 "Money Coming! Money Coming!")
THE RAJ AT WAR: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF INDIA'S SECOND WORLD WAR
Author: Yasmin Khan
Publisher: Random House India
Pages: 416
Price: Rs 699
In late June 1941, a new shipyard was opened in the eastern coastal port of Vizagapatam to great public excitement. Four thousand guests attended the inauguration festivities, priests said prayers and blessed the site and astrologers were consulted on the timing. Five kinds of jewel were buried deep in the concrete foundations where a berth in the shipyard would stand. Garlanded luminaries of the nationalist movement, most notably future president of India Rajendra Prasad, gave speeches extolling the enterprise and Prasad laid a foundation stone at the site. Gandhi sent a message of goodwill - 'May your enterprise be successful and may it be beneficial to the whole country' - while the renowned poet Rabindranath Tagore spelt out the dream with more precision: 'I hope the day is not distant when Indians shall sail the seas in their own ships flying the flag of their own country.'
Midway between Calcutta and Madras on the Coromandel Coast, Vizagapatam had a burgeoning port, fed by new railways connecting the city to Madras and the eastern countryside of India, which was rich in natural minerals and coal… The port was a strategic asset in wartime as it was well hidden and the deep waters could hold large ships. Here, manganese from the interior, crucial to the making of steel and iron, was shipped, cargo steamers carried goods along the coast to Calcutta to the north and Madras to the south and workers sweated through the night during the war, loading and unloading coir, tobacco, groundnuts and cloth for export, and receiving incoming machinery and cloth.
The new shipyard was the start of a bold new venture. The owner of the site, the indefatigable industrialist Walchand Hirachand, had grand hopes for constructing a steamship, the first Indian-built steamship. The ships bringing and taking goods to and from Calcutta and Bombay had usually been constructed in Glasgow and Liverpool. Steamships, Walchand speculated, would make him wealthier still (he was already one of the wealthiest men in India) and also create a prestigious trophy for Indian industry. Like many industrialists of the age he was not so much interested in waging war with the Germans or Japanese, as with making profit. The war presented opportunities to generate capital, to acquire technical assistance, to launch mega-projects and to found his own dream ventures. From the eighteenth century onwards British approaches to Indian shipping had been characterised by an unequal dualism, with one rule for British-owned ship companies and another rule for Indians. There were higher insurance rates and bars to Indian involvement in shipping, the deskilling of local crews, and outright resistance and dirty rate wars which drove Asians out of the business. War, many businessmen believed, would turn the tables. They eagerly hoped for new opportunities - unprecedented profits and the advancement of Indian heavy industry, and the chance to manufacture for the domestic market for which they had waited so long. …
As fronts in Egypt and the Middle East became central to the ongoing conflict, India came under pressure to support the war by supplying manufactured goods to the expanding Indian Army and also the wider British cause. Channelling supplies from the eastern empire towards the Middle East was a solution to the pressures placed on Britain as the industrial and manufacturing pivot of the empire. After years of drawing on the empire for raw materials in exchange for manufactured goods, Britain now needed its colonies to provide readymade products: guns, uniforms, paper, steel, leather boots, if not for export, at least for import substitution.
Government contracts soared in number and by the start of 1940 orders for manufactured goods weighed in at over £62 million. 'It is reported to me by persons of status that money is being spent like water in the name of the war', Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy. Seven million garments a month rolled out of Indian factories and 3 million pairs of boots. Within three years, India would be producing as much for war supply as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa combined together. Alongside government-run and protected ordnance factories, hundreds of trade workshops and railway workshops were subcontracted to produce spare parts, small machinery and tools. Private industries, particularly factories manufacturing chemicals, paint, paper, metal alloys, jute for khaki uniforms and canvas, all attracted increasing numbers of workers as the pressure to complete government contracts increased month on month; one paper mill owned by the Birla group, for instance, had soon tripled its output. By the mid-1940s India was churning out rifles and bayonets, machine guns and ammunition, artillery and shells, tractors and plating for armoured vehicles, anti-tank ammunition, boots, blankets, uniforms, camouflage and sandbags.
