[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.]
India in the Second World War – an emotional history is truly a labour of love for author, Diya Gupta. She explains in the acknowledgements how close the book came to not being written. She was devastated by the death of her father from Covid in October 2021, and the book is dedicated to him. She credits her academic supervisors along with colleagues and supporters for giving her the motivation and strength to complete it.
With so much written about the Second World War, it is important to understand the context and framework of the book. As set out in the cover notes, the author is very specific about what she seeks to achieve: In 1940s India, revolutionary and nationalistic feeling surged against colonial subjecthood and imperial war. Two-and-a-half million people from undivided India served the British during the Second World War, while three million civilians were killed by the war induced Bengal Famine, and Indian National Army soldiers fought against the British for Indian independence. This book shines the light on emotions as a way of unearthing these troubled and contested experiences, exposing the personal as political. (cover)
The meticulous and extensive research carried out by Gupta permeates every page. She draws on poetry, memoirs, photographs and philosophical essays in both English and Bengali to weave a compelling tapestry of emotions felt by Indians in service and at home during the war. She brings to life a host of characters from an unknown sepoy in the Middle East yearning for home, to anti-fascist activist Tara Ali Baig; a disillusioned doctor on the Burma frontline, and Sukanta Bhattacharya’s modernist poetry of hunger; Mulk Raj Anand’s revolutionary home front, and Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of civilisation. She recovers a genuinely global history of the Second World War, revealing the crucial importance of cultural approaches in challenging a traditional focus on the wartime experiences of European populations.
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During the war years, India became a wartime industrial production house and suffered acute shortages in grain, kerosene, cloth and other essential items. Gupta questions whether the people of India believed in the war as their own. She notes that contested feelings pushed against each other, particularly after Japan’s rapid military takeover of British-occupied territories in Southeast Asia by May 1942. We learn how songs composed by the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) established by the Communist Party of India in 1943, proved extremely popular among impoverished peasants from Bengal, particularly sharecroppers, as a response to their plight. One example (translated from Bengali):
O farmer, your home is on fire, and outside a typhoon raged. A foreign government occupies your home, and on your doorstep is Japan. (p. 4)
Another folk song highlights a community of lamentation formed among Bengali women left behind at home while their men join the imperial war effort.
This information-packed book investigates a knotted emotional history produced by combatants, civilians and prisoners-of-war, poets and intellectuals, men and women in response to Indian involvement in the Second World War as a British colony.
Rita Payne is a member of the Round Table editorial board.
India in the Second World War – an emotional history by Diya Gupta, London, Hurst, 2023.
