The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History

by Sanjeev Sanyal

As one can see, Ashoka does not look like such a great king on closer inspection but a cruel and unpopular usurper who presided over the disintegration of a large and well-functioning empire built by his father and grandfather. At the very least, it must be accepted that evidence of Ashoka’s greatness is thin and he was some shade of grey at best. Perhaps like many politicians, he made grand high-minded proclamations but acted entirely differently. This fits with the fact that he is not remembered as a great monarch in the Indian tradition but in hagiographic Buddhist texts written in countries that did not experience his reign. He was ‘rediscovered’ in the nineteenth century by colonial-era orientalists like James Prinsep. His elevation to being ‘Ashoka the Great’ is even more recent and is the result of political developments leading up to India’s independence.

A few Western writers like Charles Allen have patronizingly written how ancient Indians were somehow foolish to have had little regard for a great king such as Ashoka. On a closer look, it appears that they knew what they were doing. What is more worrying is how easily modern Indians have come to accept a narrative based on such minimal evidence.

We know that Bindusara was in touch with Alexander’s successors in the Middle East. He once asked Seleucus’s successor Antiochus for figs, wine and a Greek philosopher. Antiochus sent the figs and the wine but politely refused to send the philosopher on the grounds that Greek law forbade the sale of scholars! So, what did Bindusara send in return? We know that Antiochus used Indian war elephants to fend off a major invasion by Gauls into Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). So it is quite likely that he was being supplied elephants and their mahouts by Bindusara. In other words, the Greeks had continued the Persian practice of using Indian soldiers although they had shifted from horsemen to mahouts for war elephants.

Ashoka too maintained the links with the Greek rulers of the Middle East. His thirteenth edict mentions that he sent missionaries to Antiyoka (Antiochus of Syria), Turamaya (Ptolemy of Egypt), Antikini (Antigonus of Macedonia), Maka (Magas of Cyrene) and Alikasundara (Alexander of Corinth). The Indian rendering of these ancient Greek names is interesting in itself.

One commonplace example is the custom of chewing paan (betel leaves with areca nuts, usually with a bit of lime and other ingredients). While it is common across the Indian subcontinent, the areca nut, called ‘supari’ in Hindi, is originally from South East Asia and was chewed across the region and as far north as Taiwan. Paan is still widely consumed in India but, in recent years, has become less popular in the urban areas of South East Asia. Still, the leaf and nut continue to play an important cultural role and are used in many ceremonies. I have eaten them at a wedding in Bali and found old villagers chewing them in the Philippines. The Vietnamese too use it for many marriage-related ceremonies. It is quite possible that they were used by the warrior princess Soma when she sent the marriage proposal to Kaundinya.

Sigiriya was gradually abandoned except for parts that were used as a Buddhist monastery. Nonetheless, medieval tourists would keep visiting the site for centuries, especially to admire the paintings of bare-breasted damsels that adorn a cave shelter halfway up the rock. These tourists expressed their admiration in graffiti love poems that can still be read. Here are some examples:10 Lovely this lady Excellent the painter And when I look At hand and eye I do believe she lives We spoke But they did not answer Those lovely ladies of the mountain They did not give us Even the twitch of an eye-lid It appears that some female visitors, seemingly irritated with their male companions, also left some graffiti: You fools! You come to Sihagiri and inscribe these verses Yet not one of you brings wine and molasses Remembering we are women.

Socotra is a fragment left over from the break-up of the supercontinent of Gondwana and its long isolation has left it with unique flora and fauna. The island’s name is derived from Dwipa Sukhadhara, or ‘the Island of Bliss’ in Sanskrit. It is telling that an island so close to Arabia had a Sanskritic name and, The Periplus tells us that, in addition to Arabs and Greeks, it had a large population of Indians. One can still read graffiti left by these ancient mariners on the walls of Hoq cave on the island.