The impact on the ecology of the subcontinent was becoming evident as timber from the forests of Burma and from the north-east and central India was hewn into packing cases, ammunition boxes, railway sleepers and telegraph poles, leaving the natural landscape of the Burmese borderlands changed even before the ravages of war in the region. A few voices spoke up for the preservation of the forests but they went unheard. The war was about to unleash an unprecedented assault on the natural environment of the north-east and once road-building began in 1942, the region became more accessible than ever before. Private companies, often British- and American-owned, like Burma Shell, were given the rights to prospect for oil and minerals, and looked hungrily towards the Bengali river basins for exploration.
The economic boom was welcomed, especially after the long years of depression. Little wonder that G D Birla and his peers initially hesitated to support the Congress, and believed Gandhi was 'wandering in the wilderness'. Business leaders backed the war for the time being, demanding with candour 'a fair share of the additional demand'. For a while, businessmen like Walchand and G D Birla threw themselves behind the war and when Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, Birla telegraphed him to congratulate him. Pained by the increasing estrangement of the British and the Indians and concerned about the desperate fortunes of the Allies in Europe, industrial leaders attempted to straddle the middle ground, to mediate between empire and nationalists. Birla pressed his old friend Gandhi towards a settlement with the British and told him frankly 'we are going the wrong way' when Gandhi initiated satyagraha in 1940.
Profits for war industries soared and time and again the roots of staggering post-war fortunes can be found in the 1940s. The larger Indian-owned companies could acquire licences, cartelise and buy out expatriate firms and concentrate wealth in ever fewer hands. Well-placed and canny operators like the Marwari Ramakrishna Dalmia, who had previously owned some of the largest sugar and cement companies in India but had not diversified, and turned his attention to finance. He established Bharat Bank in 1941 and was soon buying into flour-milling, sugar and jute mills, cotton textiles, civil aviation, railways, coal mines, electricity supply and newspapers. In Jamshedpur, the home of Tata Steel - India's iconic steel plant - towering chimneys smoked day and night. During the Battle of Britain, Tata Steel made a voluntary donation for the purchase of two Spitfires, so keen was the Indian-owned business to display its loyalty to the war effort. Alongside the larger companies, smaller firms stockpiled warehouses, chased contract opportunities and risked new ventures, often reaping profits on a new scale, while it soon became apparent that small workshops and petty craftsmen could tap the new windfalls as well as the bigger players.
Indian laboratories started to make advances too and scientists could already trumpet the technical and scientific innovations generated by the war. Nearly 300 different drugs that had formerly been imported could now be made locally. Military and civil hospitals looked to the domestic market for everything from disinfectants to surgical instruments, hotwater bottles, bandages, rubber gloves and enamel dishes. …
For many people of far more modest means, wartime looked potentially promising too. The megacities, Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, buzzed with a new energy while artisans, clerks and railway workers in small towns and cities looked forward to greater chances of employment, far preferable to the long hard years of the 1930s. Workers flocked towards the cities, and factory employment went up by a third. As one Lascar recalled at the start of the war, everyone was saying 'Money Coming! Money Coming!' …
… The rising wages, though, have to be set against rising living costs. The boom in wages quickly proved illusory as the wartime economic pressure cooker in India started to boil. Demand was intense and shifts in the factories and war industries became harder, longer and more disruptive to ordinary life, and labourers had to be prepared to pick up day wages and to chop and change contracts. The usual mechanisms for negotiating problems between boss and worker also started to fail as the state could crack down on strikes using the Defence of India rules and managers used every trick in the book to keep mill hands at work, to keep the spindles turning and the engines humming twenty-four hours a day.
