Abstract
The outbreak of the Second World War heralded a new phase in Indo-British relations and the beginning of American political-military interest in the subcontinent. However, the unilateral announcement by Lord Linlithgow on 3 September 1939, of India’s participation in the war — justified legally on the basis that the viceroy was empowered to decide on foreign policy issues — raised basic issues about the participatory and supposedly equal role of South Asians in the decision-making process. The provincial governments already working through the Congress ministries or similar coalitions in Muslim majority provinces had not been consulted prior to the announcement. The Indian National Congress (INC) reacted strongly to this development, feeling that it had been bypassed, though the elected assemblies of the Punjab, Bengal and Sind supported the declaration as did the princely states through their Chamber of Princes. The Congress demanded that the British government declare its policy on the political future of the subcontinent in the light of her war aims. In other words, the Congress high command wanted to establish whether Britain was fighting for democracy, and would then implement it in India after the cessation of hostilities, or would strive to maintain the status quo.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The non-cooperation movement was launched by the Congress in October 1940 with a popular slogan: ‘It is wrong to help the British war efforts with men or money, the only worthy effort is to resist war with non-violent resistance.’ See R. Coupland, The Indian Problem, part II (London, 1944) pp. 248–249. The Muslim League welcomed the August offer to the extent that the British government had formally committed itself to take the interests of the minorities into consideration in such constitutional arrangements. It was a rather official recognition of the multinational formation of the subcontinent, amounting to a rebuke for the unilateralism spearheaded by the Indian National Congress. However, the League had its own reservations on the August offer as it fell short of the Muslim demand for Pakistan.
Harijan, 15 June 1940. Earlier, at the Haripura session of the Congress, Nehru observed: ‘I have examined the so-called communal question through the telescope and if there is nothing what can you see?’ S. S. Peerzada (ed.), Leaders Correspondence with Mr. Jinnah (Bombay, 1944) p. 104.
Jinnah to Gandhi, 15 September 1944, quoted in H. Bolitho, Jinnah (London, 1954) p. 149.
T. A. Raman, Report on India (New York, 1943) p. 84. It might be relevant to mention here the later suspicions of Raman’s thesis due to his close relationship with the British government.
Churchill, as a young subaltern, had ventured into the tribal areas of Malakand and Mohmand agencies in the NWFP in 1896. He was involved in an incident while in India, hurting his shoulder, which became ‘a grave embarrassment in moments of peril, violence, and efforts,’ causing a life-time agony. He fought in India against the tribal Pushtuns ‘destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke down the reservoir in punitive devastation’ yet was full of praise for swarthy Pathans. He liked their valour and fighting skills in a Kiplingesque way, and in fact Kipling’s works had left a strong impression about India on Churchill who said of him, ‘India brought us together.’ Churchill was an imperialist who believed totally in ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘the white man’s burden’. For details see Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (London, 1930) pp. 107–54.
Also, Lord Moran, Winston Churchill, The Struggle for Survival (London, 1966).
C. H. Philips and Mary D. Wainwright (eds), The Partition of India, Policies and Perspectives: 1935–1947 (London, 1970) p. 18.
Humayun Kabir, ‘Muslim politics, 1942–7’, in ibid., p. 391; also, D. A. Low, Review of J. Glendovan, The Viceroy at Bay, South Asian Review, IV, no. 3, April 1973, p. 257.
Lord Linlithgow (1887–1952) had extensive experience of service in the subcontinent in the 1920s and 1930s before being designated as the viceroy in 1936. He had been the chairman of the Royal Commission of Agriculture in India in 1926–8 and chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Indian Constitutional Reforms during 1933–4. His tenure as viceroy from 1935 to 1943 was a very ‘volatile’ period in party politics in the subcontinent. He served British imperial interests very successfully by following a non-committed policy, leaving problems for his successor, Lord Wavell. For more on his relationship with Jinnah, see Waheed Ahmad (ed.), Jinnah-Linlithgow Correspondence, 1939–43 (Lahore, 1978). For a favourable account of Linlithgow’s political career,
see John Glendoven, Viceroy at Bay, Lord Linlithgow in India 1936–43 (London, 1971). Wavell summed up his predecessor’s problems as follows: ‘I think his trouble in India was that he is too wedded to efficiency to make allowance for Indian inefficiency, and never grasped that the Indian thinks and acts a great deal more with his heart than his head.’
Penderel Moon (ed.), Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (Oxford, 1973) p. 118. For a comprehensive work on Linlithgow,
see Syed Ali Gowher Rizvi, Linlithgow and India. A study of British Policy and the Political Impasse in India, 1936–43 (London, 1978) pp. 223–42.
For more on Franklin D. Roosevelt and his domestic policies see James McGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York, 1956) and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York, 1970).
L. Natarajan, American Shadow Over India (Bombay, 1952) p. 12.
William E. Curtis, Modern India (New York, 1905) p. 464.
Claude H. Van Tyne, India in Ferment (New York, 1923).
Katherine Mayo, Mother India, 2 vols (New York, 1927 and 1930).
M. K. Gandhi, The Truth About India (Stockton, 1929). He actually called it a ‘Drain Inspector’s Report’.
Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India (Calcutta, 1928). Other titles like Father India and Uncle Sam by contemporary writers were intended to defend India.
For example, see J. T. Sunderland, India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom (New York, 1928).
‘India seems to occupy the most inferior status in the eyes of the United States. This is apparently due, at any rate in part, to unfavourable opinion of Indians prevalent in some influential quarters of the United States.’ K. Rao, ‘Indians overseas’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, May 1944, as quoted in M. Abul Khair, United States Foreign Policy in the subcontinent (1939–1947), vol. 1 (Dacca, 1968) p. 17.
They looked after eighteen orphanages, ninety-three hospitals and managed more than 200 dispensaries across the subcontinent. For more data see J. I. Parker (ed.), Interpretative Statistical Survey of the World Mission of the Christian Church (Chicago, 1938).
A. Guy Hope, America and Swaraj: The U.S. Role in Indian Independence (Washington, 1968) p. 14.
Certain influential newspapers and periodicals like the New York Daily Press, Chicago Tribune, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, New Republic, Philadelphia Inquirer, Christian Science Monitor and Asia gave favourable coverage to the cause of the South Asian nationalists. South Asian leaders like Nehru were trying to reach the American public as early as 1940 to remind them of the historic responsibilities that lay before America as ‘the burden of the future’. Atlantic Monthly (April 1940) quoted in B. Prasad, The Origins of Indian Foreign Policy (Calcutta, 1960) pp. 176–7. For a study of the American media portrayal of political developments in the subcontinent until the mid-1930s
see Harnam Singh, The Indian National Movement and American Opinion (Delhi, 1962).
According to J. J. Singh, there were about 4,000 South Asians in the USA in 1946, 95 per cent of whom were uneducated. 3,000 of them lived on the west coast as farmers, whereas 500 lived in the New York area with 300 in Detroit and the remaining 200 scattered all over. J. J. Singh, India and America a pamphlet published by India League of America (New York, 1947) p. 11.
Haridas T. Muzumdar, America’s Contributions to India’s Freedom (Allahabad, 1962) p. 13.
For details see D. S. Saund, Congressman From India (New York, 1960).
On British efforts to manipulate world opinion in the Allies’ interest during the Second World War see William Stevenson, A Man Called Interpid. The Secret War, 1939–45 (London, 1978).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1991 Iftikhar H. Malik
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Malik, I.H. (1991). The Second World War and the Britain-USA-Subcontinent Axis. In: US-South Asian Relations, 1940–47. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21216-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21216-3_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-21218-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-21216-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)