Note that merchants were not the only people who travelled between the Roman empire and India. We know, for instance, that it was fashionable for wealthy Roman women to consult Indian astrologers. We also have the story of Demetrius, a student of Greek philosophy, who was wrongly accused of stealing from a temple and arrested in Egypt. After he was exonerated and freed with compensation, he gifted all his property to a friend and sailed to India to study Vedic philosophy.18 In other words, the shipping lines provided the infrastructure for all kinds of people to move back and forth across the seas.

At some point in the fifth century, Indonesian sailors in their outrigger boats began to visit the island. In terms of seamanship, this matches the exploits of their Polynesian cousins in the Pacific. Thus, an island so close to the origin of our species in Africa was first colonized from the other side of the Indian Ocean. Recent genetic studies show that the first permanent settlement of the island was done by a tiny group from Indonesia around AD 800, and may have included just thirty women.19 Similarly, the island’s main language, Malagasy, has been traced back to south Borneo. Reflecting the spread of Indic influences in their homeland, the settlers also brought certain Hindu rituals and words from Sanskrit that survive in traces.

The power struggle culminated in the Battle of Karbala in AD 680 where Muhammad’s grandson Husain ibn Ali and his followers were massacred by a much larger army sent by Umayyad Caliph Yazid. Husain is said to have died with his infant son in his arms. This incident created the Shia–Sunni sectarian divide that exists to this day. Intriguingly, there is an oral tradition in India that Husain’s party included a group of Hindu mercenaries who were also killed in the battle. This is why the Mohyal Brahmins of Punjab still join Shia Muslims in the annual ritual mourning of Muharram.

The spirit of the times is echoed in the tales of the Arabian Nights. In the tale ‘How Abu Hasan Broke Wind’ we are told of a wealthy Yemeni merchant who had become very rich by trading with India.17 Having loudly farted at his own wedding, he fled social embarrassment by sailing off to India where he settled in the port of Calicut (Kozhikode) in Kerala. We are informed that the local king, a Hindu, welcomed Arabs and that the port had a large community of Hadramawt Yemeni merchants. We are not concerned here with the storyline but the vivid description of medieval globalization.

Jadi Rana asked the Parsis to explain their religion and rituals to him. He must have been struck by the obvious similarities between Zoroastrian and ancient Vedic rituals. The newcomers also composed sixteen Sanskrit slokas to explain their beliefs (these have been preserved). The king must have been satisfied by the explanations for he decided to give the Parsis refuge provided they accepted the following conditions in perpetuity: that they would give up arms; that they would adopt Gujarati as their language; that their women would wear the local dress; and finally, that all marriage ceremonies would be held in the evening

Even as Arabs, Parsis and Jews were settling in India, at least one group of Indians migrated to the Middle East. It has long been suspected on cultural and linguistic grounds that the Roma (Gypsies) of Europe were of Indian origin. Genetic studies have confirmed that they are the descendants of medieval migrants from north-western India.20 What were they doing in the Middle East?

Moreover, the climate was so hot and humid that people sometimes got up at night to bathe. This would come as no surprise to anyone who has spent the day exploring the sites at Angkor—the still, steamy heat can wear down even those used to Singapore or Mumbai.

Ahahaha

To an Indian of those times, the Turkic raids would have seemed like yet another round of incursions like those of the Macedonians, Huns, Bactrians and Scythians of the past. The invaders had been either pushed out or absorbed, and had not posed a civilizational threat. If anything, there seems to have been a sense of complacency. So when Prithviraj Chauhan, ruler of Delhi, fended off a raid by Muhammad Ghori in 1191, he allowed the invader to return home to Afghanistan! Ghori returned the following year to defeat and kill Prithviraj. This led to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate and opened up the rest of India to conquest.

Bands of Turkic adventurers poured into India to seek their fortune. Bakhtiyar Khilji was one of these adventurers.20 He seems to have arrived in Ghazni from Central Asia around 1195 before moving to India as a soldier. He soon managed to get himself a small estate near Mirzapur (now in Uttar Pradesh) where he gathered a sizeable body of Central Asian soldiers of fortune like himself. Around 1200, Bakhtiyar attacked and destroyed the famous university of Nalanda. Most of the Brahmin scholars and Buddhist monks were put to death and its library was torched. Another famous university at Vikramshila was similarly destroyed soon thereafter.

