British Empire Archives - Page 3 of 4

The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert C. Allen (2009)

Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective constitutes an impressively holistic approach in economic history to a topic that can be infinitely multifaceted and is often severely oversimplified. Considering that the causes of British industrialization have been the subject of heavy debate for the better part of a century, if not longer, Allen offers a refreshing infusion of nuance to classic questions in European and global economic history. He provides a well-rounded account of why Britain industrialized without becoming either too technical or too simplistic in its dialogue with other economic explanations.

Allen argues that industrialization occurred in Britain because institutionalized labor costs were comparatively higher there than in other places in the world. The use of coal to provide energy to its burgeoning commercial centers was associated with costs that were drastically lower than those of other industrial contenders. Healthy wages engendered a comparatively well-educated class of laborers, which also helped generate significant technological innovation and investment. Allen contends that his combination of advanced labor and cheaper energy not only explains why the industrial revolution began in Britain, but also why it had to occur there.

Throughout the book, Allen refutes earlier arguments that see science, the Enlightenment, politics, demographic shifts, agricultural movements, and numerous other issues as the singular key factors in industrialization. His discussions of each of these alternate explanations for the industrial revolution systematically detaches, or at least makes an effort to detach, strict causality from each. For many of these accounts, such as the role of agricultural, technology, and population change, he is able to avoid direct confrontation with scholars in his field by incorporating their arguments into his own interpretations of the importance of wage labor and the pursuit of economic opportunity.

Philip James de Loutherbourg's "Coalbrookdale by Night," which depicts the Madeley Wood Furnaces of Coalbrookdale (Science Museum, London)

Philip James de Loutherbourg’s “Coalbrookdale by Night,” which depicts the Madeley Wood Furnaces (Science Museum, London)

While a few of Allen’s comparisons and data may require more interrogation from the arena of political and cultural history, his attempt to cover as many counterarguments as possible features valiantly throughout the work. Most impressive for an economic history is the way in which domestic British cultural evolution is meticulously addressed. For example, Allen carefully examines the qualitative influence of shifts in agriculture, technology, and literacy rates on generating a willingness to engage in the social and economic opportunities created by energy and labor circumstances in Britain.

Gustave Doré’s “Over London by Rail,” circa 1870 (Wikimedia Commons)

Allen’s book will prove a helpful introduction to the traditional literature of industrialization. Though its argument, which is deeply rooted in economic methodology, may be insufficient for readers who desire substantial political and social explanations, its comprehensiveness in the arena of economic history is admirable. Most importantly, Allen does well to seat his analysis in the current scholarly emphasis on globalization, and in the case of economic history, the global dimensions of commerce. These dimensions help Allen situate the rise of Britain as a core financial power with complicated connections to the global peripheries. Fundamentally, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective delivers a refreshing account of an old narrative in industrial economic history.

Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, by Gauri Viswanathan (1989)

Gauri Viswanathan provides a fascinating account of the ideological motivations behind the introduction of English literary education in British India. She studies the shifts in the curriculum and relates such developments to debates over the objectives of English education both among the British administrators, as well as between missionaries and colonial officials.

Viswanathan argues that British administrators introduced English literary study in India in the early nineteenth century to improve the moral knowledge of Indians. Since Britain professed a policy of religious neutrality, Christian teachings could not be used in India, unlike the situation in Britain. In order to resolve this dilemma, colonial officials prescribed English literature, infused with Christian imagery, for government schools. Initially, Indians studied English literature using poetical devices, such as rhyme, alliteration, and reduplication. However, missionaries decried such secular practices and insisted upon a more religious reading of English literature. As a result, between 1830s and the mid-1850s, government schools in India used English literature to explain Christian teachings and emphasize the higher levels of historical progress and moral standards of English society. By the end of the 1850s, however, British administrators again changed their stance and advocated a secular reading of English literature to encourage commercial and trade literacy. This reversal of stance occurred as British officials realized that a religious reading of English literature did not provide Indians with the proper knowledge to join the colonial administrative services. Besides, after the 1857 Indian revolt against foreign rule, British officials did not wish to adopt policies that might ignite fears of conversion among Hindus and Muslims.

