Abstract
When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, British officials throughout the subcontinent dug in for a long and protracted conflict. The Viceroy, Linlithgow, declared India at war with the King’s enemies without consulting a single Indian politician on the night of 3 September and, whereas the authorities in the First World War had waited until 1915 to drastically curtail civil liberties, in 1939 Delhi immediately went to work on war legislation. Shortly thereafter, the British administration regained total control of most of India’s provinces. Congress ministers, who had resigned in protest over Linlithgow’s unilateral declaration, were replaced by Governor’s rule under section 93 of the Government of India Act.1 In the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Dr. Khan Sahib’s Congress government resigned at the beginning of 1940, and Sir George Cunningham took up the reins of power under section 93, before passing it off to a Muslim League ministry in 1943.2
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Notes
Johannes H. Voigt, “Cooperation or Confrontation?: War and Congress Politics, 1939–1942,” in Donald Anthony Low (ed.), Congress and the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle, 1917–1947, 2nd edition (New Delhi, 2004), pp. 349–374.
For the rise of the Muslim League in the NWFP, see Sayed Wiqar Ali Shah, Ethnicity, Islam, and Nationalism: Muslim Politics in the North-West Frontier Movement, 1937–1947 (Karachi, 1999).
See Defence of India Plan, 1941, India Office Records (IOR) L WS 1/530; Milan Hauner, “The Soviet Threat to Afghanistan and India, 1938–1940,” in Modern Asian Studies, 15, 2 (1981), pp. 287–309.
G. Leslie Mallam and Diana Day, A Pair of Chaplis and a Cassock, (London, 1978), Mallam Papers, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge University (CSAS), p. 87.
Tuker later served as Eastern Commander of the Indian Army and was therefore responsible for security in Bengal and Bihar during the communal massacres of 1946–1947. See Sir Francis Tuker, While Memory Serves: The Last Two Years of British Rule in India (London, 1950).
Wavell’s Diary entry for 31 October 1945, in Sir Penderel Moon (ed.), Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (Karachi, 1997), p. 179.
As Hugh Beattie has pointed out, the report even questioned the entire “tribal” taxonomy of the region as it had been understood since Eliphinstone, noting that among the Mahsuds “so kaleidoscopic is the structure, so loose the organization that an infinite variety of alliances is possible, negotiations with them are difficult and treaties seldom binding” (See Hugh Beattie, “Custom and Conflict in Waziristan: Some British Views” in Magnus Marsden and Benjamin D. Hopkins (eds), Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy Along the AfghanistanPakistan Frontier (New York, 2012), p. 218).
Fraser Noble, Something in India (London, 1997), p. 278. Also see
Fraser Noble, “An Experiment in Foodgrain Procurement: A Case Study in Planning in an Undeveloped Area,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 5, 2 (1957), pp. 175–185.
See Robin J. Moore, Escape from Empire: The Attlee Government and the Indian Problem (Oxford, 1983).
Indivar Kamtekar, “A Different War Dance: State and Class in India 1939–1945,” in Past and Present, 176, 1 (2002), p. 195.
Brian R. Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj, 1914–1947: The Economics of Decolonization in India (London, 1979), p. 140.
See Simon Epstein, “District Officers in Decline: The Erosion of British Authority in the Bombay Countryside, 1919 to 1947,” in Modern Asian Studies, 16, 3 (1982), pp. 493–518.
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© 2015 Brandon Marsh
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Marsh, B. (2015). “A Glorified Maginot Line”?: The Frontier and the Second World War, 1939–1946. In: Ramparts of Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_10
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