The common practice of Buddhism in India had been in steady decline but it was still home to several institutions that attracted pilgrims and scholars from abroad. It now collapsed from the systematic destruction of these institutions. The Turks were unbelievably cruel towards Hindus and even fellow Muslims, but they seem to have reserved their worst for the Buddhists. One possible explanation for this is that they themselves had converted to Islam from Buddhism relatively recently and felt that they had to prove a point.

Polo also mentions that Indians had a peculiar way of drinking water—they poured the water into their mouths without the lips touching the cup. This way of drinking water still survives in parts of southern India!

With the tacit support of the Ming Treasure Fleet, the Thai would become increasingly aggressive and in 1431, they would sack Angkor. The great city would be abandoned although a much-reduced Khmer kingdom would survive. The Thai, however, would absorb many elements of the culture of Angkor. This is why much of what is now considered traditional Thai art and culture is of Khmer origin.

Thus ended the kingdom of Champa that had lasted for one and a half millennia. It has left behind many enigmatic temples strewn across southern Vietnam. Sadly the most important temple cluster in My Son was heavily damaged by American carpet bombing during the Vietnam War and, despite being designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, there is relatively little left to see. A small Cham community survives in Vietnam although many converted to Islam in the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, the tiny Balamon–Cham community (numbering around 30,000) still preserves a form of ancient Shaivite Hinduism in remote villages in southern Vietnam. As we sipped strong local coffee at a Ho Chi Minh City cafe, Prof. Sakaya, himself a Cham Hindu, told me that it is their belief that when they die, the sacred bull Nandi comes to take their soul to the holy land of India.

Even by the standards of that time, they established a well-deserved reputation for extreme cruelty. For example, when Vasco da Gama returned on a second voyage to Calicut, he refused to negotiate and simply bombarded the city for three days. He also seized all the ships he found in the harbour and their crews—800 men in all. They were paraded on ships’ decks and then killed by having their arms, noses and ears amputated. The body parts were piled into a boat and sent ashore. When the Samudrin sent a Brahmin to negotiate for peace, he was gruesomely mutilated and sent back. His two sons and a nephew, who had accompanied him, were hanged from the mast.

Despite these victories, the Portuguese were still operating like nomadic pirates and did not have a permanent establishment in the Indian Ocean yet. After another unsuccessful raid on Calicut, it was decided that Goa would be a good place to build a base. Under the command of Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese attacked and took Goa from the Sultan of Bijapur in 1510. Albuquerque would boast to King Manuel in a letter: Then I burned the city and put everyone to the sword and for four days your men shed blood continuously. No matter where we found them, we did not spare the life of a single Muslim; we filled the mosques with them and set them on fire.

Better technology may partly explain Portugal’s success, but it was also driven by the fact that its expeditions attracted extraordinary adventurers. Often cruel and bloodthirsty, they were also willing to take enormous personal risks. Two such characters were Ferdinand Magellan and Francisco Serrao, close friends who would participate in the first Portuguese attempt to capture Malacca in 1509. Magellan would later become famous for having led the first successful circumnavigation of the globe (although he would be killed in the Philippines and would not complete the voyage himself).

One of the enclaves acquired by the Portuguese during the sixteenth century was Mumbai, then a collection of marshy islands. The sculpted caves of Elephanta Island suggest that the area had been an important commercial hub in the seventh and eighth centuries, but it had since declined. The first Portuguese landing on the islands in 1509 was a brutal raid: ‘Our men captured many cows and some blacks who were hiding among the bushes, and of whom the good were kept and the rest were killed.’

