‘Help the British anyhow’

The other day, some anti-imperialist students were questioning the presence in their institutions of statues of Cecil Rhodes, a West African cockerel and, very strangely in view of her conspicuously anti-racist convictions, Queen Victoria. In response, a Guardian columnist, who has probably made less effort to learn Hindi than Queen Victoria did, amusingly said that it was time to ‘start a debate’ about the British empire. I would have thought that we have spent much of the last century energetically examining the subject from topknot to shoesole. Nevertheless, there remain some large areas which haven’t been properly considered, and among them is the complex story of India’s role in the second world war.

Srinath Raghavan is the author of an excellent study of the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence. It’s worth thinking for a moment about the connections between the subjects of these two books. In some very peculiar ways, the extraordinary and savage war of 1971 was the consequence of British imperial attitudes and decisions — of Curzon’s 1905 decision to split Bengal into two and of the disastrous decision in 1947 to yield to Jinnah’s plan for a country separated in two, united only by religion.

Most of all, the course of the war was shaped by the lingering belief — not all of it springing from the British — that some of the races of India were ‘martial’ and some were not. In 1971 it was widely taken for granted that the ‘martial’ Pakistani Punjabis would defeat the ‘non-martial’ Bengalis. Having explored, with memorable results, the last outing of this bizarre belief, Raghavan has returned to India’s experience of the second world war. As he shows, it was the war that, in large part, created modern India. It may be that the extreme experiences of wartime tested and hardened some political positions which had previously been largely theoretical, for good or ill.