11
The twentieth century began with the Indian Ocean rim firmly in the grip of European powers. Even the smallest independent enclave, such as Bali, had been brutally crushed. With the loss of many of their colonies in the Americas, the Europeans had greater control over the Indian Ocean than over the Atlantic. It had taken centuries of war and colonization to create this edifice and not many would have wagered that it would all dissolve within a few decades. The first hint of the turning tide was the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905. This was the first time that Asians had scored a decisive victory over a European power since Marthanda Varma’s victory over the Dutch. Although this victory may have encouraged later Japanese militarism, it also shattered the myth of European racial and cultural superiority. Then came the First World War.
The Raider
Most histories of the First World War (WWI) tend to ignore the Indian Ocean. While much of the action happened in the trenches of Europe and around the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean rim also saw a number of important events that are often left out of the story and are now largely forgotten even in the countries where they took place. One of the fascinating episodes relates to the German light cruiser Emden that single-handedly paralysed Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean for several months.
When the war began in July 1914, the Emden was one of a handful of German vessels that found themselves stranded on the other side of the world at Tsingtao (Qingdao). This was a German-controlled enclave along the Chinese coast and is still famous for a beer brewery established by the Germans. It soon became clear that Tsingtao and other German colonies in the East were not defensible and the ships would have to find their way home. They left as a convoy to cross the Pacific in an attempt to get to the Atlantic by rounding South America. Karl von Muller, the commander of the Emden, however, asked for permission to head west to the Indian Ocean. Permission was granted and the Emden slipped through neutral Dutch-controlled waters into the Indian Ocean. Muller added a fake smoke funnel in order to disguise his ship as a British cruiser.
By early September, the Emden was in the Bay of Bengal where it began to systematically attack and sink ships belonging to the British and their allies. There was panic as no one knew what was happening; British intelligence had been under the impression that the Emden was in the Pacific along with the rest of the German fleet. Karl von Muller, interestingly, soon developed a reputation as a gentleman privateer because he minimized casualties, treated his prisoners well and let them go at the first opportunity.1 It was only through information gleaned from the released crews that authorities in Calcutta realized what was happening.
On 22 September, the Emden unexpectedly appeared off the coast of Madras and proceeded to bombard the port. The raid lasted for barely half an hour but the 125-odd shells set ablaze oil containers and threw the city into chaos. The ship then disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. Although the damage was limited, the raid had a major psychological impact on the city and for a generation the word ‘Emden’ would be used as Tamil slang to denote maverick cunning or resourcefulness. I was surprised, therefore, to find that few of Chennai’s younger residents knew about this episode and not one could tell me the location of the plaque commemorating it. Eventually, I found it along the eastern wall of the High Court (across the road from the line of stalls selling mobile phones and other electronics). It marks the spot where one of the shells had landed.
The Emden now sailed down the coast towards Sri Lanka, capturing and sinking more ships along the way. Eventually, it headed for Diego Garcia, a remote British-held island in the southern Indian Ocean. Muller was pleasantly surprised to find that the islanders had not heard about the war! Modern communications technology had not yet connected every point on the planet. The Emden was, therefore, able to carry out repairs and refuel in peace. At this stage, Muller could have decided to head home around the Cape or make for an Ottoman-held port on the Red Sea, but he opted for his most audacious raid yet—an attack on Penang in the Malacca Straits.
The Emden slipped into Penang harbour at dawn on 28 October using the extra funnel to disguise itself. It soon spotted an old Russian cruiser that had stopped by for repairs. The Germans opened fire before the Russians could respond and destroyed the ship. The Emden was now engaged by a number of British and French ships but managed to fight its way out, sinking a French destroyer along the way. The Penang raid added to Muller’s legend and was a big blow to the prestige of the Allies. Not only had a German ship made its way into the Malacca Straits but had also single-handedly caused so much damage before getting away. Now every warship in the Indian Ocean was pressed into looking for the Emden.
Muller now headed for the Coco Islands, south of Sumatra, where the Allies had a major wireless and cable communications station. The Germans planned to knock out the communications hub and a small party was sent ashore to destroy the equipment. Here Muller’s luck finally ran out. One of the operators on the island was able to send out an SOS message and alert an Australian naval convoy that happened to be in the vicinity before the Germans captured the station. The convoy included a state-of-the-art cruiser HMAS Sydney that could outmatch the Emden’s firepower.
The sudden appearance of Sydney forced Muller to abandon the landing party and sail out to meet the enemy. The two cruisers bombarded each other but Sydney was both faster and had heavier guns. After a couple of hours of exchanging fire, Muller realized that his ship was sinking and was forced to beach it in order to save the remaining crew.2 Sometime later he surrendered. Some of Emden’s guns were carried away as trophies and one is now displayed in Sydney’s Hyde Park.
This was not the end of this story. Remember that a German landing party had been abandoned on one of the islands. This group managed to commandeer a schooner and sailed all the way to Yemen from where they fought their way past Bedouin tribesmen before making it to Turkish-controlled territory. The Turks arranged for them to travel by rail to Istanbul where they told their remarkable story. Meanwhile, Karl von Muller was taken as a prisoner of war and held in Malta till he returned home at the end of the war to a hero’s welcome. Most of the remaining crew were held prisoners in Singapore where their arrival caused quite a flutter. A few months later they would be witness to major revolt by Indian soldiers based on the island.
The Great War
As we have seen, Indian soldiers were the foundation on which the British empire was built, but the colonial authorities were always worried that the soldiers would switch loyalties; the memories of 1857 were still fresh. Under normal circumstances, all colonial powers maintained a sizeable force of European regiments in the colonies as backup but WWI had forced the withdrawal of many of these units. The balance worsened as the British began to recruit Indian soldiers on a large scale to fight in the war. They even managed to get Indian political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi to support the recruitment drive. Gandhi would initially recruit for non-combatant roles but would later help with the recruitment of soldiers.3 Approximately 1.3 million Indian soldiers and auxiliaries would participate in the war and around 74,000 would lose their lives. It was Indian soldiers who stopped the German advance at Ypres. Thousands would die in the trenches of Europe and at Gallipoli. Sadly, their contribution is barely remembered and recognized today even in India.4 Even less remembered are the battles they fought in the Indian Ocean rim.
One of the first places where Indian soldiers were deployed was in German East Africa (now Tanzania) where they campaigned against the spirited guerrilla tactics of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Despite being cut off from supplies and reinforcements, and with British Indian troops in hot pursuit, the wily Lettow-Vorbeck and his men would keep up German resistance in Africa till the end of the war.
Recognizing the importance of India as a source for troops and supplies, the Germans and the Turks were very keen to provoke a revolt. One strategy was to instigate the Muslim population across the Middle East and the subcontinent to rise up against the British. The Ottoman Sultan’s supposed position as the ‘Caliph’ of all Muslims was played up. A German agent called Wilhelm Wassmuss slipped into the Persian Gulf to instigate the tribes of southern Iran to attack British interests in the region. He even spread rumours that the German Kaiser had converted to Islam and adopted the name ‘Haji’ Wilhelm Mohammad.5 I am not making this up!
Wassmuss told the tribes that a grand Turko-German army would soon march through Iran into India and throw out the British infidels. Reports soon began to reach Quetta that a powerful Baloch chief was already in touch with the Germans. British intelligence took this threat seriously and an expeditionary force was sent out from India to Iraq in order to pre-empt the possible invasion. They would simultaneously use their own agent, T.E. Lawrence, better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, to instigate the Arabs against the Turks.
