Churchill's Secret War (9 page)

Dhara had been released from prison, thanks to Gandhi’s understanding with Irwin; he began to hide out with other Congress agitators in the countryside. They were well protected—by the conch shells possessed by many Hindu women in nearby villages. The women blew the shells during their evening
pujo
, or prayer, sending a long, melodious call resonating through the dusk. But when one of them spotted policemen passing by, she would blow the shell then, prompting mothers, wives, and daughters for miles around to relay a cacophonous warning. Except in the dead of night, the police had no hope of catching anyone by surprise.
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In 1932, in a fresh act of resistance to the Raj, Midnapore’s householders started refusing to pay a small tax that maintained the village
chowkidar
, or watchman, who often doubled as a police informer. In response, parties of police—usually Muslims from northwestern India in largely Hindu Midnapore, divide and rule being the principle by which keepers of the law were assigned to different regions—established camps alongside the villages. In lieu of the tax of a few rupees, they confiscated cattle and jewelry worth thousands. The government also imposed a punitive tax to fund these police outposts. Villagers unfamiliar with English called it the
pituni
, or “beating,” tax because of how it was extracted.
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Also in these years, the Great Depression overcame rural India. High grain prices in the 1920s had allowed some cultivators to accumulate savings in the form of gold or land, which had prompted an increase in taxes. Although the prices of wheat and rice began to slide in 1930, slashing farmers’ incomes, cultivators still owed taxes and other dues. Moneylenders (who, through a chain of refinancing arrangements, were ultimately beholden to banks) ran out of cash, refused additional credit, and instead forced peasants to pay up their debts—which they did by confiscating the gold bangles, earrings, and necklaces belonging to the
family’s women. (The alternative was to sell land, which for a peasant was the last resort because it deprived the family of its cheapest source of food.)

The secretary of state for India and the governor of the Bank of England controlled the colony’s monetary policy. They ensured that as much as possible of this “distress gold” flowed to the United Kingdom. In the United States, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stopped the export of the metal and used the country’s gold reserves to support the value of the currency, allowing him to inject money into the economy to revive it. Historian Dietmar Rothermund has written that had the British government in India been more responsive to the needs of the people, it similarly would have collected the distress gold and used it to finance projects to alleviate rural suffering. Instead, banks melted down 3.4 billion rupees (£255 million) worth of gold jewelry into bars and shipped it to London, helping to buttress its threatened position as a financial capital of the world. As a result, rural India was drained of its savings, leaving peasants defenseless against future economic shocks.
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By the end of 1932, the civil disobedience movement was petering out. Also that year, the Government of India announced a so-called Communal Award: along with reserved seats in Parliament, every significant minority group would have a separate electorate. Gandhi, who was in prison, embarked on a fast until the leader of the Depressed Classes agreed to merge his constituency with the general Hindu electorate, in exchange for a larger number of reserved seats. When in 1935 His Majesty’s Government enacted into law the colony’s new constitution, Nehru charged that it “petrified” British rule in India by playing off different constituencies against one another. “The Act strengthened the alliance between the British Government and the princes, landlords, and other reactionary elements in India; it added to the separate electorates, thus increasing the separatist tendencies; it consolidated the predominant position of British trade, industry, banking, and shipping and . . . retained in British hands complete control over Indian finance, military, and foreign affairs,” Nehru would write in a history of India. The new political arrangement gave elected ministers certain responsibilities,
such as in agriculture and education, but posed no bar that would keep India from being inducted, with or without its acquiescence, into World War II.
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AFTER HAVING SERVED six months for his satyagraha against the war effort, Sushil Kumar Dhara emerged from prison in the spring of 1941 to find that the leader of his local Congress cell, a dedicated Gandhian named Kumar Chandra Jana, was still in prison. Jana’s wife was running the cell, and around this motherly figure had gathered a cluster of young women who were eager to join the fight. Most of these recruits had very little schooling, and it became Dhara’s pleasurable task to teach them poetry, the history of rebellions around the world, and the political ideas of Gandhi, Nehru, and Bose.