775px-Pandit_Bapudeva_Sastri_1821-1900_Professor_of_Astronomy_teaching_a_class_at_Queens_College_Varanasi — *Bapudeva Sastri, Indian Astronomer and Professor, teaching a class at Queen’s College, Varanas, 1870*

Viswanathan gives a detailed account of the various debates that influenced the introduction of English literary study in India. While she minutely examines the stances of Utilitarians, Anglicists, and missionaries, the absence of chronological benchmarks at regular intervals prevents the reader from fully understanding the shifts in education policies in British India emerging from such debates. However, her work changes our way of studying British educational policies in India. Previously, scholars merely studied the transformative effects of British education to understand the historical function of educational policies. Viswanathan ably proves that it is necessary to examine the discourse and the context of the formulation of educational policies to better understand educational history.

La_Martiniere_1858 — *La Martiniere, a British private school in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, 1858*

Photo Credits:
All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins (1975)

by Ellen Mcamis

Freedom at Midnight paints a sweeping picture of the tumultuous year of India’s independence from Great Britain in 1947. The narrative style of the book immerses readers in the visual landscape of the falling Raj and allows them to step into the minds of the great actors of this time. This sort of narrative history also contains drawbacks that limit our understanding of this important moment.

The book compresses the story to a tight one-year time frame. This allows Collins and Lapierre to focus on the state-level negotiations on India’s independence. It begins with Louis Mountbatten’s installation as the Last Viceroy of India, and closely follows the negotiations between Mountbatten, Whitehall, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and Mohandas Gandhi as they make the decision to partition India. It then continues with the chaos and bloodshed of the split, until ending with Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. This narrative is undeniably fascinating, however, it also places an almost exclusive emphasis on the “great men” of history. They are represented here as isolated personages who hold the fate of the Indian people in their hands. The people themselves are often lost in this depiction, appearing as faceless masses helplessly reacting to political machinations.

Mahatma Gandhi (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Despite this focus on the agency of the great men, the primary mechanism which forces history forward in the book is destiny or fate. In this account, the British were “a race that God had destined” to rule the Indians, and therefore “naturally acquired” India. Faced with the prospect of division, Mountbatten must “save India” from itself. This device frees Mountbatten and the British from the charge of poorly handling or rushing independence. Instead, they are depicted as contending with historical inevitabilities far more powerful than themselves.

While a current reader does not expect a highly sympathetic and nuanced portrait of India from a book written three years before Edward Said’s Orientalism, and the rise of post-colonial studies, as a narrative with insight into the rush of daily life on the cusp of independence, it remains an enjoyable and exciting read.

You may also like:

Sundar Vadlamudi’s review of “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India.”

Amber Abbas’ review of “Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan.”

Jack Loveridge’s reviews of “Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal,”“Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography,”“The Decline, Fall, and Revival of the British Empire,” and “The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan.”

Voices of India’s Partition, Part V: Interview with Professor Mohammad Amin

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Interview with Professor Masood ul Hasan

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Interview with Professor Irfan Habib

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire by John Gallagher (1982)

by Jack Loveridge

Based on lectures first delivered in Oxford in 1974, The Decline, Revival, and Fall of the British Empire, commands sustained attention today. In his sharp analysis of Britain’s declining world system, Gallagher offers both a novel explanation of empire’s “discontinuous decline” and a critique of contemporary decolonization theorists. He rejects as vain the pursuit of unearthing a single domestic or international motive for imperialism, concluding instead that, “All theories of the growth of imperialism have been failures.” By extension, this assertion applies to theories of imperial collapse, freeing Gallagher to dismantle the idea that the shocks of the Second World War abruptly derailed Britain’s global system. He convincingly demonstrates that the interwar years saw little agitation in domestic politics for ending empire. Party politics discouraged efforts for total withdrawal from the colonies and encouraged a sort of imperial status quo. Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his Conservative counterparts Andrew Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin equally sustained a flexible empire during their tenures. The “official mind” of Whitehall propelled the empire along during these years, chiefly because the world system supported Britain’s interests and colonized peoples – and not the British public – footed the bill. Only when Britain energized the structures of empire to meet the challenges of the Second World War did empire see a resurgence that also spelled its doom.

