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The great force that now embarked on reconquering British Asia saw itself as the new ‘forgotten army’. British India provided the bulk of its manpower. The subcontinent was seething with discontent, directed and channelled by the Indian National Congress whose leaders the British had reluctantly released from jail as the war drew to its close. Official monitors reported that local people were relieved that the fighting had ended but were too exhausted and apprehensive about the future to indulge in anything more than perfunctory celebration. Indians, Burmese and Malayans were also horrified by the barbarity they had witnessed during the war’s ending and the future dangers it portended. The Bengal press adviser reported to the governor that people believed ‘the situation did not call for such indiscriminate havoc; and that the readiness to use such means has lowered the moral prestige of the United Nations’.1 The fiery nationalist apparatchik Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, general secretary of the Indian National Congress, commented that: ‘Entire cities, children, the old, animals and all have been wiped out. What a demonstration of the limitless cruelty of Western civilisation.’ Ominously, he went on to link Western barbarism with what he saw as the British attempt to perpetuate differences between Hindus and Muslims in India.2 Lord Wavell, viceroy of India and Patel’s main sparring partner, agreed about the atomic bomb: ‘It is not a weapon that any thinking man would willingly have put into the hands of the present-day world.’3
Indians asked themselves what was the point in condemning German and Japanese atrocities if the Allies themselves were prepared to massacre civilians on such a massive scale. Others were as concerned with the political as with the moral implications of the atom bomb. Would its existence so hugely increase the imbalance of power between the West and Asian peoples that the mirage of independence would once again vanish? A Bengali newspaper wondered if ‘the Asiatic people would not pass from the hands of one group of pirates to another’.4 Aung San, leader of Burmese resistance against first the British and then the Japanese, vowed that ‘no atom bomb can stop our march toward freedom’.5
What the British did not immediately appreciate was the extent to which Asian nationalism had been transformed by the war. Before it there had been movements of civil disobedience across India and Burma: peasant farmers had been goaded into revolt by the sufferings of the Depression of the 1930s; terrorist movements had flickered in Bengal and pan-Islamic ideologues had stirred the passions of the faithful throughout Asia; the Comintern had sponsored fledging communist parties in Burma and Malaya, where trade unions had flexed their muscles in its industrial areas. The Japanese war, however, had given nationalism a new face – a youthful, militaristic one. Before the Second World War Burma had been granted a form of semi-independence by the British. It had its own flag and its own prime minister, but it had no proper army. What passed for Burma’s defence forces comprised recruits almost exclusively from minority peoples, the Karen, Kachin, Shan and Chin, along with resident Anglo-Burmese, Gurkhas and Indians. Burmese Buddhists had effectively been excluded from the army since the final British conquest of the country in 1886. The reason given was that Buddhists were too pacific, a fiction contradicted by Burma’s impressive military traditions; the real reason was that soldiers from the minorities were cheaper and friendlier to the British Raj.
During the war all this had changed. With Japanese support, Burma had created its own army, the Burma Independence Army, renamed first the Burma Defence Army (BDA) after the Japanese invasion, and then the Burma National Army (BNA) after Japan’s installation of a nominally independent Burmese government in August 1943. One day in March 1945, the BNA had revolted against the embattled Japanese forces, hoping finally to secure real independence before the British reoccupied the country. By now the Burmese had military heroes as well. The young and intense former student leader, Aung San, had become ‘Bogyoke’, the general.6 He was the first Burmese commander since General Mahabandula in 1826 to embody the military spirit of the Burmese people and to be known and admired across the country. Aung San and his ‘Thirty Comrades’ had marched into Rangoon with the Japanese in early 1942. The contrast between these young men in uniform and the civilian politicians of the British era, Ba Maw and U Saw, was obvious to all Burmese youth. Volunteers signed up in healthy numbers. Moreover, the war forged new links between the cities and the countryside as the army was billeted on the villages. When the British moved back into north Burma in 1945 they were faced with a militarized countryside populated by volunteer levies, many of whom identified with the socialist or communist thinking of the metropolitan radicals.7
Further down the crescent in Malaya, an inchoate Muslim Malay nationalism was on the move. It had its roots in movements of reaction to the notion – endlessly reiterated by British officials, scholars and educators – that the Malays were custom obsessed, docile and passive. This ‘myth of the lazy native’ was challenged in the 1930s by movements of religious and community uplift and by a phenomenal expansion of newspapers and periodicals that debated the future of the Malay race. Malay martial pride was rekindled, even as the Malay Regiment all but perished in an heroic last-ditch defence of Singapore. The Malay rulers were not the effete figureheads – ‘pitiful Neros, squalid and insignificant’ in one description – that most British imagined them to be, and they guarded their privileges jealously, not least their status as the heads of the Islamic religion. A wealthy State such as Johore, just across the causeway from Singapore, could embark on its own programme of modernization; Sultan Ibrahim, who had ruled Johore since 1895, had looked to Meiji Japan as a model, as had his father before him. Initiatives were also coming increasingly from commoners, especially the new caste of clerks and school teachers. The more radical of these looked to Japan as well, but as a nation-state and an anti-Western force. In 1937 they founded the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, or League of Malay Youth, which, led and orchestrated by the civil servant and journalist Ibrahim Haji Yaacob, ran an underground intelligence network for the Japanese military. Ibrahim used Malay prostitutes in the northeastern town of Kota Bahru to coax information about the coastal defences from their British clients.8 It was here that Yamashita had made his initial landings, on Pantai Cinta Berahi – The Beach of Passionate Love – on the northeast coast of Malaya in December 1941. When the British rounded up 150 supporters of the movement shortly afterwards, they included fifteen bartenders and cabaret ‘taxi-dancers’.9 The Malays who assisted the Japanese were not to receive the same rewards as Aung San and his Thirty Comrades. The Japanese held a similarly patronizing view of the Malays to that of the British, but the Malay youths received the same kind of training as the Burmese and the Malay nationalism that emerged from the war would have the same radical potential. In the words of one of the central figures of these years, Mustapha Hussain: ‘although the Japanese Occupation was described as one of severe hardship and brutality, it left something positive, a sweet fruit to be plucked and enjoyed only after the surrender’.10 This was also a nationalism that did not necessarily recognize the old colonial boundaries. Mustapha Hussain and Ibrahim Yaacob had dreamed of merging their people into a greater Malay nation that would include the vast population of Indonesia.11
The much larger and older forces of Indian nationalism had also been galvanized by the war. The leaders of the Indian National Congress, the main nationalist movement, had witnessed the surge of popular anti-colonialism during the Quit India movement of 1942. Gandhi’s largely non-violent mass protest against the continuing British presence had been particularly intense in Bengal and the eastern areas of the country, where people had experienced real hardship during the war and had seen with their own eyes the humiliation of the British Raj by the Japanese invaders. They felt, perhaps for the first time, a sense of mass nationalism, unifying student and shopkeeper, peasant and small landlord, man and woman. They had ample time to ponder on the lessons of the movement: 14,000 of the 60,000 demonstrators and political activists arrested in August and September 1942 were still in jail in 1944 and the leadership remained imprisoned until nearly the end of the war. When they were finally released on 15 June 1945, Nehru, Patel and their socialist colleague Jayaprakash Narayan emerged determined to make up for lost time. At a speech in September 1945, an impatient Nehru threatened to set the country alight. For his part, Patel resurrected the spirit of 1942 as soon as he was released. A final push was necessary to force the British out of Indian and this time, unlike 1942, the armed forces, police and lower government servants, all on the verge of striking for better pay and conditions, were also determined to see the back of the British.