Читать книгу Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War - Raghu Karnad - Страница 19

April 1942

April came, and every morning as the sun pulled itself from the waves, the humidity marched off the sea and into Madras like an invading force. By afternoon, the city was a hydrothermal vent. Once or twice a day, Bobby wasted a cigarette as he tilted his head down to light it and his sweat landed fatly on the paper. Sweat ran into his eyes and it burned.

There hadn’t been a war in Madras in nearly two centuries. The city sweated doubly; from the heat, as every year, and from the fear, as never before. Labourers sweated as they flung earth out of trenches around the ports and the City Hall. Families sweated into threadbare lungis as they lined up at recruitment centres, stroking the hands of gaunt and downcast sons, hoping for reassurance about what was going to happen to them. Sweat ran down the Governor’s neck as he waited in his mansion for instructions from Delhi. At the Carnatic and Buckingham Mills, workers sweated in their picket lines as they agitated for an evacuation allowance. Their union leaders swapped street rumours: aircraft were being organised to evacuate Europeans … The Tatas were in secret talks with the Japs, to spare the steelworks in Jamshedpur from bombing … At a village fair, up north, a Japanese paratrooper descended into a crowd, spoke to them in their own tongue, and then used his parachute to jet back into the sky … Wavell had been killed.1

Families packed trunks, and the wealthiest ones had already sent servants ahead to bungalows in the Nilgiri Hills, to get things ready, just in case. The Burmese refugees who had streamed into Madras sweated in their hotel rooms and relatives’ homes, watching as Madras prepared to stream out.

One exception in this sticky immobility was GP, who shot around town with an energy that suggested he was personally choreographing national events. Though he wasn’t yet thirty, GP was now the chief editor on foreign affairs at The Hindu. It was no more than was expected of him. The Iyengar Brahmins were past masters at reincarnating ancient privilege in the form of modern success; a balancing act in which they rarely put a foot wrong. After Oxford, while GP waited for Subur to finish, he had somehow managed to train at The Times of London, to qualify as a barrister, to play first-class cricket, and even to grow familiar with the World Socialist Movement and various Indian nationalists in London.

In the current crisis too, he was as artfully moderate as ever – quite like Rajaji, the Congress apostle in Madras and another Iyengar. With Manek away on duty, and Bobby and his sisters too hot to say much, GP used the dinner table to rehearse his editorials without interruption.

Any day now, he’d say, a new sun could rise on the horizon beyond Marina Beach. The bayonet that had drilled through all of Asia was now pointed directly at Madras. Japanese messages were coming in on the shortwave, offering friendship to Indians, but warning that if they did not surrender, it was ‘inevitable that India will receive the ravages of war’. The Commander-in-Chief in Delhi cabled Whitehall: ‘India cannot repeat cannot be held against the likely scale and method of Japanese attack.’ Brooding over the prospect, the Congress leaders had taken a hard decision: the price of their cooperation would be political freedom first.

If the war was going to be fought on Indian soil, there appeared to be two examples of how it could go. As a British colony, the example was Burma and Malaya: futile defence, whole divisions squandered, cities abandoned to the mercy of the Japanese. As a free country, the example was the Soviet Union, whose Red Army had made a heroic retreat, fighting to the last breath, scorching its own homeland, in what was rightfully being called the Great Patriotic War.

But Whitehall had different ideas. By now Neville Chamberlain had been forced to resign, handing over the government to Winston Churchill, an implacable opponent of Indian independence. To Churchill, the war was a call to redeem the imperial bond, not to dissolve it. India would need to be the principal base for Britain’s war against the Japanese, not to mention the United States’ campaign to aid China. The prime minister expected Indians to ‘kindle again the spark of hope in the breasts of hundreds of millions of downtrodden or despairing men and women throughout Europe’. Churchill despised the Congress, but knew that popular support would be essential to fight the Japanese back from India. He despatched a minister in his War Cabinet, Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labour man with sympathy for the nationalists, to obtain that support.

