An Indian Town’s Entry into the Second World War: Holding Together the Congress Party and Training Chinese Soldiers in Wartime Raj

Abstract

During the Second World War, Ramgarh, a small town in northeast India, was the site of the 53rd Session of the Indian National Congress and the training centre for the Chinese Expeditionary Force. By uncovering the links between the two events and knitting them into the broader context of the Indian nationalist movement and China’s War of Resistance, this article tries to break down the hegemony of the Eurocentric national narratives of the history of the Second World War in India and China. In doing so, it provides an alternative way of writing an entangled history of India and China during the Second World War.

Keywords

Ramgarh Second World War India China

Introduction

Ramgarh is a small town sitting in the district of Hazaribagh in southern Bihar (today’s Jharkhand state in the Republic of India). The Hazaribagh district lies in the heart of the Chota Nagpur Plateau with an average altitude of 600 metres (Lister 1917: 2). The relatively high altitude of the district made its climate different from other neighbouring districts. The yearly average temperature in the early twentieth century in Hazaribagh was around 23 °C and the mean humidity was about 51%, much lower than coastal areas such as Calcutta (mean humidity was 76% around the year). Even during the rainy season, which begins from June every year, the air in Hazaribagh is much drier than in lower regions (Lister 1917: 24–5).

The Damodar River flows through Hazaribagh and joins the Hooghly River below Calcutta in the Bay of Bengal. Part of Ramgarh lies in the Damodar Valley and sits on a rich coalfield (Lister 1917: 28–9). To transport coals out, a railway station was built in Ramgarh in the early twentieth century, and the town was directly connected to big cities such as Patna and Calcutta through the Grand Chord Railway and the Bengal Nagpur Railway (Lister 1917: 144–5). During the Second World War, Ramgarh was the site of the 53rd session of the Indian National Congress (INC) and the training centre for the Chinese Expeditionary Force (CEF). By uncovering the links and knitting them into the broader context of the Indian nationalist movement and China’s War of Resistance, this article writes a shared history of India and China during the Second World War.

The history of the Second World War has often been told through the perspectives of particular nation-states. The Americans highlight their decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany in Europe and Imperial Japan in Asia. The British try to write a history of fighting alone. The Russians, in their turn, call attention to the sacrifice they made in Leningrad and Stalingrad. Similarly, historical narratives of the Second World War in India and China have also been dominated by national histories for a long time.

Scholars of modern Indian history take the period of the Second World War as nothing more than the chaotic moment of the Quit India Movement and the Bengal famine (Henningham 1983). Very few attempts were made to investigate how the Indian population and natural resources were involved in the global war. Even fewer study on how Indian national politics, local landscape and the experience of ordinary people were shaped by the war. Rather, Indian national history pays much attention to nationalist heroes such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose. Since Gandhi and Nehru were imprisoned during most time of the war and Subhas Chandra Bose was on the side of the Fascists, the Second World War has become irrelevant to Indian national history (Khan 2015: xv).

China’s history of the Second World War has been firmly merged with the War of Resistance (the Second Sino-Japanese War). Chinese national history, written both by Chinese and Western scholars, has produced a large number of studies exploring the role of the Chinese communists during the War of Resistance (Guofangbu Shizhengbianyiju 1985). These studies left an impression that only the communist experience and narrative was important to making sense of China’s Second World War (Johnson 1962; Selden 1971).

As India and China tried hard to compete for the leadership of post-colonial Asia by glorifying their past, both countries began to reappraise their roles in the Second World War. The experience and sacrifice of Indian soldiers, who fought for the Allies from north Africa to southeast Asia, have been uncovered to challenge the Eurocentric narrative of the Second World War and to uplift the contribution of the Indian nation (Bayly and Harper 2005; Marston 2014; Voigt 1987). Campaigns led by the Chinese Nationalist government against the Japanese during the War of Resistance have been appropriated into the mainstream narrative of Chinese national history with the argument that the Chinese nation played a forgotten but crucial role in the victory of the Allies during the Second World War (Zhongguokangrizhanzhengshibianxiezu 2011).