There is evidence that the Ortas continued to practise Judaism in secret and even had secret Hebrew names. Garcia’s secret name was Abraham. This is the real reason that Garcia da Orta was living quietly in Mumbai (incidentally, he refers to the place both as Bombaim and Mombaim in his writings). Over time, he used his contacts in the colonial headquarters in Goa to bring over family members and other New Christians from Portugal. In this way, Goa and other Portuguese enclaves ended up with a sizeable New Christian population. Although there was always an air of uncertainty, things were tolerable till the arrival of Francis Xavier, a Jesuit missionary, in 1542. Xavier, later to be canonized as a saint, is known today in India for the numerous Jesuit schools and colleges named after him. However, it was he who invited the Inquisition to Goa before leaving for Malacca. When the Inquisition arrived in Goa, the vast majority of the local population practised Hinduism and there were numerous temples dedicated to goddess Shanta-Durga. Egged on by the Jesuits, the Portuguese would destroy hundreds of temples. Thousands of Hindus would be killed or forcibly converted to Christianity. Many small children were forcibly taken away and baptized.16 The remains of destroyed temples can still be seen in Goa, some with churches built over them.

The Inquisition soon turned on the communities of Syrian Christians who had lived peacefully on India’s west coast for over a thousand years before the arrival of the Portuguese. Their ancient rituals were condemned as heretical and they were forced to accept Latin rites; many of their books and records composed in Syriac were burned.18 Not surprisingly, the Inquisition also began to scrutinize the New Christians. Many would be tortured and killed including Garcia da Orta’s sister Catrina who was burned at the stake as ‘as an impertinent Jewess’ in 1569, a year after Garcia’s death. Her husband confessed under torture that the famous physician had kept ‘the Sabbath on Saturday’. It is a reflection of the vindictiveness of the Inquisition that Orta’s remains were dug out of his grave and burned, and the ashes thrown into the Mandovi River.

When the Portuguese first arrived in India, most of the northern and central parts of the subcontinent were ruled by Muslim rulers of Turkic, Afghan and Persian extract (although there remained several pockets of resistance such as the kingdom of Mewar). The southern half of the Indian peninsula, however, was home to a remarkable Hindu empire remembered today by the name of its capital—Vijayanagar. Built on the banks of the Tungabhadra River, it was then the largest city in the world.

TIL

Many foreign visitors have left us eyewitness accounts of how the city looked in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Abdul Razzaq, an envoy from the Timurid ruler of Persia, wrote that the city had seven concentric walls that enclosed a vast area. The area between the first and third walls was semi-rural with cultivated fields and gardens. Between the third and the seventh were homes, grand temples, workshops and bustling bazaars. At the centre was the royal citadel that contained the palace and the grand assembly hall. Razzaq tells us that rock-cut aqueducts and canals brought water from the river to the palace complex. The remains of the city at Hampi are truly spectacular and are comparable to those at Angkor, except that the dense Cambodian jungle is replaced here by gigantic rock outcrops littered across the landscape. A fair amount of agriculture continues to be practised within the UNESCO World Heritage Site, in many cases using the medieval canal system.

There is surprisingly little written by scholars about the three queens although their exploits are well remembered in the oral histories of the Kanara coast and are recounted in numerous folk songs and in dance-theatre. The problem is that the folk tales often fuse the exploits of the three queens into one character that makes it difficult to work out the actual chronology. The warrior-queens are also mentioned in a few European accounts such as those of Pietro Della Valle but again we have only scraps of information that have not quite been pieced together. So, a full history of the remarkable queens of Ullal is yet to be written.

Madras (now Chennai). As already mentioned, a small strip of coastline was acquired from the local ruler in 1639 by the EIC agent Francis Day. It was an odd choice as it was neither easily defensible nor did it have a sheltered harbour. Ships had to be anchored far from the shore and boats had to ferry people and goods through heavy surf. It was not uncommon for boats to overturn and cause the loss of life and property. Contemporary gossip had it that Day chose the site as it was close to the Portuguese settlement at San Thome where he kept a mistress. Thus, we must thank this unnamed lady for the location of one of India’s largest cities.

