Amitav Ghosh on the Indian exodus from wartime Burma and people as battlegrounds

Let me cite an example: In 1941, in Malaya, Indian soldiers of the British colonial army found themselves in a predicament — fighting a war for freedom on behalf of an empire that held their country in subjection. Their condition was not without analogy: the Greeks in the Ottoman Army, the Serbs in the Austro-Hungarian Army and many others have had to deal with a similar dilemma. Yet the conditions of the Indian soldiers in Malaya were different in ways that came to be realized only within the actual moment that framed their actions. This moment was constituted not just by their ties and loyalties but also by such specificities as the terrain they found themselves in, the food they were served and, indeed, even the weather.

The predicament of an intentional silence

To my mind, as a novelist, my duty to history lies in a commitment to reproducing those elements of the past that create the environment of a character's predicament. But to know everything about a predicament is still to know nothing at all about how any human being may respond. It is in this sense that I find history to be a limiting condition of the imagination. Yet it is a condition that demands a certain scrupulousness, not merely for ethical reasons but also because of the simple fact that the predicaments of history, when carefully retrieved, are usually of far greater interest than any that a novelist could imagine unassisted.

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But there arises here a question that I, as an Indian, have frequently been forced to confront. How does a novelist write of the past when the predicament of his characters is shaped precisely by a willed wordlessness, an intentional silence, a refusal, or inability, to acknowledge the legitimacy of an overarching narrative? This is a question that is forced upon us by the history of colonial India — indeed, by all colonial histories, replete as they are with examples of events that occur as symptoms of unknown motives and unspoken intentions. In northern India in 1857, what precisely was the thinking behind the passing of chapattis from village to village? Who set the movement in motion and why? What was the meaning of this strange connubium?

It is no accident that we still do not know the answers to these questions. We are not meant to know; those who circulated the chapattis did not want us to know, and they succeeded in their intention. Perhaps they intuitively realized that knowledge is inseparable from conquest and, therefore, to challenge their conquerors was also to refuse to translate their intentions into the language of instrumental means and ends. For a novelist, this circumstance creates a specific challenge: How do you recreate in words the predicament of an intentional silence?

In posing this question rhetorically, I run the risk of suggesting that I have an answer. I do not. Nor, as a novelist, am I ultimately required to provide one; as I see it, I am required only to present the story as best as I can, leaving it to readers to draw their own conclusions.

People as battleground for history

The following is one such story. Its background consists of an event that was described by the British historian Hugh Tinker as ‘A Forgotten Long March’. In 1941, when the Second World War spread to Asia, Rangoon was predominantly an ‘Indian’ city, in that the majority of its population consisted of people of subcontinental origin or descent. According to the 1931 census, there were slightly more than 1 million Indians in Burma at the time; of these, some 60 per cent (617,521) were born in India. The social consequences of Indian migration into Burma are too complex to go into here. Suffice it to say that through the 1920s and ’30s, there were powerful currents of hostility towards the Indian presence in Burma: in 1930, bloody anti-Indian riots broke out in Rangoon and many thousands were killed. As a result, there was an increasing nervousness within the Indian population in Burma.

Japan entered the Second World War on 7 December with simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbour and northern Malaya. On 23 December came the first Japanese air attacks on Rangoon, which created absolute panic in the city. It is important to remember that very few civilians had expected the war to spread to Asia. The survivors I spoke to were almost unanimous on this. The attitude is hard to account for, because in military circles, Indian as well as British, it was well-known that the Japanese were preparing for war. Similarly, British municipal authorities had made preparations for air raids: trenches had been dug and an Air Raid Precautions authority, modelled on similar bodies in London, was set up in Rangoon and other cities.

Yet, psychologically, the civilian population of the British territories in Asia appears to have been completely unprepared for the catastrophe that lay ahead. I have in my possession several accounts of how people stood on the streets of Rangoon, staring as the first Japanese planes swooped down on their bombing runs. It was as though they could not believe that the war would come to them; in their own eyes, they were simply not important enough to become a battleground for history. Their role was to serve as an audience.

The ghosts of the past

In thinking and writing about this period, I have frequently asked myself why this was so. I don’t know if there will ever be a satisfactory answer to this certainly, if there is, I don’t claim to know it — but it seems to me that this attitude is illustrative of a particular aspect of the psychology of colonial rule: one in which the political disempowerment of a population creates a distancing from immediate events, even where they constitute a clear and present danger. Possibly, for Indians as well as many Southeast Asians, a century of Pax Britannica had removed all memory of war and civil uncertainty. I do not mean to say that there were no conflicts in this period, for there certainly were. Yet British imperial success was due in no small measure to the fact that the spheres of the civil and military were kept strictly segregated. Soldiers came from certain castes and groups, and over time, through careful administrative policies, they were segregated from society at large.

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They lived in cantonments, and when they were seen in public, it was always from a great distance — a distance underscored by the racial and other mythologies with which the business of soldiering was surrounded. When Indian soldiers were sent to war, the rest of the nation rarely saw any of the consequences: there were no body bags, literally or metaphorically, and such consequences as there were were felt only within those villages and districts from which the soldiers had been recruited. Even though Indian soldiers fought in every important conflict of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer War, the First World War, a succession of Mesopotamian campaigns, etc. — their compatriots were never anything other than distant spectators in relation to these conflicts. They had no say whatsoever in matters of recruitment of deployment: in other words, they had absolutely no control over how their countrymen were used.

What can we make of this? On the one hand, it was surely a good thing that civilians were spared the spectacle of violence, and it is certainly true that this was a luxury the empire amply afforded its Indian subjects. Yet it is also true that if a society is ignorant of the consequences of conflict, then it runs the risk of forgetting that conflicts do have consequences. Those who forget this are inevitably forced to relearn it in very painful and perhaps tragic ways. Often, looking back on the recent history of the Indian subcontinent — particularly the nuclear situation — it seems to me that this is one of the most implacable of the many ghosts that have haunted the region over these last fifty years.

Excerpted from Wild Fictions: Essays by Amitav Ghosh with permission from HarperCollins India