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The hubris of the Raj

Mukund Padmanabhan's elegantly written book seeks to reconstruct a 'narrative of events that have been neglected, of stories that have been lost'

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Kanika Datta
5 min read Last Updated : Apr 25 2024 | 10:57 PM IST
The Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked over a Japanese Non-Invasion
Author: Mukund Padmanabhan
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 245
Price: Rs 599


On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Hawaii was not just a “day of infamy” for the US, as President Roosevelt emotionally described it, but the start of a period of deep ignominy for European colonialism too. By March 1942, the possibility that the sun could set on the British Empire sooner than expected rapidly dawned on many colonial subjects.
 

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As Mukund Padmanabhan writes in The Great Flap of 1942, “Japan advanced with a speed that stunned the world, ripping apart like muslin an empire that was woven purposefully over centuries.”  In meticulously planned simultaneous operations, the Japanese invaded the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. Japan had few natural resources and no dense jungles for the military to train in. Yet Japanese soldiers on bicycles and light rations overwhelmed the British, who had ruled the jungles for almost a century, offering a masterclass in jungle warfare. Seemingly impregnable British warships were sunk and by February 15, 1942, “Fortress Singapore” fell.
 
The capture of Singapore led to the biggest surrender by Britain in its history. Worse, the precipitate evacuation of the sahibs, memsahibs and their families, leaving the native population to its fate and the mercy of ruthless conquerors presaged the Great Flap of 1942 in India.
 
Mr Padmanabhan’s elegantly written book seeks to reconstruct a “narrative of events that have been neglected, of stories that have been lost”. The idea for this book grew from stories his mother, aged 17 at the time, told him, of fleeing Madras for Coimbatore, and almost losing a year of the two-year interm­ediate degree in the bargain. Soon he realised there was not a single family he knew in the city that had not fled in 1942. “That an entire city could have fled because of an invasion that never happened is a story with an irresistible twist of dystopian futility,” he writes.   
 
Dystopian, yes; but not futile from India’s perspective. Though the history is not new, the value of this work lies in recreating the kaleidoscope of events that exposed, to ordinary people as much as politicians, the fragility and hubris of imperial power.
The widespread panic was buoyed by rumours of “fantastic Japanese prowess and contemptible British cowardice” from terrified Indians fleeing Burma on foot, convincing people that an attack on India was imminent. We now know from Japanese records that Tokyo had no such plans; the invasion of Burma and attacks on the Raj’s peripheries were in the nature of securing the rear of their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
 
Madras was not the only town that saw an exodus. As the Japanese tore through south east Asia and conquered Port Blair in the Andamans, coastal villages and towns — from Calcutta to Bombay — emptied as panicked citizens fled. By the end of 1941, for instance, 17 per cent of Calcutta’s population fled and in the New Year, 60 per cent of Vizag’s residents had decamped.
 
The terror of a Japanese land advance was compounded by naval operations that saw the sinking of a British aircraft carrier, a destroyer and a merchant fleet as well as the bombing of Vizag and Cocanada, attacks that triggered serial exoduses. They are little remembered today mainly because they didn’t receive much publicity at the time. That was partly because, the author points out, “there was nothing even remotely positive that could be spun out of the incidents.”
 
The Great Flap also spoke volumes for the poor quality of British intelligence. In August, Arthur Hope, the hopeless Governor of Madras Presidency, ordered the dispersal of his government to the interior, as did the Cuttack government and the Cochin secretariat on the back of information that the Japanese fleet would make landfall near Madras.
 
The more permanent impact played out in the political sphere. The inevitable failure of the Cripps Mission, sent by the British to seek India’s cooperation for Britain’s efforts in the war, of March 1942 was one consequence. There was also a hardening of Mahatma Gandhi’s outlook towards the British presence in India culminating in the Quit India movement in August— in retrospect an ill-judged move, prompting the British to jail all prominent Congress leaders and leaving the field open 
to Jinnah and the impulses of partition.
 
Mr Padmanabhan’s book stands with Yasmin Khan’s  The Raj at War as a well-researched narrative of an era that is falling out of collective memory as the generations pass. It is instructive to know, among other things, that George Orwell was deployed as part of an elaborate programme to influence India’s intelligentsia about British success in the war as an antidote to Bose’s radio broadcasts and Japanese propaganda.
 
Though the Japanese continued their sporadic attacks around the south-eastern coast, the Great Flap, a term deployed by the British with characteristic understatement, was over by May, leaving many bemused. The author reproduces a rhyme from a letter to a local paper that sums it up: “M’s for Madras where the scare grew and grew/ But ‘what it was all about’ nobody knew”.
 
For my mother, eight at the time, 1942 was a lark, the year of sleeping under sturdy dining tables, evacuation to Ranchi and home-schooling on Reading Without Tears.  In her memory, the greater flap was in 1943, the year of the Bengal Famine, the most egregious failure of colonial rule. Mr Padmanabhan describes how a lone bomb dropped by the Japanese in Madras harbour in 1943 did not cause a flutter. But when the Japanese bombed the Kidderpore docks in December 1943, killing almost 500 people, that death toll added to the thousands of famine-stricken bodies that littered the city.

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