(See Cover)
The whole Far East was atremble. From Burma, waves of refugees were already breaking over India's borders. Calcutta, Madras and other seaboard cities were being partly evacuated. If the Japanese struck at India and the Indian Ocean, 200 years of British-Indian argument might go up like tissue paper in a bonfire.
Yet in London the British Government was still mulling over the old argument. The incredibly complicated India problem threatened to become purely academic, a mass of mere words. Sir Stafford Cripps politely told Parliament that the Government had postponed comment on India's demands for self-government. While the British public cried for action, London rumor held that Government proposals had struck snags both in London and New Delhi.
In India the heat was creeping north from Cape Comorin, the heat which would grow to a relentless blaze scorching the country until the June monsoon. Much-traveled General Sir Archibald Wavell, back in New Delhi to resume his Indian command (see p. 19), waited in the heat for London to make up its mind. A U.S. air mission had arrived, the first tangible sign that U.S. fighters might join in India's defense. They too waited for London's words. And in New Delhi the Viceroy, who rules India for Britain, also waited.
Big, dignified, Roosevelt-jawed Victor Alexander John Hope, 54, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, strolled among the splashing fountains of his colossal, copper-domed viceregal palace. A mighty and beglamored figure, Britain's deputy over 352,000,000 Indians, he reviewed Indian troops of the New Delhi area, conferred with his Executive Council, talked with his private secretary Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, fed worms to his pet turtle, Jonah, whom Mohandas Gandhi once asked especially to see. Like the rest of India's millions, the Viceroy was waiting in the heat, waiting while the Japanese won Java and Rangoon, waiting to see whether, among other things, he would keep his post-waiting for London to make up its mind.
To much of the outside world, the British Government seemed like the Heifetz of all fiddlers while the Rome of all Romes burned. History might soon make the description fit. But after centuries of British-Indian relations, and even with the loss of India much more than a possibility, few British statesmen could be expected to do anything decisive about India. There were many reasons for this indecision.
Two Faces East. Britain has long shown India two different faces. One face has been ruthlessly imperialist. The harshness of this face can scarcely be exaggerated. During the Mutiny of 1857, the last widespread, violent revolt against the British Raj, Britons slaughtered harmless elderly Hindus of both sexes by the score (and were sometimes slaughtered themselves by the sepoys-see cut, p. 28). They seized Moslems, whose religion forbids contact with pork, and sewed them into pig skins before killing them. They tied some rebellious sepoys to the muzzles of cannon, and then fired the cannon. As late as 1919, at Amritsar, British General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer ordered his troops to disperse a prohibited meeting of unarmed Indians by firing into the crowd; the volley killed 379.