Exploring a unique resource

Together Mani's official dispatches, private diaries, and published journalism provide an illuminating eye witness account not only of his own developing views but of the activities and attitudes of Indian troops during the latter part of the war and its immediate aftermath. Just as significantly, these sources reveal how the British need to establish wartime lines of communication which brought news from the Asian front back home to India became appropriated and subverted. Reading Mani's official output as a public relations officer among the Indian troops within the British Eastern Army or, as he consistently called his position, an ‘Indian Army Observer’, alongside his unofficial writings as an Indian nationalist, we gain a valuable insight into how one colonial subject grappled with the tensions inherent in his wartime enlistment. By travelling across the region with the Indian Army, under British command, Mani was able to compile what might be called, following James Scott, a ‘hidden transcript’, never made explicit in any one dispatch but which, when his many dispatches are read together, offered a narrative about what India could be without British rule.Footnote ³ Mani's dispatches from the Burma campaign, despite not being included in his book about his time in Indonesia, go a long way to explaining the content of his Indonesian writing once we begin to look for this ‘hidden transcript’. Furthermore, his writings overall reveal how his journey both before and after the end of the war gave new meaning to his anti-colonial activities, as it became clear to him that India's struggle for freedom had become one part of a much wider pan-Asian liberation struggle.

This close focus is not intended to offer an overall history of the conflicts, but rather to bring attention for the first time to the presence of an Indian voice speaking from an embedded position with troops serving under British command during the Second World War. It is unusual enough that a contemporary Indian account can be found from within the fighting forces during the war. But it is unprecedented to have the writings of an Indian observer for the two years after the war officially ended. There have been masterful studies of the battles and politics of the British-led SEAC in this period in Indochina and Indonesia, notably that by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper in their Forgotten wars.Footnote ⁴ But when discussing Indian troops, they and other authors have relied virtually entirely on British sources, albeit occasionally the British officers commanding Indian troops.Footnote ⁵ There are Indian authors in the work by OmissiFootnote ⁶ and by Bhattacharya,Footnote ⁷ but those voices have been filtered through British surveillance. Both Omissi and Bhattacharya rely on British military censors’ readings of Indian troops’ letters home, with all the attendant linguistic issues, pointed out very clearly in Bayly's Empire and information.Footnote ⁸ Santanu Das's reflections on Bengali troop letters focus, like Omissi's work, on the First World War.Footnote ⁹ A somewhat stronger source for Indian troop views during the SEAC operation in Indonesia is Richard McMillan's analysis. He interviewed British officers but included also some comments from Indian troops.Footnote ¹⁰ Srinath Raghavan's recent India's war draws much further on Second World War Indian sources as it takes a broad view of the declared hostilities, but this valuable analysis of the whole period cannot focus on the tensions experienced by individuals.Footnote ¹¹ None of these authors investigates and compares the public and private communications of any one Indian over a longer period.

Although drawing on all these wider studies for contextualization, this article turns instead to a close study of the deliberately public and the private statements of P. R. S. Mani, as the one Indian voice available over a sustained time, from 1944 to 1946, and during the crucial divide between declared war (ending with the Japanese surrender) and the ensuing undeclared conflicts with anti-colonial movements. We have three types of writing by Mani—two are public (although intended for different audiences): his 1944 and 1945 dispatches which were ultimately written for an audience of Indian troops but only after review by the British military (and which are often directly addressed to the British headquarters), and his 1946 war correspondence journalism for the Free Press Journal of Bombay, aimed at both Indian nationalist and British left-wing audiences. The third is the private writing which relates only to Indonesia—two bundles of pages from his personal diaries, typed up apparently close to the time the events took place in both 1945 and 1946.Footnote ¹²

The close of the war, heralding the end of the military threat of fascism in general and the Japanese invasion of India in particular, changed the situation for Indian nationalists whether in or out of uniform. This article asks how an Indian nationalist journalist, effectively still trapped after the war in the British-controlled Indian Army, responded to the dilemmas, as he saw them, for Indian troops ordered into battle against those fighting for Indonesian independence. This carries with it a further puzzle: why does this bundle of documents exist as a resource? The full answer to this is related to the first question, and will be discussed in the conclusion to this article. The short answer, however, to the puzzle of the resources is that P. R. S. Mani himself selected the documents. He went from being a military officer, to a war correspondent for the Free Press Journal of Bombay in 1946, to a press attaché to Nehru late in 1947; then in 1949 he moved into the newly established Foreign Service of independent India. He went on to have a distinguished career as a diplomat for his country, serving in Manila, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Goa, West Germany, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius, eventually retiring in 1973 from his last position as ambassador to Sweden. On his retirement he was the longest serving member of the Indian Foreign Service.Footnote ¹³ Over all these years, he apparently nursed a desire to write about his experiences during the tumultuous days of the Indonesian revolution. To fulfil this dream, Mani selected these papers, gathering some—or perhaps all—of his 1944 and 1945 PR dispatches, his 1946 newspaper articles,Footnote ¹⁴ and a small number of pages he chose to keep from the diaries he wrote during the events in Indonesia before and after his military role.

