Interwar internationalism

Karaka, Abbas, and Jog came from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Born in 1911 to an upper-class Parsi family, the son of an imperial customs official, Karaka grew up in a spacious bungalow in the elite neighbourhood of Malabar Hill in Bombay. His family exemplified the Parsi elite’s loyalty to the British, and his childhood was filled with moments such as reciting ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and excitement at the 1921 visit to India of Edward, Prince of Wales.Footnote ¹⁸ At the same time, discussions of Gandhian satyagraha gradually came to dominate conversations in newspapers and living rooms. Karaka first heard the name Gandhi as a child witnessing a procession of Bombay millworkers. While recollecting the event, he was honest enough to write that hearing the slogan ‘Mahatma Gandhi Ki Jai’ (Long live Mahatma Gandhi) gave him ‘the same feeling of exhilaration as when I had sung “Rule Britannia!”’.Footnote ¹⁹ This awkward juxtaposition appears to indicate a deep-seated, embodied experience of duality that shaped his ideological and emotional makeup and, eventually, his attitude to the Second World War.

Karaka spent the formative years of his twenties at the University of Oxford, where he was the first Indian to be elected president of the Oxford Union. When he returned to India in 1938 at the age of 27, he decided, to his father’s great disappointment, to become a journalist. He joined the Bombay Chronicle, a nationalist newspaper, whose editor, Syed Abdulla Brelvi, was a member of the Bombay Congress Committee, had socialist leanings, and was deeply non-communal, striving for Hindu-Muslim unity.Footnote ²⁰ The Chronicle’s staff in those days was filled with enthusiastic young men who took to journalism as part of their nationalist calling and ‘crusade against imperialism’.Footnote ²¹ Karaka’s first assignments focused on Congress activities, resulting in a feature column about his tours to different towns in India and in an adulatory, nationalist biography of Gandhi.Footnote ²²

Nevertheless, Karaka’s coverage of his travels across India was not devoid of ambivalence. The 1939 Congress session in Tripuri, which he covered, was attended by a crowd of 200,000 people, and the breeze that wafted among them brought with it ‘the smell of India also: coconut oil, spinach and stale sweat. All this became nauseating at times.’Footnote ²³ This response reveals a self that was nationalist yet highly elitist and Anglicized, a combination that may have influenced his support of the British war effort later on.

Abbas and Jog came from humbler, middle-class backgrounds in provincial towns. Among the three, Abbas is the most celebrated figure, prominent in the Progressive Writers Movement, in the Indian People’s Theatre Association, and in the Bollywood film industry. Born in the town of Panipat, not far from Delhi, Abbas joined the Gandhian movement at an early age. As a child, he was mesmerized by Gandhi, who visited his town and gave a speech in the courtyard of one of Abbas’s relatives. As a teenager, Abbas took part in a large Congress procession in Delhi, was caught by the police, driven several miles out of the city, and left on the jungle outskirts in the harsh winter. This experience, he later claimed, left a mark, and he resolved never to join government service. Abbas pursued his studies at Aligarh Muslim University, the intellectual hub of modern Muslims, modelled after Oxbridge. There he delved into nationalist newspapers and revolutionary literature, and was shaken by news of the execution of the revolutionary Bhagat Singh in 1931. He also made his first forays into journalism and, to the frustration of his father who looked down upon this profession, just as Karaka’s father did, he decided to move to Bombay and pursue this underpaid and insecure calling.Footnote ²⁴

Less is known about Jog, a Maharashtrian Brahman, who was born in the princely state of Ichalkaranji. He was educated at Satara High School, studied for a BA and MA in history at Willington College (Sangli) and Bombay University, and had a keen interest in the Maratha past. He took part in the Maharashtrian Sangamner forest satyagraha, as part of Gandhi’s famous Salt Satyagraha.Footnote ²⁵ He joined the Bombay Chronicle in 1935, shortly after Abbas, and the two became close friends, co-editing the paper’s Sunday edition. Apparently, there was no close relationship between them and Karaka. Decades later, Abbas referred to Karaka only once in his autobiography, quite derisively, as ‘the Oxford educated elitist’.Footnote ²⁶ Such mockery may have been determined by post-independence rivalries, as Abbas and Karaka represented two opposing views on the Cold War: while Abbas joined the weekly Blitz, which unequivocally supported Nehru’s nonalignment, anti-imperialism, and socialism, Karaka, who had become bitterly disillusioned with Nehru, set up his own tabloid, The Current, which was pro-American and became Blitz’s competitor and ideological arch-rival.Footnote ²⁷

Their differences and divergent paths notwithstanding, during the 1930s the Bombay Chronicle writers shared an enthusiasm for Nehru, echoing the blend of nationalist and internationalist commitments that he represented, embedded as he was in the circles of interwar leftist activism. As it is precisely this interwar internationalism that would be challenged by the Second World War, an explanation of what it entailed is in order.

The future architect of independent India’s foreign policy, Nehru was recognized as the Congress’s main authority on world affairs and formulated its foreign policy, starting in the late 1920s. His extensive travels, his connections with communists, socialists, pacifists, and anti-imperialists from around the world, and his insatiable reading of world history and politics, gave him a rare ability to view India’s situation within the broader international context. This expertise dovetailed with an internationalist orientation, an aspiration to connect India’s anticolonial movement to larger networks of socialist and anticolonial struggles in other parts of the world.Footnote ²⁸

As Michele Louro elaborates, Nehru took a leading role in the League Against Imperialism from 1927 to 1930, imbibing an acute sense of the interconnectedness of the world—both of capitalist and imperialist structures of oppression, and of the struggles against them. He thus expressed an aversion to narrow-minded nationalism, insisting that India’s struggle for independence was intimately connected to, and called for solidarity with, colonized people and oppressed groups around the world.Footnote ²⁹ The living spirit behind the inauguration of the League Against Imperialism were the communists German Willi Münzenberg and Indian exile Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. The movement was intimately connected with the Comintern (Communist International, also known as the Third International, 1919–1943), which coordinated the activities of communist parties around the world.

The dynamic connection that developed between anticolonial activists and communism was grounded in the discourse about the right of peoples to self-determination, which became dominant in the wake of the First World War. Whereas Woodrow Wilson confined the concept to Europe, shattering the hopes of anticolonial movements, Vladimir Lenin applied it to the colonial world and expressed support for national liberation struggles around the globe.Footnote ³⁰ After the First World War, networks of overseas anti-imperialist activists and revolutionaries, such as the Indian Ghadarites, gravitated towards the Communist International, embracing the Leninist analysis that imperialism and capitalism were inextricably linked, and therefore socialist revolution in Europe was bound up with the overthrow of imperialism and the liberation of Europe’s colonies.Footnote ³¹