The rise of social history in the 1970s left heavy marks on the studies of modern India and China. Practitioners begin to inquire how various aspects of Indian society (including today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh) were transformed by the Second World War (Damodaran 1993; Kamtekar 2002). They argue that it was not only the Indian soldiers who were deployed overseas that make India relevant to the World War, but also the Indian workers, peasants, businessmen and intellectuals from different regions of the country who shared the experience of the war from their specific contexts (Mukherjee 2015; Pandey 2006). Also, the wartime experience of these ordinary Indians further shaped the outlook of independent India (Mukherjee 2010).

Historians of modern China are also attentive to the increasing influence of the social turn in historical studies. Paul Cohen observes that more and more scholars turned to the ‘China-based paradigm’ to examine modern Chinese history from regional and social perspectives in the 1970s and 1980s (Cohen 2010). Regarding the period of the Second World War, a growing number of studies have examined how the war affected the social relations, personal choices and economic livelihood of ordinary Chinese in specific regions (Brook 2007; Henriot and Yeh 2009; MacKinnon 2008; Mitter 2011; Wakeman 2008; Yeh 2004).

Since the 1980s, some practitioners have cast doubt on the long-held assumption that history is merely an event that happened in the past. They argue that historical narrative is the textual discourse that has been constructed and reconstructed again and again by human agents in different ages and contexts (Spivak 1985; White 2015). This ‘cultural turn’ of historiography influenced historians of modern India and China, who set out to scrutinise how personal experience and collective memory have shaped both countries’ understandings of their respective pasts, and how the experiences and memories themselves have changed in different periods (Amin 1995; Chatterjee 1994; Cohen 1998). Yasmin Khan persuasively contends that the experience of starving villagers, traumatised urbanities, angry intellectuals and female activists in wartime India could be very helpful for reconstructing a history of India’s Second World War that has long been neglected by the mega-narrative of national history (Khan 2015). In China, scholars find that the collective memory of China’s war with Japan from 1937 to 1945 has been undergoing constant change, as certain events such as the Battle of Wuhan and the 1942 famine of Henan that used to be very important in historical narrative have been less mentioned latterly due to the changing political and cultural milieu (Coble 2011; MacKinnon 2008; Muscolino 2011).

The approaches of social history and cultural history have remarkably challenged the dominant position of national history by providing local, regional, marginalised and even oppressed perspectives. The rise of global history since the 1990s, with its emphasis on cross-boundary interactions and transnational networks, has further brought into question a top-down way of reviewing national history. Efforts have been made in recent years to transnationalise the involvement of India and China in the Second World War. Through analysing personal letters of ordinary Indian soldiers deployed overseas, scholars are able to establish links between the economic hardship in a remote village in Punjab and the frontlines in Egypt (Barkawi 2017; Khan 2015). The transnational movement of the Indian National Army and its failed attempt to overthrow the British Raj from outside India with the support of the Japanese during the Second World War have also been examined (Bose 2009; Cao 2017). To date, most scholars agree that it is necessary to study China’s Second World War in the context of global history, not only because the war in China was the consequence of international political, economic and ideological conflicts, but also on the grounds that the foreign elements in the China theatre (Soviet Union weapons, American pilots and Canadian physicians for example) made the War of Resistance a real international war (Hu 2013; Hu, Han, and Peng 2015; Mitter 2014). Some scholars also try to tell local wartime stories such as the inflation in Chongqing and the smugglers in Guangzhouwan by putting them in contemporary transnational contexts (Ai 2014; Esherick and Combs 2015).

This article joins the trend of challenging national history from both local and transnational perspectives. Focusing on the northeast Indian town Ramgarh, this article conjoins two seemingly irrelevant events that happened in Ramgarh during the Second World War—the 53rd INC Session in March 1940 and the establishment of the CEF training centre in August 1942. It is found that the CEF training centre was an extension of the colonial internment camp and that one of the main concerns of the Congress’s Ramgarh session was India’s reluctant involvement in the Second World War. This article suggests that the combination of local and transnational perspectives is helpful in appropriating exclusive national histories into an integrated single framework.