This is clear evidence of the decisions Mani made about selection—although he seems to have been in the habit of keeping a diary, there are no diary pages from his service during the war: he apparently chose not to expose any differences that may have existed between his official dispatches and his personal feelings. Similarly there are no diary entries from any time during his later career as an Indian diplomat. He only kept diary entries—and then only some—from his time in Indonesia, first under SEAC command, when he was experiencing growing frustration and then anger with British control, and then from his period as a war correspondent, when he was again experiencing frustration in his dealings with both British and Dutch military commanders.

Mani must have gone to a great deal of trouble to protect this large bundle of papers throughout his peripatetic life as a diplomat. Many of these papers were used almost verbatim in his 1986 book, Story of Indonesian revolution, published by the University of Madras and translated into Bahasa Indonesia in 1989 as Jelak Revolusi 1945.Footnote ¹⁵ After his death in 2011 his family searched, but found no other traces of his diaries, despatches or articles. Mani must have destroyed or discarded them. However, he did not include all of the topics covered in the document package in the book. In particular, none of the stories from his many 1944 and 1945 dispatches sent during the Burma campaign are discussed in the book, which concentrates on Mani's life in Indonesia. While he may have had many reasons for excluding this material from the book, there still remains the question—to which we will return—of why he included the Manipur papers in this bundle in the first place, and then carried them around for so long.

Mani and the Indian nation at war

The ‘Indian Army’ which the British had assembled had seen many changes. After the Indian Uprising in 1857, known to the British as the ‘Indian Mutiny’, the British assumed state control over the British East India Company holdings and its armed forces. Distrustful of those Indians who had led the Uprising, the colonial army that the British Raj sought to recruit comprised those Indians regarded as most likely to be loyal. They were predominantly from the northwestern states rather than those from Bengal and the southeast whose troops had been prominent in the Uprising. It was about the men from the northwest that the British developed their theory of Indian ‘martial races’ who were argued to be constitutionally best suited for combat and discipline.Footnote ¹⁶ Gajendra Singh has undertaken a careful analysis of the shifting attitudes within this colonial army and among the Punjabi and other northwestern peoples who were living through a time of increased foreign travel and residence in the early twentieth century. The Caliphate movement in Turkey, the Ghadar movement in the Canada and the United States, and the international experiences of Indian troops during the First World War had radicalized the northwestern diasporic populations of all religions, with led to increased levels of dissatisfaction among career soldiers in the Indian Army who increasingly looked towards nationalism as an alternative to unquestioned loyalty to the British empire. In response, as Singh has argued, the recruitment strategies of the British had already begun to alter during the 1930s, with more troops being sought from Bengal and the southern states than in previous decades.Footnote ¹⁷ This was, however, a slow process: even in 1942, this ‘colonial army’ complied with British command orders, with its Indian troops firing on fellow Indians on Indian soil during the Quit India conflict.Footnote ¹⁸ It was still the case when Mani entered the war effort that the vast majority of the troops serving in the Indian Army had come from the northwestern states. For his purposes, as we discuss in the following section, Mani had to do a lot of leg work.

Mani's profession as a journalist was of great interest to the British command of the Eastern Army. There appear to have been a number of Indian journalists—some with newspaper experience and some, like Mani, from radio—who were drawn into the Public Relations Division.Footnote ¹⁹ The war itself was a fearful spectacle which the Indian media were anxious to cover, and so, when Mani was commissioned in January 1944, there had already been Indian journalists involved in the war as correspondents for some time. One famous example was T. G. Narayanan, an outstanding journalist from the staff of The Hindu who became well known for his articles on the gruelling Bengal famine of 1943 (a catastrophe which was the direct result of wartime conditions) which were published in 1944 in book form.Footnote ²⁰ Narayanan and Mani had much in common and knew each other well. Both had studied at Madras Christian College and spent time working at All India Radio before becoming war correspondents. The war then set them on common transnational trajectories. Once Narayanan became war correspondent for The Hindu, he, like Mani, travelled to Manipur and then Burma, covering the battles with the Japanese and then their retreat down the spine of Burma into Malaya. When Japan surrendered, Narayanan went to Batavia, still reporting for The Hindu, to cover the emerging conflict between the Indonesian Republicans, the British-led forces of the South East Asia Command, the Dutch seeking to return to Batavia, and, in some cases, the Japanese whom the British recruited to maintain policing duties.

Unlike Narayanan, however, Mani reported on the war from within the British-controlled Indian Army as a commissioned officer. There must have been some tensions in his decision to take up this role, as there were for the many Indians who decided to enlist in the British-controlled forces in the middle of the war. For Mani the sources of tension were multiple. In Madras before the war, he had certainly developed an internationalist outlook through his interest in Theosophy. He met European visitors at the Theosophical Society's international headquarters, just south of the city at Adyar, during the 1930s. His meetings with Dutch Theosophists would later contribute to his dismay that the Dutch colonialists he encountered in Indonesia were so very different.Footnote ²¹ Mani's great passion was for Indian nationalism, as the title page of his personal copy of Jawaharlal Nehru's Whither India? makes abundantly clear. In a hand written homage to Nehru's ideas, dated 8 March 1939, just six months before the commencement of the Second World War, Mani revealed the strength of his anticolonial sentiments:

