Why did Indians join up to fight the Japanese?

I’m doing a few talks this summer on the subject of my new book A War of Empires. I do hope you’ve heard of it! One of the questions I’m regularly asked is ‘why did Indians fight?’ In fact, I don’t spend much time talking about the subject in the book: a really good analysis is in Professor Srinath Raghavan’s book on the Indian Army here. But I regularly come across a profoundly ill-informed narrative that suggests that the war wasn’t ‘their’ (ordinary Indians) fight. Wasn’t the war, this argument posits, one between the nasty Japanese proto-imperialists on the one hand and the equally horrible British empire on the other? Surely it wasn’t India’s fight and in any case both sides of this ugly squabble were as bad as each other? So why did ordinary Indian men and (some) woman join up? Surely it must have been imperial coercion? Weren’t Indian soldiers simply mercenaries?

I believe that if we were to accept this proposition we would be denying the Indians of the past a rational say in their own lived experience. I was confronted with this when I was interviewing an Indian veteran in Gauhati many years ago. When I asked him why he had joined the ‘British’ Indian Army he put me very firmly in my place. ‘It was 1942’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a matter of being British or Indian. In fact, at that stage I had never met a Britisher in my life. I was 18 and had just left school. It was a matter of opposing the Japanese. We read the newspapers. We knew all about Nanking. We didn’t want the Japanese here. I wanted to join the Indian Army to stop the Japanese invading India.’

It was a salutary experience for me as an historian. I had assumed that he hadn’t joined the army because he had wanted to, but because he’d had no choice. His response helped me to recognise that history is not just or always about big themes or movements, but about actual people and the personal decisions they make. In particular, the conversation helped me understand why so many millions of Indians of their own volition joined the Indian Army after 1942. One would have thought that, following the catastrophic loss of Malaya, Singapore and Burma in 1942 that the Raj would have simply unravelled. After all, some 60,000 Indian POWs did join the Japanese-led Indian National Army in Singapore in 1942 (these numbers were eventually whittled down to 15,000 men in 1944). Indeed, Japan believed that the loss of their Asian colonies would send the Europeans scurrying back to Europe with their tails between their legs. Instead, the opposite happened. The attempt by Japan to expand its own empire by means of war in 1942 saw young Indians flocking in large numbers to the service of the Raj, even at a time of growing nationalist clamour at home. Between 1939 and 1945 India’s armed forces recruited 2,581,726 (of whom 2,065,554 were serving at the point the war ended). The Indian Air Force, which had begun the war with 285 officers and men, was now the Royal Indian Air Force, with nine squadrons of aircraft and 29,201 officers and men. It appears that rather than destroying it, the crisis of 1942 strengthened the sirdar (government) temporarily at its point of greatest peril, and allowed it to strike back decisively in 1944 and 1945. Thereafter, Britain relinquished its control of India not because it had been defeated, but precisely because it had been victorious. This is a fascinating counter to what we are frequently told. Indians quite clearly fought for India regardless of the reality of colonialism. In other words, colonialism was irrelevant to the decision that many ordinary Indians made to join up. The idea of India was a far bigger consideration that the fact that India was not independent but part of a wider (British) empire. It looks likely that the much professed Indian animus to the British has been, in retrospect, exaggerated. Indeed, much more prosaic reasons often lay behind the decision to join up, as Srinath Raghavan demonstrates.

Nevertheless, in the decades since, a strange consensus has seemed to settle on this period in the West and in India, both of which treats the history of India during the war as an aberration, because of India’s status as a colony of the British Empire. Indeed, the assumption by some over the decades since independence is that what happened before 1947 – including the Second World War – happened to another, far distant, country. This is because, so it is argued, pre-1947 India was undivided (and for Indian nationalists, tainted by an Islam that has since been exported to Pakistan and Bangladesh), and second that it was part of the Raj, and thus tainted by Britain. It is politically unbecoming to equate a sense of Indian-hood with what Marxist historians in the West and Hindu nationalists in India tells us was India’s slave status under colonialism.

An Indian infantry section passes Japanese dead near Meiktila, Burma, 1945

But it’s hardly logical. In fact, it gives us particular problems when we look at the Second World War and India’s contribution to the vast human experience that reset the structure of the modern world. The problem is that the post-colonial interpretation makes slaves of Indians. It argues that they had no personal control of their destiny because the government was in the hands of others. When the British declared war, India became an unwilling participant. This argument is that the top-down forces of colonial government, together with its systems, structures, cultures and attitudes, were deeply and inherently exploitative, such that it cannot properly be argued that colonial intentions were anything other than unfair and abusive. In this view, Indian men fought and strived against their will, even though they weren’t fully aware of it, as cultural coercion blinded them to the reality that they were fighting a British war against Britain’s enemies. The absurdity of this argument suggests, to give but one example, that Auchinleck’s otherwise culture-challenging efforts in 1943 and 1944 to raise the pay of Indian Commissioned Officers to the levels of their British colleagues, was for the purpose of buying their loyalty rather than of giving them equality with their peers. Equally, it is seriously suggested in some quarters that the offer of money likewise persuaded millions of otherwise impoverished Indians to sign up for war work during the industrial expansion of India. Illiterate peasants knew no better than to take the financial bribes offered in exchange for their labour. It is argued that others were forced by convention and the belief that family and personal honour depended on a military career. Millions of men thus became mercenaries of the British, subject to intense and relentless propaganda which bound their minds and wills in an unprecedented and highly successful, coercive, manipulation.

Indian troops and armour advance together, Meiktila, Burma 1945

I suggest that we recognise these assertions to be exaggerations and political point-scoring, to prove that the Raj was bad and that the Indians who willingly stood up against fascism and totalitarianism in the Second World War weren’t doing it for India, but because they were forced against their conscious will to do so. This type of argument is pointless. It assumes that we know why each man and women made the decision they did, and imputes to them a post hoc political or ideological rationale that is not only impossible to prove but reduces human decision-making to binary determinants. I can find no evidence that 2.5 million men joined the Indian Army between 1939-45 as the result of, as one author puts it, a ‘propaganda offensive’ by the British government which ‘secured the partial allegiance or at least acquiescence of part of the population’. The argument does not explain why the men thus recruited were prepared to die for this compulsion, and why Indian soldiers were to win 22 of the 34 Victoria and George Crosses awarded, for example, during the Burma Campaign. It is rational to conclude that, instead, most Indians who joined the armed forces in such extraordinary numbers did so because they had weighed up the options and assessed the nature of the sacrifice they were willing to make for the sake of the government of India, regardless of its political colour. In this sense, their decision was made on the basis of a conception of India much larger than the framework of politics as it existed within Indian polity at the time. The threat to their conception of what India was and could be therefore far outweighed the rights and wrongs in their minds of colonialism, if the issue or argument ever surfaced at all for the majority of young men making the choice to join up.

The truth is that reality trumped ideology in the face of the imminent and existential danger to the Indian state by the Japanese. Most Indians accepted that the Raj was, rightly or wrongly, or for the time being, the legally constituted Government of India. Like all governments everywhere, it had supporters and opponents. Few who opposed the government on nationalistic or self-governance grounds questioned its legitimacy, as that would have invalidated their own claim to be its successor in due course. Likewise, the Indian Army was India’s army, not Britain’s. As Dr Sumantra Maitra observes in a review of my book in The Critic, Indians joined the Indian army for the right reasons.

To read more, you know where to look…