Gallagher strays somewhat from his denunciation of a monocausal theory of imperial collapse in his assertion that empire’s price tag became too much for the British public to bear during the 1940s. He admirably demonstrates domestic and international considerations that played off one another and the disadvantages of formal rule compared to a system of influence. A single smoking gun emerges, however, in the material conditions shaping public opinion within Britain. In spite of this small flaw, Gallagher successfully paints imperial decline as highly contingent upon changing economic and political circumstances.

Photo credits

Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. (Left to right): Rt. Hon. W.L. Mackenzie King (Canada), General Jan Christian Smuts (South Africa), Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill (United Kingdom), Rt. Hons. Peter Fraser (New Zealand), John Curtin (Australia),” London, 1 May, 1944.
Library and Archives Canada via Wikipedia

You may also like:

William Roger Louis, a UT historian of British Imperialism, wrote a piece about his professional and personal relationship with John A. Gallagher for the American Historical Association. You can read it here.

Jack Loveridge’s review of “Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal,” along with his review of the biography of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Voices of India’s Partition, Part V: Interview with Professor Mohammad Amin

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Interview with Professor Masood ul Hasan

Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal by Archibald Percival Wavell, ed. Penderel Moon (1973)

Archibald Percival Wavell served as the penultimate viceroy of India from 1943 to 1947, meticulously chronicling his experience through the twilight of the British Raj. With only light edits from Penderel Moon, Wavell’s journal delivers a lucid account of declining imperial power and rising nationalist aspirations in India during the Second World War. Wavell’s frustrations multiply through the journal, revealing not only the viceroy’s suspicions of key Indian leaders, but also the growing intractability of continued colonial rule.

The journal confirms Moon’s opening assertion that the structural limitations of the viceroyalty crippled Wavell. His entries reveal his claustrophobic position between the competing factions of Indian nationalism and the British government itself. Indeed, Britain’s War Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, demonstrates remarkable stubbornness through the 1943-1944 Bengal famine, cynically dismissing the viceroy’s relief proposals. Similarly, the Simla Conference of 1945 crumbles as much from pressures imposed by London as by the recalcitrance of the Congress and the Muslim League. Even after the Labour Party’s victory in the summer of 1945, Wavell reveals the government’s rigidity in its approach to Indian nationalism by exposing its refusal to grant the viceroy greater autonomy in negotiating the transfer of power and excluding him from the inner workings of the 1946 Cabinet Mission. In these ways, Wavell’s writings provide strong evidence for the charge that the British government’s failure to innovate in an administrative capacity precluded a smoother road to Indian independence.

Wavell candidly admits his own limitations as a negotiator, stating flatly: “I do not pretend to be a diplomatist.” Yet his journal reveals a creative and introspective individual, concerned both with the practical politics and the moral ramifications of his imperial role. While highly critical of India’s nationalist leaders, Wavell clearly aspires to deliver on promises of self-government. Evidence pours forth, condemning the inflexibility of that very role and redeeming the individual. Wavell emerges as a complex and contemplative character, in sharp contrast with his contemporary image as unimaginative and out of touch.

Photo credits:

No. 9 Army Film and Document Unit, “Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein KG GCB DSO 1887-1976. Montgomery as CIGS (Chief of Imperial General Staff) designate in the Vicerehal Gardens, New Delhi with the Viceroy, Field Marshall Wavell and Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, Field Marshal Sir Vlaude Auschinleck,” 17 June 1946.

Yarico’s Story

by Jessica Wolcott Luther

The original story of Yarico is from Richard Ligon’s 1657, A True and Exact History of Barbados:

This Indian dwelling neer the Sea-coast, upon the Main, an English ship put in to a Bay, and sent some of her men a shoar, to try what victualls or water they could finde, for in some distresse they were:

But the Indians perceiving them to go up so far into the Country, as they were sure they could not make a safe retreat, intercepted them in their return, and fell upon them, chasing them into a Wood, and being dispersed there, some were taken, and some kill’d:

but a young man amongst them stragling from the rest, was met by this Indian Maid, who upon the first sight fell in love with him, and hid him close from her Countrymen (the Indians) in a Cave, and there fed him, till they could safely go down to the shoar, where the ship lay at anchor, expecting the return of their friends.

