![]() “The British Tommy hates the east,” a War Office report deduced from censored letters. Allied troops wondered what they were doing in India. A military cook from Lucknow who was able to prepare custards and gravies felt he was being demoted when an influx of Indian officers told him to make “chapattis and things like that”. Hoteliers and speculators made a fortune, and farmers had their land requisitioned to make aerodromes. Like all conflicts, the war in India was a time of shifting hierarchies. Within these confines, Khan achieves almost complete success: The Raj at War is a striking example of people’s history, packed with anecdotes, memories and information about a shared but largely unwritten global past. Telling history from the bottom up is difficult, since those in extremis rarely record their experiences it is easier to come in from the sides than from below, and use the diaries and letters of Europeans or members of India’s Anglophone elite. “At many stops on their way to Bombay, local people greeted the children at the stations, treating them with sweets, fruits, cold drinks and toys,” reported the wife of the Polish consul general. In The Raj at War, Khan sets herself a tough task: to recover the weft of India during the second world war and tell a story not only of servicemen but of nurses, bearers, political activists, road builders, seamen, interned central European Jews, schoolgirls, Bengali famine victims, enlightened officials, 22,000 African American GIs and even destitute Kazakhs, Iraqi beggars and orphaned Polish children who were escaping upheavals elsewhere. In South Asia, too, the 2.5 million volunteers who served in the second world war are forgotten, since they do not fit easily with the nationalist narrative of independence attained by non-violent resistance. At last year’s centenary of 1914, the government avoided the E-word and called such people “Commonwealth soldiers”, although the Commonwealth did not exist at the time. Troops from Africa, the West Indies, India and beyond are historically more awkward: they tend to be seen as an adjunct to the main event, although Britain’s success in both wars came from the logistics and manpower derived from its massive empire. Winston Churchill’s idea of a plucky island race standing firm against tyranny in two world wars continues to resonate. ![]() Whether it’s a Spitfire display, replica red poppies streaming out of the Tower of London or a commemoration of the battle of Waterloo, we know how to do it. Yasmin Khan reminds us at the start of her book that “Britain did not fight the second world war, the British empire did”.
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