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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2018
This article, based on new archival materials, reconstructs the experiences and observations of an Indian war correspondent from 1944 to 1946 as he covered the advance of Indian soldiers of the British-led Indian Army from northeast India, through Burma to Malaya at the war's end, then to their eventual deployment with the South East Asian Command in Java after the Japanese surrender. As it transpired, Captain P. R. S. Mani worked as an enlisted public relations officer of the British-led Indian Army but also sustained his commitment as a patriotic Indian nationalist, who gathered intelligence on the Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia and on the impact of Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army. Relatively little scholarship has focused on Asian war journalism. Mani's tension-ridden role as a self-styled ‘Indian Army observer’ provides an illuminating insight into the way in which Britain's lines of communication were appropriated and subverted during wartime and beyond, and into the way his own nationalism was reshaped by his unofficial transnational activities.
1 See Omissi, David (ed.), Indian voices of the Great War: soldiers’ letters, 1914–1918, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Das, Santanu (ed.), Race, empire and First World War writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 There is a noticeable lack of research on Asian war correspondents. The few exceptions include contributions by Jager, Sheila Miyoshi and Mitter, Rana (eds), Ruptured histories: war memory, and the post-Cold War in Asia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007 Google Scholar; Blackburn, Anne M., Locations of Buddhism: colonialism and modernity in Sri Lanka, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rothschild, Emma, The inner life of empires: an eighteenth century history, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Through studying individual life stories, these authors uncover transnational and global historical processes within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British empire.
3 Scott, James C., Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 1–16 Google Scholar.
4 Bayly, C. and Harper, T., Forgotten wars: the end of Britain's Asian empire, London: Allen Lane, 2007 Google Scholar. See also Dennis, Peter, Troubled days of peace: Mountbatten and South East Asia Command, 1945–46, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987 Google Scholar.
5 British voices—even when they are the officers of Indian Army troops—are the sole and authoritative sources in virtually all accounts of the Indian Army, from the early 1951 regimental history by Doulton, A.J.F., The fighting cock: being a history of the 23rd Indian Division, 1942–47, Aldershot [England]: Gale & Polden, 1951 Google Scholar, to the recent work of Marston, Daniel, The Indian Army and the end of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 Google Scholar.
6 Omissi, David, The sepoy and the Raj: the Indian Army, 1860–1940, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Omissi (ed.), Indian voices. Omissi's work also focuses largely on the First World War, clearly a time of great ferment in nationalism as well as in battle experiences, and so relevant to this argument, but nevertheless a significantly different context to that of the Second World War.
7 Bhattacharya, S., ‘British military information management techniques and the South Asian soldier: eastern India during the Second World War’, Modern Asian Studies, 34:2, 2000, pp. 483–510 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Bayly, Christopher, Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 Google Scholar.
9 Santanu Das, ‘Indians at home: Mesopotamia and France, 1914–1918, an intimate history’ in Das (ed.), Race, empire and First World War writing.
10 McMillan, R., The British occupation of Indonesia, 1945–1946: Britain, the Netherlands and the Indonesian Revolution, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006 Google Scholar.
11 Raghavan, Srinath, India's war: World War II and the making of modern South Asia, New York: Basic Books, 2016 Google Scholar.
12 After his death in 2011, all papers found by Mani's family were donated to the Blake Library, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). They are held in the P. R. S. Mani Collection, Blake Library, UTS.
13 From Mani's own biographical summary, written after 1977, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 26.
14 These were published anonymously—the Free Press Journal editor, S. Sadanand, refused to allow any journalist to be identified. Letters and cables between S. Sadanand (Editor, FPJB [Free Press Journal of Bombay]) to P. R. S. Mani, 1946, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 18.
15 Mani, P. R. S., The story of Indonesian revolution 1945–1950, Monograph 6, Chennai: Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Madras, 1986 Google Scholar.