... Despite intensified attempts in 1941 to gear India towards war, the most important change that was taking place across the country was a silent, pervasive phenomenon… Inflation was already outstripping rises in wages. Ordinary villagers did not buy a vast array of goods and the price of a small number of consumable items was critically important, the basic stuff of life on which people depended: grain, kerosene and cloth. … The warning signs about how risky and precarious life was becoming for the rural poor flashed again and again. Silver coins were disappearing from the market as high metal content was regarded as a form of security in times when money was becoming less reliable. The new rupee note, introduced ostensibly to save metal, was also a signifier of inflation and people instinctively rejected it in favour of the former metal coin. These telltale signs of people severely squeezed by economic circumstances were subtle, but widespread.
Reproduced with permission
Author: Yasmin Khan
Publisher: Random House India
Pages: 416
Price: Rs 699
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Midway between Calcutta and Madras on the Coromandel Coast, Vizagapatam had a burgeoning port, fed by new railways connecting the city to Madras and the eastern countryside of India, which was rich in natural minerals and coal… The port was a strategic asset in wartime as it was well hidden and the deep waters could hold large ships. Here, manganese from the interior, crucial to the making of steel and iron, was shipped, cargo steamers carried goods along the coast to Calcutta to the north and Madras to the south and workers sweated through the night during the war, loading and unloading coir, tobacco, groundnuts and cloth for export, and receiving incoming machinery and cloth.
The new shipyard was the start of a bold new venture. The owner of the site, the indefatigable industrialist Walchand Hirachand, had grand hopes for constructing a steamship, the first Indian-built steamship. The ships bringing and taking goods to and from Calcutta and Bombay had usually been constructed in Glasgow and Liverpool. Steamships, Walchand speculated, would make him wealthier still (he was already one of the wealthiest men in India) and also create a prestigious trophy for Indian industry. Like many industrialists of the age he was not so much interested in waging war with the Germans or Japanese, as with making profit. The war presented opportunities to generate capital, to acquire technical assistance, to launch mega-projects and to found his own dream ventures. From the eighteenth century onwards British approaches to Indian shipping had been characterised by an unequal dualism, with one rule for British-owned ship companies and another rule for Indians. There were higher insurance rates and bars to Indian involvement in shipping, the deskilling of local crews, and outright resistance and dirty rate wars which drove Asians out of the business. War, many businessmen believed, would turn the tables. They eagerly hoped for new opportunities - unprecedented profits and the advancement of Indian heavy industry, and the chance to manufacture for the domestic market for which they had waited so long. …
As fronts in Egypt and the Middle East became central to the ongoing conflict, India came under pressure to support the war by supplying manufactured goods to the expanding Indian Army and also the wider British cause. Channelling supplies from the eastern empire towards the Middle East was a solution to the pressures placed on Britain as the industrial and manufacturing pivot of the empire. After years of drawing on the empire for raw materials in exchange for manufactured goods, Britain now needed its colonies to provide readymade products: guns, uniforms, paper, steel, leather boots, if not for export, at least for import substitution.
Government contracts soared in number and by the start of 1940 orders for manufactured goods weighed in at over £62 million. 'It is reported to me by persons of status that money is being spent like water in the name of the war', Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy. Seven million garments a month rolled out of Indian factories and 3 million pairs of boots. Within three years, India would be producing as much for war supply as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa combined together. Alongside government-run and protected ordnance factories, hundreds of trade workshops and railway workshops were subcontracted to produce spare parts, small machinery and tools. Private industries, particularly factories manufacturing chemicals, paint, paper, metal alloys, jute for khaki uniforms and canvas, all attracted increasing numbers of workers as the pressure to complete government contracts increased month on month; one paper mill owned by the Birla group, for instance, had soon tripled its output. By the mid-1940s India was churning out rifles and bayonets, machine guns and ammunition, artillery and shells, tractors and plating for armoured vehicles, anti-tank ammunition, boots, blankets, uniforms, camouflage and sandbags.
The impact on the ecology of the subcontinent was becoming evident as timber from the forests of Burma and from the north-east and central India was hewn into packing cases, ammunition boxes, railway sleepers and telegraph poles, leaving the natural landscape of the Burmese borderlands changed even before the ravages of war in the region. A few voices spoke up for the preservation of the forests but they went unheard. The war was about to unleash an unprecedented assault on the natural environment of the north-east and once road-building began in 1942, the region became more accessible than ever before. Private companies, often British- and American-owned, like Burma Shell, were given the rights to prospect for oil and minerals, and looked hungrily towards the Bengali river basins for exploration.