Nehru became part of these overlapping and crisscrossing networks of interwar leftist internationalists, which were connected, to varying degrees, to the project of international communism. Other notable Indian figures whose paths crossed with Nehru’s were Comintern members M. N. Roy and Chattopadhyaya.Footnote ³² As recent studies emphasize, the interwar years were marked by great fervour and urgency. Inspired by the 1917 revolution, leftist internationalism had distinctly utopian qualities, envisioning liberation struggles as parts of a global revolutionary upheaval that would emancipate humanity. Nationalism, in other words, was bound up with internationalism. Activists’ political imagination therefore did not succumb to rigid dichotomies and ideological boundaries; rather, it was flexible, amalgamating different political projects. Thus, the League Against Imperialism facilitated the collaboration of communists, socialists, anticolonial nationalists, Pan-Africanists, and pacifists from across the world. Furthermore, international activists constantly moved around the world, traversing state boundaries.Footnote ³³

Against the background of the rise of Hitler, Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (1935), the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937), and, finally, the Munich Agreement, which forced Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany in 1938, Nehru became a harsh critic of fascism and of Britain and France’s appeasement policy. He spoke passionately in support of Abyssinia, Republican Spain, China, and Czechoslovakia.Footnote ³⁴

Nehru accepted the communist analysis that imperialism and fascism were interconnected outcomes of Western capitalism, and that anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and socialist projects were thus intertwined as well.Footnote ³⁵ True, the inclusionary spirit and cross-party cooperation of the League Against Imperialism came under attack during the Comintern’s ‘Third Period’ of rigid sectarianism, and Nehru ended his formal association with the organization in 1930.Footnote ³⁶ This falling-out notwithstanding, Nehru continued to pin his hopes on the Soviet Union as the harbinger of a new world order.Footnote ³⁷ When, in 1935, Stalin and the Comintern adopted a policy of broad and inclusive collaboration against fascism, supporting the Republicans at a time when Britain and France maintained neutrality vis-à-vis the Spanish Civil War, Russia was seen as a pillar against fascism.Footnote ³⁸

Simultaneously, with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Nehru’s notions of Pan-Asian solidarity became grounded more firmly in identifying with China against Japanese aggression, and solidarity with China became a central pillar of his vision.Footnote ³⁹ The Congress sent an Indian medical mission to China in 1938 and Nehru visited China in 1939, establishing a special rapport with Chiang Kai-shek. In Chongqing, China’s temporary wartime capital, he experienced five air raids and marvelled at the determination and composure of the Chinese, who resiliently resumed normalcy as soon as a raid was over. The Chinese, he found, combined the imprint of an ancient and proud civilization with energy and adaptability to the modern world.Footnote ⁴⁰ ‘I was no judge of the military position, but I could not imagine that a people with this vitality and determination, and the strength of ages behind them, could ever be crushed.’Footnote ⁴¹ For Nehru, sending medical supplies and food to China (as well as Spain) had internationalist ramifications; they ‘helped to raise our own national struggle to a higher level, and to lessen somewhat the narrowness which is always a feature of nationalism’.Footnote ⁴²

Nehru’s ideas reverberated in the public sphere, significantly in two books published in 1938—Abbas’s Outside India and Karaka’s I Go West. Both books belong to the genre of travel writing, gesturing towards the American journalist and writer John Gunther’s Inside series. Abbas was teasingly called ‘the most consistent of all Nehruites—including Nehru!’.Footnote ⁴³ As an adolescent, he was electrified by Nehru, who represented a young, dynamic leadership with radical views about complete independence and socialism. Abbas became a regular staff member of the Bombay Chronicle on the day Italy invaded Abyssinia and thereafter, he claimed, fascism ‘haunted’ him.Footnote ⁴⁴ He took pride in Nehru’s refusal to meet Mussolini in 1936 on his way back from Europe, participated in Nehru’s Abyssinia Day, and was excited at the 1936 Congress resolution stating solidarity with Spain’s Republicans. An invitation from Congress socialist leader Yusuf Meherally to join an anti-fascist youth rally in New York was an opportunity to see the world outside India for the first time. Thus, in 1938, Abbas toured East Asia at war and Europe on the brink of it. He visited Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Japan, then spent a week in Hollywood and another in New York, concluding with a tour of Europe in the midst of the Czechoslovakian crisis. He published his impressions as articles in various Indian newspapers and collected them soon after his return in Outside India, which was marked by two sentiments—anti-fascism and anti-imperialism.

On an Italian steamer heading to East Asia, Abbas met destitute Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria and bemoaned the implications of the racial madness unloosed in Europe. In Hong Kong he met Chinese refugees from nearby Canton and heard their tales of the destruction wrought by constant Japanese air raids. He was astonished, he wrote—echoing Nehru and using a familiar trope in international discourse—by the remarkable endurance and discipline of the Chinese, their unbreakable morale. In Kobe, he found the Indian students to be excessively impressed with everything Japanese, and was alarmed that many of them unashamedly supported Japan’s aggression in China. Abbas cautioned that Indian patriots were seduced too easily by the military paraphernalia of uniforms, parades, and flags, warning that ‘we [should] guard against our national movement degenerating into Fascism’.Footnote ⁴⁵

In Geneva, Abbas described his disgust at witnessing sessions of a League of Nations that seemed lethargic, apathetic, and totally incapable of dealing with the crisis. His criticism was undoubtedly influenced by Nehru, whom he met in Geneva, and who ‘refused to attend any meeting of this sham “League of Nations”’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Abbas reported on unemployment and aggressive jingoism in Italy, and on groups of uniformed Brown Shirts in Munich, where huge swastikas hung everywhere. He recorded his doubt that the pro-Nazi Indian students he met knew what Hitler had written in Mein Kampf about ‘“inferior races” like ours’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Vienna after the Anschluss, he was alarmed to see anti-Jewish literature in every bookstall, and huge posters above Jewish stores calling on customers to boycott them.

Karaka’s I Go West, a bestseller portraying his years at Oxford, was published the same year. Like his subsequent writings, the book centres on Karaka himself, and it reveals the writer’s extremely privileged background, preoccupied as it is with his personal revolt against Parsi high society ideas of respectability. Yet it bears striking similarities to Abbas’s Outside India, with plenty of adulatory comments on Nehru as the embodiment of India’s future: ‘To-day as we look beyond the horizon another figure stalks across the grey skies. Sleek. Smart. Manly. Upright of carriage he walks on the troubled waters, without fear, without compassion, without apology. His name is Jawaharlal Nehru.’Footnote ⁴⁸

Both books are anti-fascist and anti-imperialist, echoing Nehru and representing the Bombay Chronicle policy of the late 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet a close reading reveals that, compared with their ideologically driven, somewhat rational and distanced condemnation of fascism, Abbas and Karaka’s critique of British imperialism took a much more personal, emotional form. Far from an abstraction, the problem of empire was the problem of foreign rule in their home; it was, first and foremost, a national issue. While Abbas’s account of East Asia and Europe is that of a distant, if dismayed observer, his reportage on London and the racial bar he encountered there is personal and emotionally involved. Similarly, Karaka’s portrayal of his years at Oxford moves between excitement over exposure to intellectual and radical circles and resentment at his first-hand encounters with British racism.Footnote ⁵⁰

