When VE Day was declared on May 8, 1945, Major R.G. Salvi, 2nd Lieutenant in the Maratha Light Infantry, British Indian Army, did not realise that the war in Europe was over. Sheltering in the mountains near the village Villa San Sebastiano in the Italian countryside, he heard a German soldier’s rapid fire from a tommy-gun only inches away from his hiding place and prayed for his life. “I felt as if ‘Yamadoot’ [the messenger of death] himself stood upon me with his noose ready,” he recounts.
Salvi survived to tell his tale: 13 days later, once the Germans had left, a group of Italian villagers came to rescue him from the mountains. “The sleepless birds of the night, with the advent of dawn had left their dark abodes and fluttering their wings exuberantly were soaring high up into the endless blue sky,” reflects Salvi. “Our hearts too rejoiced in the new-found freedom.”
Salvi’s 1983 memoir on the Second World War, Whom Enemies Sheltered, demonstrates the dominant presence of Indian soldiers in Europe during the Second World War. This wasn’t simply the case towards the end of the war. When hostilities were first declared in Europe, Force K6, comprising four mule companies in the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, journeyed to France in support of the British Expeditionary Forces.
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Several hundred such men were on the beaches at Dunkirk during its evacuation in May and June 1940, heartbroken at having to leave their mules behind. Thirty-three-year-old Dost Muhammed, a sepoy in the 22 Mule Company, was among them. His home was nearly 5,000 miles away, in Rawalpindi in modern-day Pakistan. Dost Muhammed died in France.
After defeating Axis troops in the Middle Eastern and North African theatres of war in 1943, Indian soldiers joined the Central Mediterranean Forces, invading Sicily in July 1943 and forming part of the Allied landings in mainland Italy in September 1943. A selection of these Indian forces were also sent on to Cyprus and Greece. Through letters exchanged between the home front and international battlefronts, the little-known emotional worlds of these soldiers are opened up for us. What were their thoughts and feelings on seeing Europe for the first time?
A colour party leads the British infantry contingent through India’s memorial arch in Delhi during the Victory Parade. © IWM
Colonial military enlistment and its legitimacy for travel opened the door for these men – a large proportion of whom were from rural India – to unknown places, and new ways of seeing. While the letters themselves become agents of communication between remote villages spread across India and theatres of war thousands of miles away, they also show us how soldiers become itinerant spectators, engaging in – and often enjoying – encounters in new lands. Travel itself becomes an experience of emotions, and Europe, viewed through the eyes of Indian soldiers, the focus of intercultural exchange.
A sepoy in the Central Mediterranean Forces, part of the Allied forces in Italy, writes in Malayalam to family back home:
“As a reward for all our previous sufferings, Almighty brought us here to Sicily. We are supplied with British Troop rations. Sicily is a very fertile country. It is the Kashmir of Europe. Wherever you go, you will find groves of date palms and innumerable vineyards. […] An Indian soldier is respected both for his fighting qualities and morale. The people here display no colour prejudice. The coloured are better loved than the white. […] On the whole this is one of the happiest and most beautiful countries I have ever seen.”
The viridescent Italian countryside serves here as a harmonious landscape for a cross-cultural appreciation that, nonetheless, indicates the presence of systemic inequalities in the army – the Indian soldier mentions receiving better quality British troop rations because this is a novelty. The soldier’s letter also alerts us to the complexities of wartime relations. Being a colonial soldier on the victorious Allied side destabilises racial hierarchies to the extent that “the coloured” liberators become “better loved than the white”.
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An Indian captain in the Auxiliary Pioneer Corps is similarly euphoric:
“I am sitting under an olive tree and so many trees of almonds are standing nearby. No sooner there is a slight wind than all the ripe almonds fall down on the ground. Vineyards are hanging everywhere. Birds are chirping and orchards are found all over the area round about us. Vegetables are in abundance and fruits are more than I can put in black and white […] Our relations with the local inhabitants are cordial and they are very social.”
This Italian paradise’s mellow fruitfulness is lovingly described by the writer. He too emphasises the restorative promise of a natural world in a strange country. After experiencing strenuous fighting in arid desert conditions in the Middle East and North Africa, Sicily, Greece and Cyprus seen for the first time by these Indian soldiers must have seemed lush, fertile and full of new life – places of welcome in which to recover from war-weariness.
A sepoy in the Indian infantry describes how precious this respite was to his family in August 1943:
“I am passing some of the happiest hours of my life in a beautiful European island. We are free from every sort of restriction and shall never forget this liberty throughout our lives. […] We could never dream of visiting these places at any cost and are fortunate in this respect.”
Aerial view of contingents setting off on the Victory Parade in Delhi. © IWM
But victory in Europe in 1945 did not mean that the war was over. On the other side of the world the Japanese threat loomed large. 700,000 Indian men would eventually form part of the cosmopolitan Fourteenth Army which served in the Pacific theatre of war – completely overshadowed in modern memory by European Allied triumphs. The Indian men stationed in Europe knew that, on returning home, their next transfer could be to the jungles of Burma. A Lance-Naik demonstrates this awareness in a letter to his loved ones from Italy: “If you insist I will get back home but I will have to go again towards the east where Ghulam Mohammed is now serving.”
It was in battles at Kohima and Imphal on the Indo-Burmese border that men in the British Indian Army would come face-to-face with their brothers-in-arms – the soldiers in the Indian National Army (INA), comprising former prisoners-of-war in Southeast Asia and Indian expatriates, led by the charismatic political radical Subhas Chandra Bose.
The “new found freedom” that Major Salvi describes in his memoir was still a long way ahead, both for Indian soldiers serving in the British Indian Army, and for the INA men, who, just after the war, would transform into a rallying symbol for Indian independence.
Diya Gupta is a Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.