![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article analyses the military transformations that India underwent during the Second World War. It focuses on the institutional dimension of these changes and considers the longer-term changes wrought by the war in the composition of the army, the logistical and support infrastructure and the emergence of an indigenous military industrial base. Taken together, the article argues, these changes positioned India as a potential regional military power that was qualitatively different from the interwar period.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Note, 5 September 1946 in S. Gopal (ed.) Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru Second Series, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1984), 438–42.
2 Ibid.
3 Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007).
4 For a fuller treatment, see Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2016). This article draws on materials used in this book.
5 Figures from Appendix I to Sri Nandan Prasad, Expansion of the Armed Forces and Defence Organization, 1939–1945 (New Delhi, Ministry of Defence, Government of India, rprt 2012), 398–99.
6 India Defence to Secretary of State for India (SSI), 18 May 1940, CAB 67/6/37, The National Archives (TNA), Kew.
7 Memorandum by CoS, 25 July 1940, CAB 66/10/22, TNA.
8 Prasad, Expansion of the Army, 61–2.
9 Bisheshwar Prasad, Defence of India: Policy and Plans (Delhi: Combined Inter-Services Historical Section, 1963), 87–90.
10 Prasad, Expansion of the Army, 63–5.
11 Memorandum by SSI, 30 January 1942, CAB 66/21/34, TNA.
12 India Defence to SSI, 5 May 1941, WO 106/3740, TNA.
13 This paragraph and the next draw on Memorandum by SSI, 30 January 1942, CAB 66/21/34, TNA; Prasad, Expansion of the Army, 66–70.
14 SSI to India, 20 April 1944, WO 193/119, TNA.
15 Prasad, Expansion of the Army, 73.
16 David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army 1860–1940 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 10–34; Thomas Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Douglas M. Peers, ‘The Martial Races and the Indian Army in the Victorian Era’ in Daniel Marston and Chandar Sundaram (eds.) A Military History of India and South Asia: From the East India Company to the Nuclear Era (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 34–52.
17 Cited in Anirudh Deshpande, British Military Policy in India 1900–1945 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005), 147.
18 Rajit Mazumdar, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003); Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (London: Sage, 2005).
19 Calculated from Bisheshwar Prasad (ed.) Recruiting for the Defence Services (Inter-services Historical Section, 1950), Appendix H, 140–42.
20 Ibid.
21 Prasad, Expansion of the Armed Forces, 84–5.
22 Note by Adjutant General, 2 November 1942, L/WS/1/1680, Asian and African Collections (AAC), British Library, London.
23 Steven Wilkinson, Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).
24 Resolutions on Esher Committee, CID 119-D, CAB 6/4, TNA.
25 Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj, 168–78; Deshpande, British Military Policy in India, 91–8.
26 Cited in Namrata Narain, ‘Co-Option and Control: Role of Colonial Army in India, 1918–1947’ (PhD Thesis, Cambridge University, 1993), 219–20.
27 Cassells to Linlithgow, 29 June 1940, L/PO/55, AAC.
28 Gautam Sharma, Nationalisation of the Indian Army 1885–1947 (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1996), 184.
29 Daniel Marston, Phoenix from Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002); T.R. Moreman, The Jungle, the Japanese and the British Commonwealth Armies at War 1941–45: Fighting Methods, Doctrine and Training for Jungle Warfare (London: Frank Cass, 2005).
30 B.L. Raina, Preventive Medicine: Nutrition (Delhi: Combined Inter-Services Historical Section India & Pakistan, 1961), 14.
31 Ibid., 53–4.
32 Ibid., 55.
33 Extracts from No. 1 Indian Operational Research Section Report, 12 November 1943, WO 203/269, TNA.
34 Results of these surveys were published by A.M. Thomson, O.P. Verma and C.K. Dilwali in Indian Journal of Medical Research 34 & 35 (1946, 1947).
35 Raina, Preventive Medicine: Nutrition, 20–2.
36 Report on Nutritional Status of Indian Troops – Fourteenth Army by Canadian Nutritional Research Team, 31 May 1945, WO 203/269.
37 A Medical Officer, ‘Feeding the Indian Soldier’, Journal of the United Services Institution of India (JUSI) 74: 314 (January 1944), 90–2.
38 Raina, Preventive Medicine: Nutrition, 6, 79.
39 V.J. Moharir, History of the Army Service Corps (1939–1946) (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1979), 45.
40 Moharir, Army Service Corps, 20–49; Raina, Preventive Medicine: Nutrition, 61–3, 92–6, 139–41.
41 ‘The India Base’, January 1945, WO 203/5626, TNA.
42 Graham Dunlop, Military Economics, Culture and Logistics in the Burma Campaign (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 55; S. Verma and V.K. Anand, The Corps of Indian Engineers 1939–1947 (Delhi: Ministry of Defence, Government of India, 1974), 110–12.
43 ‘The India Base’, January 1945, WO 203/5626, TNA.
44 Dunlop, Military Economics, 56–8; Moharir, Army Service Corps, 30–2.
45 Alfred Martin Wainwright, ‘The Role of South Asia in British Strategic Policy, 1939–50’, (PhD Thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989), 36–40.
46 Report of the Modernization Committee, 1938, L/MIL/17/5/1801, AAC.
47 Report of the Expert Committee on the Defence of India, 1938–39, L/MIL/5/886, AAC.
48 G.D. Khanolkar, Walchand Hirachand: Man, His Times and Achievements (Bombay: Walchand & Co., 1969), 355–75; Subject Files 45 and 47, Walchand Hirachand Papers, NMML.
49 Statistics Relating to India’s War Effort (Delhi: Government of India, 1947), Table 9.
50 Statistics Relating to India’s War Effort, Table 15.
51 Tata Iron and Steel Company, Annual Report 1942–43, Tata Archives, Jamshedpur.
52 For an excellent new histories of the famine, see Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (London: Hurst, 2015); Madhusree Mukherjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Srinath Raghavan
Srinath Raghavan is Professor of International Relations and History at Ashoka University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia (New York: Basic Books, 2018).