Tag Archives: imperialism

Nationalism Restored

01 Sat Sep 2018

Posted by in Book Review

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hazony, Yoram. The Virtue of Nationalism. New York: Basic Books, 2018. 304 pp.

Ever since the cultural turn in academia in the early 1970s, it has become de rigueur to disparage nationalism as a volatile and dangerous sentiment susceptible to extreme violence and prejudice. Nationalism was cast as an imagined community with the implication that it was a simulacrum whose substance came wholly from fabricated myths, rituals, and symbols. In this echo chamber, Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism comes as a rare and welcome breath of fresh air that revives the idea and places it in context with other alternatives that have been offered over the ages.

Hazony looks to the Bible, specifically Devarim, to find his definition of nationalism. The scriptures actively promote the feeling of brotherhood among all members of the Jewish nation and Mosaic law would serve as their constitution; the king of the Jewish state, its priests, and prophets would all be drawn from among the brotherhood and each would have a role in preserving the traditions, customs, and laws of the community. Geographically, the boundaries of Israel are set by Moses as he expressly forbids the expansion of the nation-state into the neighbouring lands of Esau, Moav, Lot, and Ammon.

The ambitions of nationalism are clearly limited and not inherently expansionist or committed to world domination as critics are prone to hyperventilate. Hazony does not deny that there has been great violence in the past in the name of nationalism but that is also true of any other theory of mass organisation, ethics, and governance. This is an interesting proposition put forth by the author, that nationalism is not merely a feeling of cultural connectedness between people who do not know each other but properly seen, it also includes a system of ethics.

According to Hazony, the roots of nationalism are to be found in the structure of the family – individuals are biologically related in a family and share a sense of rights and duties, blood and belonging, vis-a-vis one another; the prosperity of one member is the success of them all. As families band together into clans, clans into tribes, and tribes into nations to provide better security and accomplish greater tasks, the loyalty commanded by the heads is transferred upwards towards common characteristics the members share, such as language, faith, or ethnicity.

Using the family as a model of organisation for the state is certainly not peculiar to the Bible – similar notions are found as far apart as China and Greece. Confucius clings to the metaphor a little too closely with the result that the ideal Chinese state tends towards authoritarianism; Aristotle sees the polis – state – as the full flowering of the family life but does not carry the analogy too far as he recognises that there is a difference in the nature of power within states and families, not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well.

The Virtue of Nationalism juxtaposes a localised nationalism with universalist ideologies such as imperialism, Christianity, Marxism, and Liberalism. Nations are inherently anti-imperial and therefore more stable, the argument runs, because its members are connected to each other through bonds not mediated by institutions of state. Nations are particular to geography, language, faith, ethnicity, or some other criterion that defines the community whereas the universalist aspirations of Christianity, Islam, Marxism, and Liberalism fall to the temptation of conquest and subjugation of the entire world to the one “true” doctrine of choice.

Hazony’s depiction of nationalism as limited may be true in the Jewish tradition but it has had a very different history in Europe and Asia, at least. Halakha distinguishes between milkhemet mitzva – war of obligation – and milkhemet hareshut – optional war. In the first category fall, for example, the wars of Joshua against the seven nations while David’s campaigns of expansion come under the latter classification. In fact, G-d prohibits David from building the Temple because he was “a man of battles and [had] shed blood.”

It is also problematic to portray imperialism as a universalist principle. Although imperialists have no bounds to their geographic ambitions, it is usually also true that the imperial quest is usually carried out in the name of a nation; the various nations that fall to a growing empire are neither treated nor seen as equals. We see this again and again from the Roman Empire to the pink-tainted map of British expansion. Rome expanded its citizen base only in the latter years to stave off a fiscal crisis brought on by decades of decadent emperors but ties by birth or marriage to the Italian peninsula and preferably Rome were favourable traits to possess well into the second century. Similarly, London scoffed at Mohandas Gandhi’s idea that Britain welcome all inhabitants of its dominions as equal citizens of their empire. Hazony accepts this at one point, but not before an unnecessary discourse on the universalist instincts of imperialism.