At the start of April 1942, GP moved Subur and their young son up to Delhi, to ensure their safety and to allow him to follow the negotiations under way there. In Delhi, Cripps was urging the Congress to accept a promise of Dominion status after the war. The Congress objected. Why not now? ‘The leaders of the people should be enabled honestly to shout to the masses,’ Rajaji pressed, ‘that this war is the people’s war.’ A genuine national government, in charge of its own defence, would give soldiers the morale of patriots, instead of the motives of mercenaries.

Cripps and the Indian leaders competed to raise the stakes of a solution. ‘Today India is the crux of the war,’ Nehru announced, at a press conference that ran to three hours. ‘The only other really important theatre is the Russian theatre … Very little else counts for the present. Every country in the world realises this, of course, except for the big people in New Delhi and Whitehall.’2 The disagreement became a deadlock.

Deprived of their personal dinner broadcast, Bobby and the others struggled to keep up with political news. The Hindu reprinted a Punch cartoon, Arms for the East, which had Cripps in dock worker’s overalls waiting to load a wooden crate onto a steamer. His one hand holds the winch ropes and the other steadies the crate, which is labelled ‘Dominion Status for India’ and stamped ‘Not to be Sent Till After the War’. Watching the reaction of his baleful supervisor – Churchill – Cripps asks: ‘How about shipping this thing now?’ On the picture pages, with each day that passed, Cripps and the Congressmen stood further apart; the Japanese drew closer.

The script for their invasion was written and only awaited its performance: the defence of Chetpet; the rout at Thambaram; amphibian landing craft crunching into the corners of the beach temples at Mahabalipuram; the carnage and the coconut groves in flames. All that would be only the beginning of a ‘Cross-India expedition’,3 a rapid advance to reach the west coast and seal the port of Bombay.

Around them, Madras prepared however it could. Twenty-two miles of trench were dug around the city. The ivory buildings of Queen Mary’s, a beachside beacon to enemy bombers, were painted over in dark grey. The college lecturers, who had taught all the Mugaseth girls, were issued with timetables and tin helmets, and patrolled the rooftops after dusk listening for the sounds of bombers. Below them, the campus was under blackout. Students walked into railings and tumbled down stairs.

The ribbon of land between Fort St George and the sea supported a shoddy façade of air defence. The beach, usually crowded with catamarans and drying nets, was bare and fringed with anti-aircraft guns, though only one gun in ten was real. The others were coconut trunks, tarred black, one solid and balanced on another split down the middle. The Madras Guard dug into positions between them. The higher ground was a decoy airstrip; ‘dummy’ fighter planes and bombers squatted on it, and a lone flight of actual Wapitis circled out and back continuously to try and maintain the illusion. The port was closed to commercial cargo, and an anti-submarine boom pushed out across the mouth of the harbour. Undermanned, the Madras Coast Battery recruited young women to run phones and the Fire Direction Tables.

At the Secretariat, the Commissioner of the City, O. Pulla Reddy, learned one morning that Governor Hope and the majority of his staff were about to depart for the Nilgiri Hills. Reddy was able to put in a call to Sir George Boag, First Adviser to the Governor, requesting instructions. ‘You can do what you like,’ Boag replied. ‘I have no time to discuss details. I have to catch the Blue Mountain Express in a few minutes.’ So it was left to Reddy, and the Commissioner of Police, Sir Lionel Gasson, to evacuate the penitentiary – and thereafter, the caged predators in Madras Zoo. To Reddy’s horror, Gasson sent in a platoon of Malabar Special Police to shoot dead the lions, tigers and panthers, as well as a single polar bear, which may alone have been grateful for it.