The two young writers were also enraged by American literary and cinematic representations of India, which they deemed imperialist, distorted, and degrading—from Katherine Mayo’s best-seller Mother India (1927) to the Kipling-based Hollywood production of Gunga Din (1939).Footnote ⁵¹ Karaka often mentions such degrading representations of India alongside humiliating personal encounters with racial arrogance, thus connecting personal with collective dishonour.Footnote ⁵² In the late 1930s such an intimate critique of colonialism sat comfortably with the internationalist, anti-fascist facets of our Nehruvian writers’ mental landscape. But these two facets would come to clash during the war.Footnote ⁵³

Will war come to India? 1939–1942

Indian nationalists’ response to the onset of the Second World War was shaped by their memories of the First World War and its immediate aftermath in India. The First World War created high expectations among the Congress leaders, who unequivocally supported the war effort. Encouraged by the Wilsonian rhetoric of a right to self-determination, they expected significant progress on the path to self-rule. But the war was followed by the Rowlatt Act, which allowed for incarceration without trial even in peacetime, and by the massacre of unarmed demonstrators in Amritsar, which became a metonym for colonial oppression and catalysed the first Gandhian mass movement.Footnote ⁵⁴

Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 signalled the ultimate failure of the appeasement policy of the 1930s, and Britain and France finally declared war on Germany. When Viceroy Linlithgow simultaneously declared India’s entry into the war without consulting Indian leaders, the Congress demanded immediate independence. The rejection of their demand led to the resignation of the Congress provincial governments, and to tortuous negotiations between the Congress and the British government about India’s contribution to the war effort. Above these negotiations hovered the threat of a mass Gandhian civil disobedience campaign in the middle of a war.Footnote ⁵⁵

The Congress and associated parties were not unified in their position. At one end of the spectrum was Subhas Chandra Bose, the Bengali leader and former Congress president, who had drifted away from Gandhi and the Congress leadership, and established his own Forward Bloc party, yet possessed great influence. Pursuing a long-standing strategy of Indian revolutionaries from the First World War, Bose was convinced that the outbreak of the European war was India’s opportunity to overthrow Britain, that independence could be achieved only through armed struggle, and that India should pragmatically align with its enemy’s enemy. Bose’s Pan-Asianism centred on Japan, which had gained Indians’ admiration following Japan’s modernization and astounding victory over Russia in 1905. Bose would escape from India in January 1941, stay in Berlin under Nazi patronage for nearly two years, and eventually move to East Asia to take command of the Indian National Army (INA) from 1943 to 1945 with Japanese support.Footnote ⁵⁶

In the war’s early stages, between the signing of the German-Soviet nonaggression pact in August 1939 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communist Party of India (CPI) fiercely condemned the war as an imperialist war and, like Bose, saw it as a revolutionary moment to be utilized, calling for an armed insurrection against the British and fomenting massive labour strikes.Footnote ⁵⁷ At the other end of the spectrum was M. N. Roy, a Marxist thinker who played a key role in the networks of interwar communist internationalism. Roy became ostracized in the political world of wartime India for his unequivocal support of the British war effort. He insisted that solidarity with the global struggle against fascism took precedence over, and preconditioned, India’s struggle. The war was nothing short of a ‘struggle for the future of the civilised humanity against the greatest menace of our time’.Footnote ⁵⁸

The Congress leadership had a wide spectrum of opinions, and its official reaction was more equivocal and hesitant. Gandhi, though conciliatory at first, would soon reject any cooperation with the British war effort on grounds of nonviolence. Nehru was ambivalent. The Soviet-German nonaggression pact, he admitted, was a shock, as was the subsequent Soviet march into Poland and Finland. Both shook the image of the Soviet Union as a pillar against fascism and imperialism. Yet initially, the Congress, like the CPI, claimed that Britain and France were fighting an imperialist war with a rival imperialist power while cynically speaking the language of democracy and freedom. Further, Nehru expressed support of the Soviet Union in the event of a Soviet−British conflict, which seemed probable at this stage.Footnote ⁵⁹

The Congress stance, however, was challenged by developments in the European war. Between April and June 1940, Hitler’s army launched an astonishing blitzkrieg in north and west Europe, sweeping through Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg, and France. The French Army collapsed, the Allied soldiers had to evacuate Dunkirk in northern France, and the British Isles were under threat of invasion. In May 1940, Chamberlain’s cabinet was replaced by a new war cabinet, headed by Winston Churchill. Against the backdrop of the unfolding crisis and Britain’s grave plight, the Congress leadership emphasized it would not take advantage of its rival in its difficult hour and would abstain, for the time being, from launching the satyagraha encapsulated in its previous Ramgarh resolution.Footnote ⁶⁰ In contravention of Gandhi’s insistence on nonviolence, the Congress compromised on its initial demand for total independence; instead it agreed to support Britain’s war effort in exchange for the establishment of a national government during the war and a promise of independence afterwards. Britain’s response, in the form of the August Offer (1940), fell far short of this lesser demand and unified the Congress leadership behind Gandhi, who launched a limited campaign of individual civil disobedience in October 1940. Individual members courted arrest by declaring that India would not participate in the war effort, and Nehru, along with over 7,000 Congress members, was imprisoned. Yet it is noteworthy that such individual civil disobedience was intentionally limited in scope, intended to be symbolic rather than to compromise the war effort.Footnote ⁶¹

On 22 June 1941, while the Congress leadership was still in prison, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, invading the Soviet Union and opening up the Eastern Front of the war. This brought about another dramatic realignment, as the Soviet Union created an alliance with capitalist and imperialist Britain against the fascist powers, dealing a blow to the convictions of interwar leftist internationalism. That the fate of the Soviet Union was now at stake also brought the war and its dire possibilities much closer to the hearts of Indian leftists, first and foremost the CPI.

‘Rarely had the international and domestic environments so plainly pulled the CPI in opposite directions as in the months after June 1941.’Footnote ⁶² Soviet and British communists now stated that the defence of the Soviet Union took precedence over all other struggles in the colonial world, for its defeat would mean the defeat of the world’s proletariat—and of humanity at large. Indian communists were expected to support the British government as long as it was a Soviet ally, fully and unconditionally, with or without independence. But ‘Indian nationalism demanded freedom, war or no war; any political party in India that urged temporary surrender in the anti-imperialist struggle would risk ostracism or worse.’Footnote ⁶³ This was an acutely felt dilemma that produced months of debates and a chasm within the party. Whereas the imprisoned leadership accepted the overriding importance of the Soviet Union’s survival—and hence of collaboration with Britain—it took the underground party outside prison almost six months to recategorize the war from an Imperialist War to a People’s War.Footnote ⁶⁴ Eventually, the CPI took the momentous decision to prioritize the fight against fascism over the fight against British imperialism, internationalism over nationalism.Footnote ⁶⁵

What made this decision so torturous were controversial events such as the Atlantic Charter. On 14 August 1941 American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced the Atlantic Charter—a shared statement of the war’s aims, which promised to restore sovereignty and self-government to those who had been forcibly deprived of them. Echoing the anticipation and disappointment surrounding the Wilsonian moment of the First World War, the charter aroused hopes in the colonial world that were brutally crushed when Churchill clarified, three weeks later, that this promise was confined to European countries under Nazi occupation and did not apply to India or other parts of the empire. The charter and Churchill’s subsequent qualification of it encapsulated the tension between the universalist rhetoric of the Allied fight for democracy and Britain’s imperialist agenda. The reaction in India was fierce.Footnote ⁶⁶

