In early 1948 the independent government of India had sent saplings from a leafy descendant of the tree in Bodh Gaya, under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment, to celebrate Burma’s own independence. Yet no more than Burma were India and Pakistan dancing in streams of gold and silver during that cold weather. Scarcely had the communal massacres died away than tension between the two dominions began to increase on the borders of the disputed state of Kashmir. Scarcely had Nehru written his first New Year message as prime minister than the aged Gandhi was shot to death by a right-wing Hindu assassin after his daily prayer meeting in Delhi. John de Chazal, one of the remaining and now increasingly disillusioned British police officials, remembered the outpouring of grief in his distant part of south India when an urn of Gandhi’s ashes arrived there to be scattered, symbolizing the unity of the nation. Mourning was so intense that it reminded him of family stories of Queen Victoria’s funeral. As the ashes were consigned to sacred rivers and lakes across India and even sent to Burma to be scattered on the Irrawaddy among crowds of mourning Indians and Burmese,84‘drums beat all night and men and boys shouted “Gandhi-ji ki jai; Gandhi-ji ki jai [victory to Gandhi!]” till they were hoarse’.85 The remaining British officials and military men already knew their days in the subcontinent were numbered, some feeling that their lives’ work had been for nothing. Their authority now in rapid decline, they scattered across the empire. Some went to commercial jobs in Britain, Canada or Australasia; others entered the Nigerian or Kenyan civil service or police. For them, the long tradition of the Raj came to an end with regret and resentment.
It was not only British India but also the wider British Indian empire, from the Arabian seas to the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal, that came to an end. The year 1948 saw Indian power recede from Burma for the first time in 130 years. One of the most venerated public places in Mandalay, particularly in the year of independence when enemies were pressing in on all sides, was the pagoda that held the great image of Buddha Mahamuni. This had been taken from the kingdom of Manipur on the Burma–India border in the late eighteenth century when the Burmese king Bodhayappa had been trying to create a Buddhist empire in Southeast Asia. The raid into the northeast of the Indian subcontinent had attracted the attention of a much bigger and well-armed commercial empire, that of the East India Company. From the 1820s onward, Burma had been subject to successive waves of invasion by British troops, colonial logging companies, ruby and oil interests and, finally, Indian merchants and labourers. In 1944 and 1945 the British Indian Army had invaded the country and as late as October 1947 there had still been thousands of Indian soldiers there. That influence had now been withdrawn. Indian troops had left Burma along with the last British officers and civil servants. Up to 800,000 Indian civilians remained in the country, some like Balwant Singh in positions of authority. But India’s proxy empire in Burma disappeared with the end of British rule in the subcontinent. India’s new rulers were to keep a weather eye on events in their neighbouring country and even, on occasions, to intervene with money and military aid. Yet Nehru and his foreign-affairs expert Krishna Menon had no desire for a greater Indian empire. They discouraged both the Indian businessmen and labour unions which wanted to keep a hold on their smaller eastern neighbour. Pakistan retained an interest in the Muslim population of Arakan, but was keen to avoid any further ethnic and religious conflicts that might compromise its bizarre set of borders. The huge land mass of the Indian subcontinent continued to exert its gravitational pull on Burma, like a monster planet influencing a satellite moon, but empire had given way to moral and economic suasion.
In part, this was because the great subcontinent was absorbed in its own problems and because residual British influence was deployed to keep the new dominions from each other’s throats. Mountbatten, the last British leader to span both India and Burma, was preoccupied with the problems that arose from partition. Some of the British who ‘stayed on’ accused him of ‘too much pomp, overacting and creating a “Hollywood atmosphere”’.86 But Indians enjoyed seeing newsreels where he and his wife Edwina were shown deep in discussion with Gandhi or at the recently assassinated leader’s funeral. Later in the year an unofficial war broke out between India and Pakistan over Nehru’s beloved state of Kashmir. The Indian Army was deployed in the mountainous country along long lines of communication to combat invasion by Muslim irregulars, who were determined to bring the Muslim-majority state into Pakistan. The remaining British soldiers and military attachés on both sides tried to prevent the situation from degenerating into full-scale war between two members of the Commonwealth.87 Hindu, Sikh and Muslim soldiers who had been comrades in arms in the Burma campaign a mere four years before found themselves on opposite sides. Some old comrades were killed by their erstwhile friends. Major K. K. Tewari, who had fought through the third Arakan campaign and taken part in the reoccupation of Malaya, lost one of his closest comrades in the fighting.88 This man’s mutilated body could be identified only by the Japanese pistol he had in his holster and the copy of the Bhagavad Gita, part of the ancient Hindus scriptures, he kept in his pocket. Roy Bucher, who remained commander-in-chief of the Indian army until 1949, was put in the invidious position of treating his opposite number in Pakistan, Douglas Gracey, as an undeclared enemy. That autumn the Indian Army was also used to occupy and absorb into India the recalcitrant princely state of Hyderabad, whose royal line was Muslim. The ostensible enemy were bands of Muslim irregulars called Razakars, who opposed union with India. But a wider shadow was now falling across the whole of South and Southeast Asia. Bucher and his boss, Vallabhbhai Patel, noted the creeping advance of communism in Asia. They viewed with alarm the beginning of communist ‘base areas’ in the Andhra areas of Madras and nearby southeast Hyderabad. Bucher wrote that the ‘greater fragmentation of India which would have occurred had Hyderabad become independent, must have resulted in Communism making more headway in this continent’.89
Here Bucher was anticipating a theme which President Eisenhower would coin into that masterful, if erroneous, concept of the ‘domino theory’ in which communist insurgency would topple one postcolonial country after another in South and Southeast Asia. By 1948 China, Vietnam and Burma seemed seriously threatened by the new political contagion. Even in India, observers espoused a kind of ‘minidomino theory’. Hyderabad might link up with Andhra and even with Kerala in the southwest, where communist parties were making electoral headway. In turn, southern Indian communism might be linked through Bengal with Arakanese and Burmese communism and on into Southeast Asia. Actually, for most of Bengal’s population in 1948, the most pressing issue remained the fate of the refugees. People continued to flood across the new border in both directions, fleeing murder and arson during the great Hindu and Muslim festivals, but now scarified by local militias trying to firm up the lines of Radcliffe’s notional border. Communal warfare remained endemic, yet in both north and south Bengal poor peasants were still agitating for better economic conditions, urged on by communists who claimed that Hindu–Muslim conflict was really a smoke screen behind which capitalists, imperialists and ‘feudal elements’ pursued their wicked ways. In the northeast of India, the leadership of a section of the Naga people, which had declared independence the previous August, remained intransigent, waiting to see how Indian administration would turn out in practice.