But at last, seeing them upon the shoar, sent the long-Boat for them, took them aboard, and brought them away. But the youth, when he came ashoar in the Barbadoes, forgot the kindnesse of the poor maid, that had ventured her life for his safety, and sold her for a slave, who was as free born as he: And so poor Yarico for her love, lost her liberty.

Ligon’s work was the only comprehensive text published about the English Caribbean throughout the entire seventeenth century. His text was widely read and often quoted. There is no indication from Ligon’s text if his account of Yarico is based on actual people or simply an allegory for how the English treated the native Carib people on Barbados.

S. Hutchinson, 1793 © National Maritime Museum Collections

Richard Steele, an author and editor of the daily publication The Spectator, picked up the story in 1711 (issue 11 on March 13, 1711). He expanded and elaborated it into the version that became popular during the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.

In his version, he names the Englishman Inkle and describes him as a 20-year-old who was schooled by his father early in life in the “love of gain.” The ship, on its way to Barbados, came under some distress and “put into a Creek on the Main in America, in search of provisions.” There, he met Yarico.

They appeared mutually agreeable to each other. If the European was highly charmed with the Limbs, Features, and wild Graces of the Naked American; the American was no less taken with the Dress, Complexion, and Shape of an European, covered from Head to Foot. The Indian grew immediately enamoured of him, and consequently solicitous for his Preservation.

She hid him and cared for him. “In this manner did the Lovers pass away their Time, till they had learn’d a Language of their own.” They lived this way for a few months. Then Yarico, instructed by Inkle, flagged down a shipped on the coast. When they found out it was traveling to Barbados, Inkle was ecstatic.

It ends thusly:

To be short, Mr. Thomas Inkle, now coming into English territories, began seriously to reflect upon his loss of Time, and to weigh with himself how many Days Interest of his Mony he had lost during his stay with Yarico. This Thought made the Young Man very pensive, and careful what Account he should be able to give his Friends of his Voyage. Upon which considerations, the prudent and frugal young Man sold Yarico to a Barbadian merchant; notwithstanding that the poor Girl, to incline him to commiserate her Condition, told him that she was with Child be him: But he only made use of that Information, to rise in his Demands upon the Purchaser.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, at least 60 versions of the story were published and there were a number of translations (according to Frank Felsenstein). It was made into an opera, a play, rendered in the form of a poem, and was retold many, many times.

While we will never know the veracity of this particular story about this particular indigenous woman (though it’s fair to say that Steele’s additions were fictitious), it does tell us a lot about how the British thought about hierarchy, gender, and the fraught relationship between the British and the people that they enslaved. Yarico shows that from some of the earliest decades of English settlement, there was an uneasiness about the exploitation of other people and the easy slippage between “free” and “enslaved.”

Also, it draws attention specifically to the plight of enslaved women. Yarico’s tale shows how complicated personal relationships were (and are) in a society were power is so unequally distributed. One cannot doubt that there would have been many an enslaved African or indigenous woman sold into slavery by men who had shown them affection, even love. Steele’s version in particular lays bare the almost unimaginable reality in the life of an enslaved woman: her dual role of producer and re-producer, her value was as much in her ability to do the work of a male slave as in the ability of her body to reproduce the next generation of slaves.

You may also enjoy:

Zach Doleshal’s podcast interview with Jessica Luther

Zimbabwe’s Hanging Tree

by Ruramisai Charumbira

On December 8, 2011, newspapers in Zimbabwe – and Zimbabwe’s diasporas – reported that an unmarked tree in the middle of a busy street in the capital, Harare, had been accidentally knocked down by a city council van. The tree made headline news because urban lore has it that it was the tree upon which “Mbuya Nehanda” (Charwe wokwa Hwata), the late nineteenth-century spirit medium, was hanged by British colonial authorities. Historical evidence holds otherwise, but scholarly and popular debates on Nehanda-Charwe attest to the vigor of her connection with this tree and her larger place in history.