Jog followed the European war closely, covering and analysing its progress in a weekly column in the Bombay Chronicle.Footnote ⁶⁷ Significantly, as 1941 drew to a close, Jog anticipated an imminent change, suggesting that even as the Indian public felt detached from the war, the latter was getting closer to home. In the column from 3 September 1941, in response to the German advance towards the Caucasus and Japan’s strategic position in Southeast Asia, he wrote,

The two concluding sentences cleverly capture this moment of suspense and India’s odd relation to the war: while India became a belligerent in September 1939, contributing soldiers and resources, the war had not been fought on its soil, the Congress had not lent its support, and the public had remained apathetic or ambivalent. Karaka, for instance, described a scene he saw in a Bombay bus: the conductor was punching tickets, and when one blew away, an Indian man mockingly said, ‘Like a Dunkirk hero your ticket has run away.’Footnote ⁶⁹ The evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk, which in the Anglo-American discourse signified the British people’s courage, solidarity, and heroism, weakened the empire’s prestige and carried a subversive meaning in the colonial context.Footnote ⁷⁰ India’s strange relationship to the war would become a leitmotif in subsequent wartime publications by Karaka. At this early stage of the war, Jog’s position was not far from Karaka’s: both saw the wars raging outside India as wars that would determine the future of humanity, and both were committed to sparking the interest of the Indian public.Footnote ⁷¹

In early December 1941, Congress members, including Nehru, were released from prison. Four days later Japan attacked the American base at Pearl Harbor and launched its invasion of the Philippines, Malaya, Thailand, and Hong Kong. The European war and the Second Sino-Japanese War now merged into a single world war, and the question—Will war come to India?—became all the more urgent.

Chongqing, 1942: ‘To have seen it once is more than hearing about it a hundred times’Footnote ⁷²

Churchill called 1942 the ‘Hinge of Fate’, because ‘in it we turn from almost uninterrupted disaster to almost unbroken success’.Footnote ⁷³ In the first six months of 1942, Rommel’s forces in North Africa approached Egypt, the German Army advanced in the Caucasus, and Japan occupied Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies. This year was also India’s most dangerous hour, because the war ‘caught the colonial state looking the wrong way’.Footnote ⁷⁴ For decades Britain had focused on preventing a Russian attack on India from the northwest, and it was unprepared for an attack from the east. Japan’s rapid advance in southeast Asia caught it by surprise.

When Singapore, the British ‘fortress’ in the Indian Ocean, fell to the Japanese in February 1942, it was a shocking and humiliating capitulation. ‘For the British, it was the end of a world that was never to be recreated, despite a second occupation after 1945 of nearly twenty years.’Footnote ⁷⁵ A garrison of over 85,000 men surrendered to a Japanese force of roughly 30,000 troops. About 45,000 Indian troops were turned over to the Japanese as prisoners of war, and many Indian soldiers, feeling betrayed, joined the new Indian National Army (INA, Azad Hind Fauj), which would later fight the British Indian Army under Subhas Chandra Bose and the Japanese flag, becoming a symbol of Indian nationalism.

In February, General Chiang Kai-shek, who had already established a personal connection with Nehru when the latter visited Chongqing in 1939, came to India to reconcile Congress and British positions at a time when Japan was nearly at India’s eastern border and India’s collaboration with the war effort had become vital for China’s survival. While Chiang came to India as a British ally, his mission had Pan-Asian and anti-imperialist resonance. Inspired by a New York Times article, Karaka interpreted the historical gravity of the event in terms of impending decolonization: ‘a man, who by the old standards, was just a “native”, but, by the new was one of the half-dozen most important men in the world … had flown to India to tell the British to fight harder, and to ask the Indians to. In the difference between the telling and asking lay, if not a world, at least an Empire.’Footnote ⁷⁶ In spite of British protestations, Chiang devoted much of his visit to meeting Congress leaders and publicly expressed his support for India’s independence.

Yet Chiang left India frustrated. His long discussions with Nehru proved futile, because the latter clarified that, as a long as a national government was not established, all the Congress could offer China was its sympathy. Gandhi, Chiang wrote, ‘knows and loves only India, and doesn’t care about other places and people…’.Footnote ⁷⁷

In his farewell broadcast to the Indian people, Chiang said, ‘The present international situation divides the world into two camps, the aggression camp and the anti-aggression camp. There is no middle course… .’Footnote ⁷⁸ Alluding to the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese forces, he warned that an Allied defeat would be hazardous for India and humanity. Chiang’s intimation that Gandhian nationalism was inward-looking became a dominant trope in the Allied world. Karaka echoed it, criticizing Gandhi’s insular position in the midst of total war. Chiang’s visit inspired him to seek an assignment in Chongqing, in order to bring the war closer to the Indian public.

Significantly, British officials were initially reluctant to allow Karaka’s visit. ‘Why should the Government of India even visualize the possibility of Chungking having any objection to an Indian correspondent when they welcomed correspondents from all over the “Allied” world?’ he asked in frustration.Footnote ⁷⁹ The question—and its answer—touches on the core of the colonies’ peculiar position during the war: India was not an independent, equal partner in the Allied camp, and the colonial government’s need to mobilize and unify public opinion behind the war effort did not sit easily with its concern for law and order and its desire to curb Indian journalists. Propaganda was an arena where the wide gap between government and society in the colony was nakedly evident, so that Allied propaganda—quite effective at home—floundered in the colonial world.Footnote ⁸⁰

Eventually, Karaka received approval for his trip, to report for the Bombay Chronicle and to broadcast for the government-run All India Radio, which served as a war propaganda organization and as competition to the Axis radio in India.Footnote ⁸¹ In Chongqing Karaka became acquainted with ‘the press gang’—the war correspondents from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, taking part in their daily routine of press conferences, shared meals, and political conversations.Footnote ⁸² His first war assignment in Chongqing made a huge impact on him, as he wrote explicitly—and divulged implicitly by the large amount of space allocated to Chongqing in subsequent, even much later, books. His visit coincided with the Japanese occupation of Burma, which cut off the Burma Road, but also with the first Allied air raid on Tokyo (18 April) and the American victory in the Coral Sea Battle (8 May). Such news was devoured by the international community in Chongqing with dejection and elation. It was an acute sense of the global nature of the war and its stakes that Karaka absorbed.

Karaka felt that Chongqing taught him the difference between reading about a place at war and seeing it. Indeed, from now on, his role as an eyewitness became a leitmotif in his writings about the different war theatres—allegedly granting a special authority to his understanding of the war. It was in Chongqing that he witnessed death for the first time—not the death of individuals given a proper funeral, but rather dead bodies lying in the street as a feature of everyday life. Chongqing was the first in a series of encounters with death—in Bengal in 1943, Bergen Belsen in 1945, and Punjab in 1947—that would invest Karaka’s understanding of the Second World War with a universal meaning.