That Mani, despite holding this commitment to Gandhian civil disobedience and the view that the British had raped the ‘Indian Peasantry of their wealth and happiness’, should then accept a commission in the British-led Indian Army for three years reflects his grave concerns about the danger that fascism posed for the world, not just for Europe. By this time too, Japanese control over Southeast Asia seemed from the outside to be secure and increasingly threatening as Calcutta was bombed even more severely than ever before in December 1943.Footnote ²³ The motives of subject peoples enlisting in colonial armies were more complex than at any time in the past. The coming of the Second World War complicated these motives even further, as Indian nationalists were very aware of international events, as was Mani in 1943.Footnote ²⁴

Mani later recalled his personal need to do something to aid the anti-Axis war effort.Footnote ²⁵ Yet despite this decision, he sustained a sense that his role in the Army was one that served the coming India, not the British. The Directorate of Public Relations (PR) into which he was commissioned addressed itself to both ‘British and Indian units’, included both European and non-European PR officers, and was expected by both the British Army and government to build up the fighting spirit of the Indian troops.Footnote ²⁶ This morale-building role was spelled out in a text that was included in the inside front cover of the division's officially issued notebooks, which Mani possessed:

Mani, however, did not see his role in such terms. He always signed his dispatches as ‘Mani, Indian Army Observer’ rather than ‘Public Relations Officer.’ Writing as a Tamil who originated from a part of India culturally distinct from the states of the west and northwest, from where the majority of Indian troops still came (as did Narayanan), a recurring theme in his dispatches became the Indian national unity being created on foreign battlefields. Acting to subvert the British strategy of ‘divide and rule’ aimed at marginalizing any unified Indian nationalist sentiment, he sought to inform all Indian troops—as well as the wider Indian public—about the diverse origins and religions of their fellow countrymen in different units. At the same time, in the filing of such reports, Mani fulfilled his official morale-boosting duties. He clearly felt, as he noted in his diary during October 1945, an intense loyalty to the Indian troops who made up a substantial proportion of the British forces which marched across Southeast Asia. He was also aware that the British press and military information machine paid little attention to the Indian soldiers who were fighting so bravely and in so many different parts of the army.Footnote ²⁸

With what must have been a significant effort, Mani tracked down Indian troops from many backgrounds. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) film footage of the crucial Allied victory at the Battle of Imphal in Manipur in mid-1944 makes for an instructive comparison. Filmed by British cinematographers, the IWM cameras focused consistently on the British troops, with shots composed so that the troops who were not British (with the occasional exception of Nepali Gurkhas) were placed on the edges of the frame, or too far away to be individually identified. By contrast, each of Mani's 80-plus dispatches from this battle, collected in a notebook he entitled The Battle of Manipur, was a tightly crafted vignette in ‘human interest’ journalistic style, highlighting the actions and personality of a different, named Indian soldier or group of fighting men from different Indian localities, from provinces as far apart as Madras and Punjab. Furthermore, he sought out women nurses in Chittagong and the refugees, many of them women, who were fleeing from Japanese-controlled areas in Burma into Assam. Many of the troops were Hindu but from a range of different castes, and some were Muslim. Some were subaltern foot soldiers and some officers. Some were tank drivers, some artillerymen, and others mule handlers. Mani chose to profile each in turn, introducing, in effect, the diverse soldiers of Britain's Indian Army to one another—seeking out their many different origins and affiliations, celebrating their achievements, and ensuring that all of them were recognized for their courage, initiative, and resilience.Footnote ²⁹

Mani chose a variety of subjects to profile. Some were young officers, just graduated, including some who were Rajputs from the northwestern states whom the British had identified as ‘martial’ and whom Mani also portrayed as courageous fighters. Yet he also celebrated the tenacity of much more humble troops, like the mule handler who had also served in the First World War, whom he carefully identified in his dispatch of 27 June from Imphal as ‘Risaldar Ghulam Mohideen, a Tiwana Punjabi Muslim of Mitha, Tiwana, tehail Khush Ab, district Shahpur and troop commander in an Animal Transport Company’ carrying supplies up gruelling mountains to get them to the troops.Footnote ³⁰ The terrain around Imphal was so steep that no other transport except mules could be used, and the handlers were crucial to the campaign.Footnote ³¹ On the occasion about which Mani wrote, Ghulam Mohideen had had no rest but had not hesitated to step in to manage the difficult movement of another essential load. Although he came under heavy fire, he delivered all the supplies but had to leave two mules after they slipped down a steep crevasse. On his return journey, he went back to rescue the animals.

Each of the men was portrayed as demonstrating great valour for their country—not for England, but for a diverse India. In a characteristic extract, his dispatch from Imphal of 13 June 1944 describes a battle on the Tiddim Road. Mani wrote:

In addition, Mani sought to connect this diverse yet unified Indian Army on the move with its homeland. As well as researching and writing his dispatches about the Indian nation at war, he was active in attending to the interests, and therefore the morale, of the Indian troops, ensuring, for example, that they had access to entertainment and news from home through radio, the modern electronic medium with which he was so familiar.Footnote ³³