The CEF training centre in Ramgarh

In December 1941, the Pacific War broke out as Japanese forces marched into southeast Asia. Within a few months, Hong Kong, British Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies were all under the control of the Japanese. In fear of a full-scale Japanese invasion into British Burma and the subsequent cut off of the Burma Road that was used by the Allies to supply materials to China, an agreement between the British and Chinese governments was reached that the Chinese would send its troops into Burma to help strengthen the defence.

In January 1942, the Japanese Fifteenth Army launched an attack on southern Burma and occupied the port city Moulmein. The British defence collapsed as the Japanese advanced to Rangoon. At the urgent request of the British, the CEF was formed and was sent to Burma in February 1942. The Chinese troops were composed of three armies (the Fifth Army, the Sixth Army and the Sixty-sixth Army) and totalled around 10,000 soldiers.¹

When the main troops of the CEF arrived in Burma in early March 1942, however, the situation was getting worse. Since most British airfields had been destroyed by the Japanese airstrikes, the Japanese had gained supremacy in the air over Burma. Major cities and the Allied forces were constantly under attack by the Japanese bombers. In early March, the British had realised that they were unable to defend Rangoon and evacuated the city.

As Rangoon fell into the hands of the Japanese, the Allies tried to reorganise in upper Burma around Mandalay with the support of the CEF.² During March and April, the CEF fought the Japanese in the Battle of Yunnan-Burma Road and the Battle of Yenangyaung.³ Due to a lack of coordination and communication among the Allied forces, they were repeatedly outflanked and encircled by the Japanese. By the end of April 1942, the entire defensive line of the Allies in Burma collapsed.⁴

The retreat of the Allied forces turned out to be a military disaster (Ven 2017: 23–30). The British Burma Corps made their way back to India through the east Indian state of Manipur. Almost all of their equipment was lost on the road, and many soldiers and refugees died of disease and starvation. For the Chinese side, part of the CEF that fought along the China–Burma border retreated back to Yunnan in early May.⁵ The majority of the CEF, however, was trapped in northern Burma. As Lashio and Myitkyina were occupied by the Japanese, the main roads that connect Burma and China were cut off, and it became very difficult for the rest of the CEF to retreat back to China.⁶

By mid-May, it seems that the CEF had only two options to save itself from being exterminated by the Japanese—either return to China through the mountainous areas of northern Burma or enter into British India.

On the grounds that the Chinese forces might be controlled and manipulated by the British, Chiang Kai-shek, commander of the Nationalist Chinese Forces, ordered the CEF not to enter into India in mid-May.⁷ The CEF, led by General Du Yuming, then attempted to make a way back to China through Kachin Hills, a mountainous area of northwest Burma.⁸ The impassable forested terrain along this retreat route and their being cut-off from supplies and communications to the outside world brought about heavy casualties to the CEF.⁹

There were exceptions, however. The New 38th Division led by General Sun Li-jen was assigned to cover the retreat of the CEF near Bhamo in northern Burma in late April.¹⁰ The original plan made by the high command for the New 38th Division was to move northward to Myitkyina and retreat to China through the Kachin Hills together with other CEF units.¹¹ Realising that the original retreat plan was so impractical and dangerous, Sun Li-jen led his troops westward into British India and arrived in Imphal on 25 May 1942.¹²

By the same time, Chiang Kai-shek had also realised that it would be very costly to move his troops back to China through the Kachin Hills. In a telegram of 19 May, Chiang asked the commander of the CEF, General Luo Zhuoying, to find some local guides to help him retreat into India, from where he could then return to China.¹³ Later that month, Chiang also asked Du Yuming to bring his troops to India for supplies, instead of returning to China directly.¹⁴