The difficulty of sustaining nations on abstractions such as liberalism stems from the inability to justify loyalty to the principle. The likelihood of changing our minds as we experience life and are exposed to more information means that any belonging to an ideal remains unstable at best. Hazony takes help from psychology to make the case that humans are social animals who have a need to belong to networks and believe in something greater than than the mere material of life. Here, he brings up a word not often seen in nationalism studies these days – loyalty – which is the crux of the debate. It is not easy, if at all possible, to have loyalty to an idea in the same manner one feels ties to a sibling or parent.

Hazony reworks several historical events to lend support to his hypothesis, in many cases problematically. For example, rather than see the Thirty Years’ War from the traditional perspective of a conflagration between Protestants and Catholics, Hazony casts it as being primarily motivated by universalist impulses against local inclinations. While most historians would agree that the religious element ceased to animate the conflict as the years passed, the war remained an old-fashioned struggle for geopolitical dominance between France and the Habsburgs.

Perhaps the most jarring incongruity in The Virtue of Nationalism is how the second Christian schism is repackaged as a contest between universalism and particularism. At a certain level, it is undeniable that Catholic allegiance to their Pope made way for dual loyalties. However, it is hardly the case that Protestantism was a particularist creed any more than Christianity a sub-sect of Judaism. While the theological reorganisation gave monarchs their independence from Rome, the faith itself still believed it possessed a universal message. The recent Evangelical movement has strongly underscored this conviction.

The largest empire in the modern era was put together by Britain and it was Prussian militarism that sank Europe into the first of its cataclysmic convulsions of the 20th century. The United States began its expansionist project with Manifest Destiny and then eyed territories beyond; none of these countries were Catholic. What is disappointing is that these ill-considered examples are unnecessary and distract from Hazony’s already persuasive defence of nationalism.

These weak digressions may conceal the real import of The Virtue of Nationalism, which is an assault on the cult of the solitary individual. Hazony traces the roots of this ideology to at least one of its origins, John Locke. Hazony finds the English philosopher’s initial assumption that all people are rational and his utilitarian methodology in assessing rationality flawed. Contrary to Locke, Hazony argues that the fundamental unit of existence is not the individual or even the family but the community. Our ethics arise from our communal interactions as does our sense of self; in turn, these inform all our other beliefs and relations, such as liberty or nationalism.

This is at the root of the conservative world view, that the community and family are prior to the individual. Ever since the early Liberals recast society as a collective of individuals, the idea has taken hold and grown to a point where it is not even questioned any more. The few who reject this modern normal have usually done so on theological grounds and have been easy to ignore in an increasingly profane world. By reviving a classical framework, The Virtue of Nationalism fires a broadside at not just the critics of nationalism but the entire Liberal project. Not only are the dangers of a universalist mindset compared against nationalism and found to be as dangerous if not worse, but individual liberty is argued to be mere license if not exercised within the bounds of community and morality. Thus, this is as much a work of political philosophy as it is about nationalism.

It is to the author’s credit that he does not pay much heed to the silly distinction between patriotism and nationalism – Vidura counters this best in the Udyoga Parva in India’s treasured epic, the Mahabharata, when he says, “[t]hose prone to get drunk get drunk on knowledge, wealth, and good birth; but the same are triumphs of the strict.”

The Virtue of Nationalism is a short book and not written in a solemn academic tone despite boasting an impressive bibliography. Hazony would do well to realise, however, that his understanding of nationalism is peculiar to Judaism and not characteristic of all politico-cultural movements. The inadvertent contradistinction, however, should be most interesting to scholars of nationalism. Readers should beware that the chatty affectation of the book belies a profound sociopolitical weltanshauung and a powerful critique of Liberalism in all its guises. There may be some historical quibbles but they do not, oddly, take away from the overall argument and to narrowly focus on those would be to miss the forest for the trees. In an era of Liberal activist academia, Hazony’s efforts to take us back to first principles and rethink our implicit assumptions is a welcome intellectual challenge.

The Roots of Indian Foreign Policy

04 Sat Mar 2017

Posted by in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on The Roots of Indian Foreign Policy

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

making-of-indias-foreign-policyPrasad, Bimal. The Making of India’s Foreign Policy: The Indian National Congress And World Affairs, 1885-1947. Delhi: Vitasta Publishing, 2013. 301 pp.

