Book: INDIA IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR: AN EMOTIONAL HISTORY
Author: Diya Gupta
Published by: Rupa
Price: Rs 795
With sixty million dead, entire cities reduced to ash in the snap of a finger, and a bereaved, depraved life staring at those who survived, the ravages of the Second World War still haunt our collective memory. For India, the war was complicated by deep ideological tensions. Touted as a victory of democracy against fascism, it collided with anti-colonial sentiments that had been brewing for decades and were by then reaching full force.
In Farthest Field, Raghu Karnad writes of this eddying confusion: “The word ‘freedom’ pulled one way and then the other. It meant freedom for the men of Europe. It meant freedom from the men of Europe.” This dilemma was further fractured by India’s own heterogeneity of caste, class, social status, and army rank, all interacting in dizzying proportions to challenge the unifying nationalist idea of freedom.
In that context, what Diya Gupta achieves in India in The Second World War is laudatory. Drawing on meticulous archival research and a sensitive reading of contemporary literature, she reimagines what ‘freedom’ meant to people from different walks of life.
The subjective emotions embodied by the English-speaking elite, the Bengali peasant, the army recruit, and the sepoy from a marginalised background become the lens through which their realities are seen and interpreted. Take, for example, a photograph in the chapter on male friendships: a group of Indian military recruits stand in a Burmese stream, frolicking in and splashing water, one of them soaping another’s back. The uniformed soldier in the frame is a reminder that war is only a hair’s breadth away even as the men lose themselves in a fleeting moment of joy. Such photographs destabilise the singular narrative that often overshadows the emotional terrain of war.
A similar reckoning emerges through the letters in the first chapter, “‘The Thing That Was Lost’: Re-conceptualising Home in Indian Life Writing”, where Gupta meditates on the idea of home. The colonial military urgently needed men to fight the war. While conscription was not mandatory, the army offered concessions and benefits to lure the young. A curious phenomenon followed: the jobless, the emaciated, and the marginalised, those traditionally forbidden from joining the army, thronged recruitment centres in huge numbers, leaving villages without men to till the land.
The letters, however, problematise the idea of home and homeland. Many new recruits appreciated the perks that came with the job; some even expressed disgust at the poverty and the disorder back home and were reluctant to return. Yet others found themselves among strangers, burdened with back-breaking work and overwhelmed by homesickness. One sepoy likens letter-writing to “half meetings”.
As Peter N. Stearns cautions in his book, History of Emotions: Issues of Change and Impact, “Emotional history is not about discovering what people felt, but what they thought they were feeling, and what societies allowed them to express.” Gupta similarly shows how the written word and the visual media were exploited by colonial powers to further their agenda. In a photograph titled, Village hero: New Recruit on his first leave, in the Imperial War Museum, a tall army recruit in a crisp Western uniform stands before a group of amused children. Gupta finds it staged and playful, dissecting how the stripe on his sleeve and the cow sauntering in the background betray the falsities of the British raj.
Her analysis extends to war writings by literary doyens such as Mulk Raj Anand and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, while also shedding light on lesser-known poets such as M.J. Tambimuttu, Muriel Wasi, and Tara Ali Beg. Prisoner diaries, such as Eaten by the Japanese by the rank-and-file soldier, John Baptist Crasta, who was captured in Singapore by the Japanese, and Whom Enemies Sheltered by R.G. Salvi, juxtapose the atrocities of captivity with the fragile solace of male friendship.
The lay reader might find the book inaccessible at times due to its dense academic idiom. What also felt slightly irritating was that it retains the structure of the original thesis without adaptation. It could easily have been reshaped into a book by pruning the lengthy introductions to each chapter and the repetitive summaries that close them.
That said, India in the Second World War remains a significant contribution, part of a growing body of work in the vein of studies on World War I that seeks to understand India’s wartime experience not through politics or strategy but through the fragile, pulsing landscape of emotion.