The British Indian troops led by Major General Townshend initially won a series of easy victories in Iraq as they made their way inland. However, as they closed in on Baghdad in November 1915, the Turks put up an unexpectedly fierce resistance at Ctesiphon (once the capital of the pre-Islamic Persian empire). Townshend was forced to retreat to the town of Kut that he fortified while he waited for reinforcements. The Turks, meanwhile, surrounded the town and enforced a siege. It was a grim reminder of how Indian mercenaries fighting for the Shiite cause twelve centuries earlier had been surrounded and trapped at the battlefield of Karbala. With the evacuation of Gallipoli, the Allies suddenly found themselves in a difficult situation, and the Turks were able to fend off British relief columns that had got bogged down by floods on the Tigris. There was even a failed attempt by T.E. Lawrence to bribe the Turkish commanders.
The siege of Kut would last five agonizing months till the starving garrison finally surrendered on 29 April 1916.6 The Turkish leader Enver Pasha celebrated the victory by declaring himself a Ghazi (Holy Warrior). Around 3000 British and 6000 Indian troops were captured and force-marched to Turkey as prisoners. Although Townshend would be treated quite well in captivity, many of his men would die from disease and ill-treatment. The Haider Pasha cemetery in Istanbul contains the graves and ashes of a few of these soldiers. One of the memorial stones reads: ‘The following Hindu soldier of the Indian Army is honored here: Lance Naik Dhan Bahadur Limbu, 6th Gurkha Rifles.’
Few Indians today remember these men and their deaths in faraway lands but their stories were still fresh when civil servant and writer Dennis Kincaid wrote these words in the 1930s:
When you are wandering around in the Maratha hills you chance upon a war memorial in some tiny hamlet; and it is moving to read that, say, eleven men went from that village to serve in Irak. Many of these village lads were at Kut. Very few men, once taken prisoner, returned or were heard of again. The clean fighting Turk saw to that.7
Few residents of Mumbai will be aware that the city has a memorial to Indian sailors who died in WWI. It’s tucked away in a sailors’ hostel in the old port area and almost no one visits it. Commodore Odakkal Johnson of the Indian Navy and I tracked it down amidst torrential monsoon rain and spent an hour reading the names of these long-forgotten sailors. It told an interesting pattern of how the British of that period recruited and deployed their Indian troops—the army casualties in Kut were mostly Hindu but here the naval casualties were largely Muslim.
The events at Gallipoli and Kut had resurrected the reputation and morale of the Turkish military. The British now needed a decisive victory and a formidable force of 150,000 men was assembled. These men were put under the command of Sir Stanley Maude, one of the most experienced generals in the British empire. In early 1917, this huge army pushed towards Baghdad against determined Turkish resistance. Finally, on the night of 10 March, the British forward positions witnessed a bright glow over Baghdad. The Turks were burning everything of military or economic value before retreating. By noon the next day, General Maude’s troops had occupied the city. Despite the city’s romantic associations, they found Baghdad in shattered ruins—almost all major government buildings had been burned down, shops and homes had been looted, rotting corpses lay everywhere.
The fall of Baghdad also meant that the German agent Wassmuss found himself isolated in southern Iran. Few tribesmen now believed his story of a grand Turko-German army marching to India. However, his greatest failure was not his fading ability to rouse the Tangistani tribesmen but a small error that had major consequences for the German war effort. During his adventures in southern Iran, Wassmuss had been captured on one occasion by a pro-British tribe. Although he made a daring escape, he was forced to leave behind his belongings which included the German diplomatic code book. This code book eventually made its way to ‘Room 40’—the specialist code-breaking unit in London.
Armed with Wassmuss’s code book, the cryptographers uncovered a German plan to unleash all-out submarine warfare against the Allies while simultaneously bringing Mexico and Japan into the war. The Germans had promised the Mexicans that if they entered the war, they would be helped to recover Arizona, Texas and New Mexico from the United States. The British gleefully passed this information to the Americans. On 1 March 1917, newspaper headlines across the United States revealed the story to an outraged American public.8 The sinking of American merchant ships by U-boats over the next few weeks made it clear that the United States could no longer remain neutral. On 6 April, President Wilson declared war on Germany. The fate of the Central Powers was now sealed. Thus, a small mistake by a secret agent in the Persian Gulf had a big influence on the course of world history; the flapping of a butterfly’s wings had caused a hurricane.
The Grand Conspiracy
As already mentioned, many senior leaders of Indian National Congress, including Mahatma Gandhi, opted to collaborate with the British during the First World War. There was an expectation that this would be rewarded with major political concessions after the war. However, not all Indians agreed with this approach and many felt that the war provided a golden opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke. At the forefront of this alternative effort to free India were revolutionaries who believed in using armed rebellion to defeat the British. Most conventional history books and textbooks give the impression that India’s independence movement was a uniquely peaceful one led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. The role of the revolutionaries is usually left out or mentioned as a footnote. As we shall see, they too played a very important role in how events unfolded.
Punjab and Bengal were the two main hubs of the revolutionary movement although there were several others scattered across the country, most notably Varanasi. The movement was initially made up of a number of autonomous groups working in isolation but before the outbreak of war they were already getting networked due to the efforts of Rash Behari Bose and his young lieutenant Sachindra Nath Sanyal. They were also in touch with like-minded activists among the expatriate Indians scattered around the world. One of them was Har Dayal who was studying at St John’s College, Oxford (incidentally, I would attend the same college eight decades later). While in England, Har Dayal was influenced by the ideas of Vinayak Damodar ‘Veer’ Savarkar, a revolutionary then operating out of India House in London.
Savarkar was arrested in 1910 and, despite a dramatic escape attempt in Marseilles, was sent off to prison in Port Blair in the Andamans. Recognizing the risks, Har Dayal shifted to California where he continued to organize support for revolutionary activities among the newly arrived Indian students and immigrants, especially Sikhs from Punjab. In other words, an elaborate revolutionary network was already in place before war was declared. Indeed, the revolutionaries had nearly managed to kill Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy, in December 1912 while he rode on a ceremonial elephant through Delhi’s Chandni Chowk. The Viceroy sustained severe injuries from the bomb but survived; none of the attackers were caught.
When war was declared and it became clear that the British would have to rely heavily on Indian troops, the revolutionaries immediately came up with a plan to take advantage of the situation by instigating a coordinated revolt by Indian regiments. Rash Behari Bose and Sachin Sanyal set about making elaborate arrangements on the ground. They coordinated a large number of clandestine participants—Sikhs returning from North America, revolutionaries in Bengal and regiments primed for mutiny from Punjab to Burma. The date of what would be known as the Ghadar uprising was set for 21 February 1915.
Unfortunately, the uprising unravelled before it began. It had been planned that the sequence of events would be triggered by the regiments in Mian Mir on the north-west frontier and Punjab first rising in revolt. However, just five days before the revolt, an informer called Kirpal Singh revealed the plans to the colonial authorities in Lahore. Bose now decided to bring forward the date to 19 February in order to deny the authorities time to react but by now British intelligence was already on full alert. Police raids captured several of the conspirators, and Indian guards at all armouries were replaced by British ones. The element of surprise had been totally lost. Seeing such decisive action, the soldiers lost their nerve and momentum simply melted away.