The economic boom was welcomed, especially after the long years of depression. Little wonder that G D Birla and his peers initially hesitated to support the Congress, and believed Gandhi was 'wandering in the wilderness'. Business leaders backed the war for the time being, demanding with candour 'a fair share of the additional demand'. For a while, businessmen like Walchand and G D Birla threw themselves behind the war and when Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, Birla telegraphed him to congratulate him. Pained by the increasing estrangement of the British and the Indians and concerned about the desperate fortunes of the Allies in Europe, industrial leaders attempted to straddle the middle ground, to mediate between empire and nationalists. Birla pressed his old friend Gandhi towards a settlement with the British and told him frankly 'we are going the wrong way' when Gandhi initiated satyagraha in 1940.
Profits for war industries soared and time and again the roots of staggering post-war fortunes can be found in the 1940s. The larger Indian-owned companies could acquire licences, cartelise and buy out expatriate firms and concentrate wealth in ever fewer hands. Well-placed and canny operators like the Marwari Ramakrishna Dalmia, who had previously owned some of the largest sugar and cement companies in India but had not diversified, and turned his attention to finance. He established Bharat Bank in 1941 and was soon buying into flour-milling, sugar and jute mills, cotton textiles, civil aviation, railways, coal mines, electricity supply and newspapers. In Jamshedpur, the home of Tata Steel - India's iconic steel plant - towering chimneys smoked day and night. During the Battle of Britain, Tata Steel made a voluntary donation for the purchase of two Spitfires, so keen was the Indian-owned business to display its loyalty to the war effort. Alongside the larger companies, smaller firms stockpiled warehouses, chased contract opportunities and risked new ventures, often reaping profits on a new scale, while it soon became apparent that small workshops and petty craftsmen could tap the new windfalls as well as the bigger players.
Indian laboratories started to make advances too and scientists could already trumpet the technical and scientific innovations generated by the war. Nearly 300 different drugs that had formerly been imported could now be made locally. Military and civil hospitals looked to the domestic market for everything from disinfectants to surgical instruments, hotwater bottles, bandages, rubber gloves and enamel dishes. …
For many people of far more modest means, wartime looked potentially promising too. The megacities, Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, buzzed with a new energy while artisans, clerks and railway workers in small towns and cities looked forward to greater chances of employment, far preferable to the long hard years of the 1930s. Workers flocked towards the cities, and factory employment went up by a third. As one Lascar recalled at the start of the war, everyone was saying 'Money Coming! Money Coming!' …
… The rising wages, though, have to be set against rising living costs. The boom in wages quickly proved illusory as the wartime economic pressure cooker in India started to boil. Demand was intense and shifts in the factories and war industries became harder, longer and more disruptive to ordinary life, and labourers had to be prepared to pick up day wages and to chop and change contracts. The usual mechanisms for negotiating problems between boss and worker also started to fail as the state could crack down on strikes using the Defence of India rules and managers used every trick in the book to keep mill hands at work, to keep the spindles turning and the engines humming twenty-four hours a day.
... Despite intensified attempts in 1941 to gear India towards war, the most important change that was taking place across the country was a silent, pervasive phenomenon… Inflation was already outstripping rises in wages. Ordinary villagers did not buy a vast array of goods and the price of a small number of consumable items was critically important, the basic stuff of life on which people depended: grain, kerosene and cloth. … The warning signs about how risky and precarious life was becoming for the rural poor flashed again and again. Silver coins were disappearing from the market as high metal content was regarded as a form of security in times when money was becoming less reliable. The new rupee note, introduced ostensibly to save metal, was also a signifier of inflation and people instinctively rejected it in favour of the former metal coin. These telltale signs of people severely squeezed by economic circumstances were subtle, but widespread.
Reproduced with permission