Sekuru Kaguvi and Mbuya Nehanda after capture, 1897.

Charwe wokwa Hwata was born in about 1862, and was medium to a revered female spirit of rain and land fertility, the spirit of Nehanda. She is called Nehanda or Mbuya Nehanda for much the same reasons Tenzin Gyatso is called the Dalai Lama. Charwe participated in the 1896-97 uprising against British colonialism in central Zimbabwe, and became a British symbol for the need to “civilize” the Africans. The memory of Nehanda-Charwe in the history of Zimbabwe dates back to 1898 when she was executed. In the 1950s, Charwe (as Nehanda) became a symbol for African Nationalists of the “uncolonized” past that had been destroyed by colonialism. During the anticolonial, liberationist wars of the 1960s-70s, her image was recruited as spiritual guide and nationalist symbol as evidenced by this song from that period.

The song begins:

Mbuya Nehanda died truly wondering

‘How shall we take [back] this land?’

The one word she told us was

‘Seize the gun and liberate yourselves.’

The song is itself fascinating for its blend of history (1896-97) and memory (1960s-70s), as Nehanda became at once an old ancestor, and a current guerrilla fighter, a theme I explore more fully in my book.

What has been fascinating about the recent story of the “Nehanda tree” is not so much the felling of an old tree in the city, but the interpretations of reporters, bloggers, eyewitnesses, and anyone who can access the internet to comment on those news stories and blogs. On my most recent trip to Zimbabwe, in December 2011, friends and family told me about the “tragedy” of Nehanda’s tree in whispers, lamentation, argumentation, and the gamut of expressions much like those found online. The response to the story of Nehanda’s tree knocked over by a mere city council van, are most fascinating because of what they say about the animation of personal and social memories in particular moments in history. This incident has brought to the surface memories of colonialism, conflicts over religion, and especially angst about the present as people graft meaning onto the knocked down tree as representing a turning point (for better and/or worse) for Zimbabwe from here on out. News about this tree and memories of the woman associated with it have raised tensions today because she is seen as a symbol of the hopeful, anti-colonialist guerilla movement of the 1960s-1970s, whose elites have turned into ruthless rulers blinded by the corrupting nature of political power.

The story of the “Nehanda tree” shows that the socio-cultural and political meaning of the symbol of Charwe as “Mbuya Nehanda” vigorously rubs history and memory against each other in Zimbabwe to produce doubts about her place in history, faith that she (her spirit, that is) is still very present and is trying to say something to the country, especially its leadership, Christian inflected attacks on what she stood for (African forms of religious power and spirituality), as well as the need to honor a woman who made it into the history books when so many African women of the past have gone the way of seeds in the wind that land in the desert never to be remembered.

The meaning of this song today – much like the reports and comments on the dead tree – is connected to the ways that the past is grafted onto the present. The “tree of Nehanda,” reveals some of the ways people exercise their citizenship, protesting (and/or supporting) the current state of affairs that are incongruent with “Mbuya Nehanda” the symbol of anti-colonialism turned matron saint of a now unacceptable regime that has reneged on what she died for: the promise of full independence made in 1980 when the country’s black majority gained civil rights in the country of their birth. The reports and comments on “the tree of Nehanda” speak to the ways societies shake the tree of history in order to find meaning in the past.

Translation of the song about Mbuya Nehanda can be found in Songs that Won the Liberation War by Alec J.C. Pongweni

The debates on Zimbabwe are ongoing, see among others:

Ruramisai Charumbira “Nehanda and Gender Victimhood in the Central Mashonaland 1896-97 Rebellions: Revisiting the Evidence” History in Africa,35 (2008)

Mahmood Mamdami, “Lessons of Zimbabwe,” London Review of Books

Scholars discuss Mamdami’s “Lessons,” Concerned Africa Scholars

Making History: Jessica Wolcott Luther

Interview by Zach Doleshal

In the second installation of our new series, “Making History,” Zach Doleshal speaks with Jessica Wolcott Luther about her experience as a graduate student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. In the interview, Jessica shares stories about researching in seventeenth century archives (she’s been to eleven so far!), studying history using anthropological documents, and overcoming the frustration of knowing that she may never get the chance to find a direct source from a former enslaved person.