The only place that saw a full-scale revolt was Singapore where predominantly Muslim regiments mutinied on 15 February and took over large parts of the island.9 They also freed the Germans captured from Emden and asked them to join the battle but were refused. It took the authorities a full week of fighting, backed by reinforcements, to quell the uprising. Dozens of mutineers would be lined up against a wall on Outram Street and publicly executed by a firing squad.
With his plans unravelling and the authorities closing in, Bose first sought refuge in the narrow lanes of Varanasi where the Sanyal clan could use its network of family and friends to temporarily hide a fugitive. However, as police raids mounted, he decided to escape to Japan where he would keep up his efforts for the next three decades. Sachin Sanyal saw him off at Calcutta’s docks in May but stayed back to organize the remaining revolutionaries.10 They received a morale boost when they heard that the German war machine had decided to back them. A body called the Indian Revolutionary Committee was set up in Berlin and was given full embassy status. Since the United States was still neutral at this stage, the German embassy in Washington DC acquired 30,000 rifles and pistols (plus ammunition) and began to secretly arrange for them to be sent to India.11
Two vessels—a schooner called Annie Larsen and a tanker called Maverick—were hired to take the weapons across the Pacific to Asia where they would be divided into smaller vessels to be carried to India. The idea was that well-armed revolutionaries would capture Calcutta on Christmas Day, 1915. Again, things did not go according to plan. The two ships failed to make their rendezvous on the agreed date and location. Worse, a German agent named Vincent Kraft was arrested in Singapore; he agreed to tell everything in exchange for a large sum of money and being allowed to emigrate to the US under a new identity. Boats carrying weapons to India through Thailand and the Bay of Bengal were intercepted. Finally, in a series of lightning raids, 300 conspirators were arrested in Calcutta and Burma. The Christmas Day plot had been crushed.
As one can see, the Ghadar uprising and the Christmas Day plot were very large-scale plans to overthrow British colonial rule in India. Although they failed, they had both come closer to being executed than most people realize and, with a bit of luck, could well have worked. Ex ante, they were no more audacious than T.E. Lawrence’s exploits in Arabia but Lawrence succeeded while Wassmuss and Bose did not. Even allowing for possible differences in individual competence, it is an illustration of how small twists of fortune can sway the flow of history. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the dynamics set in motion by the revolutionaries did not end here but would influence events in the Second World War and eventually contribute to India gaining freedom in 1947.
Imprisoned by the Black Waters
By early 1916, the colonial government in India had managed to capture a large number of revolutionaries. Several of them were hanged while others were given long prison sentences. This included Sachindra Nath Sanyal who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the dreaded Cellular Jail in Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. It was where the British held those whom they considered the most dangerous—hardened criminals as well as political prisoners considered a serious threat to the empire. It was known in India as ‘Kala Pani’ or the Black Waters.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are a string of Indian islands in the Bay of Bengal. Although separated from the mainland by a large body of water, it was somehow colonized by humans at a very early stage and some local tribes still carry the genetic imprint of the earliest human migrations. Given their location close to major maritime trade routes, it is not surprising that the islands were known to ancient and medieval mariners and are mentioned in several old texts. It is thought that the name ‘Andaman’ is derived from the Malay pronunciation of ‘Hanuman’, the Hindu monkey-god. In the eighteenth century, the Danes, of all people, came to control these islands but failed to establish an economically viable settlement. Eventually they handed over the islands to the British who decided to use it as a penal colony. The Cellular Jail complex was built for this purpose. Barindra Ghosh, younger brother of the famous spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo, would be sent there in 1909 for his revolutionary activities and would spend over a decade there. He has left us vivid descriptions of life inside the prison:12
Each room has a door closed by iron bars only, with no door leaf. On the back wall of the room, at a height of four cubits and a half, there is a small window, closed also with iron rails two inches apart. Of furniture in the room there is a low bedstead one cubit and a half wide and in one corner an earthen pot painted with tar. One must have a most vigilant sleep on such a bed, otherwise even the least careless turn would land the sleeper with a bang on the floor. And the tarred pot is a most marvelous invention to produce equanimity of the soul with regard to smell, for it is the water closet. . . .
It is amazing that Barindra Ghosh was able to write with a sense of humour about a place where he languished for so many years. He tells us that prisoners were made to do hard physical labour—making coir ropes, turning the oil press and so on. However, the prisoners, especially the revolutionaries, were constantly subject to mental and physical torture. This was not done directly by the British warden but through his Pathan subordinates, particularly a certain Khoyedad Khan. These petty officers further recruited enforcers from among the criminals in the prison in order to maintain their writ. The idea was to systematically break the will of the revolutionaries. Ghosh tells us how the petty officers and their enforcers would often sexually assault and rape the teenagers and younger men: ‘The very shame of it prevents them from complaining to the authorities; and even if they do, it is more often than not crying in the wilderness.’
Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress had expected major concessions after the war but they soon realized that Indians would get little in return for their cooperation. Instead, the British introduced the draconian Rowlatt Act in 1919 that gave the authorities sweeping powers to arrest and detain activists. It was the colonial government’s response to fears that the returning Indian soldiers would be susceptible to revolutionary ideas. The law elicited strong protests and, amidst the deteriorating political climate, culminated in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in April 1919. Like the massacre perpetrated by the Dutch in Bali, the cold-blooded murder of so many unarmed men, women and children ended British claims of civilizational superiority.
The colonial government tried to retrieve the situation by giving a general amnesty to several of the revolutionaries including Sachindra Nath Sanyal. The returning revolutionaries now agreed to work with Mahatma Gandhi on a movement of non-violent non-cooperation. The protests spread very quickly and brought the subcontinent to a standstill. It looked like the British authorities had finally been cornered but, just as some form of victory seemed imminent, Gandhi unilaterally suspended the movement. The proximate reason for the decision was an incident in Chauri-Chaura where a mob of protesters set fire to a police station and killed several policemen. Gandhi argued that this incident had violated the principle of non-violence but it caused a permanent schism with the revolutionaries who saw it as hypocrisy. Why did Gandhi have to make such a fuss over a single incident of violence, they argued, when he had been recruiting soldiers for the British just a couple of years earlier?
What particularly incensed the Indian revolutionaries was that only a few weeks earlier the Irish had managed to force the British to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty paving the way for an independent Irish Republic. If a tiny country like Ireland could gain freedom under the nose of the British, why did a large and faraway country like India have to wait? Sachin Sanyal now reverted to organizing the various revolutionary groups under an umbrella organization called the Hindustan Republican Association in 1924 and under it began to build the Hindustan Republican Army. The choice of names shows how the success of the original Irish Republican Army (not to be confused with later versions) had inspired Indian revolutionaries of that time. The Irish influence on India’s freedom struggle is barely recalled today.
It was during this period that Sachin Sanyal came in contact with a young, rising star in the Congress party—Subhash Chandra Bose, later to be known simply as ‘Netaji’ (literally, The Leader). Sanyal would be sent back to prison a few years later and many of his followers would be killed or executed, but Subhash Bose would leverage the international networks pioneered by the revolutionaries in his attempt to build an armed revolt against the British during the Second World War.