It is easy to forget, sometimes, that the roots of a country’s foreign policy are always embedded in its domestic politics and experiences. Postcolonial states are no exception to this rule, but a rupture in the continuity of self-rule – usually at a critical time in world history when the global order was undergoing major economic, technological, and political upheavals – left them inexperienced in the ways of the international community. Some states, such as India, were newly created and had no memory of ever having had to navigate international politics while holding together a state that defied every understanding of nationalism. Originally published in 1960 but reprinted in 2013 at the urging of former foreign secretary Muchkund Dubey and columnist C Raja Mohan, Bimal Prasad’s The Making of Indian Foreign Policy: The Indian National Congress and World Affairs delves into the formative period of a modern Indian international outlook to suggest the antecedents that have informed Indian foreign policy in its independent era.

The Indian National Congress did not begin in 1885 as an organisation opposed to British rule of India. Rather, in its early years, it affirmed the loyalty of Indians to the Crown and worked to create for them a position of equality within the British imperial system. This is not much different from the position of Mohandas Gandhi, who until the end of World War I, argued against racial and exploitative policies of the Raj rather than its imperial venture.

Indian nationalists and the INC voiced opposition to British adventures in Afghanistan, Tibet, and elsewhere at the expense of India’s development. They were not convinced of the London’s paranoia about the security of the jewel in the English imperial crown, and condemned operations against Russia and China in much the same tone as international opinion surrounding the American invasion of Iraq in the noughties. The break came, oddly, with the signing of the Treaty of Sevres on May 14, 1920, which dismembered the Ottoman Empire and terminated the Caliphate. Indian Muslims were agitated by the events unfolding in the Middle East, and Gandhi saw it as unduly harsh and uncaring of the sentiments of millions of the Crown’s Indian Muslim subjects. Additionally, the refusal to accede to India dominion status cemented a distrust of British motives in India. This late divergence is curious, given English behaviour ever since they rose to power in the subcontinent in the mid-18th century.

The Indian world view was always outward looking. Even three decades before Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment would become a pillar of Indian foreign policy and a pan-Asian gefühl its flavour, Indian nationalists were not isolationist and particular but sought international cooperation against imperialism. In 1920, for example, the INC paid homage to the memory of Irish patriot Terence MacSwiney and send a message of sympathy to the Irish people. As Gandhi declared in his presidential address to the Congress in 1924, “the better mind of the world desired not absolutely independent states warring one against another, but a federation of friendly interdependent states.” Nehru set up a Foreign Department within the Congress in 1930 and within a year, it had made contact with over 400 groups, organisations, and individuals worldwide. Henceforth, the party would also get regular reports from around the world on important political ideas and developments.

Nehru’s views on the Soviet Union, commonly understood to have formed in his college-day flirtations with Fabian socialism, were influenced more profoundly by the events of the 1920s. Gandhi, Nehru, and others began the decade being critical of Bolshevism and Marxism. The change came in 1927 when Nehru attended the Brussels Congress and attended the committee meetings of the League against Imperialism. Not only did the future prime minister develop sympathies for the Third International, he was amazed by the changes sweeping the Soviet Union. Nehru believed India and the Soviet Union to be in the same boat – recipients of Western hostility/imperialism, largely agrarian, and with a large, mostly illiterate population. If the Soviets could catapult themselves to the forefront of nations with their new methods, India would do well to learn from them. This is not to say that Nehru was blind to the totalitarian nature of Iosif Dzhugashvili’s state but his contagious enthusiasm for the scientific and technological revolution taking place to India’s north spread among his fellow Congressmen.

Admiration for the Soviet Union was fanned by imperialist misbehaviour worldwide. As the Jewish question came to a boil in the Middle East, Nehru and Gandhi came to view the Balfour Declaration as another example of the imposition of imperialist whims on a defenceless subject population. Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, the abdication of responsibility of European powers in the Spanish Civil War the same year, silence at the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, and the supplication of the victors of Versailles to Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, all while the Soviet Union alone spoke stridently against imperialism understandably had an effect on Indian nationalists.  Nehru came to believe that London and Paris were deliberately stoking fascism in Europe as a counter to Bolshevism. “Perhaps what moved these reactionary governments in so-called democratic countries,” he wrote with reference to Munich, “was not fear of defeat but fear of victory, for that victory would have been a victory of real democracy and possibly an end of fascism in Europe. Fascism had to be kept going in Europe whatever the cost.”