As more and more Chinese units arrived in India from Burma, the Allies came to discuss how to settle these troops. In fear of an imminent Japanese invasion of India, the British and Chinese authorities agreed that the New 38th Division should be transported from Imphal to Ledo to defend local airbases and the northeast frontier of the Raj.¹⁵ Once arrived in Ledo, however, the Chinese were frustrated by the harsh conditions there. It was reported that there was no camp in Ledo to accommodate Chinese troops, that the local weather was very humid and hot, and that they were short on supplies.¹⁶ Even worse, in a telegraph addressed to Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Li-jen stated that the British defence of Ledo was weak and disorganised. Sun further asserted that the British were unable to defend India and that the Chinese troops there would be betrayed by the British. For these reasons, he asked Chiang to take them back to China immediately.¹⁷

The arrival of the CEF in India also drew the attention of the Americans. Indeed, the Americans had been considering training the Chinese troops in India as early as April 1942. General Joseph Stilwell, the commander of the Allies’ China–Burma–India (CBI) theatre, was frustrated by the command of high-ranking officials of the CEF. He highly appreciated the fighting spirit of ordinary Chinese soldiers, while attributing the defeat of the CEF in Burma to the irresponsible leadership of the officials. Stilwell believed that a Chinese force trained in a modern way and equipped with modern weapons under his command would be of great use in future campaigns against the Japanese in the CBI theatre.¹⁸

In a memorandum Stilwell sent to Chiang Kai-shek in May 1942, he stated that the Americans were willing to equip and train several divisions for the Chinese in India.¹⁹ Desiring to modernise his troops, Chiang Kai-shek accepted the proposal and agreed to send 100,000 Chinese soldiers to India for this project.²⁰ This plan, however, was temporarily shelved as Burma was lost to the Japanese and the transportation between China and India was largely cut off.

When Stilwell learnt that some Chinese troops had entered into India, he immediately dispatched his agents to inspect their condition and help in the arrangement of accommodation and supplies for the Chinese.²¹ In mid-June 1942, Stilwell flew to Chongqing in person to talk with Chiang Kai-shek about the settlement of the Chinese troops in India. Chiang agreed with Stilwell that the Chinese troops, including the New 38th Division and the Fifth Army, could recuperate and receive American training in India. Nevertheless, they had different ideas about choosing the site for the training. Chiang proposed Darjeeling in Assam on the grounds that it was close to the Chinese border and that the Chinese troops could be easily transported back to China via Tibet.²²

Stilwell did not think Darjeeling was a good option since it had been difficult to obtain adequate supplies in that remote part of India. More importantly, Stilwell had concerns that if the training site was close to the Chinese border, the Chinese would bring their troops back to China once their training was complete. He would then have no troops in hand to achieve his military goal of reconquering Burma.²³

Instead of Darjeeling, Stilwell selected Ramgarh, a small town 200 miles northeast of Calcutta. Stilwell argued that the climate in Ramgarh was suitable for the recuperation of the Chinese troops.²⁴ Throughout the Burma Campaign of 1942, one of the main causes of the casualty among the Chinese troops was tropical diseases such as malaria. It was reported that the diseases not only killed a large number of troopers but also seriously impacted the morale of the army.²⁵ When the CEF arrived in India, more than half of its soldiers were in very bad health and were no longer able to undertake any military training. Therefore, finding a hygienic place for the Chinese troops that would help them get rid of tropical diseases was crucial at that moment.

Ramgarh lies in the heart of the Chota Nagpur Plateau with an average altitude of around 1,000 metres. This high altitude makes Ramgarh cooler and less humid than other parts of northeast India. Stilwell believed that Chinese troops would dramatically improve their health here.²⁶ Furthermore, Ramgarh was at a railway junction that connects Patna in the north, Ledo in the east and Calcutta in the south. Supplies could be brought to Ramgarh very easily from Calcutta and Patna, while trained troops could be transported to the Burma frontline through Ledo.