The spirit of Chongqing—the resilience of a society at war—took his breath away. Bombed and often flattened in parts, China’s wartime capital exemplified the Chinese will to fight. Japan would never break Chinese morale, because ‘A country that can take such blows for so long without complaining cannot lose.’Footnote ⁸³ Of course, ‘the spirit of Chongqing’ was a common expression disseminated throughout the world, as we have already seen in Abbas’s 1938 travel book and in Nehru’s impressions from his 1939 visit, and hence Karaka’s experience of the place was mediated by romanticized notions. These were further deepened during his stay through his close interaction with foreign war correspondents, diplomats, and military officials.

Karaka’s account bears the evident imprint of Nehru’s voice, resounding as it does Nehru’s focus on the bond between China and India against European racism and imperialism. Karaka felt that, as an Indian, he was especially welcome in Chongqing:

A telegram Nehru wrote on Karaka’s behalf ensured a warm reception. Karaka was pleased that the only foreign flag in sight at the Kuomintang’s Central Political Institute was that of the Congress, which Nehru had given to the vice chancellor when he had accompanied Chiang to India. He observed that, in the communist circles surrounding Zhou Enlai, interest in India was even greater.Footnote ⁸⁵

The book is thus shot through with the theme of Asian civilization’s moral and spiritual superiority, bonding China and India together.Footnote ⁸⁶ Karaka’s dedicates a lot of space to quoting and analysing an article by Song Meiling (Madam Chiang Kai-shek), which surveyed the history of China’s relations with its current allies, telling of decades marked by plunder and humiliation, followed by detachment and condescension when China was attacked by Japan in 1937. Song Meiling gloatingly contrasted China’s heroic resistance with France’s defeat in 1940 and the British fiascos in Hong Kong and Singapore. Karaka related emotionally to her hurt at the West’s ‘superiority complex’ and was especially touched by her suggestion that the Indians had the spirit to win the war if they were convinced that they were fighting for their own freedom.Footnote ⁸⁷

Yet, the emphasis on Indian-Chinese solidarity notwithstanding, the text marks a departure from Karaka’s and Abbas’s late-1930s publications. Pan-Asianism’s connection with anti-imperialism had become more complicated and discordant against the background of the war’s changing alliances. Alongside the East–West division operated the division between Allies and fascists. China was now part of the Allied world, and witnessing China struggle gave Karaka a deeper understanding of India’s responsibility and a growing commitment to the Allied war effort. ‘War is a very real thing in this part of the world. … People think and live and eat and move about in terms of war…. Of course I knew that China had been at war for over four years, but then India had also been at war for nearly three—so I was told.’Footnote ⁸⁸ Echoing Jog’s 1941 book title, Karaka concludes, ‘The war had not come to India.’Footnote ⁸⁹

India’s detachment from the war would become a recurrent, almost obsessive theme in Karaka’s writings. He identified two culprits: the colonial government’s rigid, unbending, and anachronistic attitude, reminiscent of nineteenth-century imperialism, and Gandhian nationalism, which he increasingly deemed narrow-minded and insular, naive in its clinging to nonviolence in the face of total war. Both forces meant that India remained ‘stuck’ in the 1930s and failed to adapt to the totally altered world circumstances. Karaka’s sense of a temporal and experiential gap between India and the world at war became all the more acute when news of the final collapse of the Cripps Mission reached Chongqing.

Quit India, 1942: A moment of decision

With Japan advancing in Burma, hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to India, and air bombing of Ceylon and India’s eastern coast, ‘the Shiver of 1942’ was deeply felt in both England and India.Footnote ⁹⁰ The prospect of a Japanese invasion into India loomed large and the identification of the Indian public with the war effort became crucial. Under mounting American pressure, Churchill was forced to send Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labour Party member of his War Cabinet, to negotiate for India’s participation in the war in exchange for dominionhood (or even complete independence) afterwards.Footnote ⁹¹

Gandhi was opposed from the outset on grounds of nonviolence, while others felt that the Congress should not align itself clearly with the Allies in case Japan invaded. Bose, living under Nazi patronage in Berlin, made radio appeals to the Congress to refuse the Cripps offer.Footnote ⁹² Nehru was more open, as he still hoped to turn the war into a truly popular cause. Cripps shared Nehru’s commitment to socialism and was emphatically sympathetic to Congress demands, yet negotiations collapsed over the Congress’s insistence that an Indian-run Executive Council direct India’s wartime policy, and England’s equal insistence that power remain in the hands of the British commander-in-chief. Churchill apparently felt that the mission had served its public relations purpose, especially with respect to the Americans, and he later hinted that postwar independence had never really been acceptable to him.Footnote ⁹³ The high expectations, tense negotiations, and ultimate failure of the mission reflected the fundamental contradictions inherent in India’s position in the Allied war camp.

In response to the failure of negotiations, in its Allahabad resolution of May 1942, the All India Congress Committee (AICC) condemned the Cripps offer as imperialistic. Gandhi originally wished to demand a withdrawal of Allied troops from Indian soil, but Nehru, greatly upset, argued that such a withdrawal would allow Japan to invade India and expand westward towards the Middle East, rendering India a passive collaborator with the Axis powers.Footnote ⁹⁴ Accordingly, the Allahabad resolution excluded the demand for Allied troop withdrawal, called for a nonviolent but resolute resistance to a Japanese invasion, and asserted a categorical antipathy to fascism and Nazism. Yet Nehru admitted that, despite its internationalist language, the resolution reflected the prevalent ‘swing back to intense nationalism’, even isolationism.Footnote ⁹⁵

This was vindicated in subsequent months, as Gandhi prepared the ground for a mass civil disobedience movement. Nehru, though reluctant at first, gradually became convinced that this was the only way. The Cripps Mission’s impact, together with oppressive wartime measures, the shameful flight of the British from Southeast Asia, the differential racial treatment of Indian and European evacuees from Burma, and rumours of food shipments to Persia despite the mounting food crisis at home, shattered any confidence the public had in the Raj. Gandhi, Nehru felt, was voicing deep currents within the Indian public, and events were leading inevitably to a mass movement.Footnote ⁹⁶ In cables to Krishna Menon, a close associate in interwar communist circles who now expressed his distress at the grave situation on the Chinese and Russian fronts, Nehru stressed that Congress sympathized with Russia and China, but that the demand for independence overrode all other considerations, and the Congress could not go against an almost unanimous public opinion.Footnote ⁹⁷

The Quit India resolution of 8 August 1942 demanded the withdrawal of British power from India and its replacement by a provisional national government that would cooperate in the war with the United Nations (as the Allies were called from January 1942), and it sanctioned the start of ‘a mass struggle on nonviolent lines on the widest possible scale’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The arrest of the Congress leaders the morning following the resolution unleashed massive protests, beginning in the cities and spreading to the countryside. With Gandhi and the Congress leadership in prison, the movement was guided by more radical, often socialist leaders, and took a more intense and violent turn than previous mass movements.Footnote ⁹⁹ Later historiography validates Nehru’s sense that Gandhi had unleashed subterranean forces over which he could have very little command. The British reaction, for its part, was ‘brutal, effective and quick’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

