How would the Indian people react to a Japanese invasion? The Burmese people, we were discovering, were so anti-British that, when they did not actively collaborate with the Japanese, they passively accepted the invaders as new conquerors replacing the old. Would this happen in India? And even if the enemy did not invade, how would the anti-British feeling prevalent among Indians develop and affect us Americans? Would we, as allies and guests of the British in India, be enveloped in the hostility of a population hating its waning colonial rulers more than the new imperialism surging out of the east? We did not have the answers.
The salient facts about the India of 1942 were imposing. It was big, including what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh. Larger than Western Europe, it was referred to as a subcontinent. India was also populous, some 350 million inhabitants.
They were remarkably diverse—australoid peoples, such as the Dravidians, mainly in the south; Aryans, mostly in the north; and Mongoloids (my Naga friends, for example, whom we will learn more about later) along the northern frontiers. The diversity was most striking in the language differences, even within ethnic groups. About 1,500 languages and dialects were spoken in India.
Two of the great religions of the world, Hinduism and Buddhism, had originated in India. Islam was introduced by conquerors from the northwest and displaced Buddhism as the second most popular religion. Hindus and Muslims became inter-mingled, although the principal Muslim communities were in the northwest and northeast, while the Hindus were in the majority in the center and heavily so in the south. Other religious communities were much smaller. Among them were Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Zoroastrians, and, on the southern coast, the remnants of a Jewish colony.
It was evident in 1942 that the two major communities did not enjoy an unruffled relationship. Religious animosities sometimes flared into bloody communal rioting. Furthermore, Muslims, who were generally poorer than Hindus, resented what they believed was Hindu economic discrimination against them.
Cleavages also existed within the Hindu community. They were the rigid, hereditary differences among the four principal castes and also between those within the caste system and those outside of it—the untouchables, pariahs.
The paramount authority in India was the Viceroy, representing George VI, who, while only King of England, etc., was Emperor of India. The British wisely had not tried to impose their administration over all of India. They directly governed the 17 provinces of British India. But they allowed a constellation of native states, from tiny to big, varying degrees of autonomy so long as the rajahs, maharajahs, and other princelings, however called, acknowledged the British raj.
The instrument of British rule was the Government of India. It administered British India and supervised, usually lightly, the states. The GOI was run by several hundred Britons who occupied the controlling positions. Nearly all were members of the ICS, the Indian Civil Service, regarded by many Britons as one of the most desirable of careers. The vast majority of officials, from members of the Viceroy’s Council, a pseudo-cabinet, to the village postman, were Indian. A select few were members of the ICS.
The British tolerated Indian political organizations, the most influential of which was a party called the Indian National Congress. It stood for Indian independence and claimed to represent all Indians irrespective of creed or class. In reality its following was predominantly Hindu. Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma or Great Soul, and originator of nonviolent resistance, dominated the Congress party. Jawaharlal Nehru and Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, known abroad for their literary attainments as well as their political activities, were among the secondary figures in the party.
The Muslim League, headed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, advocated the creation on the subcontinent of an Islamic state to be called Pakistan, in which the Muslims would be free of what they regarded as oppression by both the British and the Hindus. Militant Hindus, for their part, belonged to the Hindu Mahasabha, which called for the uncompromising supremacy of the Hindu community. Other parties and factions, including rival communist parties, sought attention and support. But none approached the strength of the Congress, the League or the Mahasaba.
My initial instructors on India were colleagues in the American diplomatic mission at New Delhi and the consulate general at Calcutta. They were well informed, generously shared what they had learned with me, and introduced me to their British and Indian contacts. This was most helpful, but I wanted to go further afield, to other parts of India, and to meet influential Indians outside the diplomatic circuit, especially the troublemakers.
Had I been on the staff of the American Mission, it would have been awkward or even improper for me to associate with those hostile to the government to which I would have been accredited, the Government of India. But I was assigned to the American Embassy in China and detailed to General Stilwell. My legitimacy in India derived from my detail to the general who, as Commanding General of American Forces China-Burma-India, enjoyed for himself and his staff an accepted standing in India. As Stilwell allowed me wide latitude of initiative and action, I was free to move about the country and to seek out Indians with whom my Foreign Service colleagues had little or no contact.
Beginning my political explorations, I went to a meeting of the Congress leadership at Allahabad. Uninvited, I intended simply to appear on the scene and ask to be allowed to see and hear as much as permitted. Fortunately, I was in the company of Edgar Snow, who, as a famous liberal journalist, was a presumed partisan of Indian independence and therefore assured of a welcome. In any event, all literate Indians, especially the Congress people, were fascinated by the American newcomers on the Indian scene. It was not simply the novelty of the American presence and personality, it was also, at least during the first half of 1942, an astonishingly widespread assumption that the United States could and might induce Britain to give India back to the Indians. We were expected to identify ourselves with the Indians, for had we not also suffered under the British colonial oppression?
“With the magic password, ‘American correspondent,’“ I wrote in my diary on May 2, “Ed and I were hustled through the crowd into the council hall. The floor was covered with white canvas on which perhaps 300 people were seated. Ed and I sat on some steps at the side of the hall.”
There on the low platform at the end of the small hall were those who only five years later would govern India. Gandhi was absent, but only in the flesh, for although he was at his ashram, in Central India, all of the Working Committee were aware of what he expected of them. Sitting on a chair just off stage was the glamorous super-Brahmin, Nehru. Also on the platform was C. Rajagopalachari, the clever, pragmatic politician from Madras who would in 1948 become Governor General of India. The brilliant, ebullient, poet-politician, Mrs. Naidu, was settled comfortably on the floor with other members of the Working Committee. Maulana Azad, one of Congress’s token Muslims, whose membership was pointed to as a refutation of the Muslim accusation that the party was really a Hindu organization and not representative, presided over the meeting, seated on a chair and hunched over a footstool-high table.
The issues before the meeting were conditioned by two recent developments. One was the breakdown of negotiations between Congress and Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord Privy Seal, who had been sent out from London with a qualified offer of independence for India. Each side blamed the other for the failure. The second development was that by bombing some of the east coast towns, the Japanese had suddenly brought home to the Indians the threat of invasion.
Reflecting Gandhi’s position, the sense of the meeting was negative and passive—it would be futile to attempt to reopen negotiations with the British; the British would never relinquish control; also, it would be useless to seek to join forces with the Muslim League in approaching the British because the League would not accept a Congress overture. As for the war against Japan, the Congress would not support the British and if the Japanese invaded, they should be met by Gandhian non-violent resistance. Rajagopalachari voiced the only dissent.
“The windows were open,” I noted in my journal. “The railroad track lay beyond. An occasional train went past whistling in a piping little voice. The windows behind the platform were also open, framing in neat symbolism a corner of a small house with a collapsing roof caused by a crumbling wall.”
Rajagopalachari was speaking when we came in. A slight, stooped little man swathed in white