The Fall of Singapore
Countless Hollywood films have led us to believe that the attack on Pearl Harbour marks Japan’s entry into the Second World War. In reality, the very first shots were fired at 10.20 p.m. on 7 December 1941 on the beaches of Kota Bharu on the north-eastern corner of the Malay peninsula.13Given the differences in time zones, this took place a little before the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbour. Despite resistance from Indian troops in the area, the Japanese were soon storming the beaches and landing men and equipment. By 4.30 a.m., Japanese bombers were making raids on Singapore.
To be fair, British commanders in Malaya had anticipated the possibility of such an attack but had thinly spread their troops as they did not know exactly where the landing would take place. Moreover, the best Indian regiments had already been deployed on the other side of the Indian Ocean in Africa where they evicted the Italians from Ethiopia before engaging Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Libya.14 The Allied troops in Malaya were inexperienced new recruits from India and Australia who, in many cases, had not completed their basic training. What made it worse was they were not backed either from the air or from the sea. The small number of outdated aircraft based in Asia would prove no match against the Mitsubishi Zero.
Soon the Japanese were landing troops at will and making their way down the peninsula. The defence crumbled so quickly that in many areas the invading force cycled over long distances without encountering serious resistance. When British Prime Minister Churchill realized what was happening, he ordered that Singapore should be defended to the last. This was based on a widely held belief that the island was an impregnable fortress. He also ordered the cruiser HMS Repulse and the battleship HMS Prince of Wales to sail to Singapore. Their arrival in Singapore on 2 December brought some cheer to the defenders but military strategists should have realized that they were sitting ducks without air cover. By 10 December, both of them had been sunk by torpedo bombers.
Recognizing the deteriorating situation, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival ordered his remaining troops to fall back on Singapore. Nonetheless, there was still a sense of confidence that Singapore would hold. Even as the Japanese were closing in on the island in mid-January 1942, Robinson’s department store was still advertising ‘Snappy American Frocks for day and afternoon wear $12.50’ and the Raffles Hotel was still organizing dances. P&O was even running regular passenger services to Calcutta—$185 for first class and $62 for second class.15
By the first week of February, however, the Japanese had taken over Johor and were bombarding the island from the air and by artillery. There is an oft-repeated legend that Singapore’s big guns pointed south towards the sea in anticipation of a naval assault and could not be turned around against attackers from the north. This is not entirely accurate. The problem was that they were supplied with armour-piercing ammunition meant to be used against ships and were not effective against infantry. So, although the guns could be turned 360 degrees, there is an element of truth in the old legend.
Percival now had to guess where Japanese commander Tomoyuki Yamashita would make his main assault. Eventually, he decided to place his best troops to the north-east. This proved to be a big mistake as the main Japanese landing took place from the north-west where the Johor Strait is at its narrowest. Overcoming resistance from Australian units defending this sector, the Japanese were soon closing in on the city. On 13 February, the 1st Malay Regiment attempted a last desperate defence of Pasir Panjang ridge. A colonial-era bungalow on the ridge is now a museum dedicated to their last stand (most of the hand-to-hand combat happened just below the museum in what is now the car park).
By this point the centre of the city, including the underground command centre at Fort Canning, was being pounded constantly and civilian casualties were mounting. The situation was clearly hopeless and on 15 February, Percival drove to the Ford Motor factory in Bukit Timah to personally discuss the terms of surrender with Yamashita. It says something of the dire situation that Percival had to borrow a car from the Bata Shoe Company in order to go for his meeting. Thus began the Japanese occupation of Singapore. For the Chinese population, in particular, this would be a period of extreme hardship. The Indians would face hardship too but for them the period has a different significance. Another example of how the same history can have different meanings for different people.
The Indian National Army
When the Second World War broke out, the British again looked to India for troops and support; some 2.5 million Indians would participate in the Allied war effort. However, having learned from the experience of the previous war, Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress decided not to cooperate with the colonial government and launched the non-violent Quit India movement. Note that not all Indian leaders agreed with the decision to launch the Quit India movement as they felt that opposition to Fascism was the greater cause. Still others felt that the war had produced a second golden opportunity to throw off colonial rule through armed revolt. By this time the senior revolutionary leaders from the previous war had mostly been killed or were in prison, so it fell on Netaji Subhash Bose to take up this cause.
Subhash Bose had drifted away from the Congress but the British still considered him a dangerous leader and had placed him under house arrest in Calcutta. In early 1941, he made a dramatic escape and made his way in disguise through Afghanistan and the Soviet Union to Germany where he requested help from the Nazi government. He was treated well and given a patient hearing but he soon realized that the Germans were unwilling or unable to commit large resources to his cause.
While Netaji was wondering about his next move, he received news of the fall of Singapore. Soon he heard that veteran revolutionary Rash Behari Bose was organizing surrendered Indian soldiers into the Indian National Army (INA) that would fight alongside the Japanese (recall that Rash Behari had escaped to Japan in 1915 after the collapse of the Ghadar uprising). Netaji next travelled by submarine around the Cape of Good Hope to Singapore where the older Bose handed him the command of the INA on 4 July 1943. The handover ceremony took place at the Cathay Cinema theatre where Netaji delivered a rousing speech. The next day he reviewed the INA troops at the Padang grounds in the middle of the city. Of the 40,000 Indians who had surrendered in Singapore, the majority opted for the INA.16 S.R. Nathan, a future President of Singapore, would witness many of these events as a boy.17
Some of the landmarks related to Netaji’s stay in Singapore can still be discerned. The Cathay theatre has been turned into a shopping mall but part of the old facade has been preserved. The open grounds of Padang and several of the surrounding buildings are still around. So is the old Ramkrishna Mission compound where he frequently withdrew to meditate. The bungalow where Netaji lived, No. 61 Meyer Road, has been pulled down and replaced by a high-rise condominium. It was here that he wrote down the Proclamation of the Provisional Government of Free India. The neighbourhood is popular with expatriate Indians today, perhaps some sort of subliminal memory of its historical links!
Meanwhile, the Japanese had taken over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and handed de jure control to Netaji. This would be the only piece of Indian territory that the Provisional Government would ever control but, given its associations with the revolutionaries, it had great symbolic value. The INA now joined the Japanese on their march through Burma to the eastern gates of India. The British responded by rushing a large number of troops to defend the line. Through the summer of 1944, the two sides simultaneously fought ferocious battles in Kohima (now capital of the state of Nagaland) and in Imphal (capital of Manipur). These are considered among the most hard-fought battles of the Second World War.18 The climax was a closely fought hand-to-hand struggle over a tennis court in Kohima. The Japanese lost and the tide of war turned in favour of the Allies. The campaign would cost the Japanese side 53,000 in dead or missing while the Allies lost 16,500.
Churchill’s Dirty Secret
From an Indian perspective, the tragedy of these battles was that Indian soldiers fought and died bravely on both sides, sacrificing their lives for someone else’s empires. Even worse was the famine that killed 3 million people in Bengal in 1943. Crop failure and the disruption of rice supplies from Burma may have initially triggered the problem but the British colonial government did little to provide relief. Instead, they commandeered all the boats in order to deny the invading army the means to traverse the riverine terrain. This meant that locals could not even fish.
Meticulous research by writer Madhusree Mukerjee shows how Churchill was fully aware of the dire situation but seems to have deliberately delayed and diverted supplies as part of a scorched earth strategy against the advancing Japanese.19 He is reported to have remarked that Indians were a ‘beastly people with a beastly religion’ and that the famine was caused by Bengalis who ‘bred like rabbits’. There is a strong case for terming this genocide.