Jessica Wolcott Luther is a PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Texas. Her dissertation focuses on Barbados from 1640 to 1700. It analyzes the impact that the growing English empire, the rapid move toward slavery as the main form of labor, and a new-found desire to document nature through the lens of empirical science had on the way that the English thought about the human body.

The dissertation is mainly a local study using the personal documents (letters, journals, merchant ledgers, etc.) created by people in Barbados, the laws enacted to control certain bodies, and official government documents used to track populations (census, wills, baptisms). It analyzes how the English made sense of the many new bodies and their own bodies’ reactions to the space of the Caribbean as the century progressed and the enslaved population on the island became the majority by large numbers. My project also attempts to trace the ways that those changing ideas about the body affected the lives of everyone in Barbados: Englishmen and women, including servants; enslaved Africans; and native Carib peoples (most of them enslaved). It is also an Atlantic study, as it documents how the expansion to the Caribbean and the novelty of the institution of slavery led to an increasing interest in black bodies in both the Caribbean and England, not limited to but especially within scientific circles.

More broadly, this project intervenes in one of the central debates in early modern historiography — how did the modern concept of race emerge? — and its corollary — when did race become so intertwined with science? My project argues that it was in Barbados in the seventeenth century when Englishmen began to work out, in confusing, contradictory, and experimental ways, some of the kernels of belief that would eventually become central to English notions about race.

Existing at the intersection of cultural and intellectual history, this dissertation is about the process through which a society made sense of itself as it underwent radical, dramatic shifts in fundamental arenas of thought and practice when issues of human difference came quickly to the fore.

Learn more about Jessica Wolcott Luther and her work by visiting her website and following her on Twitter.

You may also like:

The inaugural episode of “Making History,” which features an interview with UT history graduate student – and author! – Christopher Heaney.

Jessica Luther’s blog piece on seventeenth century diarist Samuel Pepy’s hypothetical tweeting history, along with her review of David Eggers’ 2009 book “Zeitoun.”

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924)

by Isabel Huacuja

Set during the nascent years of the Indian nationalist movement in the fictitious North Indian town of Chandrapore, E.M. Foster’s novel, A Passage to India, follows Adela Quested, a young English woman visiting India for the first time. During a trip to the nearby Marabar caves, Adela accuses Dr. Aziz, an educated and well-reputed Muslim, of attempting to rape her. The contentious trial, which follows Adela’s accusation, brings to the surface the racial and sexual tensions of the British Raj.

British officials condemn Dr. Aziz before the hearing begins, and the judge comments at the onset of the trial that “the darker races are physically attracted to the fairer races but not vice versa.” Foster implies, but never explicitly states, that Dr. Aziz never molested Adela and that she imagined the entire incident. Therefore, the British abuse of power, or more explicitly British colonialism, and not the attempted rape, represent the real crime in the novel. Forster unashamedly condemns British colonialism, which he believes victimizes not only Indians, but also British women. Even though Adela causes Dr. Aziz great distress, Foster portrays her as a victim of patriarchy. As the literary critic Jenny Sharpe explains, colonial officials, “treat Adela as a mere cipher for a battle between men.”

Furthermore, Foster’s perceptive eye captures the political forces at work. Published in 1924, A Passage to India anticipates the nationalist movement’s eruption and India’s and Britain’s final rupture. “India should be a Nation!” yells Dr. Aziz in a spurt of passion. “India a Nation? What an apotheosis!” replies Mr. Fielding. At the end of the novel, Dr. Aziz and Mr. Fielding accept their differences and reconcile, but the two shall never be close friends again. “Why can’t we be friends now?” says Mr. Fielding to Dr. Aziz. “It is what I want. It is what you want,” replies Dr. Aziz. But the friends “swerved apart” because “the earth did not want it,” because “the sky said ‘No.”