The patriotic investigator: Mani and the Indian diaspora

As Mani made his transnational trek across Southeast Asia with the British Army, his activities extended beyond merely attending to the Indians who served within it. He continued to see himself as an investigative journalist, so wherever he went, he sought to understand local conditions and he searched out local contacts through whom he might gain access to such knowledge. In this respect, his Tamil background helped him greatly. As he travelled, he stayed in close touch with T. G. Narayanan and found many other fellow Tamils in Southeast Asia—not only in Manipur but, as the Japanese Army retreated, also in Burma and Malaya. To locate and write about the small number of southern Indians among the Indian troops for his dispatches, Mani had to actively seek them out. In contrast, war-torn Southeast Asia contained substantial Tamil and Malayali-speaking communities, many of whom had come as indentured agricultural workers for colonial plantations or as labourers on railways or other industrial development. Others had come as traders or professionals like lawyers and doctors.Footnote ³⁴ Some had fled the invading Japanese—including the family of Mani's future wife—to eventually arrive in Manipur or move further into other eastern Indian states. Others, including those who had left India in protest against the rule of the British, refused to leave Burma or Malaya when the Japanese occupied it.Footnote ³⁵

Many of these southern Indians took up roles in the Indian Independence Leagues (IILs), the civilian organizations which arose across Southeast Asia from early 1942 to articulate the interests of local diasporic Indian communities and express their opposition to the continued British presence in India. Although the relationship between the IILs and the Japanese varied and was often uneasy, the Japanese authorities tolerated these bodies. Many of the IIL members also supported or joined the emerging Indian National Army (INA), following its revival under the charismatic Bengali Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in 1943.Footnote ³⁶ A great deal has now been written about the INA, but during the war and the resulting trials of INA members, the British attempted to limit severely the circulation of information about it. As far as Mani knew when he was first commissioned, the INA had been recruited from both Indian troops who had formerly been prisoners of the Japanese, and Indian volunteers from across Southeast Asia, both men and women. Mani understood that Bose, by drawing some support from Britain's enemies, planned to release India from the British yolk through an attack on her borders which would stoke an internal rebellion led by sympathetic patriots. Just as with the IILs, the Japanese endorsed the INA's objectives, yet the relationship between them was far from smooth. Ultimately, the INA itself became a rallying-point for diasporic Indians from very distinct backgrounds and diverse places of origin. It is known, for example, that around 75 Indian men travelled from the Indian communities across what was then the Netherlands East Indies, to join the INA in Malaya.Footnote ³⁷

Mani's attitude to the INA was ambivalent. As an avowed opponent of international fascism, Mani was not sympathetic to Bose nor the military strategies of the INA. He was, nevertheless, interested in the INA's relationships with local Southeast Asian Indian populations whom he had witnessed being exploited as indentured plantation labourers (as in Malaya) or as industrial workers (as in Burma). Others who enlisted in the INA or gave it their support came from the ranks of merchants or professionals such as lawyers. For Mani, many of the latter became articulate informants as to the conditions of Indian communities living under both the present Japanese and the earlier British occupations. Their evidence formed part of a detailed report on the INA and local Indian populations, ‘painfully compiled’ over several months, as Mani described it, by T.G. Narayanan with Mani's assistance. The research often required both men to seek contacts in territory beyond the control of the British forces. In Mani's opinion, Bose and the INA recognized the disadvantaged industrial and civil conditions of the local Indian populations, and so had come to espouse not just a military strategy—which Mani continued to reject—but also a social platform, of which Mani strongly approved.Footnote ³⁸

As he explained in his 1986 book, Mani also paid close attention to the relationship between the INA and the Japanese. He came to the conclusion that although the INA under Bose may have been in alliance with the Japanese it was not, in either a political or military sense, dependent on or subservient to Japan. This conclusion proved important in Mani's subsequent assessment of Indonesian republicans such as Sukarno, who, having taken leadership roles under the Japanese and cooperated with their civil structure, still claimed their independence from Japanese control. In Mani's view, this claim could be validated by the autonomous action he had witnessed among the INA leadership in their own dealings with the occupying Japanese.Footnote ³⁹

After the report was completed, Mani carried it back to India to deliver to Nehru in person. He did so at a key time in the history of the Indian freedom struggle, probably in late 1944 or early 1945, when he returned to India in his military PR role to give radio broadcasts about the conditions of the Indian troops in Manipur and Burma.Footnote ⁴⁰ At this stage, the British Army was attempting to keep the existence of the INA a secret and so Mani's dispatches never mention it. However, the INA had begun to broadcast its existence and rationale over short wave radio, news which is understood to have reached some people in eastern India as well as Indians who had remained inside Malaya and Burma.Footnote ⁴¹ Mani's delivery of the report was apparently successful, but the document itself has yet to be found among the Nehru Papers held in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Nonetheless, its composition reveals much about war's globalizing function in the transmission of information. The lines of communication, the mobility, and the access to local intelligence which the conflict opened up for Mani enabled his ultimate subversion of the role of colonial intermediary. That he was able to play such a dual role, as both loyal propagandist and anti-colonial investigative reporter, is indicative of the difficulties encountered by the British empire at war in controlling and censoring the transnational communications of its colonial subjects.

Into the cauldron of decolonization: Java after the war

As a passionate nationalist whose international concerns had drawn him into the alliance with the British, Mani found himself in a further dilemma when the Japanese surrendered in August 1945. Once the immediate threat of Japanese invasion had passed, a simmering anger resurfaced within India as a consequence of the British refusal to quit, one that became widely reported in Indian newspapers of which not only Mani himself but Indian troops in general were well aware.Footnote ⁴² Compounding this, there was no change for the Indian troops who served the British in its Eastern Army following the end of hostilities; there was certainly no automatic discharge for Mani himself. Rather, each of their terms of duty continued and the British persisted in regarding the Indians as reliable troops in its ‘colonial army’ who could be expected to go on obeying orders. Mani was confronted with the implications of his enlistment—he, like the career soldiers about whom he had been writing, were part of a standing army controlled by the British.