The next major settlement was Bombay which was acquired from the Portuguese as part of the dowry when King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza. Bombay was then a group of small islands and the king leased them to the EIC in 1668 for ten pounds per annum. Unlike Madras, it already had a small but functioning settlement and also a good harbour. As a naval power, the English would have found its island geography easier to defend. Given the unpredictable demands of the Mughal governor in Surat and raids by Maratha rebels led by Shivaji, the EIC’s agents soon preferred to operate out of Bombay. Thus, a more substantial fort was built on the main island—in the area still known as the Fort. However, a series of smaller fortifications were also maintained at various strategic points. One surviving example is Worli Fort that was built to defend the northern approach. To get there today one has to walk through the narrow lanes of a former fishing village but the fort itself has been recently restored. From the top one gets a panoramic view of Mahim Bay and of the recently built Bandra-Worli Sea-Link. One can immediately see why this would have been a good location for a cannon battery. I stood on the ramparts at sunset and imagined myself an English gunner keeping a suspicious eye on the Portuguese in Bandra.

The EIC officially allowed some private trade in order to compensate for the low salaries it paid, but its agents often misused the company’s infrastructure and networks to further private deals. Thus, the company bore the costs and individuals pocketed huge profits. This is how Elihu Yale, the Governor of Madras, amassed a large personal fortune before being removed from his post on suspicions of corruption. Part of this ill-gotten wealth was used to fund the university that bears his name. Thus, one of North America’s leading universities is built on money garnered through dodgy deals in the Indian Ocean.

The Portuguese depended on an Indian merchant called Naruttam to supply their provisions. He had a beautiful daughter that the Portuguese commander Pereira coveted. Naruttam and his daughter were not keen on the match but Pereira kept up the pressure. At last, under threat, the merchant agreed and requested some time to prepare for a grand wedding. Meanwhile, he convinced the authorities that Mirani fort needed to be cleared out so that he could do some repairs. Using this as the pretext, Naruttam removed all the provisions from the fort and then informed Sultan ibn Saif that the garrison was unprepared for a siege. The Omanis attacked immediately and took the fort and the town in 1650.10 Thus, an Indian father’s determination to protect his beloved daughter led to the demise of the Portuguese in Oman.

Fuck yeah! You go, dad!

As they lost control over the spice trade, the Portuguese were reduced to trading in African slaves although they were not above kidnapping Indian children and selling them in faraway markets. A particularly intriguing case is that of an eleven-year-old girl, Meera, who was kidnapped from India’s west coast and then sold to the Spanish in Manila. She was then taken to Mexico where she is remembered as Catarina de San Juan. She came to be considered a popular saint although her veneration was explicitly prohibited by the Inquisition. Her life is an amazing tale of how a young girl adapted herself to survive all alone in a distant land and in very difficult circumstances.

Marthanda Varma is a little-discussed figure in history books but without his determined opposition to the VOC, it is possible that this book would have been written in Dutch rather than in English.

The transplanting of spices was by no means the only instance of economic espionage. Indian textile technology was also stolen and copied by the Europeans. Indian cottons, especially wood-block prints called ‘chintz’, were so popular in Europe that governments often imposed severe import restrictions and bans on usage. A French missionary called Father Coeurdoux managed to get some Indian weavers, whom he had converted to Christianity, to reveal the secrets of the technique to him. Over time, further details were sent back by agents of the French East India Company. Thus, by the 1760s, French and English factories were churning out chintz on an industrial scale.2 Western countries today often accuse Asian economies of violating intellectual property rights but it is worth remembering that their own economic rise was based on stealing ideas from others.

While most Indian farmers and weavers were hurt by the triangular trade system, some Indians also benefited from working for the European merchants as agents and brokers. Many of these were drawn from the Parsi community, descendants of Zoroastrian refugees who had come to India centuries earlier from Iran. From the late eighteenth century, many Parsis had migrated to Bombay where they prospered as suppliers, victuallers and shipbuilders. Opium exports were initially monopolized by Calcutta but Bombay gradually emerged as an alternative hub as cotton farmers in Malwa switched to growing opium. Soon, Parsi agents became an important part of the supply chain all the way to Hong Kong. This is why many of Hong Kong’s old institutions have Parsi founders. The famous ferry between Hong Kong island and Kowloon, for example, was set up by Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala. The Indian brokers and agents were known as ‘shroffs’ (derived from the Hindi word ‘saraff’ used variously for agent, broker or money changer). The term ‘shroff’ survives in Hong Kong but is now used mostly for parking-ticket collectors—one of those odd artefacts of history!