China was very much on Nehru’s mind in the months before and after the Quit India resolution. He ‘had long been troubled and distressed at the thought that we might do something which might mean breaking faith with China’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Accordingly, the resolution recognized China’s and Russia’s heroic struggles and stressed that the Congress was anxious not to compromise their defence. It justified its decision by stating that ‘India, the classic land of modern imperialism, became the crux of the question’,Footnote ¹⁰² and that a colonized India would continue to taint the United Nations’ war effort. When Congress passed the resolution, Nehru simultaneously released a public statement in support of China.Footnote ¹⁰³

Yet, idealistic wording notwithstanding, we should not lose sight of the practical implications at stake: the resolution was taken before the tide turned against the Axis. Although the defeat of the Japanese in the Battle of Midway (June 1942) dispelled the danger of a Japanese landing on India’s eastern shores, an invasion through Burma could not be ruled out—and would indeed take place in 1944. In the Middle East and Soviet Union, the turning points of El Alamein and Stalingrad had not yet taken place.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This was a moment of decision when, as the Quit India resolution’s drafter put it, nationalism took precedence over internationalism.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

As the Congress perspective became ever more entrenched in a nationalist, anticolonial rather than anti-fascist position, Karaka drifted further away from it. News of the Cripps Mission’s failure and of the Allahabad resolution was received as a staggering blow in Chongqing. Nehru’s previous statements about the need to organize guerrilla resistance against a Japanese invasion had aroused enthusiasm in Chongqing:Footnote ¹⁰⁶ ‘They ask me here… Will India fight as China has done—from the housetops, from the windows of little houses, on the beach and in the streets?’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The phrasing, presumably Karaka’s, unmistakably echoes Churchill’s ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech, delivered after the withdrawal from Dunkirk, thereby insisting on a common Allied struggle.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But now the Allahabad resolution, stating that all the Congress intended to do in the event of a Japanese invasion was to offer nonviolent non-cooperation, baffled those surrounding Karaka in Chongqing, who dwelled at length on the horrendous massacre in Nanjing.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Having to explain the Congress position to the international community in Chongqing left Karaka confused about his conflicting loyalties. There was a decisive moment, he later claimed, as he took a walk and stood on hilltop, from which he could see little boats and ‘little dots’ moving on the river below—Chinese boatmen and labourers who ‘were once the flesh and blood of China, but which in five long years had become skin and bone, knowing only blood, sweat, toil and tears’. Again, one cannot miss the Churchillian ring of the statement.Footnote ¹¹⁰ ‘Somehow I cannot take my vengeance on humanity, because I bear a grudge to a handful of Englishmen.’Footnote ¹¹¹ Together, the Chinese ‘little dots’, the American soldiers, and the Englishmen at Dunkirk embodied humanity struggling to survive. He resolved that this global war was more urgent than the anticolonial struggle at home.Footnote ¹¹² Karaka recast pan-Asianism in support of the Allies’ war effort.

Back in India, faced with the inertly conservative attitude of the British government and an impending Congress movement, Karaka experienced a dislocation. Compared with the urgent reality of war that he had briefly witnessed, India felt unreal, out of touch with the times.Footnote ¹¹³ The war had come, yet had not come to India.

A war of words

All the tensions and frustrations surrounding colonial rule in India surfaced under the pressures of 1942. The events of that year forced Indian socialists (who led Quit India) to break from both Indian communists (who supported the Allied war effort following the German invasion of the Soviet Union) and British socialists (who supported Cripps and blamed Gandhi for the mission’s failure).Footnote ¹¹⁴

Following Quit India, the Government of India published a report vilifying the Congress leadership, especially Gandhi, as defeatist.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Now that the Congress leaders were confined in prison, it was up to nationalist writers and journalists to disseminate its version of events against British propaganda.Footnote ¹¹⁶ A war of words ensued, and Abbas and Jog played a central role in it. As Quit India and the war on fascism pulled in opposing directions, Abbas was keen to prove that Congressmen, first and foremost Nehru, were anti-fascist and internationalist to the core, and to disprove the prevalent allegation that Gandhian nationalism was narrow or, worse still, pro-fascist. In Let India Fight for Freedom (1943), he reminded his readers that, when Britain and France sacrificed Abyssinia, ‘our Jawaharlal was refusing to meet or shake hands with Mussolini. … When Chamberlain was flying to Munich to placate Hitler, our Jawaharlal was flying to Madrid to support the anti-Fascist heroes of Spain.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ Abbas took special pride in the medical mission that the Congress sent to China, and in the Indian doctor who married a Chinese woman and died in China—a ‘symbol of Indo-Chinese unity’ and a testimony to Nehru’s internationalism and Gandhi’s deep-seated humanitarianism.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Yet I would like to suggest that these endeavours, like Abbas’s participation in the 1938 World Youth Congress, belonged to the time, spirit, and logic of interwar internationalism, not to the global conflict that ensued after Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor, when the Second Sino-Japanese war and the European war coalesced.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Jog, for his part, replaced his early endorsement of the Allied position with a strictly Indian anticolonial position. Jog’s monograph Churchill Blind-spot: India (1944) began where his previous book ended—the Atlantic Charter—this time judging it bitterly as the epitome of the contradictions in Britain’s war aims. Jog took part in international conversations about the war, referring throughout the text to Lin Yutang, to Wendell Willkie’s One World (1943), and to Louis Fischer, Pearl Buck, Edward Thompson, and Harold Laski, who all supported the Congress position. The book offers an intriguing study of Churchill’s political career, placing his India policy at the centre. If there was one creed that remained consistent throughout Churchill’s fickle political career, claimed Jog, it was his unassailable belief in the British empire and his understanding that, without India, there would be no empire. Churchill had been charmed with Mussolini and Hitler, and he stopped his flirtation with fascism only when he realized it posed a danger to the British empire. Churchill was not ‘a great democrat, or a great internationalist’;Footnote ¹²⁰ rather, his war was driven by the need to preserve the empire.

A year later, Jog published Judge or Judas? (1945), a scathing reply to the English writer Beverley Nichols’ Verdict on India (1944), which had expressed outright indignation at Hindu society and Gandhi. Jog’s book was a huge success, and the first edition of 3,000 copies was sold out within two weeks.Footnote ¹²¹ The polemical exchange explicitly resounded and built upon earlier controversies over Mayo’s Mother India and similar degrading representations of India by Westerners. Indian nationalists, as stated earlier, were hurt and outraged by such literature, which encapsulated arrogant Western imperialism. The Nichols–Jog exchange thereby alluded to the personal and emotional experience of empire, the touchy sentiments of humiliation and honour. And it rested on, and reaffirmed, a division of the world into west and east, colonizers and colonized—a division that ran against the wartime division of Allies versus Axis.