Considering Ramgarh as an appropriate site for setting up the training centre for the Chinese troops, Stilwell requested the British authorities to handle the arrangements. Nevertheless, the initial British response was negative, on the grounds that the accommodation facilities in Ramgarh were too old and impoverished to receive the Chinese troops.²⁷

It turns out that the British lied to Stilwell, as the condition of the accommodation in Ramgarh was neither old nor impoverished. The British authorities had already built a large camp in Ramgarh for accommodating German civilians from the Dutch East Indies²⁸ and Italian PoWs who were captured in Africa and were transferred to India in 1941 (Moore 2002). When Stilwell proposed to build a training centre for the CEF in Ramgarh in June 1942, the British authorities were fully aware that they were capable of accommodating those Chinese soldiers in Ramgarh by evacuating the Italian and German internment camps. Nevertheless, the British initially declined Stilwell’s request and accepted the proposal only when he guaranteed that the stay of the Chinese in Ramgarh was short-term and temporary.²⁹ The main concern for the British lay in India’s domestic politics. Most senior British officials of the Raj worried that the existence of foreign troops in India then would seriously weaken the British colonial rule at a crucial moment in the Indian nationalist movement.³⁰

The Ramgarh session of the Indian National Congress

For most of the early twentieth century, the INC was a political organisation that had its bases in big cities such as Bombay, Calcutta and Lucknow. Urban intellectuals and professionals were dominant powers in the party. Although Congress leaders had realised that Indian peasants were the bedrock of the nationalist movement and that the success of civil disobedience depended on peasant support as early as the 1920s, they were unwilling to mobilise the rural masses (Pandey 2006: 199).

Indeed, most Congress leaders and cadres had rural connections and backgrounds. Many of them were actually from small zamindar and upper tenant families, who benefited from the Raj’s land and tax arrangements (Pandey 2006: 213). A mobilisation of rural peasants against the Raj would most probably damage the interests of these Congressmen. Such concern thwarted Congress’ expansion into rural areas of India in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the Justice Party, a local rival of the Congress, made good use of the absence of the Congress in rural areas to expand its influence in the early 1930s (Arnold 2006). It was not until the 1935 Government of India Act that the Congress set out to pay serious attention to Indian villages.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Raj was under great pressure from Indians who struggled for a more autonomous status or even the independence of their country. Though the civil disobedience movement in 1930, led by Mahatma Gandhi, failed to achieve its goal, it gave the British a warning that it was necessary to take action to pacify the tension in India. The Government of India Act in 1935 was drafted and issued against such background. The 1935 Act proposed a federation of India, which was composed of provinces of British India and princely states. It granted unprecedented autonomy to provinces and introduced the direct election of representatives in which more than 30 million Indians, most of whom lived in rural areas, were granted voting rights (Muldoon 2009).

By 1936 the Congress decided to take part in the provincial elections and began to prepare itself for election campaigns across the countryside in India (Muldoon 2009: 239; Pandey 2006: 215). One remarkable aspect of the rural turn of the Congress was the change in the sites for the annual sessions, from big cities to small and remote villages. Before the 50th session of the Congress at Faizpur, Bombay Presidency (in what is now Maharashtra State), in December 1936, almost all annual sessions of the Congress were held in big and populous cities or administrative centres such as Bombay, Karachi, Calcutta and Madras.

Table 1.

Annual Sessions of the Indian National Congress, 1920–40.

Year	Session Venue
1920	Nagpur
1921	Ahmedabad
1922	Gaya
1924	Belgaum
1925	Kanpur
1926	Gauhati
1927	Madras
1928	Calcutta
1929	Lahore
1931	Karachi
1932	Delhi
1933	Calcutta
1934	Bombay
1936	Lucknow
1936	Faizpur
1938	Haripura
1939	Tripuri
1940	Ramgarh

In May 1936, the Congress working committee made a decision to choose Faizpur, a small village in east Khandesh District, northeast of the Bombay Presidency, as the site for the 50th session of the Congress (Times of India 1936). To explain this decision, contemporary observers stated:

(it) is a distinct departure from the practice for the last 49 years. This decision may affect the future policy of the Congress with regard to the peasant masses. There is, however, every likelihood that this decision may also indicate a future policy of the Congress with regard to the elections to the new legislatures…(the Congress) using the occasion of the Congress session to canvass votes for Congress candidates from the peasants and rural voters. (Times of India 1936b)

The judgement that Faizpur was selected in order to promote the provincial election campaigns of 1937, however, could only partly explain why the Congress set its annual sessions in villages each year from 1936 to 1940. If the selection of Faizpur was out of concern for the election campaigns, the Congress could bring the sessions back to big cities after its landslide victory in early 1937. Yet, from the 51st session in Haripura, to the 52nd session in Tripuri, to the 53rd session in Ramgarh, all venues were in remote countryside locations.