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Dhara became entranced with one of the women: Kumudini Dakua was dark-skinned, sweet-faced, and quick-witted, with almond eyes that “held an inexplicable allure.” It was just as well that a few years earlier, when his mother had pressed him to get married, Dhara had sworn to remain celibate until the land became free. Kumudini was the wife of his close friend Khudiram Dakua, with whom he had played pranks on unsuspecting elders when both had been in school and later in the same prison. She found Dhara attractive as well. His deep voice “had a magical ability to entice,” Kumudini Dakua would recall decades later, and his impassioned recital of the poem
Bidrohi
(Rebel) “made revolutionaries of us all.” Soon the women were touring the countryside, exhorting everyone to help the movement in any way they could. With Dhara around, “none of us felt any fear at all,” Dakua remembered. His high spirits, his patriotic songs and poetry recitals, and his attention to the trainees’ every need made it fun to become a
sadhinawta songrami
, or fighter for freedom.
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As they trekked around the villages, urging the people to refuse help to the government, Dhara and his fellow rebels often found shelter in the homes of ordinary villagers. “We were very young, would run around a lot,” Dakua related. “Once, we were all sleeping on the upper floor of a mud hut, and we were so many and so rowdy that the roof fell. We
were terribly embarrassed. The lady of the house came up and said, ‘That’s okay—the old roof fell so we’ll build a new roof. Why should you be upset?’ The villagers loved us so much, they’d keep piling food on our plates even when we were stuffed.”

During 1941—as Churchill crossed the Atlantic Ocean to seek help for the war from the United States, Amery dispatched Indian troops to secure the oilfields of Iraq and Iran, Bose strove to gain German assistance for Indian liberation, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union (unknowingly sealing his own fate), Nehru languished in prison, and Gandhi fretted about the scarcities stalking the land—a suppressed but powerful surge of excitement was mounting in rural Bengal. No matter what their imperial rulers believed, “slowly the people were realizing that the era of the British was coming to an end,” Dhara wrote. At the same time, war-related shortages of food, cloth, and kerosene (used for lighting lanterns—rural Bengal had no electricity) were making survival ever more difficult. In every villager’s heart a small flame of rage was spontaneously coming alive. “We began to fan the flames,” Dhara recalled, “in the hope of uniting them all into one gigantic conflagration.”

“S
hoot Gandhi, and if this doesn’t suffice to reduce them to sub mission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that doesn’t suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established,” Adolf Hitler had advised the viscount of Halifax (formerly Lord Irwin, viceroy of India) when they met in November 1937. “You will see how quickly they will collapse as soon as you make it clear that you mean business.” Hitler esteemed Britons and Germans as superior races that nature had designed for hegemony over lesser peoples. Divining the British Raj to be the source of English pride and affluence, he sought to bestow a similar empire on his compatriots. As he saw it, Britons could continue ruling over Indians, while Germans would subjugate Slavs; the labor of the vanquished races, and the natural resources of their former territories, would nourish and enrich the victors.
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Hitler’s determination to carve the Third Reich out of the countries on Germany’s eastern border would place him on a collision course with the United Kingdom—even as the conviction of shared destiny would complicate his attitude toward the British, the adversaries he could not but admire, and undermine his prosecution of the war. Perhaps because of his racist worldview, Hitler did not comprehend the extent to which the Indian freedom movement, along with other developments of the twentieth century, had weakened imperial controls over the colony. The days of formal empires were numbered—and, ironically, the conflict he initiated would deal the fatal blow. To commandeer Indian manufactures and produce for the war, His Majesty’s Government would have to deploy inflationary monetary policies in preference to straightforward
confiscation of the colony’s products or revenues, which would have met with resistance from the colony’s business elites and politicians. In the short run, the United Kingdom’s wartime financial arrangements with India would set the stage for famine, and in the long run they would hasten the disintegration of the British Empire.