Jamsetjee soon became the main Indian partner of Jardine, Matheson & Company and acquired a large fleet of ships. He also became a highly respected citizen of Bombay and was included by the EIC’s Court of Directors in the Queen’s Honours List. In an elaborate ceremony at the Governor’s residence in May 1842, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy was knighted.13 Modern-day critics of Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy may say that he was no more than a drug lord who collaborated with a colonial power to enrich himself by engaging in a business that devastated the lives of many fellow humans, both Indian and Chinese. His supporters would argue that he was just a businessman who responded to the circumstances of his times. Moreover, they will point out the fact that Jamsetjee gave away a significant part of his fortune in charity. Mumbai is still served by the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Hospital. Whatever one thinks of him on balance, he was certainly a remarkable man living at a remarkable time in Mumbai’s history. One of Jamsetjee’s lesser-known contributions to Mumbai is the introduction of ice cream. This was made possible by the regular supply of ice from Boston from the 1830s.

Sassoon’s palatial house survives as Masina Hospital in the neighbourhood of Byculla. Readers familiar with Mumbai may wonder why one of the city’s richest residents built a house in such a crowded area but Byculla was in fact a fashionable suburb in the nineteenth century. The exterior of the main building is in good condition but the interiors have been haphazardly divided into cubicles for various medical activities. I did, however, find a grand wooden staircase that has survived largely unscathed and retains the feel of a merchant prince’s house. The David Sassoon Library, built in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda area, is another elegant example of the period’s architecture. The Sassoon Docks in Colaba were built by David’s son Albert-Abdullah. It is now used to land Mumbai’s daily supply of fish. This is the reason that on a hot day, when the wind is blowing from the east, Mumbai’s expensive Cuffe Parade neighbourhood finds itself cloaked in a strong fishy odour.

A significant concentration of Indians settled around Durban in South Africa. Some had come as indentured workers and stayed back while others came freely in search of economic opportunities. By the end of the nineteenth century, their numbers not only equalled that of the white population but they were successfully competing with the Europeans as accountants, lawyers, clerks, traders and so on. This led to a series of discriminatory laws aimed at protecting the interests of the whites. This was the milieu to which a young lawyer called Mohandas K. Gandhi arrived in 1893. He was brought to South Africa by a well-established Gujarati businessman Dada Abdoolah to assist in a personal matter. However, he was soon part of a movement to oppose anti-Indian laws. In 1894, the Natal Indian Congress was established with Gandhi as its secretary. Thus began a journey.

Cecil Rhodes did not live to see the end of the war as he died in March of that year. He would leave most of his estate for the creation of the famous scholarship that now bears his name. The idea seems to have been to create an Anglo-Saxon elite, educated in Oxford, who would rule the British empire into perpetuity (there was also a hope that the United States would join the British in this grand enterprise). Rhodes lived during the high noon of British power and it would not have occurred to him that his beloved empire would cease to exist within half a century. It is somewhat ironic that I owe most of my education to Francis Xavier and Cecil Rhodes. I attended a high school named after the former and my years at Oxford were financed by a scholarship named after the latter. I am quite aware that in both cases I was not the intended beneficiary. This brings us to the tricky question of how to judge individuals from history—do we judge them by their intentions or by the consequences of their actions? Do we judge them only by the standards of their times or by some absolute yardstick? I do not claim to know the answer but these are questions that scholars of history constantly grapple with.

Nonetheless, while researching this book, I was surprised to come across the following line in Rhodes’ final will and testament: ‘No student shall be qualified or disqualified for election to a Scholarship on account of his race or religious opinions.’25 This is a remarkably liberal statement given the context of the times and Rhodes’ reputation as a racist. Perhaps like Ashoka he wanted future generations to think well of him. Or perhaps he had more shades of grey than I had imagined. The first black Rhodes Scholar was elected as early as 1907 and this elicited such a backlash in the United States that American selection committees did not award the scholarship to another black student till 1963. The Rhodes Trust to its credit, however, persisted with its open policy in other parts of the world and non-whites continued to be elected (Queensland 1908, Jamaica 1910 and so on).