Mani was alarmed to realize that they were all now to be moved into the flashpoint areas of the region, in particular into Indochina and Indonesia, where nationalist movements had already emerged. The British had assumed leadership of SEAC, nominally to accept the Japanese surrender and restore civilian order. In practice, the very existence of SEAC facilitated the restoration of the old European imperial controls. From the outset Mani was very unhappy about this situation but believed, he later recalled, that he should remain with the troops as he was one of the few who were recording their experiences and perspectives.Footnote ⁴³

Mani therefore remained in his role as an official chronicler of the experiences of Indian troops who fought for the British after the war, loyally submitting his dispatches to the same Directorate of Public Relations which had served the Eastern Army with both British and Indian units. At the same time he continued to embed within these official writings traces of a clearly patriotic message and to compile his hidden transcript as a patriotic investigative journalist. These traces can be seen in, for example, an official dispatch from 29 September 1945, in which he described the pan-Asian hopes and aspirations of the troops as they crossed over to Java:

At the same time, Mani and the Indian troops he travelled with would have been well aware of the bitterness back home which greeted the British decision to use Indian troops across Southeast Asia and, in particular, of the popular outrage at their deployment in Indochina, where they had been involved in fighting Vietnamese nationalists.Footnote ⁴⁵ Some English-born troops in the British Army in Indonesia likewise became uneasy about the role they were being asked to play in this effective recolonization, with one group writing to the Labour prime minister in London to protest at the position into which they were being forced, while Indonesians themselves had also heard about the use of British troops against the Indo-Chinese nationalists.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the official dispatch cited above, Mani displayed a very British talent for strategic understatement when he observed that the ‘local reaction’ to the arrival of Indian troops in Batavia ‘has been a little lukewarm owing to strong nationalist feelings’. His diary reveals that the crowds who greeted them were silent, that anti-British graffiti was displayed across all the buildings, and that as the troops were taken into their barracks it was clear they were not at all welcome.Footnote ⁴⁷

Mani's official dispatches from Batavia continued to reveal traces of his true feelings. He reported that the Indian troops there were largely asked to do no more than simple policing duties, and he registered his dissatisfaction with the menial nature of the tasks they were asked to perform for British officers.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Batavia, he again stayed in close contact with T. G. Narayanan: as events on the ground spiralled out of control, his series of thoughtful features for The Hindu over the next few months were deeply critical of the British.Footnote ⁴⁹ Narayanan explained that the chaos in Batavia was caused by the many competing forces in the city and he referred his readers instead to the situation in Bandung, where the nationalists were largely in control and where order and calm prevailed. It was the Dutch and the British, he argued, who were responsible for Batavia becoming ungovernable.Footnote ⁵⁰

Meanwhile, Mani himself, while again ensuring that the Indian troops he was with had access to recreational radio, strove as an investigative journalist to arrive at his own critical appraisal of the political situation. Throughout October, Mani set about meeting and getting to know Batavia's Indonesian nationalist leadership and became particularly close friends with Sutan Sjahrir, whom in November 1945 Sukarno appointed prime minister, and the charismatic leftist Amir Sjarifuddin, who founded the Indonesian Socialist Youth party, also in November 1945, and was to become prime minister the following year.Footnote ⁵¹ At this time—October 1945— Mani's British paymasters were scathing about such figures. They described Batavia, where many such nationalist leaders were based, and where substantial numbers of Dutch were seeking to be restored to power, as confused and disordered. They depicted Sukarno as a quisling because of his earlier collaboration with the Japanese. Sjahrir was preferred, as he had led resistance struggles against the Japanese, but neither he nor the left-leaning Sjarifuddin were trusted by the British.Footnote ⁵²

After only a few weeks, the 23^rd Indian Division with whom Mani was posted, including Mahratti and Rajput artillerymen, as well as troops from other Indian regions, were sent to Surabaya. The political situation here contrasted markedly with that in Batavia as the city was completely in the hands of Indonesian nationalists, having concluded a series of alliances which drew in all groups. The Surabaya administration was being led by the established elites (the priyayi) but they were supported both by the younger revolutionary nationalists (the pemuda) and by the broader mass of Surabaya working people, the arek Surabaya from the port city's neighbourhoods (the kampungs).Footnote ⁵³ The Japanese had surrendered to a small group of impatient Dutch, who were then promptly imprisoned by Indonesian republicans who assumed control of the whole Japanese armoury. Surabaya was, in fact, the only Indonesian city in which nationalists formed the sole civil structure, for even in Bandung some British and Dutch were present. The republican government in the city was clearly effective. By the time the British and Indian troops of SEAC arrived, having been delayed by the logistics of evacuating internees from other cities, civil order had been firmly established for some weeks.

