: aircraft were being organised to evacuate Europeans … The Tatas were in secret talks with the Japs, to spare the steelworks in Jamshedpur from bombing … At a village fair, up north, a Japanese paratrooper descended into a crowd, spoke to them in their own tongue, and then used his parachute to jet back into the sky … Wavell had been killed.1
Families packed trunks, and the wealthiest ones had already sent servants ahead to bungalows in the Nilgiri Hills, to get things ready, just in case. The Burmese refugees who had streamed into Madras sweated in their hotel rooms and relatives’ homes, watching as Madras prepared to stream out.
One exception in this sticky immobility was GP, who shot around town with an energy that suggested he was personally choreographing national events. Though he wasn’t yet thirty, GP was now the chief editor on foreign affairs at The Hindu. It was no more than was expected of him. The Iyengar Brahmins were past masters at reincarnating ancient privilege in the form of modern success; a balancing act in which they rarely put a foot wrong. After Oxford, while GP waited for Subur to finish, he had somehow managed to train at The Times of London, to qualify as a barrister, to play first-class cricket, and even to grow familiar with the World Socialist Movement and various Indian nationalists in London.
In the current crisis too, he was as artfully moderate as ever – quite like Rajaji, the Congress apostle in Madras and another Iyengar. With Manek away on duty, and Bobby and his sisters too hot to say much, GP used the dinner table