The Dutch force landed on Sanur beach and faced little resistance as it marched inland. Along the way, it found that all settlements had been abandoned. Only when they approached the royal palace at Denpasar did they see signs of activity. There was no army to greet them but they could see a lot of smoke rising and hear drums beating inside the palace compound. The invading force took up positions and waited. After a while, a ceremonial procession emerged from the main gate including the king, his queens and children, priests, servants and retainers. They all wore funerary garments and their finest jewellery. The women next walked up to the lined soldiers and mocked them, flinging their jewellery and gold coins at them. Then a priest took out a kris, the traditional dagger, and stabbed the king to death in full view. This seems to have been the signal for the Balinese to pull out their krises and make a last charge. The Dutch machine guns and rifles mowed them all down within minutes. Waves of men, women and children kept coming out of the palace and the Dutch kept shooting them down. There were soon mounds of dead bodies, probably numbering over a thousand. What the Dutch had just witnessed was the Balinese Hindu rite of ‘Puputan’ or the Last Stand (the Indian equivalent is called jauhar).

Few residents of Mumbai will be aware that the city has a memorial to Indian sailors who died in WWI. It’s tucked away in a sailors’ hostel in the old port area and almost no one visits it. Commodore Odakkal Johnson of the Indian Navy and I tracked it down amidst torrential monsoon rain and spent an hour reading the names of these long-forgotten sailors. It told an interesting pattern of how the British of that period recruited and deployed their Indian troops—the army casualties in Kut were mostly Hindu but here the naval casualties were largely Muslim.

He tells us that prisoners were made to do hard physical labour—making coir ropes, turning the oil press and so on. However, the prisoners, especially the revolutionaries, were constantly subject to mental and physical torture. This was not done directly by the British warden but through his Pathan subordinates, particularly a certain Khoyedad Khan. These petty officers further recruited enforcers from among the criminals in the prison in order to maintain their writ. The idea was to systematically break the will of the revolutionaries. Ghosh tells us how the petty officers and their enforcers would often sexually assault and rape the teenagers and younger men: ‘The very shame of it prevents them from complaining to the authorities; and even if they do, it is more often than not crying in the wilderness.’

Meanwhile, the Japanese had taken over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and handed de jure control to Netaji. This would be the only piece of Indian territory that the Provisional Government would ever control but, given its associations with the revolutionaries, it had great symbolic value. The INA now joined the Japanese on their march through Burma to the eastern gates of India. The British responded by rushing a large number of troops to defend the line. Through the summer of 1944, the two sides simultaneously fought ferocious battles in Kohima (now capital of the state of Nagaland) and in Imphal (capital of Manipur). These are considered among the most hard-fought battles of the Second World War.18 The climax was a closely fought hand-to-hand struggle over a tennis court in Kohima. The Japanese lost and the tide of war turned in favour of the Allies. The campaign would cost the Japanese side 53,000 in dead or missing while the Allies lost 16,500.

Fucking none of this was in our history textbooks

Even worse was the famine that killed 3 million people in Bengal in 1943. Crop failure and the disruption of rice supplies from Burma may have initially triggered the problem but the British colonial government did little to provide relief. Instead, they commandeered all the boats in order to deny the invading army the means to traverse the riverine terrain. This meant that locals could not even fish. Meticulous research by writer Madhusree Mukerjee shows how Churchill was fully aware of the dire situation but seems to have deliberately delayed and diverted supplies as part of a scorched earth strategy against the advancing Japanese.19 He is reported to have remarked that Indians were a ‘beastly people with a beastly religion’ and that the famine was caused by Bengalis who ‘bred like rabbits’. There is a strong case for terming this genocide.

A day after Japan surrendered on 15 August, Subhash Bose flew from Singapore to Taiwan. What happened next is a mystery. The official line is that he died in a plane crash in Taiwan but the story was disputed right from the start. It is beyond the scope of this book to evaluate the evidence for and against various theories except to say it remains a highly controversial matter to this day.