Although India recognised Israel in September 1950, the INC did not wish to pursue full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Following recognition, the Indian prime minister explained that Delhi would have recognised Israel even sooner but did not wish to offend the sentiments of India’s “friends in Arab countries.” The Congress antipathy towards Israel – despite acceptance of occasional covert assistance – was that neither Gandhi nor Nehru sympathised with the idea of a Jewish national home. They saw no reason why Jews should not, like other communities, make their country of birth or residence their home. This did not mean that there was no sympathy for the plight of the Jews in Europe: Nehru wrote, “Few people could withhold their deep sympathy from the Jews for the centuries-long oppression to which they have been subjected all over Europe. Fewer still could repress their indignation at the barbarities and racial suppression of the Jews which the Nazis had indulged in during the last few years.” Gandhi added, “if there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified.”

Then, as now, the fever of symbolism ran high in the Congress: May 9, 1936, was observed as Abyssinia Day, September 27, 1936 was recognised as Palestine Day, and June 12, 1938, was celebrated as China Day. “Let the Czechs know,” Gandhi cabled, “the [Congress] Working Committee] wrung itself with pain while their [Czechoslovakia] doom was being decided.”

The turbulence and turmoil in the world did not alter Gandhi’s mind about the value of non-violent struggle. In matters of defence, Nehru was the pragmatic one. While Gandhi advocated a post-independence guarantee of protection from Britain, Nehru believed in a world balance of power; while the former looked to civil disobedience, the latter wanted a speedy reconstruction of defence forces. The idea of an Asian federation of state had been popular with INC leaders of the 1920s but Nehru clarified that this arrangement of collective security must be based upon a complete elimination of imperialism. Pacts led by certain Western governments in the furtherance of their narrow imperialist intentions were no solution to the problems of the world.

Clearly, the material for the formulation of independent India’s foreign policy was forged in its struggle to throw off the yoke of British imperialism. The INC’s partiality towards the Soviet Union stemmed from the fact that it was the only major world power that reliably spoke out against imperialism in the two and half decades between the Congress’ disillusionment with British rule at the end of World War I  and independence. With constant provocations from imperial Europe, it is not difficult to see why early Indian leaders would develop an affinity for the USSR. This remained the mindset during the Nehru years and ossified into a reflexive policy, albeit with some justification, after his death. Critics may fault the prime minister’s intellectual nimbleness as the whole world changed after 1945 but not the initial grounds for attraction.

Similarly, India’s Israel policy seems to have been based on its domestic experience. Opposed to the idea of a confessional Muslim state being carved out of India, the Congress could hardly support a Jewish state being carved out of a no man’s land that had been inhabited by Muslims and Arabs for the last two millennia. The INC leadership had no practical solutions to the Jewish question but to term their position as ignorant of history is not entirely accurate either. Again, critics of India’s Israel policy seem to have a stronger case against the Congress’ inflexibility between 1950 and 1992 than against the original logic behind Nehru’s position on the Jewish state.

Nehru’s talk of an Asian federation petered out after independence and he was not keen on the alphabet soup of pacts the United States was forming around the world to contain communism. Loy Henderson, the second US ambassador to India (not counting Benjamin Joy), has opined that Nehru’s anti-Americanism came from his days at elite English institutions of public education. This may be partially true but another source could well be that, from the perspective of Indian nationalists, the United States did little to aid India’s independence despite its rhetoric. The efforts of Indians living in America and even Americans, clergy, journalists, and politicians, endeared the former British colony to Gandhi. Political pressure upon London was also gratefully accepted. However, the 20th century saw the US inching closer to Britain on a number of issues due to geopolitics. In this need for greater bonhomie, the Indian cause was put on the back burner. In 1942, Gandhi told an American journalist that India was willing to accept UN troops on its soil to ward off a potential Japanese invasion if Washington would intercede with London on Delhi’s behalf to leave the subcontinent. The Congress believed that India was in danger merely because she was a Crown colony and Tokyo would otherwise have no interest in South Asia. Franklin Roosevelt was not convinced, and Indian independence meant little to him during a war that was tearing down the very edifice of Western civilisation. This indifference, combined with the lack of faith in US-led multilateral defence organisations, may have soured Nehru to the United States as much as his aristocratic schooling.