As the Japanese retreated, the INA fought against the Allied advance in Burma but by early 1945 it had effectively disintegrated. A day after Japan surrendered on 15 August, Subhash Bose flew from Singapore to Taiwan. What happened next is a mystery. The official line is that he died in a plane crash in Taiwan but the story was disputed right from the start. It is beyond the scope of this book to evaluate the evidence for and against various theories except to say it remains a highly controversial matter to this day.
Netaji’s decision to ask Axis powers for help also remains controversial but this is unfair. First of all, the British had behaved appallingly from the Jallianwala massacre to the Bengal famine and, from an Indian perspective, there was little to morally distinguish the Allies from the Axis. They were just two sets of evil empires and Netaji cannot be faulted for trying to use every available opportunity to free his enslaved people.
Secondly, he was following up on international support networks established by the revolutionaries a generation earlier. We know that Subhash Bose repeatedly met Sachin Sanyal in the late 1930s when the latter was briefly out of prison. The links between the two are not widely known but Sachin Sanyal’s son, then a teenager, was witness to these clandestine meetings and personally recounted them to me. On one occasion, the Japanese counsel was also present. In other words, one cannot judge Netaji’s actions and the formation of the INA without taking into account the longer history of the revolutionary movement and its long-standing connections with Germany and Japan. This was not a case of developing a sudden love for Fascism.
The Decisive Rebellion
From the Ghadar plot to the INA, the revolutionaries had made several attempts to incite a revolt among Indian troops on whom the British empire relied. So far, they had not succeeded but their efforts did eventually bear fruit. The general public had been largely unaware of the activities of the INA due to wartime censorship but it caused a sensation when the prisoners of war were brought back and put on trial. As their stories circulated among the troops, rumblings of discontent began to grow. It culminated in the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 18–23 February 1946.20
The episode was triggered by a minor altercation in Bombay over the quality of food being served to sailors but, given the overall mood, it blew quickly into a full-fledged revolt. The sailors stopped obeying their officers and took control of a number of ships and shore establishments. Remember that the sailors were not novices; this was just a few months after the war and the British were dealing with battle-hardened veterans. Soon they had taken over the wireless communications sets on their ships and were coordinating their actions. As the news spread across the city, students, industrial workers and others went on strike and marched in support of the mutineers. Next, sailors in Calcutta and Karachi also mutinied. At its height, the unrest involved seventy-eight ships, twenty shore establishments and 20,000 sailors. When Baloch and Gurkha troops in Karachi were sent in to quell the revolt, they flatly refused to fire on the sailors. Officers and pilots of the Royal Indian Air Force similarly refused to help the authorities.
Unfortunately for the mutineers, they received no support from the Indian political leadership of the time. Both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League asked them to surrender.21 Subhash Bose was missing, and the senior revolutionary leaders Har Dayal, Rash Behari Bose and Sachin Sanyal, who had tried so hard to trigger exactly such a mutiny, were no longer alive. Lacking political leadership, the sailors eventually surrendered. Despite various assurances, large numbers of sailors would be court-martialled and dismissed (note that none of the dismissed would be reinstated by the governments of Pakistan and India after Independence).
Although the episode ended peacefully, the British colonial administration must have realized that they were rapidly losing control over their Indian soldiers. Just a week after the naval mutiny, the signals unit of the army in Jabbalpur also rebelled.22 It was quite clear that another large-scale revolt was only a matter of time. The Indian soldier was one of the bulwarks of the British empire and once his loyalty had been undermined, the British empire began to unwind not just in the Indian subcontinent but worldwide. The revolutionaries had finally succeeded.
It is quite telling that the role of the revolutionaries in India’s freedom struggle is barely presented as a footnote in official Indian histories. Having come to power in 1947, the Indian National Congress would ensure that story would be told in a way that focused exclusively on its own role. The Naval Mutiny is almost never mentioned and I learned about it accidentally after stumbling across a memorial tucked away in Colaba, Mumbai. The dominance of the Congress party’s narrative was helped by the fact that it fitted the face-saving British account that they had peacefully granted freedom to India at the end of a successful ‘civilizing’ mission. This is not to suggest that Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress did not play an important role but merely to point out that India’s freedom struggle was made up of many streams.
The Majapahit Dream
The Dutch had simply crumbled when the Japanese invaded their colonies in the East Indies and had put up very little resistance. For their own interests, the Japanese had in turn encouraged a number of nationalists like Sukarno during their occupation. So, two days after Japan surrendered, the Indonesian leaders made a proclamation of independence. There were a number of groups that had emerged in the political vacuum including Islamists and Communists but Sukarno’s Republicans were the strongest. The problem was that the Dutch had every intention of returning and claiming back their colonies. For the moment, however, they did not have the resources to reoccupy the islands and so they asked for help from the British who landed a large contingent of Indian troops near Surabaya.23 This resulted in heavy fighting and the British commander, General Mallaby, was assassinated. The Indonesians were eventually pushed out but there had been significant casualties on both sides. The episode further added to growing dissatisfaction among the Indian troops who did not see why they should risk their lives for such a cause. Some of them switched sides. As the unrest continued to spread across the islands, the Allies were forced to deploy surrendered Japanese troops in order to maintain control.24
An important factor that bolstered Indonesian resolve was that events seemed to be playing out an ancient prophecy. The twelfth-century Javanese king Jayabaya is said to have prophesied that three centuries of rule by white men would end with the coming of short yellow men who would leave after just one harvest. Other than the minor discrepancy that the Japanese had stayed for three harvests, the prophecy seemed to be coming true.
In early 1946, the Dutch began to land thousands of troops on Bali backed by support from the air. They faced fierce resistance from a small guerrilla force organized hurriedly by Ngurah Rai. The guerrillas were eventually cornered and Ngurah Rai ordered the Puputan. Yet again, the Balinese fought to the last man. The international airport in Bali is named after the guerrilla leader who was killed during the last stand.
Over the months, the Dutch managed to take over many of the main towns with the support of Allied troops but the Republicans continued to control the countryside. Realizing that the Republicans were too well entrenched to be wished away, the Dutch finally accepted the Linggadjati agreement on 15 November 1946 which gave the Republicans authority over the islands of Sumatra, Java and Madura. The two sides also agreed to work towards the establishment of the United States of Indonesia. Unfortunately, the Dutch were merely buying time in order to organize themselves. In May 1947, their troops occupied large parts of Java and Sumatra and cut the Republican forces into small enclaves. The country descended into war. An attempt by the United States to force a compromise also failed.
Amidst the chaos, a daredevil pilot from Odisha called Biju Patnaik flew secret missions into Java and rescued two key Indonesian rebel leaders from being captured (he would later go on to become the chief minister of Odisha).25 Prime Minister Nehru, meanwhile, organized the Asian Conference in New Delhi that pressured the UN Security Council to take action against the Dutch. It is remarkable that the first foreign policy action taken by newly independent India was to support Indonesia’s freedom movement. It was as if an ancient civilizational kinship had been suddenly rekindled. It was also appropriate that someone from Kalinga had played an important role in the sequence of events. It is said that Sukarno named his daughter Megawati, meaning ‘Goddess of the Clouds’ in Sanskrit, in honour of Biju Patnaik’s heroics in the sky.
