Mukund Padmanabhan:The Great Flap of 1942

The Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked Over a Japanese Non-Invasion. Mukund Padmanabhan Vintage/ Penguin/Random House New Delhi 2024 Mukund Padmanabhan has written a nail – biting, gripping story about the 2nd World War about episodes which have been quite forgotten. Did the 2nd World War start in 1939, or is it to be placed historically with the Japanese invasion of China, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore, Andaman Islands, Ceylon? For anyone interested in island historiographies and topographies and the historical impact of colonialism and imperialism, this is a fascinating study. Japan offers Indians liberation from British colonialism, and there are takers for it, as the part played by Jagadish Chandra Bose and the INA show. The map of the ‘axis’, and the manipulation of fascist countries during World War 11, are displayed as alternatives to colonial rule. The mission of the Second World War as uniting countries against Hitler, connects Europe and its colonies and the Americans. To anyone who has visited the Andaman Islands, the prison fortress and the museumisation of the bunkers and bombing troughs and trenches used by Japanese soldiers are suddenly animated by this close and detailed history of how close the Japanese were to bombing the subcontinent of India. Ofcourse, Pablo Bartholomew’s photographic exhibition showing the villages and the Naga communities who helped his father escape from Burma is a tangible record that people did leave their homes out of fear of Japanese invasion (see A Photographer’s Journey with his Trusted ‘Aides’ To Trace His Roots www TOI February 29th 2016). What Mukund Padmanabhan offers is an understanding of the 1940s as a crucial period for reinterpreting the National Movement. His understanding of Gandhi as constantly offering ahimsa as the true response in all situations, shows us how satyagraha was viewed by the Congress leaders who were quite perplexed when Gandhi appeared dialogic with Hitler, Mussolini and the potential threat of Japanese invasion, always saying that the said enemy was human, and had to be treated as such. Gandhi strongly maintained that exploitation, whether by the British or the Japanese or the Germans remained exploitation and therefore the system had to be distinguished from the individual. In extremely interesting narratives about the threat of Japanese invasion on India in 1941 and 1942, which were accompanied by rumours, Padmanabhan looks at the effect it had on innumerable lives. The Presidency towns and the port towns emptied out, people left for the countryside as everything shut down, in the face of immediate bombardment. Bombs had fallen, true, but the argument he makes is that fear was the greater danger, and economic loss of property and occupations in these cities far exceeded the actual threat of impending danger. The statistics for the emptying out of these commercial venues was matched by the injunction that necessary services needed to continue, and the war effort and manufacture of weapons must continue without distraction. Women and children of colonial administrators and the Indian upper classes were hurried out to safety, then colonial bureaucracy, and last, the ‘useless eaters’. The colonial representation of working class self sufficiency meant that the very nature of factory production of weapons was prioritized as were sanitation, water and medical services. Local communities in the presidency towns fled because they feared the garrisons of multinational troops that began to occupy and take over the Indian cities in preparation of setting up bases for World War 11. There was in fact popular and real terror of the soldiers, for whom prostitutes had to be garnered and facilitated by the British administration. People from local communities were evacuated from their homes so that brothels could be set up in their vacated residences by the British. Rape was the word used to intimidate local residents, and prostitution considered a rehabilitation device. Even civilian English residents responded to this by asking whether people were thrown out of their homes in local towns in England to administratively pimp for soldiers in the home country. After many months, often a year later, when the danger of imminent Japanese invasion was thought to be over, people returned to their homes and streets to see that everything they owned was gone, thieves had stripped their homes not just of the furniture and objects, but had stolen every nail and plank of wood. There had not even been a war, but the damage to homes was so total that many people were reduced to circumstances of being literally homeless. Usually, studies of the National Movement concentrate on Quit India and Khilafat Movement, but what Padmanabhan has given us is an act of genius. He locates the subtle differences between Gandhi, Nehru, Azad and Rajagopalchari. He allows us glimpses into the way in which these crucial years of confrontation with British Raj is mediated by the elephant in the room, the presence of Hitler and the warriors of Japanese imperialism. They were very much present, and the role of the parallel radio, which was set up to contest British broadcasts, brings this to the fore. Totalitarianism was inviting to Indians in the 1940s as a response to Macaulayism, and its effect felt very much even today, though so many decades have past. The euphoria that the generation born in the 1950s, which carried on to their growing years in the 1960s, is captured in the effervescence of the text. Part of it is consumed by the interest in the silences in the text, as nothing was available in easy conversation over the dining table, about the 1940s. Padmanabhan gives us a multilayered account, excluding the Communist interface, of how the National Movement or Freedom Movement wove a tapestry around the presence of the impending 2nd World War and its mammoth players. The Epilogue is a fascinating account of how the fear of Japanese bombardment affected the lives of the animals in Madras Zoo who were arbitrarily shot if considered dangerous. Yet, since I recently visited Andaman Islands in February 2024, and Colombo in Sri Lanka in July 2024, (to follow up interests in island ecologies in the time of climate change and sea erosion,) I can only note that both having been bombed by the Japanese, logically, the subcontinental sea ports would have faced immense panic at the nautical closeness of the harbours of Madras, Kochi, Visakapatnam, Calcutta. Is risk measurable, can panic be post- poned? Whether its evacuation of sea side towns or riverine villages, any decision made may be regretted in hindsight. At the time, however, there is response to warning by authorities, and there is the instinctive ability to flee if there is an alternative safe place.