Prasad’s book presents a useful background to the development of Indian foreign policy and is an important contribution to the field. Its proximity to events and figures makes up for its datedness, and although it may not have the turgid prose expected of academic research these days, it makes a persuasive argument with a good footing in the documents available to the author then. It is easy to see why anyone would urge for The Making of Indian Foreign Policy to be republished: in a time when India is undergoing another political and socioeconomic transition, it is always a good idea to briefly glance back at whence we came to understand where we may want to go.

Not Our War

13 Mon Jun 2016

Posted by in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Not Our War

Tags

, , , , ,

Karnad, Raghu. Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War (London: William Collins, 2016). 320 pp.

Khan, Yasmin. The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (Gurgaon: Vintage Books, 2015). 448 pp.

Raghavan, Srinath. India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945 (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2016). 550 pp.

The history of World War II is the most popular college course in the United States. Each year, thousands of undergraduates pour into classrooms to learn about, in that cloying phrase coined by Studs Terkel, the last good war. Young Americans learn how their grandfathers – perhaps great grandfathers – fought and won on the distant battlefields of Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. The narrative is, not surprisingly, centred around the American war effort; most history, at least at the introductory levels, still focus on forging citizens rather than cosmopolitan elites. No wonder, then, that similar courses in Britain would drill the island’s lone and courageous resistance to the Germans, and in Moscow, take credit for the greatest Nazi casualties despite immense losses and suffering.

Yet another view can be had from India. Then a part of the British empire, the colony – which then comprised of modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh – was dragged into the war by its imperial overlords without as much as a by-your-leave to the elected Indian representatives in the administration or to the leaders of the independence movement. This is perhaps one reason why Indians never saw the war as quite their own; another reason could be that the Indian republic has never celebrated the profession of arms, save for the annual Republic Day parade. In India, the military is not particularly visible in mainstream public life as it is in other countries such as the United States. There are few national memorials for those who fell in in its wars; what chance would the memories of a conflict not its own have?

The centenary celebrations in Europe of the Great War and the diamond anniversary celebrations of the Second World War have turned the attention of some, especially in this era of our globalised community, to India’s role in the conflagration the previous century. In these archival excavations, a fuller story of the war emerges – not necessarily surprising but damning in many ways – that apportions credit for Allied victories more fairly.

Farthest FieldRaghu Karnad’s Farthest Feld: An Indian Story of the Second World War is not as much a historical work as it is a quasi-biographical novel. Nonetheless, the tale he recounts offers a glimpse into a certain segment of middle class India of the late 1930s. This is a far cry from the overwhelming majority of Indian conscripts, to be sure, yet there emerge a few threads common to the pan-Indian experience. These are held together by the broader historical and political events that shaped Indian views on the European war.

The war came to India first by way of rising prices, followed by the tugs of ideology and opportunism. These were not necessarily aligned and it showed in how South Asia’s myriad communities responded differently to the war. The Communists boycotted it until the Soviet Union was invaded in June 1941; the Congress, burned by the poor returns despite their enthusiasm during the previous war, opposed it unless London was willing to guarantee political concessions; the nobility, completely dependent on the Raj for their very existence, worked tirelessly to provide the British with materiel; some communities, such as the Parsis, embraced the economic windfall that war meant for merchants; and a very few felt a familial loyalty towards the Crown and enlisted.

In the upper middle class setting of Karnad’s quasi-novel, the war was initially seen as a grand adventure. However, as the fighting crept closer to India from Dunkirk and Manchuria, as scarcity and inflation set in, the rosy tint evaporated. In the Pacific theatre, the widely spread Indian diaspora were overrun by the rapidly expanding Japanese co-prosperity sphere towards the end of 1941 and into 1942. As England, France, and the Netherlands lost their possessions, over half a million Indian labourers employed in British work camps began stream west to the relative safety of their homeland.

The Raj at WarThough Farthest Field gives a general feel of wartime India, it still telescopes a very thin socio-economic slice of the Indian populace as any quasi-biography is wont to do. Still, it raises several troubling hypocrisies in the British war propaganda that others like Yasmin Khan have explored further in The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War.

True to its subtitle, Khan offers a thorough exposition of the home front during the turbulent years of World War II. Khan’s work, an academic tome, makes extensive use of not just personal diaries and memoirs some soldiers may have left behind but also government and military archives around the world. The Raj at War does not delve into the politics as much as one might expect but analyses the national experience and social disruptions World War II brought India.