The UN had forced a ceasefire but the Dutch were still not prepared to leave. They tried to instigate different parts of the archipelago against the Republicans using the bogey of Javan domination. Finally, the United States threatened the Dutch with cutting off Marshall Plan aid and forced them to accept a provisional government with Sukarno as President and Mohammad Hatta as Prime Minister on 27 December 1949. Sukarno would spend the next decade securing the territorial claims of his fledgling country against secessionists, communist rebels and the continued interference of the Dutch. It is said that he was driven by a vision of re-establishing the Majapahit empire and that a map of the medieval empire hung in his office.26 It is another example of how current events are often influenced by civilizational memories that reassert themselves after being buried for centuries.
The Unravelling
Once India gained independence in 1947, the whole colonial project in the Indian Ocean began to unwind. One by one, all the countries in the region began to demand independence and the Europeans were soon reduced to fighting a rearguard action. Their reduced status was clearly demonstrated by the Suez Crisis of 1956. The sequence of events was triggered by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser who nationalized the Suez Canal Company. The British, with support from the French and the Israelis, invaded Egypt in order to take control of the canal. Although the invaders succeeded militarily, they faced severe criticism from the United States and the Soviet Union and were forced to withdraw meekly. The episode can be said to mark the end of Britain’s reign as a world power.27
Within the next fifteen years, the British and other colonial powers would free virtually all their colonies in the Indian Ocean rim. The withdrawal was far from peaceful and involved many conflicts including anti-communist operations in Malaya and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Tens of thousands of Europeans went back ‘home’, including those who had been born in the colonies and many of mixed parentage. Nevertheless, there were exceptions. In South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a dominant white minority was strong enough to remain in power for several years after the departure of colonial backing. In Australia, of course, those of European origin had replaced the indigenous population as the majority.
Perhaps the most determined attempt to retain colonial possessions was made by the French in Vietnam. In the political vacuum left by Japan’s surrender, the Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh had taken over Hanoi and declared independence. Nonetheless, the country was occupied by Allied troops—British in the south and Chinese in the north—and the French were soon given back control of the administration. The French made several promises about granting freedom but it became apparent that they had no intention of leaving. Things dragged on till 1954 when the French assembled a large military force, backed from the air, in order to expel the Viet Minh from the north of the country. However, the Vietnamese outwitted and trapped the colonial army in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and inflicted a devastating defeat. After this, the French departed quickly leaving the north of the country in the hands of Ho Chi Minh and the south with a puppet regime backed by the Americans.
The departure of the Europeans unfortunately did not mean that the Indian Ocean rim became a postcolonial utopia. Instead, the region would experience years of war and genocide. The Vietnam War would consume the country till North Vietnamese tanks finally crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon in April 1975. Next door in Cambodia, almost two million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1978 in a brutal attempt to create a communist agrarian paradise. In East Pakistan, the West Pakistani army perpetrated a genocide that killed as many as three million Bengalis and pushed ten million as refugees into India. This resulted in the Indo-Pak War of 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh. In the western Indian Ocean, Ethiopia and Eritrea would fight a long, bitter war that only ended in 1991. Yemen would be locked in a civil war between the north and the south.
The Solomonic dynasty in Ethiopia had outlived the Arab and the European expansionism but it did not survive the social forces unleashed by modernity. An aging Haile Selassie was removed from the throne in a military coup in 1974. Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, in his classic book The Emperor, has left us a vivid account of the last days of a medieval court struggling to cope with changing times.28 A few years later, Kapuscinski would witness the Iranian revolution and write about the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran.
The unwinding of the European empires also disrupted the commercial and human networks that had been created under the colonial umbrella. The Indian communities scattered across the region were particularly vulnerable. For instance, there were over a million Indians in Burma and they accounted for more than half the population of Rangoon in the 1930s. After the military coup in 1962, their businesses were forcibly nationalized and large numbers were expelled. The Indians in Uganda were similarly given ninety days to pack up and leave by Idi Amin in 1972. They were allowed to take only 55 pounds with them. Some went back to India but many went to the United Kingdom where they would rebuild their lives.29
Under French rule, Saigon too had been home to a significant number of Indians. They were not expelled but as economic conditions deteriorated during the war, they gradually drifted away. There are still two prominent Hindu temples in the middle of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). They have been maintained quite well by the government. There was a lady official deputed to act as the priest at the Mariamman temple when I visited it in 2015. She took her job quite seriously and, despite the language barrier, solemnly carried out her own interpretation of Hindu rituals. I wondered if she was a descendant of Kaundinya and the Naga princess.
Singapore, Alone
The first subregion in the Indian Ocean rim to witness rapid economic change was the Persian Gulf. Commercially viable oil was first discovered at Well Number One at Masjid-e-Suleiman, Iran, in 1908. Bahrain was producing oil by 1932 followed by Dammam in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait by 1938.30 By the 1970s, the wealth accumulated from oil exports had transformed the economic and social fabric of the region. The boom sucked in construction workers, engineers, clerks, corporate managers, nurses, teachers and other service providers from the rest of the world, particularly the Indian subcontinent. The small port of Dubai, once known for the pearl trade, did not itself have much oil. Nonetheless, it positioned itself as the key commercial hub in the region and evolved over the next few decades into the glitzy city we see today. In contrast to the oil-driven success of the Gulf states, nevertheless, the most remarkable economic transformation in the Indian Ocean rim was arguably achieved by a tiny, crowded island with so few natural resources that it even had to import water: Singapore.
In 1963, the British colonies of Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo (Sabah) agreed to enter into a federation with the states of the Malay peninsula in order to form Malaysia.31 The main objection came from Indonesia’s Sukarno who saw it as a ‘neocolonial plot’ to thwart his plan of rebuilding the Majapahit empire. Trouble began to brew soon afterwards as the Malay politicians in Kuala Lumpur looked with suspicion at the Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) led by a firebrand socialist called Lee Kuan Yew. They worried that he would leverage his base in Singapore to gain inroads into Sabah, Sarawak and the Chinese population in the peninsula. Matters were further complicated by widespread race riots in Singapore that killed twenty-three people. Dr Mahathir Mohamad, then a young backbencher, accused the PAP of being ‘positively anti-Malay’.32 Many readers will be surprised to know that this champion of Malay rights was himself not a pure Malay but of Indian origin; a Nandi Varman in reverse!
Given this atmosphere of suspicion, the Malay politicians decided to squeeze Singapore out of the federation and, on the morning of 9 August 1965, the city state’s proclamation of independence was announced over the radio. Later that day, Lee Kuan Yew broke down in tears at an emotional press conference. The future of the tiny, slum-ridden island looked grim. The British added to the prognosis by announcing that they would be shutting down their military base—they no longer had an empire and had no need to control the Malacca Straits.
Lee Kuan Yew, now Prime Minister, knew that he needed to quickly find a new economic engine for his city state. He decided to ask multinational companies to set up their manufacturing hub in Singapore by offering them rule of law, ease of doing business and low taxes. This was not only a break from his early socialist rhetoric, but was very different from what other newly independent countries were doing at that time (and much more in tune with the ideals of Stamford Raffles). Foreign capital financed capacities in sectors ranging from ready-made garments to oil refining. The Singaporeans also used the naval facilities abandoned by the British to build out a shipbuilding and repair cluster. The economic strategy was so successful that, despite a setback during the Oil Shock of 1974, Singapore soon needed to import workers!