Abbas and Jog reconciled their anticolonial and anti-fascist leanings by reiterating Nehru’s claim that India was the crux of the war, that the entire moral basis of the war against the Axis hinged on the Indian question.Footnote ¹²² With the Quit India resolution, ‘[T]he Congress had boldly stepped into the centre of the world stage and challenged the conscience of humanity.’Footnote ¹²³ Referring to Gandhi’s 21-day fast in 1943, Abbas wrote, ‘[T]he whole world watched with anxious interest… a battle for truth and justice carried on within the frail body of an old man!’Footnote ¹²⁴

It is instructive to contrast this judgement with that of Karaka, who noted mockingly that in the nationalist press ‘the diagnosis of hookworm in Mahatma Gandhi claimed pride of place over the news of the opening of the Second Front’.Footnote ¹²⁵ He felt that Gandhian nationalism and nonviolence missed the magnitude of world events, the true meaning of the Nazi idea and Japanese barbarity.Footnote ¹²⁶ ‘To me, nonviolence, great as it was as an ideal, seemed futile in terms of Stalingrad, Dunkirk and the Blitz over London. In contrast to that grim battle which those people were fighting with their backs to the wall, the unfurling of a flag in Bombay and the shouting of a slogan in Calcutta appeared a little childish.’Footnote ¹²⁷

As the AICC meeting in Bombay ratifying the Quit India resolution approached, Karaka expressed increasing distress. While acknowledging the utterly imperialist and unsatisfying attitude of Churchill’s cabinet—even Cripps had shattered Indians’ hopes—it was one thing ‘to be a passive observer in the shape of a benevolent neutral … and quite another to be … offering resistance … to those who are already fighting a war for their existence’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Civil disobedience at this time, he felt, could only mean a ‘stab in the back’.Footnote ¹²⁹ When the momentous Congress meeting eventually took place on 8 August, he could not, as an Indian, but feel deeply moved, and his report on the Congress leaders’ speeches was suffused with exhilaration. While his head was going one way, his heart was with the speakers, and, like Abbas and other Indian journalists, he did his best to communicate the Congress message to the international correspondents around him.Footnote ¹³⁰ Indeed, in later books he expressed admiration for the mental and physical resistance of Quit India, especially as it took a radical and violent turn, disproving British arguments that Indians were too illiterate to understand anything other than the language of two square meals a day.Footnote ¹³¹ Yet, unlike Abbas, Karaka did not join the movement,Footnote ¹³² and his overall judgement of the resolution was that it indirectly aided fascism.Footnote ¹³³

The Bengal Famine and the forgotten war of Burma, 1943–1944

In 1943 the Bengal countryside faced a horrifying famine along with a cholera epidemic, which together eventually claimed three million lives. Those most affected belonged to the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of the rural Bengali population. Deep structural inequality, poverty, and indebtedness in rural Bengal were aggravated by the war: the fall of Burma both cut off an important supplier of rice to Bengal and resulted in a panicked, scorched-earth policy on the part of the British Army, which destroyed all forms of transport in the delta, from boats to elephants, lest they fall into the hands of an invading Japanese Army. When, in October 1942, a cyclone devastated the rice-producing areas of eastern Bengal and Orissa, rice prices shot up and hoarding became rampant. The Bengal provincial government was corrupt, incompetent, and divided along communal lines, and the central government in New Delhi, which had failed to develop a food policy and to control prices in the first place, simply denied mounting evidence of famine. When it finally woke up to the situation, the British War Cabinet in London ignored its appeals to revoke dispatches of food from India to the United Kingdom and the Middle Eastern front. Moreover, as Bayly and Harper write, ‘Quite apart from the demands of war, it is difficult to escape the impression that the War Cabinet was simply hostile towards India. The prime minister believed the Indians were the next worst people in the world after the Germans.’Footnote ¹³⁴

Destitute, famished villagers dragged themselves to Calcutta, desperate for some relief. As many collapsed on arrival, the city was lined with skeletal, dead bodies. Karaka and Abbas were among the many journalists, academics, artists, students, and relief volunteers who went to the province, producing poems, drawings, photos, and chilling eyewitness accounts of the ‘hunger marches’ of panting and exhausted people, dying villagers emaciated to the bone, a child struggling to drink milk from the breast of his dead mother, and the wailing and groaning of children that pierced the night.Footnote ¹³⁵

Interestingly, whereas Karaka’s dispatches from Bengal in 1943 chronicled the petty squabbling and internal blame game of Indian politicians, his accounts immediately after the war were markedly angry and bitter, accusing the British and colonial governments of covering up the true causes and dimensions of the disaster, and of total neglect and indifference; he noted that Viceroy Linlithgow did not even bother to visit Bengal. Karaka’s postwar analysis lay all the blame on Britain’s scorched-earth policy and distorted priorities, dismissing insinuations about the complicity of local actors and hoarding.Footnote ¹³⁶ In this sense, Karaka’s writings took part in, and reflected, a wider discursive development in India. Local Bengali discourse on the famine, consisting of mutual accusations by rival political parties, communal Hindu–Muslim tensions, and complaints about hoarders and profiteering, was transformed, as it travelled outside the province, into a nationalist critique, which lay the blame squarely on Britain’s racialized economic priorities. This was the ultimate indictment of the utter failure and moral bankruptcy of British rule in India and the hypocrisy of its declared war goals, and it further catalysed the demand for a responsible national government.Footnote ¹³⁷ The latest in a series of disastrous famines under colonial rule, the Bengal Famine was seen as the culmination of Britain’s drain of Indian wealth and became, in a sense, the iconic tragedy of wartime India, encapsulating two centuries of colonial racial arrogance, exploitation, and violence. This is clearly evident in Jog’s indictment of Churchill’s responsibility for the famine in his aforementioned book. Such representations would be reiterated in popular Indian nationalist accounts after independence.Footnote ¹³⁸

Abbas was especially central in shaping the representation of the famine in Indian art. The progressive Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), which Abbas had co-founded in 1942, staged plays on the famine in working-class districts and in the countryside. He also wrote and directed the most memorable film on the famine—Dharti Ke Lal (‘Children of the Earth’), which was released in 1946 and featured in film festivals abroad. It centres on a starving peasant family that is forced to leave for Calcutta, where it encounters death and prostitution. Eventually the survivors return to the village to undertake cooperative farming.Footnote ¹³⁹

Both Abbas and Karaka commented on the helplessness, degradation, and dehumanization caused by the famine.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Karaka compared his visits to Chongqing and Bengal: in both places he had experienced horrid encounters with death, but Chongqing filled him with exaltation, because death had meaning and purpose, and the human spirit of resistance was on full display, whereas in Bengal there was only defeat, people ‘battered, bent and broken … for no purpose at all’, stripped of morale and the ability to resist.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Yet the two writers ultimately chose different ways to cope with what they had witnessed. Abbas engaged with the famine artistically, feeling that its representation by socially conscious artists meant ‘the reaffirmation of human values on behalf of the people of Bengal, the people of India’.Footnote ¹⁴² For him, art carried a message of hope and a new dignity for the people. While Abbas remained preoccupied with the famine throughout the war years, Karaka was captivated by the war and opted to cover combat zones outside India, in search of the human spirit he had witnessed in Chongqing.