In the early days of the war, the British could afford to be choosy about whom they recruited into the imperial army and they maintained their theory of martial races despite it having been proven wrong in the great European war just a quarter century earlier. However, as time passed and Axis gains became overwhelming, London was forced to expand its selection pool to all of Indian society. From the Indian side, the reasons for enlisting were varied and not usually patriotic. Some young men signed up because they hailed from a martial tradition that had sent at least one son into the army for generations – which political authority that army served seemed not to matter. Others joined up to escape marriage proposals, debt collectors, or law enforcement; yet others were lured by pecuniary enticements offered them or their families by the maharajas who sought to curry favour with the Crown in anticipation of the difficult post-war years. Many saw the military as an employer or even an educator who would provide skills that would prove useful after the war. It is not clear if any of these volunteers ever saw a contradiction in fighting for a country that had colonised and oppressed their own; did nationalism not exist in the Indian heart even as late a 1939 or were these decisions simply about daal-chawal? Khan does not venture into the Indian soldier’s mind.

With more and more scholarship in recent years exposing Western hypocrisy about freedom in the first half of the 20th century, it would not come as a surprise to readers to discover that racism was rampant in the British military. Not only were Indian soldiers paid only about a quarter of what their British counterparts received, soldiers of colour were also not entitled to the same perks as white men in uniform. This included not just rations of tobacco and other war-time luxuries but extended even to the war front where Indian soldiers were assigned separate messes, hospitals, and even brothels! It is difficult to imagine what motivated Indians to remain in uniform despite suffering such indignities. Even more puzzling are some of the letters exchanged between home and front in which the men or their fathers expressed their prayers and good wishes towards the King of England. While the pre-enlistment sense of service and duty or pecuniary expectations might be explained away by utilitarian reasoning, differential treatment under fire is harder to fathom.

Khan also discusses the impact of the war on Indian industry. Although, normally, wars spur industrial growth, World War II had a mild effect on Indian businesses. Despite shortage of materiel in the Asian and African theatres, there was severe opposition from London to setting up advanced armaments plants, shipyards, and ammunition factories in India for the war effort, no doubt with a partial eye to the post-war colonial order. The more immediate concern was that if industry grew, wages would rise too and this would hurt recruitment. After all, why would anyone volunteer for a foreign army to fight on distant shores when there were opportunities to be had right at home? Even with the modest growth in Indian industry in the 1940s, this was exactly what happened.

It is interesting to note how Indians reacted to Japan’s early victories in Southeast Asia. Here was an uncolonised Asian power that was shellacking the Europeans out of the region. The mixture of awe and distaste – awe for the accomplishments and distaste for the inhumanity shown to the conquered fellow Asians – filled Indian leaders and people alike. While Khan does not explicitly talk about this, Japanese successes must have surely inspired confidence in the possibility of a technologically advanced, independent, and prosperous Asia in the near future. Until the fall of Singapore, it was just a plausible theory but since, it was a virtual certainty.

Khan’s The Raj at War is a splendid analysis of the impact of World War II on India – how the European war changed the Indian economy, society, and politics. Some of these changes would last – the skills Indian officers and soldiers picked up in Africa, Italy, and Burma, for example, would serve the new republic well in its own conflicts with the equally new and irksome western neighbour, Pakistan. It is beyond the scope of the book, however, to consider how many of these changes stuck – despite the nudge towards industrialisation and Jawaharlal Nehru’s scientific temper post independence, India steadily fell back in the community of nations in industrial production and scientific achievement. How much of this was due to stifling government policies and how much was simply because India was a largely illiterate country that was not yet ready for an industrial revolution?

indias-warTwo aspects Khan does not cover in her otherwise marvelous survey of India at war are the global and military dimensions. Khan’s focus was clearly on the domestic front, but over two and a half million Indian men were shipped abroad to fight England’s enemies around the globe. This lacuna is addressed by Srinath Raghavan in his India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945.

Perhaps erroneously titled and sporting a slightly grandiloquent subtitle, Raghavan’s work is nonetheless a fantastic and much needed contribution to Indian military history. By this, I do not mean a dry recounting of battles and casualty figures interspersed by the occasional map, but a rich weaving of economics, politics, and war as any good military history ought to be. India’s War begins by explaining at length the various positions taken by the dramatis personae – London, the British government of India, the Congress party, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Muslim League just to name the most prominent. At times, these positions would prove to be dynamic, depending upon the reactions of other parties. This may explain the near-bipolar Congress response to how the British dragged India into the war.