16 Streets, Heather, Martial races: the military, race and masculinity in British imperial culture, 1857–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005 Google Scholar. Tarak Barkawi has pointed out, with particular reference to Sikh troops, that such Victorian racial categories were initially fantasies which accorded with both British and Indian mythology but then ‘were made real through imperial power and military organisation’ (emphasis in original): Barkawi, T., ‘Subaltern soldiers: Eurocentricism and the nation-state in the combat motivation debates’ in King, Anthony (ed.), Frontline: combat and cohesion in the twenty-first century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 24–45; p. 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Gajendra Singh, ‘The anatomy of dissent in the military of colonial India during the First and Second World Wars’, Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, Number 20, 2006; Singh, G., The testimonies of Indian soldiers and the two world wars: between self and sepoy, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014 Google Scholar. See also Manjapra, Kris and Bose, Sugata (eds), Cosmopolitan thought zones: South Asia and the global circulation of ideas, London: Palgrave, 2010 Google Scholar.
18 Raghavan, India's war, pp. 274–275.
19 Hack, Karl, ‘Imperial systems of power, colonial forces and the making of modern Southeast Asia’ in Rettig, Tobias and Hack, Karl (eds), Colonial armies in Southeast Asia, London and New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 3–38 Google Scholar.
20 Narayanan, T. G., Famine over Bengal, Calcutta: Pari Press, 1944 Google Scholar. Bengal was not the only place gravely short of food during the war, although it was the most severely affected. See also Zook, Darren C., ‘Famine in the landscape: imagining hunger in South Asian history, 1860–1990’ in Rangarajan, Mahesh and Sivaramakrishan, K. (eds), India's environmental history, Vol. 2, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2011, pp. 400–428 Google Scholar. Mani became aware that many of the Punjabi and other troops were anxious about the food shortages in their home areas, which undermined their morale. Narayanan's writing as a correspondent in Indonesia in 1946 is discussed in Heather Goodall, Beyond borders: Indonesian independence in the eyes of the region, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming.
21 Details of Mani's early career are found in his own two biographical outlines in Series 20 and Series 26, P. R. S. Mani Collection. The first was probably prepared in 1947 as part of his application for employment in the newly independent India's Foreign Service. The second was compiled around 1977, after his retirement in 1973. These details are confirmed by other documents found in the P. R. S. Mani Collection, by his publications (referenced below), and by his obituary: see also http://www.imorial.com/P. R. S. Mani/, [accessed 28 August 2017]. Confirmation of Mani's resume has also been provided by his sons, who donated his papers to the Blake Library.
22 Mani's signed note in Jawaharlal Nehru's Whither India, 4th edition (1937), dated 8 March 1939, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 1.
23 Awareness of the dangers of fascism to India as well as to Europe were a major factor in the decisions made by many strongly nationalist Indians to take up arms on the side of the Allies during the war. This was the case for many in M.N. Roy's Radical Democratic Party, formed in 1940, which opposed the call of the Quit India movement to oppose the Allies until Britain agreed to leave India. Manjapra, Kris, M.N. Roy and colonial cosmopolitanism, New Delhi: Routledge India, 2010 Google Scholar. Mani did not, however, endorse Roy's Radical Democratic Party, scathingly dismissing its claim to be ‘the only socialist party’ in India as ‘propaganda’ in his diary entry of 12 May 1946, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 8.
24 Rettig and Hack, Colonial armies in Southeast Asia, Chapters 1, 2, 8 and 10. These mixed motives were to be severely tested—and ultimately frayed—in the conflicts in Indo-China and Indonesia. See also Singh, ‘The anatomy of dissent’; and Singh, The testimonies of Indian soldiers.
25 Mani, The story of Indonesian revolution.
26 Christopher Bayly discussed the cultural challenges faced by early British colonial information management in India in his Empire and information. Bhattacharya, ‘British military information management techniques’, pp. 483–510, and Omissi, Indian voices, have both discussed the use of censors to ascertain the concerns of Indian troops. None of these analysts, however, discusses the operation of public relations officers nor of the independent press and of war correspondents. These issues are considered in Israel, Milton, Communications and power: propaganda and the press in the Indian nationalist struggle, 1920–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Choudhury, Deep Kanta Lahiri, Telegraphic imperialism: crisis and panic in the Indian empire, c. 1830, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Torney-Parlicki, Prue, Somewhere in Asia: war, journalism and Australia's neighbours, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000 Google Scholar. The use of what was then a very contemporary ‘new media’—radio—is discussed at length in R. O'G Benedict Anderson, Java in a time of revolution, Jakarta: Equinox Asia, 2005 (without any reference to Indians). The use of radio as a propaganda weapon on both sides of the decolonization dispute in Indonesia—as it had been used during the war itself—becomes very clear in the P. R. S. Mani archive, in particular in Series 8.