Mani's official dispatches and private observations provide us with an invaluable testimony as to the origins of the violent and tragic events that followed. In an early dispatch from the city, designated ‘Press flash immediate’ and sent to the Public Relations and Divisional headquarters in Singapore, he was notably more open in his depiction of the hostility of the crowd at the docks who witnessed the Indian troops’ arrival: ‘As in Batavia, local reception was cold and unenthusiastic and anti-Dutch slogans greeted us all over the harbour.’Footnote ⁵⁴ In the same dispatch he recorded that there ‘were no incidents’, and in a further report on 26 October: ‘The occupation by Indian troops is proceeding peacefully according to plan . . . so far there has been no hitch. . ..’ Yet his hidden transcript, in the form of his personal diary, told a completely different story. His entries for Surabaya from 25 to 28 October reveal that the hostility of the Indonesians to what they saw as another colonial army had taken its toll on the morale of Indian troops.Footnote ⁵⁵ From their very first sight of the city, their anxiety had increased as the reality of their reception, which Mani only hinted at in his official dispatches, sank in:

The suspicion emanating from the many armed Indonesian troops whom Mani saw on the streets intensified his own doubts about his role, as shown in this entry from 25 October:

In the same diary entry, Mani observed that the British commander Brigadier Mallaby had handled his first meeting with local Indonesian leaders very poorly. The British had made it clear they were not prepared to accept republican control as ‘normalcy’ and that they would insist on the start of talks that would facilitate the return of Dutch control of the port. Nevertheless, the initial British negotiation with the republican mayor of the city appeared to commit the British to remaining confined within the port area itself, on the mouth of the river and at the edge of the town. As Mani saw it, Mallaby had been insensitive and rude, and had apparently failed completely to appreciate the position of the Indonesian priyayi authorities who were trying to allay the anxieties of the various groups of nationalists in the city, that is, the pemuda and the arek Surabaya.Footnote ⁵⁷

By the time he made his next diary entry on 26 October—hurriedly typed and closely spaced—he was seriously alarmed. He felt that Mallaby's second conference with the local Surabaya leadership had also gone badly, with the Brigadier appearing to have been contemptuous of Indonesian armed strength. Mani wrote: ‘Brig Mall does not appear to gauge the situation here properly and pooh-poohs Indonesian might. Playing for time, usual game.’

Mani continued: ‘A thousand Regrets I am not a free correspondent to report what I observe. Anyway, duty by troops from my own country and cannot leave them.’ He went to bed ‘with a vague suspicion there may be a bloodbath in store for us. . .’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Worse was to come on 27 October when the British dropped leaflets in Indonesian, which Mani was able to read using the Malay he had picked up during the Malaya and Burma campaigns. These leaflets demanded that the Indonesian forces give up their arms, which was explicitly contrary to the commitments Mani knew that Mallaby had given earlier. He wrote: ‘I feel that the proud Indonesians would not give up their arms until the Dutch menace is removed.’Footnote ⁵⁹

In his diary entry describing Mallaby's evening press conference, Mani revealed his own deep frustration and anger at the ‘arrogance’ and distortion occurring:

The embedded eyewitness: Mani and the Battle for Surabaya

Mani's official and unofficial writings from Surabaya provide us with an embedded eye witness account of one aspect of the events in Surabaya which have been largely ignored in the current historiography, especially by historians who have not dwelt on the extent to which there were other Indian troops on the ground in the city, in addition to the Gurkhas.Footnote ⁶¹ The history of the Indian 23^rd Division, The fighting cock, by a British officer, Lieutenant-Colonel A.J.F. Doulton, portrays Indian troops in Surabaya as if they were in complete isolation from any local population, other than in engagements with the people identified as ‘the enemy’.Footnote ⁶² By contrast, Mani had already pointed out in official dispatches from Batavia that some Indian soldiers had been born and raised in the Dutch East Indies, in Medan in one case, and spoke fluent Malay. Now, from Surabaya, he sent further reports, on 27 October, which detailed the contact made between the Indian 23^rd and members of Surabaya's local civilian Indian community. In these, Mani described the crucial role played by local Indian merchants in securing the peaceful initial landing of Indian troops. Indonesian nationalist leaders had been in close communication with resident Indian leaders, who had then approached an Indian major leading troops into the city and successfully persuaded him to camp for the night outside the urban area. Such a recognition of the presence and active role played by the local Indian populations cannot be found in the British accounts of the day, except in the underlying suspicion with which the British military consistently regarded local Indians.Footnote ⁶³

Once again, the fraught local situation Mani encountered also triggered his inclinations as an investigative journalist. Having been billeted at Surabaya's Liberty Hotel, in the company of other PR staff and members of the Allied forces’ Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI) mission, and away from most of the Indian troops, he began to make forays into the city to learn more about it, its people, and the predicament in which they found themselves. In this respect, his principal informant was a Sindhi merchant called T. D. Kundan, who was trusted by the Indonesian nationalists and who gave Mani ‘plenty of dope on the local situation’. As Mani reviewed what he was seeing as well as this new information, he wrote of his sorrow:

On the morning of 28 October, Mani spent more time with Kundan over lunch and returned to the Liberty Hotel around 4pm. Not long afterwards, he heard the first shots ring out as the Battle for Surabaya began in earnest. Earlier, Mallaby had ordered the Indian troops to be deployed across the city far beyond the port area, in what was another contravention of the agreement previously reached with the local authorities. The Brigadier ordered the Indian troops to set up in small units, referred to as ‘penny packets’, within the kampungs, or neighbourhoods, of Surabaya. But since these forces were heavily outnumbered, this proved, in the event, no more than a symbolic occupation of the city.Footnote ⁶⁵

