India's War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia.

Srinath Raghavan.
New York: Basic Books, 2016.
576 pp. $35.00 (Hardcover),
ISBN 978-0-465-03022-4.

It is often forgotten that the largest volunteer military force in history was the pre-Partition
Indian Army (IA) of the Second World War with 2.5 million men under arms. At war’s end
this force garrisoned an arc spanning from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. All
of this paid for by the Government of India (GoI) which lent £1.325 billion to Britain. Yet
this history has been neglected because of the lasting divisions triggered by the war
within the Indian nationalist movement over whether to fight British imperialism, Axis
aggression, or both at the same time.

Srinath Raghavan sets himself the ambitious task of offering a high-level tour of the total
war effort of pre-partition colonial India by interweaving geopolitics, ‘domestic’ politics,
economic and industrial mobilisation, strategic planning, military mobilisation, and the
major BIA campaigns from North Africa, Middle East and South East Asia. He
convincingly argues this is vital not only to grasping the war in the Indian Ocean Region
from Suez to Singapore, but also to understanding modern South Asia’s history and its
lasting potential as a well of regional power. Written in elegant, highly readable prose the
twenty sections follow a roughly chronological sequence from 1939 to 1945, alternating
between the political and military threads of the story in multiple theatres.

The complex swirl of Indian and British national high politics differs from most other
accounts in that Raghavan’s account recovers the ways in which the shifting tides of the
war and the anti-colonial movements interacted with each other to reshape the
landscape. The author does important work by weaving in just how internationalised the
struggle over British rule had become with multiple discreet interventions in 1941-42 by
Presidents Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-Shek in favour of Indian independence. India’s
crucial role in securing lines of communication for the delivery of Lend-Lease aid from
America to Nationalist China made its internal political stability a matter of grand-strategic
importance to the chief powers of the Pacific; this was often in tension with the
preservation of imperial rule, an unbending ideological priority for certain Conservative
Party figures such as Churchill, his cabinet minister for India Leo Amery, and the Viceroy
Lord Linlithgow.

The campaigns against Italian and German forces in East Africa, Iraq, Iran, Syria and
North Africa receive workman like attention over four chapters. Yet the operational history
of the epic struggle against the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) across South-East Asia,
especially Burma, provides a springboard for the story of the BIA’s roller-coaster
transformation that is the heart of this work. How did the hollow army that faced an
unprecedented series of humiliating defeats in 1942 return three years later as a vastly
larger, battle-ready force that paid the IJA back with compound interest? Raghavan is on
firm ground as he covers the various waves of expansion; the repeated GoI (i.e. British)
failures at every level to seriously prepare for war with Japan; the eventual steps taken to
boost morale, fitness (including very local problems of nutrition and tropic medicine),
training for manoeuvre operations in jungle conditions, the vast logistics preparations and
deeper integration of Allied command structures.

What is particularly interesting is that all of this is happened as India experienced the
most severe internal unrest in nearly a century; unrest that the BIA played a major role in
supressing even as the officer corps was rapidly Indianised. Severe threats to loyalty and
discipline were posed by the Congress Party’s civil disobedience movement and Subhas
Chandra Bose’s ‘Azad Hind’ (Free India) movement which recruited thousands of BIA
prisoners in Japanese captivity. In fact Raghavan pays far more attention to the
development of the “Indian National Army” than he does to the Royal Indian Navy and
Royal Indian Air Force. Although the author describes these events, as well as the efforts
of the BIA’s senior (again, British) leadership to assess and contain these threats,
perhaps limited by his selection of sources, he does not offer a clear or compelling
answer as to why they succeeded under such adverse conditions. This remains an
important question as the BIA’s inheritors in the Indian and Pakistani republics have both
continued to show the deep resilience and cohesion even when faced with severe
internal and external stress.

The question of inheritances is a key theme of the book. Raghavan sketches out both
continuities and discontinuities between the colonial GoI’s distinct institutional sense of its
regional and international interests, and those of the fiercely independent Nehru as well
as Indian civil servants and industrialists. Unfortunately the author takes no interest in
doing the same for the Raj’s other inheritor state, Pakistan, whose politicians, civil
servants and army officers had served in exactly the same institutions and navigated
through the same crises. How did the experiences of the war shape their strategic
outlook? This work does not tell us. Despite these shortcomings it is without a doubt the
best single-volume work on South Asia’s participation in the deadliest global conflict in
history, a long overdue and much needed contribution.