27 The passage quoted here was printed on the inside front cover of the Directorate of Public Relations handbook, containing ‘hints’ written ‘for British and Indian units’. Mani kept only the cover of this handbook because he used it to protect his own collection of the final copy of the dispatches he cabled to the Directorate. He obscured most of the handbook's front cover by pasting over it a sheet inscribed with his own handwritten title: ‘Mani: Indian Army Observer (20 May 1944–1 Nov 1944), Battle of Manipur Stories’. See P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 2.
28 Mani, diary entry, 26 October 1945, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6.
29 Mani, ‘Mani: Indian Army Observer’, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 2. While celebrating the Indian soldiers, each vignette was written in conventional militaristic style, with the Japanese invariably dehumanised as ‘the Jap’ or a faceless enemy.
30 Mani, dispatch, 27 June 1944, Imphal, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 2.
31 Karnad, Raghu, Farthest field: an Indian story of the Second World War, New York: W.W. Norton, 2015 Google Scholar.
32 Mani, dispatch, 13 June 1944, Imphal, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 2.
33 Reference to such news and the use of radio can be found throughout the P. R. S. Mani Collection, specifically in the ‘Battle of Manipur stories’, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 2, and in the scripts for radio broadcasts by Mani from Calcutta on All India Radio, 2 September 1944, p. 5, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 3.
34 Mani, Indonesian revolution, pp. x, 65–66.
35 One such person was Gouri Sen's father, a Tamil lawyer who had left India to live in Rangoon. Gouri Sen was born in 1923 in Rangoon, became a member of the Rani of Jhansi Unit of INA, and was interviewed in 1996 for the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library which holds her interview transcript at Teen Murti, New Delhi, Accession Number 647. She explained that her father told her he would not return to his homeland in India until it was independent of the British.
36 This article focuses on references to the INA which appear in Mani's writing from the 1940s. As this article explains, Mani attempted to research the INA in Burma with T.G. Narayanan but information was scattered in that period. There is now a large body of relevant secondary analyses on the INA and, to a lesser extent, on the IILs, and it has been drawn on to contextualize Mani's references. In particular, the following have been useful: most notably Fay, Peter Ward, The forgotten army: India's armed struggle for independence, 1942–1945, Michigan, IL: University of Michigan Press, 1995 Google Scholar; Bayly, C. A. and Harper, T., Forgotten armies: Britain's Asian empire and the war with Japan, London: Penguin, 2005 Google Scholar; and Lebra, Joyce C., Women against the Raj: the rani of Jhansi regiment, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009 Google Scholar.
37 Mani, A., ‘Indians in Jakarta’ in Sandhu, K.S. and Mani, A. (eds), Indian communities in South East Asia, Singapore: ISEAS, 1993, p. 105 Google Scholar.
38 Mani, Indonesian revolution, pp. x, 33, 65–66.
39 Ibid., p. 33.
40 Ibid., p. 65. Transcripts of radio broadcasts in P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 3.
41 See, for example, Gouri Sen interviewed in 1996, transcript, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter NMML); Dr. S. Padmavati (born in Burma and sister-in-law of P. R. S. Mani), interviewed in January 2014.
42 Free Press Journal of Bombay, 20 September 1945, p. 1; Hindusthan Standard, 29 September 1945, p. 1.
43 Mani, Indonesian revolution, p. 59.
44 Mani, dispatch from Batavia, 29 September 1945, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6. The version here has been amended from Mani's original, which includes no capitalization and the spelling out of all punctuation, as was the practice for cable transmissions which would subsequently become written reports. The term ‘jaman’ may have been a typographical error for ‘jawan’, the widely used term for Indian troops.
45 The Hindu, 29 September 1945 and thereafter; The Hindusthan Standard, 29 September 1945 and thereafter.
46 McMillan, British occupation, pp. 143–144.
47 Mani, diary entry, 25 October 1945, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6.
48 Mani, dispatch from Batavia, 18 October 1945, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6.
49 Mani, Indonesian revolution, Introduction, p. x.
50 ‘Our correspondent’ [T.G. Narayanan], The Hindu, 18, 22, 24, 27 November 1945.
