The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-1945

By Peter Ward Fay

Book Overview

The last days of the Raj bring to mind Gandhi's nonviolence and Nehru's diplomacy. These associations obscure another reality: that an army of Indian men and women who tried to throw the British off the subcontinent. The Forgotten Army brings to life for the first time the story of how Subhas Chandra Bose, a charismatic Bengali, attempted to liberate India with an army of former British Indian soldiers--the Indian National Army (INA). The story begins with the British Indian Army fighting a heroic rearguard action against the invading Japanese down the Malaysian peninsula and ends with many of these same soldiers defeated in their effort to invade India as allies of Japan. Peter Ward Fay intertwines powerful descriptions of military action with a unique knowledge of how the INA was formed and its role in the broader struggle for Indian independence. Fay incorporates the personal reminiscences of Prem Saghal, a senior officer in the INA, and Lakshmi Swaminadhan, leader of its women's sections, to help the reader understand the motivations of those who took part. Their experiences offer an engagingly personal counterpoint to the political and military history. ". . . a well-crafted and thought-provoking mixture of oral history and original research, providing the most comprehensive account yet published of the events leading to the formation of the INA." --Guardian "Fay has made a magnificent attempt to analyse all the credible information on the history of [Subhas Chandra] Bose's legendary Indian National Army (INA)." --Times Higher Education Supplement "This fine study of the Indian National Army (INA) seeks to demonstrate this army's significance in the attainment of Indian independence and the termination of the British Empire. . . . Throughout, Fay seeks to explain why 'constant and true' Indians like Sahgal and Swaminadhan chose to fight alongside the Japanese and against the British . . . ." -- Pacific Affairs Peter Ward Fay is Professor of History, California Institute of Technology.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472083422
• ISBN13: 9780472083428
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 584 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

memories of midnight

There are several other books on Netaji and the view from hindsight after more than 50 years. One wonders why it took so long to do this, was it because the man would now be close to 100 years? Strangely, there are reports that he survives as a sadhu or holy man in N India, near Lucknow or Allahabad.The New Yorker carried a good article by A. Ghosh who draws on interviews with other INA personnel. The British Empire was a 'white man's club' (see Robert Huttenback). In this context, an Indian officer could not rise very high in the army (there were a few exceptions). The INA gave ex POW's in Japanese controlled territories a chance. Why deny this to someone you would not wish to invite into your own drinking circle at the Club after work? This dog in the manger attitude of the colonials still has its hangover today, even among the brown sahibs who rule India and have grudgingly given an award to Netaji Bose.My father knew Netaji in Calcutta when he was Mayor in the 1920's, and who helped him to finish college. Later he met him in Germany prior to WW 2. There are some photos somewhere.Records of Netaji's association with the Japanese and German army are available, including the materials carried along with him in the submarine to Japan.The Germans had a batallion of British volunteers who were known as Hitlers Englishmen. God only knows what happened to them.

"JIFs" or Freedom Fighters?

The Indian National Army, and its operations with the Japanese in the Burma theatre of operations during World War II, was long a controversial subject between Indians and British, and generally regarded with curmudgeonly disapproval by the British. The fact is that the issue of collaboration was probably more complicated in the Asia-Pacific theatre than it was in the European theatre. Experiencing the colonial rule of the British, French, and Dutch, many Burmese, Malays, Vietnamese, Sumatrans and Javanese saw the Japanese as colonial liberators. Even in the Philippines, under an allegedly benign American rule, much of the legislature stayed on to work under the Japanese. The Germans, of course, used peoples like the Lithuanians and Ukrainians in order to carry out the "Final Solution", but the situation was somewhat different. Asian nationalists struggling for independence, largely along lines laid for them by Western educations, found themselves betrayed by Western colonial empires who were committed to holding on at all cost (or so they thought until 1942). Fay's book provides a case study of one of the most famous (or notorious) instances of collaboration in the Asia-Pacific theatre. He examines the history of the Indian National Army (derogatorily referred to by the British as "JIFs"--Japanese Indian Forces) through an INA perspective, specifically in interviews with Prem and Lakshmi Sahgal, a husband and wife who found themselves in Singapore in 1942 when the British surrendered to the Japanese--Prem as a captured officer, and Lakshmi as a doctor. Both, disillusioned and fed up with years of British promises of independence that grew consciously or unconsciously caught up in red tape and official footdragging, decided to join the Japanese-affiliated force of Indian soldiers that would reclaim India for the Indians. The rest of the story should be read through their words, providing a much needed other side to the story of the Indian struggle for independence.