Against this background the city of Calcutta hosted a series of massive communist meetings. The aim was to show solidarity with the Soviet Communist Party, whose secretary Andrei Zhdanov had recently declared an international struggle against ‘American neocolonialism’. It was also designed to warn off India’s tough, right-wing home minister, Sardar Patel, who was now locking up communist agitators with as much despatch as the British had once done.90 From 19 to 26 February a South East Asia Youth Conference met in the city. Thirty thousand people marched through Calcutta alongside representatives from Malaya, Vietnam, Burma and China. A Chinese youth carried aloft the bloodstained shirt of a comrade who had died on the battlefield, in protest against ‘reaction’.91 Old conflicts between Bose supporters and hardline communists re-emerged. But the popular mood was heady. It received further fuel when the second congress of the Communist Party of India convened in Calcutta a little later. Than Tun arrived proclaiming the need for Indian and Burmese communists to link and overthrow the ‘sham independence’ with which the imperialists had saddled Burma and, by implication, India.92 Malayan communists rapidly moving towards open insurrection followed the proceedings with rapt attention. It was not surprising that British and American observers looked at these events, put them together with the attempt of the USSR to starve out the city of Berlin, and decided that a worldwide communist conspiracy was afoot.
For most people in India, however, independence was far from a sham. Despite the troubles, there was widespread rejoicing and nowhere more so than in the army. Despite the bloody dawn of independence observers spoke of a ‘spirit of joyous freedom’. The Indian Army in Kashmir, said the Indian attaché to the British high commissioner in Delhi, ‘was as joyous and happy as a daughter-in-law who had managed to shake off her troublesome and nagging mother-in-law and set up her own house’.93 The ‘infamous libel’ that the Indian Army would collapse without British officers had been disproved. Yet some homely British traditions lived on in spite of the prevailing bloodshed. General Kodandera Cariappa, appointed commander-in-chief of the Indian Army after Bucher, gave a lecture on the Kashmir operations to the ‘Delhi snowball knitting party’. He later privately commented that practically all the knitters were British ladies. Nehru’s independent India – high-minded, austere, supercilious – had already set its distinctive tone.
Britain’s old colonial Indian Army, which had once ranged across the whole of the crescent from Bengal and Assam to Singapore, victorious in North Africa and Italy, was broken up. In November 1947, the last of the Indian legions had departed from the subcontinent. Among the last to leave were the 2 Royal Lancers – the ‘Bengal Lancers’ of legend – to be divided between India and Pakistan.94 But many of the military stores went to Malaya to build up the fortress there; one third of the small island of Singapore was now given over to the military. Each service demanded two square miles of valuable land to house their radio transmitting and receiving stations. Among the baggage train were large stocks of whisky. It was shipped back to the United Kingdom: a telling augury of the end of empire. This infuriated British officers stationed in Singapore, for whom decent liquor was in short supply.95 But Britain still looked to South Asia to defend its Eastern empire, specifically to the Gurkhas. Two regiments of these Nepalese fighters were detached from the Indian Army to become a Brigade of Gurkhas within the British one. There was trouble in their camps, between those who stayed in India and those who opted to follow their British officers. Four out of the eight battalions of troops in Malaya were Gurkhas, and a Gurkha officer, Major General Charles Boucher, was to take over the Malaya command. Many were raw recruits; some of the veterans former prisoners of war. The Gurkhas, most of them stationed in an isolated barracks near Ipoh, were ill at ease in Malaya. The only common language between gunner instructors and 2/7 Gurkha was said to be Italian: a legacy of older campaigns. ‘We were’, recalled one soldier, ‘kept inside a camp that had wire around it like a lot of sheep…’ They were turned out first in mid 1947, to confront the radical Malay nationalists of API in demonstrations in nearby Kuala Kangsar, when the British could not rely on their Malay policemen to do so.96 Fifty years later Gurkhas would still serve Southeast Asian regimes as praetorians of last resort. The new arrivals in Malay were soon to experience one of the most vicious small wars of peace.