A forgotten army

The Indian Contingent: The Forgotten Muslim Soldiers of the Battle of Dunkirk

Author: Ghee Bowman

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 310

Price: Rs 699

The endpapers of Peter Clarke’s monumental book The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire (Penguin, 2007) reproduce a colourful British propaganda poster. The artwork resembles that uniquely juvenile, muscular style immortalised by Soviet art and the text employs bracing language: “The British Commonwealth TOGETHER”. It portrays soldiers representing various nationalities of Empire, ramrod straight and iron-jawed, marching in lockstep for a common cause.

It’s a travesty. White soldiers — British and from the Dominions— occupy the first two rows. The last row is reserved for a Sikh and an African soldier. Yet India and Africa played a disproportionately large role in churning out the men, materiel and other war supplies to fight Britain’s battles from the jungles of south-east Asia to the deserts of North Africa and even the frozen fastness of Norway.   

Ghee Bowman’s micro-study is one of several recent well-timed reminders of the degree to which the Indian empire underwrote the British contribution in World War II. This book traces the fortunes of the men chiefly of the 25th and partly of the 22nd Animal Transport Companies of the All Indian Army Service Corps “who had travelled 7,000 miles with their mules to help the British Army”. These soldiers were part of a contingent called “Force K6” or the “Indian Contingent”.

The contingents Mr Bowman chooses for this history are unique in that they included the only units in the Indian Army sent to Britain — though the men of the 22nd, having spent time in German POW camps, didn’t make it there till the end of the war. Mr Bowman relates the parallel experiences of these contingents against the looming background of the end of empire.

As he writes, “The four-year story of the men of the 25th company and their comrades is one of the great untold stories of the war. Their friendships and the racism they encountered, their struggles to find the right kind of food, the mosques they attended and improvised, the women they loved and the babies they left behind were all part of a unique experience of soldiering.”   

This socio-military study corrects several popular misconceptions including the belief that only white soldiers participated in the Battle of France in June 1940 and were involved in the celebrated rescue from Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan’s mawkish 2017 film Dunkirk, for instance, offered no images of the 300 men who were evacuated from those beaches. “They marched along the beach on the afternoon of 28 May, sepoys, drivers, naiks and dafadars, backsmiths and carpenters and cooks and one imam,” Mr Bowman writes.

Apart from a painstaking study of documents, Mr Bowman has tracked down and interviewed soldiers’ relatives and survivors of that era in the remote French, Welsh and Scottish villages and towns in which Force K6 was stationed to build an evocative and nuanced account of the encounters between men who came from mostly hard-scrabble rural backgrounds in undivided Punjab and rural Britons. He writes of their collective experiences and the occasional ambivalence of subject soldiers fighting an imperialist war against the background of a powerful freedom movement at home.

The collective purpose of empire meant that British attitudes towards Indian soldiers quartered in their midst were at least outwardly tolerant.  But Mr Bowman shrewdly points out that “the Indian presence in Britain reflected the British presence in India.” So some locals may have protested strongly against overt racism such as women objecting to Indian soldiers using an open air pool. But this was, the author wryly acknowledges, “a rather thin edge of the wedge.” Private utterances “when the tie was loosened and the guard was down” may have been a different matter altogether.

The POWs of 22nd company were spared the gross maltreatment of African soldiers thanks only to the Nazi’s racial theory that regarded north Indians as “Aryans”. A few soldiers spied for the Germans in Iraq and Iran in readiness for Hitler’s planned invasion of India via the Caucuses. Interestingly, about ten soldiers from the company escaped, no small feat for peasant boys with no knowledge of European languages. Some even joined the Resistance.

Others joined the German army at the behest of Subhas Chandra Bose, whom Mr Bowman describes as harbouring “clear fascist sympathies”. Bose’s strategy of allying with Germany and Japan to eject the British from India may have been controversial and misguided, but he subscribed neither to Mussolini’s version of fascism and certainly not Hitler’s.

As with many micro-histories The Indian Contingent is bogged down by detail occasionally. Mr Bowman reserves the best for the last in the Epilogue titled “Forgetting and Remembering”, tracing the processes of integration and preserving historical memory in Britain and South Asia. Where possible, Mr Bowman tracks the individual stories of the men through to their post-war lives in newly independent countries, such as that of Anis Ahmed Khan, the first Muslim to become a major general in the Indian army, before, frustrated by the lack of promotion thereafter, he settled in Pakistan.

We know why South Asia chose to forget. But in Britain, the collective memory lapse was wilful, a result of the social insecurities of imperial decline, producing the crude racism that became standard in popular culture.  

A Foreword by Yasmin Khan, author of the excellent The Raj at War, notes that this book is in the “vanguard of shaping new histories of the Second World War”. This is a badly needed conversation in these uber-nationalist times.