In the newspapers, insurance companies put out notices assuring Indian clients that ‘risks to their lives arising from enemy military operations, whether by land, sea or air, are fully covered’. Chambers of commerce demanded official guarantees that there would be no scorched-earth campaign in Madras, as was being executed in eastern Bengal, at the Burmese border. An advert for Parle Biscuits advised that the ½lb cartons were airtight and the best for emergency rations. Scanning through the new movies, between ads for Laurel and Hardy in Great Guns and Gary Cooper in Sergeant York, Bobby encountered strange surprises:

SUPPOSE:

The Enemy Raiders approach our Shores

What do you expect to happen to Madras?

THE ANSWER:

To this burning question of the hour

is thrillingly picturized in a new film

‘MADRAS MUST NOT BURN’

Another William J. Moylan Production

See Real Enemy Planes Rain Bombs on MADRAS

and see the Madras A.R.P. as Civil Defenders

Saturday, April 4 at the NEW GLOBE,

Mount Road, Madras

The headline a few days later: ‘JAP NAVAL UNITS IN THE BAY’. Admiral Nagumo had taken the Indian Ocean like a lion rampant red on a field of blue. Five of his six carriers had been in the fleet which struck Pearl Harbor, and they meant to strike as hard at the British fleet in Ceylon.

On 5 April, two Wapitis of the IAF Volunteer Reserve, puttering out over the sea, found themselves watching as a Japanese force of one battleship, one carrier, a cruiser and two destroyers pounded a merchant vessel into the sea. The same morning, Japanese planes appeared over the coast of Ceylon, and on reaching the Colombo harbour sank 80,000 tons of British merchant shipping, along with the cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall.

The next morning, they attacked the Indian ports of Vizag and Cocanada, further up the coast from Madras. Silhouetted against the sun, the Mitsubishis banked, bombed the docked ships and machine-gunned the vessels in the port channels. On 9 April, they returned to Ceylon to raid Trincomalee, the base of the British East Indies Naval Squadron. The antique aircraft carrier HMS Hermes escaped the harbour, but Nagumo’s planes found it and tore it to pieces on the deep. The British navy scattered and fled. It abandoned its bases on the Andaman Islands, handing Japan an effective base to stage landings in Ceylon and South India. This was, for Churchill, ‘the most dangerous moment in the war, and the one that caused me greatest alarm … The capture of Ceylon, the consequent control of the Indian Ocean, and the possibility at the same time of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring, and the future would have been black.’4

From the government came more and more rules for hiding: vehicles must have their headlights shaded; no lights visible outside any building, from any angle. Rather than suffocating behind heavy drapes and blackened glass, Nugs simply left the electric lights off. Like a sinking ocean liner, the city descended into gloomy darkness, and thieves came out into the street. Hundreds of wells had been dug around the city for fire-fighting, and had curdled with larvae. Mosquitoes poured out thick as gas.

The air-raid sirens struck up their song in the evenings. They were signalling practice drills, which meant blackout without stoppage of civilian traffic. There was a siren chart to memorise, so you knew which combination of steady note and modulated wailing meant a real air raid, but Nugs’s mind went blank each time the sirens started.

Ganny arrived every day before sundown. As the light left through the window, they lit the kerosene lamp and slipped under their bed net together. The days were enervating, but at night their senses grew large, from the narcotic mix of heat, dark and dread. When the sirens fell silent, their hearts drummed in their ears. The skin hummed, and sweat ran down their necks with touch as sure as fingertips. At any moment, the world might go up in flames, and Nugs and Ganny made the most of that possibility.

As one of those nights turned to morning, they were woken at a quarter to five by the siren crying out a real air raid. The sound that had baptised half the world into war washed over them. They didn’t move, and Nugs, in secret, felt more at peace than she had in years. For as long as she’d been with Ganny, they’d both felt a ruining anxiety about leaving their homes and losing their families. Suddenly that feeling was universal. Everybody was afraid of losing everything. It was wonderful. It made their vulnerability seem less like the cost of a private passion, and more like the rule of a new age. Henceforth, all homes are forfeit, everyone will be afraid.