Accordingly, Karaka left for Burma in March 1944.Footnote ¹⁴³ Earlier attempts to reoccupy Burma had failed. It was located at the end of a very long supply line, with a severe climate and difficult terrain, and thus required ground forces that the Allies lacked, given their Germany First grand strategy. In October 1943 the Allies launched a more focused effort. At its heart was General William Slim’s 14th Army, drawn from British, Indian, Burmese, and African units. Karaka accompanied various units of the 14th Army, getting a close look at some confrontations. Soon after, the Japanese, accompanied by Bose’s INA regiment, crossed into India’s northeastern province of Assam and lay siege to Indian Army forces in Imphal. The situation turned around when the besieged received supplies through airdrops, and the starving attackers began a long retreat into Burma, pursued by the 14th Army, in a drawn-out, arduous chase, involving savage fighting in harsh terrain.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

A central theme in Karaka’s coverage from Burma and Assam is the reversal of the situation and power relations of the war. His dispatches were infused with optimism: it was clear that the 14th Army was a well-trained and well-equipped force, and that the Allies had come a long way from the days when they had allowed Chongqing to be bombarded without response. They had the upper hand now in the most critical field of the war—the air. The South East Asia Command signified a mental awakening.

The second theme is a nationalist pride in the Indian soldiers, which Karaka shared with the few other Indian correspondents who covered the Burma campaign, notably P. R. S. Mani and T. G. Narayanan.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ They all put the limelight on the valour and bravery of Indian soldiers, and on how the battlefield forged national unity among this diverse army, allowing it to transcend communal tensions. Their reporting served as a corrective to the marginalization of Indian troops in British accounts,Footnote ¹⁴⁶ and to the long-standing British argument that India was a mere collection of discrete and fighting groups that could never forge a nation. For Karaka, the emphasis on unity simultaneously addressed domestic reservations about the war effort and embarrassment about the Indian Army fighting in the service of empire. Karaka asserted that this was no longer an army of mercenaries, but of patriotic, courageous, confident Indians, conscious of their country and on equal footing with their British counterparts. Above all, they had discipline—discipline that would lift the Indian nation to new heights and that could not be achieved in a hundred years of Gandhian nonviolence. War had transformative capacities, he insisted, thereby recasting fighting alongside the British as a step towards nation-building.

Yet Karaka soon left the Indo-Burmese theatre, in a revealing departure from Mani and Narayanan, who both lingered in Southeast Asia throughout 1946 and followed this drawn-out campaign closely. They were the first to gather in-depth information and to report on Bose and the INA. Even after Japan’s surrender, they remained in the region, reporting on the plight of the Indian and Burmese civilian populations, on INA prisoners, and on the predicament of Indian troops who found themselves deployed in bloody colonial wars, as France, Holland, and Britain rushed to reassert control over their former colonies.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The West, in contrast to these Indian correspondents, never paid much attention to Burma. Britain suppressed news of the siege in Assam, and the Allied invasion of Normandy soon eclipsed it.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ According to General Slim, the men of the 14th Army ‘were calling themselves a “Forgotten Army” long before some newspaper correspondent seized on that phrase’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Karaka succumbed eventually to the Eurocentric neglect of the Burma campaign. He too left Southeast Asia after merely two months. ‘Unlike the Battle for Stalingrad or the Blitz over London, where every moment was exciting, there is not enough sustained dramatic action to report. In Arakan the war is slow-moving, long-drawn. It is the story of the taking of one hill-feature and the bombing of another.’Footnote ¹⁵⁰ He ‘was focused on the bigger war being fought in the west’.Footnote ¹⁵¹

In Europe, 1944–1945

Towards the end of 1944 Karaka left for the Middle East and Europe on a roving assignment for the Bombay Chronicle to report on the end of the war in Europe. From Palestine and Cairo he continued to Italy, where he interviewed Field Marshal Alexander (then supreme commander of the Allied forces in the Mediterranean), heard about the great deeds of the 4th, 8th, and 10th Indian Infantry Divisions in the war, and met the partisans operating in the terrain between Massa and Bologna.Footnote ¹⁵² He also passed through London, where he interviewed Lord Leo Amery,Footnote ¹⁵³ then based himself at the Scribe Hotel, the war correspondents’ headquarters in Paris, and finally entered Germany. Germany, he wrote on 17 April, was a scene of complete devastation, ‘horrid, deathly, ghostly. There was a terrifying silence about the place and the only sign of animation was that of people digging among the ruins.’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Karaka was at Reims in France with the other war correspondents when Germany surrendered.

Two episodes in this extended tour highlight Karaka’s sense of an epistemological gap between India and the world at war. At an airport in Italy, Karaka noticed an important personage’s plane which, he concluded, belonged to American Chief of Staff General George Marshall on his way back from the historic Yalta Conference, where Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin planned for a postwar order. Karaka was ahead of the British and American press by 24 hours, and the British censor who passed the item was glad that Karaka had scooped the Americans on their own story. Yet Karaka later found out that the Bombay Chronicle had tucked the story in a small paragraph in one of the back pages. He experienced it as a widening gap between himself, situated as he was in the heart of Europe, and the Indian nationalist press.

This feeling was further accentuated in a second, far more momentous occasion inside Germany. News came that the British Second Army had entered the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen. Karaka hurried with several other correspondents to see it first-hand.

The despatch expresses Karaka’s utter shock and his feeling it was impossible to communicate what he saw. It was ‘human degradation in the lowest form such as I will never forget’. The writing is rushed, almost breathless, without attention to syntax. ‘If my dispatch to-day is not coherent it is only because what I have seen has left me…dazed and short of speech.’ All around the camp were piles of naked bodies,

Two motifs that recur in this text are connected with senses, with Karaka’s experience of the place—the unbearable stench and the fact that he saw things with his own eyes. He stressed it perhaps to express his own disbelief at what he saw, perhaps to counter disbelief in India. Interestingly, in his autobiography, written three decades later, he states that the Bombay Chronicle was not interested in his story, and when he telegrammed to ask why it was not published, the newspaper’s proprietor cabled back that ‘Nazi horrors description though good feel overdone. Change topic unless something special’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The account was published on 21 April. Maybe it was published only after Karaka pressed; maybe it was published in too abbreviated a form to his liking; or maybe his memory misled him. What clearly remained was his strong feeling that impenetrable barriers separated Indian readers from the reality of the war in Europe.

Having witnessed Belsen and Germany’s surrender, Karaka felt part of a larger-than-life history. But back home, he realized, the Indian public mood was in an altogether different place. The curtain was falling on empire, and when the 4th Indian Division returned after its glorious conduct in the war, Karaka noted that the people were not there to welcome it. Elsewhere in India, at the same time, the people were cheering Bose’s INA. When the colonial government decided to try the three top officers of the INA, Nehru took part in their defence, despite his reservations about Bose’s actions. Mass protests and demonstrations broke out throughout the country, forcing Commander-in-Chief Claude Auchinleck to commute their sentences.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ When the soldiers of the Indian Army marched through the streets of Delhi in a Victory Week celebration in March 1946, the public booed and jeered, and disturbances broke out.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Viceroy Wavell lamented that the Indian soldiers who had fought so gallantly during the war and defended India were insulted, while a bunch of INA soldiers who were traitors and cowards were exalted.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The INA frenzy left a trail in the archive of popular publications in the immediate aftermath of the war: 1945 saw an avalanche of booklets, pamphlets, and books in English and vernacular languages with admiring accounts of the INA and semi-hagiographic biographies of Bose.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Karaka’s perspective was exceptional in this publishing landscape, and it sank into oblivion.