51 Mani, Indonesian revolution, pp. 24–31. In writing this book, published in 1986, Mani gathered together his papers from 1945 and seems to have been careful to rely on them. There were, however, some sections of his papers that were not included in the book—like his account of Manipur and Burma—while some vital contextual details for the 1945 documents are included only in the book, rather than in his personal diary and dispatches.
52 See, for example, the Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 1945, p. 5.
53 Frederick, W. H., Visions and heat: the making of the Indonesian revolution, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1989 Google Scholar; Dick, Howard, Surabaya. City of work, a socioeconomic history, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002 Google Scholar; Anderson, Java in a time of revolution; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten armies; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten wars.
54 Mani, dispatch, landing at Surabaya, 25 October 1945, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6.
55 See his diary entries for 25–28 October, discussed below.
56 Mani, diary entry, 25 October 1945, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6.
57 Ibid.
58 Mani, diary entry, 26 October 1945, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6.
59 Ibid., 27 October 1945.
60 Ibid.
61 It has become usual for Indonesian memoirs to refer to all South Asians as Gurkhas, as noted by Mani, Indonesian revolution, pp. 9–10, and this practice has been followed by early Western analysts, such as Anderson, Java in a time of revolution. Anderson used ‘Indian’ in regiment titles, but ‘Gurkha’ as a generic description. See, for example, the Equinox edition of the book published in 2006, p. 159.
62 Doulton, The fighting cock.
63 McMillan, British occupation, Chapter 2: ‘The battle of Surabaya’, and Chapter 6: ‘Morale’.
64 Mani, diary entry, 27 October, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6.
65 Mani, diary entry, 28 October 1945; Frederick, Visions and heat. For invaluable detail on the battle, see Frank Palmos, ‘Surabaya 1945: sacred territory, the first days of the Indonesian Republic’, PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 2012.
66 Major Henstock, interviewed by McMillan, British occupation, p. 45; Mani, Indonesian revolution, p. 7.
67 Mani, diary entry, 28 October 1945, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6.
68 Alwi's diaries of the battle were published in Bahasa Indonesia in 2012. Alwi, Des, Pertempuran Surabaya November 1945 [The Battle for Surabaya, November 1945], Jakarta: Bhuana Ilmu Populer, 2012, p. 248 Google Scholar. His sections relating to Mani have recently been translated into English by Frank Palmos, for his own extensive work on the Battle for Surabaya. See Palmos, ‘Surabaya 1945’;
69 Mani, dispatch, 6 November 1945, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6.
70 Frederick, Visions and heat, p. 264.
71 McMillan, British occupation, p. 56.
72 Indonesian Armed Forces (ABRI) History and Traditions Editorial Team (eds), Pertempuran Surabaya: The Battle of Surabaya, Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1998; Alwi, Pertempuran Surabaya; Anderson, Java in a time of revolution; Frederick, Visions and heat; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten armies; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten wars.
73 McMillan, British occupation; Doulton, Fighting cock.
74 Mani, dispatches after his return to Surabaya, 9 November 1945, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 6.
75 Mani, ‘Supplement to his Application to the IFS’, October 1947, P. R. S. Mani Collection.
76 Mani, handwritten diary entries, 16 May 1946, 21 May 1946, P. R. S. Mani Collection, Series 8.
77 Ibid., 16 May 1946, recording agreement with Brigadier Lander.
78 Scott, Domination and the arts of resistance, pp. 202–228.
79 Free Press Journal of Bombay, 30 October 1946.
80 Ibid.
81 Bhattacharya, ‘British military information management techniques’; Omissi, The sepoy and the Raj; Omissi (ed.), Indian voices.
82 Bayly, Empire and information; Bhattacharya, ‘British military information management techniques’; Omissi, The sepoy and the Raj; Omissi (ed.), Indian voices.
83 Singh, The testimonies of Indian soldiers.
84 Scott, Weapons of the weak.
85 Scott, Domination and the arts of resistance.
86 Singh, ‘The anatomy of dissent’.
87 Singh, The testimonies of Indian soldiers and Singh, ‘The anatomy of dissent’. Scott, Weapons of the weak and Scott, Domination and the arts of resistance.
88 Scott, Domination and the arts of resistance.