Yet, to focus only on the political implications of the novel, and not mention its artistic accomplishments, would do a great disservice to Foster’s genius. He tells the story as an outsider and describes an India that is foreign, exotic, and incomprehensible to him – an India, that he lusts to understand, but humbly acknowledges he could never master. Forster recognizes his shortcomings as an outsider and perhaps that is why instead of attempting to present a whole and coherent picture of India, he sets out to capture special details: a festival, the monsoon sun, a man’s love of poetry. In his characteristic colorful style, Foster writes: “As it rose from the earth on the shoulders of its bearers, the friendly sun of the monsoons shone forth and flooded the world with color,” Simple, yet evocative passages such as this one, lend a magic touch to this extraordinary story and bear responsibility for the novel’s enduring popularity.

You may also like:

Voices of India’s Partition – Part 1

Sundar Vadlamudi’s review of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandi and his Struggle with India

Amber Abbas’s reviews of Krishna Kumar’s Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan and Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India

UT professor of history Gail Minault’s review of The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Photo credits:

Photographer unknown, Hindus and Muslims displaying the flags of both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League as a part of Mohandas Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922

via Wikipedia

The Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (2006)

by Isabel Huacuja

In The Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945, Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper chronicle the war years of the British Empire in its Asian Crescent, which curved from Calcutta to Singapore into Malaysia and Burma. Soldiers from the British 14th army stationed in India and Burma felt that few in the West took notice of them and sardonically called themselves the “forgotten army.” This label remains pertinent even today as the battles in Europe loom larger in the histories of the WWII than the war against Japan in Southeast Asia.

The “forgotten armies,” however, include much more than Britain’s 14th army. The forgotten armies encompass Subhas Bose’s Indian National Army, which fought for India’s liberation on the Japanese side, the Burma Independence Army of Aung San, and Chin Peng’s communist guerilla army in Malaya. Furthermore, Bayly and Harper’s forgotten armies also include the some 600,000 refugees who fled Burma in 1942 and perished in the mud and “green hell’ passes of Assam, as well as the thousands of laborers who toiled building the Burma – Thailand railway. Finally, this book’s forgotten armies include the Indian coolies, tea states workers, tribal people, ‘comfort women,’ and the nurses and doctors who provided Japanese and British soldiers with much needed labor and assistance. In this book, Bayly and Harper “reassemble and reunite the different, often unfamiliar narratives,” of the Far Eastern War, but the book amounts to much more than a military history of the Japanese invasion of the British Asia. The authors draw a “panoramic picture” of a region ravaged by “warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease and famine,” during the five daunting years from 1941 to 1945. Furthermore in the concluding pages, the authors argue that Japanese occupation hastened nationalist struggles for independence in the region.

Workers with hand tools build the Burma Road in southwest China, 1944

In The Forgotten Armies, Bayly and Harper present an exemplary scholarly work that draws from a large number of memoirs and diaries. But the authors deserve most praise because, in addition to scholarly accuracy and scope, they offer the nuance, enticement, and that feeling, which we can only call human touch, of great fiction. Take, for instance, Bayly and Harper’s description of the plight of refugees who fled from Burma into India: “Women and children collapsed and drowned in the mud […] Porters refused to touch the corpses so they lay decomposing until medical staff arrived with kerosene to burn them. The butterflies in Assam that year were the most beautiful on the record. They added to the sense of macabre as they flitted amongst the corpses.” Passages like this one stir a multitude of emotions: from shock, to terror, to anger, to sorrow and, finally, compassion. The authors paint a vivid and memorable picture of Malaysia and Burma under Japanese occupation and of India mobilized for war, and they tell a heart-wrenching and gripping tale of suffering and despair, a tale that the reader will feel both glad and sad to know. Bayly and Harper bring to life the many ‘forgotten armies’ that fought in Southeast Asia during WWII so that we never forget them again.

Photo Credit, US Army Signal Corps, via Wikimedia Commons

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