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 British
Indian Army (BIA) of the Second World War with 2.5 million men under arms, which by
war’s end 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
on generous terms. Yet this history has been neglected even within South Asia thanks to
the lasting divisions that the war triggered within the Indian nationalist movement over
whether to fight Axis aggression, British imperialism, or both.

Srinath Raghavan set himself the ambitious task of providing a high-level tour of colonial
India’s total war effort that integrated geopolitics, national politics, strategic planning,
military, economic and industrial mobilisation, as well as the major BIA campaigns in
Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. He convincingly argues this is needed not
only to understand the war in the Indian Ocean Region, but modern South Asian history
and India’s potential as a great 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.

Raghavan’s account of the period’s high politics differs from most as it recovers the
manner in which the war’s shifting tides and the Indian independence movement
shaped each other. In particular the author demonstrates just how internationalised the
struggle over British rule had become. India’s role in securing lines of communication for
the delivery of Lend-Lease aid from the US to Nationalist China made its internal
political stability a matter of grand-strategic importance to the Pacific’s chief powers;
this was often in tension with the preservation of Empire, an ideological priority for
Churchill and certain like-minded Conservative Party figures such as the Viceroy, Lord
Linlithgow.

The campaigns against Italian and German forces in East Africa, Iraq, Iran, Syria and
North Africa receive workmanlike attention over four chapters. However it is the
operational history of the epic struggle against the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) in
Southeast Asia, especially Burma, which provides the springboard to exploring the BIA’s
transformation. 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. He examines

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 tropical medicine); training for manoeuvre operations in jungle conditions,
the vast logistics preparations and deep integration of Allied command structures.

What is striking is that much of this happened as India experienced the severest internal
unrest in nearly a century; unrest that the BIA played a major role in suppressing even as
the officer corps was rapidly indigenised. The critical threats to loyalty and discipline
posed by the Congress’s civil disobedience campaign and Subhas Chandra Bose’s
militant ‘Azad Hind’ aka Free India movement (which recruited thousands of BIA
prisoners in Japanese captivity) are both closely described. Raghavan in fact pays far
greater attention to the development of the Axis “Indian National Army” than he does to
the Royal Indian Navy and Indian Air Force, whose contributions deserved far more
space than they receive.

Although the author describes these events, as well as the efforts of the BIA’s senior
(British) leadership to assess and contain these threats -perhaps limited by his selection
of sources- he offers few answers as to why they succeeded under such adverse
conditions. This remains an important question as the BIA’s successors in the Indian
and Pakistani republics continue to show the same deep resilience and cohesion when
facing severe internal and external stressors.

Raghavan does sketch out the continuities and discontinuities between the colonial
GoI’s distinct institutional sense of regional and international interests, and those of
Indian civil servants, industrialists and the fiercely independent Nehru. This provides
insight into the development of India’s post-1947 posture, but unfortunately he fails to
do the same for the Raj’s other inheritor state, Pakistan, whose politicians, civil servants
and army officers served in the same institutions and navigated the same crises. How
did their war experiences shape Pakistan’s strategic outlook? We simply aren’t told.

Despite the omissions described here this is doubtlessly the best single-volume work on
South Asia’s participation in the war, a long overdue and much needed addition. It is to
be hoped that it inspires many more follow-on projects.

Johann Chacko