Nonetheless, the experience of the Oil Shock taught the government that the economy needed to be diversified and upgraded. Thus, in the 1980s, new industries like electronics and pharmaceuticals were brought in. Meanwhile, the government invested in top-quality infrastructure and public housing. All of this turned Singapore into a first world country by the time Lee Kuan Yew stepped down as Prime Minister in 1990 (although he would remain in the Cabinet as a mentor). This was a truly remarkable achievement.
Things went well till the Asian Crisis of 1997 devastated the economies of South East Asia. Although Singapore was not itself in crisis, it was impacted as the main financial centre for the region. This was followed by a series of shocks—the bursting of the information technology bubble in 2000, the 9/11 attacks in New York and the panic over the SARS epidemic in 2002. All of these events hurt Singapore and there were many observers who argued that Singapore had run out of luck and would face long-term stagnation. Singapore was too expensive to compete in most traditional sectors and a new growth dynamic was needed.
The government decided to take a gamble and turn Singapore into Asia’s ‘Global City’.33 It was an audacious idea. Other global cities like London and New York had evolved organically over a very long time but Singapore would attempt to deliberately turn into one by strategically encouraging sectors like higher education, entertainment and international finance. Within a decade, the skyline was transformed by iconic towers and ‘super-trees’ while the influx of professionals for the new sectors pushed the population to 5.5 million (more than double the 1.9 million at independence). Somehow the plan worked. When Lee Kuan Yew passed away in 2015, he left behind a city that was arguably the most advanced in the world. Those unfamiliar with Singapore’s history tend to assume that its success is due to the efficient implementation of a grand plan. Far from it, modern Singapore is the result of constant adaptation and tinkering in order to deal with a complex and evolving world.
A New Dawn
The years 1990–91 witnessed major shifts in world history. The Soviet Union, till then considered a superpower, collapsed without a shot being fired. The Indian Ocean rim too saw major changes. After decades of being stifled by the socialist economic model imposed by Nehru, India finally began to liberalize its economy. As discussed in my first book, The Indian Renaissance, this would have profound implications for India’s economic and social trajectory.34 Meanwhile in South Africa, the apartheid regime finally began to crumble. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990 after twenty-eight years. He had been sent to prison in 1962 and at one point had faced execution for fomenting armed rebellion. Yet, he had kept the faith for all those years and on three occasions had rejected conditional offers of release. After his release, he took over as the leader of the African National Congress and began the difficult process of negotiations that would finally end white minority rule.35
My first visit to South Africa was in the tumultuous summer of 1993.36 I was then a student at Oxford University and had somehow managed to get myself funded to work on a development project in a remote tribal ‘homeland’ for three months. My passport still read ‘Not valid for the Republic of South Africa’ although the Indian government had removed restrictions just a few weeks earlier. My visa was not stamped on the passport but given on a separate sheet of paper. The South Africa I visited was still heavy with the remnants of the apartheid era. Racial segregation had been abolished only a few months earlier but public toilets still read ‘White’ and ‘Coloured’. Nelson Mandela had been freed but the white-run government was still in place. I lived and worked in the tribal homeland of KaNgwane along the Swaziland border—one of the many nominally autonomous reservations created for the black population (it is now part of the province of Mpumalanga). However, even in the remote savannah grassland and hills of the Low Veld, there was palpable tension in the air.
To the outside world, South Africa’s internal tensions appeared as black-versus-white but the situation on the ground was much more complicated. The white population was split between those who favoured the changes and those who clung on to hopes of some form of return to segregation. There were also the old suspicions between English-speaking whites of British origin and Afrikaans-speaking Boers of Dutch origin. The wounds of the Boer wars of 1880–1881 and 1899–1902 had still not been completely healed. The black population was similarly divided on tribal lines. The Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party was suspicious of the African National Congress (Nelson Mandela and many ANC leaders are from the rival Xhosa tribe). As the apartheid regime crumbled, these rivalries increasingly spiralled into bloodshed. In just one of the incidents, dubbed the Boipatong massacre, forty people were killed and many more were injured. By the summer of 1993, all sides were stockpiling arms. The camp where I stayed was on the route used to smuggle arms from nearby Mozambique and on one occasion my pick-up truck (locally called a Bakkie) was hijacked at gunpoint. Luckily I was not driving it at that time but my co-worker had to walk back many miles to camp. The vehicle was found abandoned a few days later, probably after being used to smuggle guns.
As if this was not complicated enough, there were still other groups including Indians and those of mixed race. The latter formed a large segment of the population in the western half of the country, but found themselves stuck in a cultural and political no man’s land. The Indian population was scattered but formed a significant concentration around the eastern city of Durban. Although it had faced discrimination under apartheid, the industrious community had come to control much of the country’s retail and wholesale trade and had become fairly prosperous. Not surprisingly, all other groups resented them. In fact, virtually every group suspected that the Indians were funding its rivals!
Over that summer, I witnessed riots at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, attended political rallies in seething townships, and listened to the hum of distant gunfire. A white-supremacist group even managed briefly to take over the World Trade Centre, Kempton Park, where multiparty negotiations were taking place. South Africa was a country on the boil and I met worried white families who were making plans of leaving the country and moving to the United States, Britain or Australia.
As I look back to that period, I realize how easily the country could have gone into a spiral of violence and retribution. The South Africa we see today owes much to the philosophical evolution and personal example of one man. It would have taken very little for the country to have turned out as another Zimbabwe or even another Somalia. It is Nelson Mandela’s extraordinary achievement that he was able to somehow reconcile the country’s many internal contradictions and carry people along with him. Equally commendable is the fact that, unlike many leaders of newly freed countries, he did not yield to the temptation of holding on to power till his death or starting a dynasty. He became President in 1994 and stepped down in 1999 after just one term. Modern historians tend to be dismissive of the ‘Great Man Theory’ of history but Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew are proof that individuals do matter. It is noteworthy that, despite being very determined leaders, both of them allowed their philosophies and ideas to evolve with changing circumstances. Therein may lie the secret of their success.
Bombay to Mumbai
The evolution of Mumbai encapsulates the social and economic changes witnessed by India since independence. When India became a Republic in 1950, Calcutta was no longer the capital but it was still the most important commercial and cultural centre. With a population of 2.6 million, it was by far the largest urban cluster in the country. Bombay was India’s second largest city with a population of almost 1.5 million. Madras was much smaller at 0.8 million.37
Bombay’s financial and commercial heart was still in and around the old Fort area although an extension had been added in the form of Ballard Estate during the First World War. Further north, the cotton mills of Lower Parel hummed with activity and attracted migrants. Although modern innovations like telephones and automobiles were leading to changes in how business was done, this was still a world that would have been recognizable to Premchand Roychand. The first big shift came in the 1970s with the construction of Nariman Point on reclaimed land near the southern tip of the island (not far from Fort). It was an unfortunate period in history for a construction boom and Nariman Point became home to a collection of exceptionally ugly office towers. Nonetheless, it created a cluster of relatively modern corporate offices. Its success in attracting corporate offices was helped by the decline of Calcutta which was wracked by violence from left-wing extremists (dubbed ‘Naxalites’) and militant trade unionism in the 1970s and ’80s. As the old capital declined, one by one, companies shifted their headquarters to Bombay. It too witnessed a period of labour unrest which led to the closure of many mills in the Lower Parel area but Bombay’s overall business culture remained intact and it emerged as India’s commercial capital.