Raghavan’s analysis of the politics is not restricted to India and Indians just because his is a subcontinental story. In fact, India is shown as a more autonomous limb of the British Empire and a decision maker in its own right; it is also shown as a strategic region with a direct bearing on geopolitics in Southeast Asia as well as the Middle East. New to many readers will be the disagreements between London and its servants in Delhi on military strategy – for example, General Claude Auchinleck was convinced that an unsettled Iraq threatened Iran and Afghanistan and therefore India, while General Archibald Wavell did not want to be distracted from more important missions around the Mediterranean.

Of course, one might ask of what significance this is – a difference of opinion between London and its representatives in Delhi hardly makes it an Indian story. At best, Raghavan has shown that each command had its own priorities in the war in much the same way the Army, Navy, and Air Force compete with each other for strategic significance and hence the budget. In favour of the author, one can argue that this sort of autonomy was seen nowhere else in the British Empire – after World War I, the British mandate of Mesopotamia had technically fallen to India, not England. And towards the end of the war, India nationalists’ interests fascinatingly coincided with imperial interests in retaining Indian pre-eminence in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Still, even if not satisfactorily Indian for some, that (white) Delhi’s views on arms production and military strategy clashed with the High Command in London is an interesting facet of the history of World War II.

The sinews of war receive their share of Raghavan’s attention, too. India contributed not just men but also materiel to the war effort. Although modern industries such as armaments, heavy machinery, and vehicles was actively discouraged by London, Whitehall retained India in its traditional role as an exploited colony. The subcontinent provided ores, agricultural products, and other raw materials which were then fashioned into supplies. In monetary terms, these outflows were enormous. Since Britain insisted on administering India with local revenues alone – with fees and fines added for imperial upkeep, such as compensation to the British families affected by the 1857 mutiny or the Anglo-Afghan Wars, for example – the Raj had been in debt to Britain at the beginning of hostilities in Europe in 1939. By the end of the war, Britain owed India £1.3 billion.

This is not to say that these resources were spent on the defence of the subcontinent or even in training and equipping units raised from India. In fact, Indian units were frequently ill-equipped and insufficiently trained even when fighting far away from South Asia, in the Middle East or Europe. While the administration in India begged London for fighter planes, radios, artillery, and other equipment, these were luxuries for Indian troops even at the front.

An interesting nugget in India’s War is the revelation of the importance placed by Winston Churchill on American views. From the start, each major policy decision that involved India was additionally examined in the light of what effect it would have on American public and political opinion. Washington’s sympathies towards Indian independence are well known, and with wartime Britain’s desperate need for American aid, it seems only natural that these factors would come together. However, as the United States itself joined the war, one would have expected such considerations to take a back seat to the strategic imperative. Whether this was so in American minds or not, Raghavan explains that Whitehall was certainly not taking any chances.

Perhaps one of the most useful contributions Raghavan makes is his coverage of Indian troops under fire. Although the trend has so far been to depict World War II battles as a colossal clash between two Western (and white) sides, the fact is that millions of colonial troops – black, brown, and others – participated in the war in the British, French and other armies. India’s War lives up to its title at least in this regard, in volume of Indian blood spilled in the pursuit of European goals. Indian soldiers were deployed everywhere from Hong Kong to England and everywhere in between – France, Italy, Crete, Greece, Cyprus, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somaliland, Yemen, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, Malaya – and fought with such bravery that even Churchill had to accept the “unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers.” After the war, they found themselves staying on to restore colonial regimes all across Southeast Asia.

Farthest Field, The Raj at War, and India’s War all portray a different history of World War II, a refreshing narrative that is not Manichean. The same Allies who fought in the name of holy liberty also enslaved half the world in the shackles of imperialism. As the Japanese advanced into Burma, the Raj preferred to use the few available lorries to evacuate their lawn furniture back to India over the tens of thousands of Indian men, women, and children caught up in the turmoil; many perished in the jungles during their long march. For all of India’s importance to the war effort – in terms of men, resources, strategic geography, money – Indians remained casual objects in the imperial scheme of things, ones that may be useful and cherished at times but ultimately not in the same hierarchy. The Second World War was not India’s war, though millions of Indians bled and fought in it.

This article first appeared in the February 2017 print edition of Swarajya.