When the battle commenced, the Liberty Hotel was soon besieged and all radio communication outwards cut off. Mani, as a captain, was second in command for the Indian troops posted at the hotel to defend the journalists and RAPWI staff. He moved from position to position to support the soldiers but also tried to monitor the radio. Although he could not get messages out, he could hear the harrowing ‘Mayday’ calls from the many isolated units of Indian troops which were now all under attack. Then he heard their screams as their posts were overrun and they were killed, one by one. These broadcasts have also been described by a British officer, Major Henstock, who recalled his memories of listening, similarly helpless, from the headquarters radio.Footnote ⁶⁶ Mani did not learn until later that other Indian soldiers had been burned alive when their post in a cinema was set on fire.

Eventually, after a series of failed telephone calls, Kundan was able to get one through to Mani, whom he assumed had radio contact with headquarters. In Mani's account, Kundan begged him to get a message to Mallaby to call a truce, but Mani explained that all communications were disrupted and his own troops and RAPWI staff were unable to move. Mani now pleaded with Kundan to use a car to get through the city to take his message.Footnote ⁶⁷ At the time, Mani did not know that he had been lucky to have even returned to the hotel at all after his lunch with Kundan. Mani's earlier contact with local Indonesian nationalists appears to have saved his life. Des Alwi, a young nationalist in Surabaya, who later became a prominent journalist and speech writer, recorded in his diary of the battle:

Mani's official dispatch of 6 November covers the rest of that terrifying night of 28 October and its aftermath.Footnote ⁶⁹ This dispatch was written after Mani had been evacuated to Singapore and it is a sombre document, very different in tone from almost all of the other official dispatches Mani posted either before or after. In it, he recounts the increasing pressure under which the journalists and troops in the hotel came. With casualties increasing, and knowing from the radio that the SEAC situation was extreme and no help was coming, they decided to surrender. They were then driven to a jail in an open-backed truck, jeered along the way by the crowds lining the streets. Once again, however, Mani's connections with Indonesian nationalists proved significant. The following morning, on 29 October, Amir Sjarifuddin came to visit Mani and the other prisoners in the cells after he, Sukarno, and Mohammed Hatta had flown into the city earlier in the day to try to organize a truce. Sjarifuddin arranged for Mani and the other journalists to be moved into ‘protective’ internment, where they were kept for four days, as Mani's dispatch describes.

While they were in this protective custody, the situation worsened dramatically. The ceasefire held for a short time, but then outbreaks of fighting led to an attempt at negotiation between the local Indonesian leadership and the British late on 30 October. Kundan served as interpreter for the Indonesians. Before he and the others had completed their negotiations, mixed messages from the British led to the eruption of firing again at the Internatio Building. In this melee, Brigadier Mallaby was killed. During this time, the Indonesians holding Mani and his group tried to evacuate them by train from the town, but they were unable to do so safely and so brought them back to the internment site. In the tense days that followed Mallaby's death, the British Indian troops worked together with regular Indonesian army personnel to evacuate the 6,000-odd European internees, whom the British had previously moved into Surabaya, to ships in the port. The British did not evacuate the far greater number of Eurasians and Chinese residents of the city, who had also been interned by the Indonesian republicans.Footnote ⁷⁰ When Mani and the other journalists with him were finally released, they spent a day or two gathering their belongings before they were evacuated on 5 November to Singapore. Only then did Mani write his long dispatch which he posted on the following day. The surviving Indian troops, who had lost more than 500 comrades, had retreated into the port area of Surabaya to regroup. There they were reinforced in large numbers when the British moved in a further two brigades of the Fifth Indian Division.Footnote ⁷¹

On 10 November, the day Mani returned to Surabaya from Singapore, there was an unmistakable massing of troops around the docks. Many believed that the new British commander, Major-General Mansergh, was determined to take revenge for the humiliation meted out to the British forces on October 28 and afterwards. Mansergh issued an ultimatum to the Indonesians, which was clearly too humiliating to accept, in that it demanded that the Indonesians disarm and surrender the city to the British. On 10 November, the leaders of all Indonesian groups in the city met and decided to fight to the death rather than surrender. The battle went on for over 100 days of bitter street-to-street fighting, in which many thousands of Indonesians died, as did hundreds of Indians and some British troops.

Several accounts of this conflict now exist, written by Indonesian fighters as well as by non-Indonesian sources, which all draw on Indonesian memoirs and oral histories. However, none of these published works discusses the Indian perspective, although most perpetuate the misapprehension (which continues to be held by many people in Indonesia today) that all South Asian troops were Nepali Gurkhas.Footnote ⁷² As discussed, even authors who write about Indian troops, such as McMillan and Doulton, rely largely, if not exclusively, on SEAC and British sources.Footnote ⁷³ The details of this bitter fighting from the perspective of Indian troops, however, can be found in documents in the P. R. S. Mani Collection. Mani stayed with the the troops during the whole of the Battle for Surabaya, sending dispatches on most days which documented the tenacity and courage of the Indian soldiers. In particular, he wrote about the growth of pan-Asian solidarity among them as they discovered, rescued, and cared for the many Chinese, Indian, and Eurasian internees of the Indonesians whom the British had left behind.Footnote ⁷⁴