In 1990–91, India’s socialist economic model collapsed and the crisis forced the country to start liberalizing the economy. The corrupt system of industrial licensing was dismantled and rules were eased for foreign investment. As foreign banks and multinationals entered the country, they bid up prices of the limited stock of commercial real estate and, within a few years, Nariman Point had some of the most expensive real estate in the world. This was ironical as many of the office blocks were shoddy and crumbling, and had elevators that were so slow and unreliable that it was often preferable to use the tobacco-spit stained stairs. Still, the country’s business elite was a small club and everyone who mattered lived and worked in the southern tip of Bombay in the 1990s. Anyone sitting in the lobby of the Oberoi hotel in Nariman Point would have seen the who’s who of India’s business elite cutting deals with foreign investors. Self-important consultants walked hurriedly to meetings with neatly bound presentations tucked under their arms while speaking into their newly acquired Nokia phones.
The socialist period, despite the rhetoric, had effectively perpetuated the privileges of a small elite. In Delhi, this elite lived in the centre of the city, dubbed Lutyens’ Delhi. In Bombay, the elite lived and worked in the southern tip—Malabar Hill, Cuffe Parade and Marine Drive, all within easy reach of Nariman Point and Fort. This meant that better urban amenities—bars, restaurants, colonial-era clubs, schools and so on—were also concentrated in the southern tip. In turn, this imposed a peculiar socio-economic hierarchy on the city where one’s position in the pecking order determined the distance one lived from Nariman Point (only Bollywood was exempt from this as it had its own cluster in Bandra–Juhu).
Given the spiralling real estate prices, a poor migrant had little choice other than to live in a slum but even a white-collar newcomer, with a well-paying job, would have to either rent a room as a ‘paying guest’ or opt for a far-off northern suburb like Borivali or Kandivali. Since jobs were concentrated in the southern tip, the office day began with a long journey in a tightly packed train followed by a hop by ‘share-taxi’ to one’s office; in the evening one did the same thing in reverse. This rough commute still defines the experience of many but taught me one of the crucial lessons in life: Never get into the Virar Fast if you only want to go as far as Bandra. Readers from Mumbai will instantly know what I mean.
By the turn of the century, however, the dynamics of the city began to change. The old, derelict mills of Lower Parel were gradually converted into offices, condominiums and malls. The Phoenix Mills complex, now a popular entertainment and shopping hub, was one of the first to experience this change. Further north, a new financial district emerged in Bandra-Kurla. This created new hubs of activity in the middle of the city. Office towers and five-star hotels mushroomed even further north near the international airport. Within a decade, most banks and corporates shifted from Nariman Point to the glass-and-chrome towers of these new clusters. In many ways, these changes democratized the city as the old elite gave way to a confident new middle class; the South Bombay accent simply counted for less. Thus, Bombay became Mumbai.
The Churn of History
The long history of the Indian Ocean is one where the unfolding of events is the result of complex interactions between myriad factors—the monsoon winds, geography, human migrations, technology, religion, culture, the deeds of individuals and perhaps occasionally the whims of the gods. It followed no predetermined path or grand plan, but is the story of long cycles, dead ends and unintended consequences, of human triumphs and extraordinary bravery but also of treachery and inexplicable human cruelty. There are many shades of grey along the way.
The complex, adaptive nature of history is a warning that a linear narrative based on a unidimensional framework is necessarily misleading. This is true even when the narrative is based on ‘scientific’ evidence such as genetics. For example, if we tried today to reconstruct the history of the British Raj in India based solely on genetic data, we would find plenty of evidence of Gujarati and Punjabi genes in Britain but very little British DNA in India. A lazy researcher would then jump to the conclusion that it was India that colonized Britain!
A corollary is that the path of history flows neither from nor to Utopia. Indeed, the attempts to ‘civilize’ others and impose utopias have been the source of much human misery and are almost always based on some unidimensional interpretation of history. This book has been written at a time that the Indian Ocean rim is enjoying a period of peace and prosperity after many centuries of colonization, war and famine. However, the failed state of Somalia and renewed hostilities in Yemen remind us how fragile this peace can be.
It is also remarkable how many continuities remain through all these centuries of change. The monsoon winds may no longer dictate where ships can sail but they are still important to the economic lives of hundreds of millions who depend on them for the annual rains. Some continuities run so deep that we hardly notice them. For instance, certain ancient cultural ideas continue to impact us to this day despite layers of later influences. We saw how matrilineal customs were an important aspect of history in the eastern but not in the western Indian Ocean rim. Perhaps this explains why we have seen so many female leaders in countries ranging from the Philippines to the Indian subcontinent: Corazon Aquino, Megawati Sukarnoputri, Aung San Suu Kyi, Indira Gandhi, Sheikh Hasina, Sirimavo Bandaranaike to name just a few. Notice how these women leaders were able to occupy positions of power irrespective of ethnicity, culture and religion. While it is true that many of them inherited their position, the contrast is stark when one compares this with the almost complete absence of female leaders in the western Indian Ocean rim from the Persian Gulf, down to the Swahili coast to southern Africa. Even the exceptions—Madagascar and Mauritius—prove the rule as their cultural roots derive from the eastern Indian Ocean.
While researching this book I also came across numerous instances of how the lives of ordinary individuals had been impacted by the churn of people and empires in the Indian Ocean. Take, for instance, the story of Odakkal Mohammad who was born on 15 August 1927 in Mundappalam (now in the state of Kerala). His family claimed descent from Yemeni merchants who had settled here in the fourteenth century. In 1942, when barely fifteen, he was thrown out of school for wearing a black badge in protest against the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi. Too scared of being scolded by his father for this, Mohammad decided to run away from home and eventually ended up in the Royal Indian Navy as an electrical artificer.
The Second World War was raging at that time and Mohammad saw action on a number of occasions. After the war, he was posted to Bombay where he would participate in the Naval Revolt of 1946. When the mutiny was suppressed, he was dismissed from the navy with a certificate that read: ‘Discharged in Disgrace from His Majesty’s Service’. Mohammad tore up the paper and flung it at the British officer. The following year, India became independent on his twentieth birthday. Since the mutineers were never reabsorbed into the navy, Mohammad tried his hand at many jobs before getting involved in protests against Portuguese rule in Goa in 1955. He was arrested by the Portuguese and spent some time in prison before being released. After several more adventures, including cycling across India, he became a tour guide in Agra where he met and married a Christian nurse Mariamma on 15 August 1964. Decades later he would return to his village in Kerala where he was living at the time this book was written. This extraordinary story was narrated to me by his son Commodore Odakkal Johnson as we hunted, amidst torrential monsoon rain, for an almost forgotten memorial for WWI sailors in Mumbai’s old port area.
This book is concerned with the past but the wheels of history roll relentlessly forward. What does the future hold? Even as I was completing this book, there were signs that the Indian Ocean may become the theatre of a new geopolitical rivalry between India and China. Those who remember history will know that the Indian Ocean has seen the likes of Rajendra Chola and Zheng He before. They will also know to expect the unexpected. After all, no one who saw Zheng He’s magnificent Treasure Fleet would have believed that, a few decades later, a small country in the Iberian peninsula would open the Indian Ocean to centuries of European domination. If there is one lesson from this history it is this: Time devours the greatest of men and the mightiest of empires.