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Hitler had been influenced in his thinking about Indians by the eugenicist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whom he dubbed the Prophet of the Third Reich. Chamberlain admired India’s caste system as having been engineered to preserve the purity of Aryans—but he nonetheless considered modern Indians to be a bastard people hopelessly contaminated by inferior blood. During the nineteenth century, tomes from ancient India had been translated into European languages, revealing a prehistory of colonization of that subcontinent by whites. Around 2000 B.C., Caucasian nomads on horseback who called themselves
arya
had poured into the Indian plains through passes in the northwestern Himalayas. They had settled on the banks of western rivers, adopted agriculture, and founded a civilization. Their earliest text, the Rig Veda, spoke of battles against the aboriginal
dasyu
, or dastards. The Aryan god of storms, with his bolt of lighting, “flays the enemy of his dark skin, kills him and reduces him to ashes,” the Rig Veda proclaimed of the dastards. Many of the dasyu were expert farmers and city-builders, but in defeat they became the
dasa
, or slave. They were inducted into the lowest ranks of a severely hierarchical and patriarchal social structure called
caste
, over which reigned priests—Brahmins—and warriors.
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Western eyes could still discern the Aryans’ stock in the northwest of India, where the men were tall and light-skinned. But as the invaders had penetrated the subcontinent, bedding native women, their pure warrior blood had succumbed to dilution, according to Herbert Risley, a late-nineteenth-century anthropologist. Every successive tribe of conquerors “became more or less absorbed in the indigenous population, their physique degenerated, their individuality vanished, their energy was sapped, and dominion passed from their hands into those of more vigorous successors.” In the distant east, where the influence of aboriginal women had been strongest, the ancient miscegenation had resulted in
the feminized Bengalis, whom “no necessity would induce to fight,” another British scholar commented.
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According to Hitler, if anyone had asked Lord Robert Clive by what right he had seized the riches of Bengal, he would have replied, “I am an Englishman!” Racial superiority entitled the British to the possession of India, Hitler informed a student body in Munich. Accordingly, the führer considered the anti-colonial movement—“a rebellion of the lower Indian race against the superior English-Nordic race”—to be as futile as it was contemptible. “The Nordic race has a right to rule the world and we must take this racial right as the guiding star of our foreign policy,” he said in 1930. Hitler had only a secondary interest in regaining the German colonies in Africa that had been confiscated by the Allies after World War I. What he wanted most of all was to conquer an extended backyard that could be defended by a land-based army. Germans would thus realize their inherent eminence and restore their prosperity by acquiring
Lebensraum
, or room to live, toward the east.
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In two books (the second of which was published long after his death), in prewar speeches, and in wartime after-dinner monologues, Hitler laid out a blueprint for the economic regeneration of Germany that drew on the British Empire as a prototype. White men, he stated in a 1932 address that won him the support of leading German industrialists, had exercised their “extraordinarily brutal right to dominate others” (which they possessed by virtue of their race) in order to reorganize the economy of lesser peoples, in India and in the Americas—thereby procuring their own prosperity. The English, in particular, had achieved a “wonderful marriage of economic conquest with political domination” that had given rise to “a remarkable development: instead of expanding in space, instead of exporting men, they have exported goods and have built up an economic world-system.” Thanks to such a process, white nations had come to possess “gigantic world-central-factories” for which “the rest of the world provides enormous markets for the disposal of goods and enormous sources of raw materials.”
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This state of affairs, Hitler maintained, could persist only “so long as the difference in the standard of living in different parts of the world
continues to exist.” The imperial lifestyle required lesser races to be preserved in poverty. Different countries had safeguarded their economic superiority in different ways, he continued, “most brilliantly of all perhaps England who has always opened up for herself new markets and immediately anchored them through political dominance.” Germans—having been, in Hitler’s view, idealistic rather than pragmatic in their approach to colonies—had failed to make adequate use of them and thus had been unable to guarantee an adequate standard of living for the fatherland’s domestic industrial workers, laying themselves open to the specter of communism.
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