By the time Mansergh declared the battle officially ‘won’ in December, Mani had had enough. ‘Much grieved with events in Indonesia’, he requested a transfer back to India where he resigned from the Army early in 1946.Footnote ⁷⁵

Reporting pan-Asianism: the hidden transcript revealed

During his time as a captain in the Indian Army, Mani did not take the route of publishing his frustrations in the Indian press, although a few journalists in similar positions, still enlisted in Burma, for example, had begun to leak their stories. On arriving in India, however, Mani immediately found employment with the Free Press Journal of Bombay as a foreign correspondent. On his return to Indonesia, he found the hostilities were still ongoing. This time he was able to negotiate with the British and the Dutch military authorities to gain access or information, and was not constrained by his position as a serving officer within the British Army. Nonetheless, as his diaries show, Mani still felt trapped by his need to bargain with these authorities about how much he revealed to the readers of the Free Press Journal of Bombay. As he explained in both his application to the newly independent Indian Foreign Service in 1947, as well as in his 1986 book, he felt committed to learning the story of the Independence struggle from the Indonesian side, but he also sought to maintain his commitment to the Indian troops with whom he had travelled.Footnote ⁷⁶

This commitment demanded his return to report on one part of the Indian troops’ story in Indonesia on which he had previously been prevented from commenting. Mani wanted to follow the stories of the Indian soldiers who had decided to act on their sympathies with the Indonesian freedom struggle and cross the lines to join the nationalists. However, in order to try to protect these men from pursuit and prosecution by the British, he agreed to delay indefinitely writing their stories for his Indian readers.Footnote ⁷⁷ The timing of Mani's decision to eventually go public with this story brings home to us the accuracy of James Scott's theoretical musings on the strategic moments when power relations between the oppressors and the oppressed shift and the hidden transcript of resistance is suddenly revealed.Footnote ⁷⁸

On 30 October 1946, Mani's article on the Indians fighting for freedom from imperial rule alongside the Indonesians appeared in the Free Press Journal of Bombay. It was published at a key time in India's own freedom struggle, on the back of the momentous Delhi ‘Red Fort’ trials of November 1945 to March 1946 (the public outcry over which eventually led the British to commute the sentences of the three main INA officers found guilty); as well as the mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy and of elements in the British Indian Army in February 1946. Mani's decision to publish was specifically motivated by another key event: the decision taken by SEAC, under intense pressure from Nehru and the nationalists in India, to withdraw all Indian troops from Indonesia completely. Mani feared that these Indians who had ‘deserted’ would be left behind. His article in the Free Press Journal of Bombay was headlined ‘A New Unity Forged Abroad Among Indian Soldiers: They Fight For Their Country Out There In Indonesia’.Footnote ⁷⁹

In keeping with the prevailing mood in India, where by October 1946 many had come to regard the INA as nationalist heroes rather than treasonous traitors, Mani opened his article with the statement: ‘Another Indian National Army is writing history in that island fortress of freedom, Java, in defence of the Indonesian Republic.’ Having established this patriotic lineage, he then explained that his story could now be told as Nehru had assured parliament that the Government of India would not tolerate ‘any subterfuge or delay in the withdrawal of Indian troops’. Mani then brought into full and complete view the theme that had been the thread through all his diverse dispatches since 1944, as well as appearing in strands in his wartime journalism. His article proceeded by stating that among the 600 ‘gallant men’ of this new INA were ‘Punjabis, Madrasees, Pathans, Mahrattas—Hindus, Muslims and Christians, once again proving that outside British control Indians of all communities tend to unite’. He noted that the soldiers who had refused to wage war on Indonesia had greeted him in Jogyakarta with the INA greeting ‘Azad Hind’ (‘Free India’). They had also been concerned to emphasize their idealism as freedom-fighting soldiers of conscience, as Mani duly reported:

In Mani's hidden transcript made public, the Indian National Army lived on, fighting another anti-colonial war in Southeast Asia. But it was able to do that only because Indians had not succumbed to the British tactic of divide-and-rule, and instead were united in their passionate commitment to an end to colonialism, both in Indonesia from the Dutch and in India from the British.

Finally, Mani related an incident from that terrifying night of 28 October in Surabaya, when he and his colleagues had been besieged in the Liberty Hotel by Indonesian forces. Until then, he had kept the details to himself but now felt able to write about it:

Mani concluded his article with this very personal and powerful experience in order to explain the political motivations of the Indian soldiers who had joined the Indonesian Revolution. The man whose death he witnessed had been decorated for valour in battle (‘ribboned’), he continued to respect his officers (he called Captain Mani ‘Saab’ or ‘Sir’), and he belonged to the Rajputs, who for over a century the British had favoured for their ‘martial’ character. In this Mani appealed to the very mythology of ‘martial races’ which all of his work had challenged. Yet he needed to make sure this vignette hit home to as wide an audience as possible. For Mani, the poignant last words of this loyal Indian soldier—the epitome of the ‘martial’ mythology—dying far away from home in a foreign land, appear to have conveyed a lasting judgement on India's entire wartime involvement. It was not just the meaning of his own death but the entire defence of colonialism that this Indian ‘hero of Burma’ had come to question with his final breath.