Indeed, Mahatma Gandhi played a significant role in integrating the Congress politics into his village work in the late 1930s. In May 1937, the Congress decided to choose Haripura, a village in the Surat district of Gujarat, as the venue of the 51st session (Times of India 1937). It was later revealed that Gandhi made this decision for the Congress in an attempt to promote his own political project. Haripura was 11 miles away from the nearest railway station (Times of India 1937b). Such a location meant that attendants would have to use bullock carts to travel. Gandhi’s plan was to employ villagers in Haripura to drive these carts. In so doing, villagers benefit economically from this session. The other reason for Gandhi to select Haripura was that there was a large population of underprivileged Raniparaj people living around Haripura. A Congress session in Haripura would strengthen the links between Congressmen and underprivileged and underrepresented villagers (Times of India 1937c).

The Faizpur session and the Haripura session, however, went against Gandhi’s original intention of reducing costs and making the Congress more grass-root by relocating the session venues to villages. Instead, the inaccessibility of Faizpur and Haripura, both of which were far away from railway lines, dramatically raised the costs of transportation and infrastructure (Times of India 1938). Drawing the lessons from this, the Congress selected Tripuri, a village in the Division of Jubbulpore, Central Provinces, as the venue of the 52nd session in May 1938 (Times of India 1938b). Tripuri was said to be the capital of the ancient Hindu kingdom of Kalinga, which appeared in the Indian epic Mahabharata. The village was in the centre of the Central Provinces and was only two miles away from the railway station. The Congress believed that the well-connected location of Tripuri would greatly facilitate the building of conference venues, as well as the accommodation and transportation of attendants (Times of India 1938c, 1938d).

The Congress followed similar criteria when it came to discuss the venue for the 53rd session on 16 May 1939. Ramgarh, a small town in the division of Chotanagpur, Bihar, which was located at the junction of several railway lines, was selected (Times of India 1939). On 19 March 1940, more than 50,000 attendants, including the Congress representatives from across India, volunteer workers and local villagers, gathered in the venue of Ramgarh and attended the 53rd session of the INC (Times of India 1940).

The Ramgarh session sheds light on how Indian nationalists responded to a war that was still far away from them. Mahatma Gandhi successfully convinced the Congress that it was not the right time to launch a massive non-cooperation movement due to the party’s internal division and factionalism. He further persuaded the Congress to give him the mandate to establish strong discipline and leadership before a nation-wide civil disobedience campaign was launched (Brown 1989: 326).

Gandhi’s success in preventing a radical showdown with the British in 1940 actually made the establishment of the PoWs camps across India, including the one in Ramgarh, possible. In 1942, however, the Japanese had occupied most of southeast Asia and posed an imminent threat to India. Even the modest nationalists began to pressure the British to give India independence immediately so that Japan would have no excuse to invade an independent India. In this context, the launch of a CEF training centre in Ramgarh made the British uneasy because the existence of the Chinese troops would enrage the Indian nationalists further. Nevertheless, under pressure from the Americans, whose support was so crucial, the British authorities finally approved Stilwell’s proposal.³¹

In early August 1942, more than 10,000 Chinese soldiers (from the New 38th Division and the Fifth Army) arrived in Ramgarh and started their training.³² Some CEF soldiers later recalled that when they entered the residential area of the Ramgarh camp, they were surprised by the spacious rooms and modern sophisticated facilities (Wang 2005: 166). In the same month, Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement that demanded the immediate independence of India.

Conclusion

When Indian nationalists, including Gandhi and Nehru, gathered in Ramgarh on 19 March 1940 for the 53rd session of the INC, one of their main concern was that Indian resources would be exploited for the British war effort and that foreign elements would be brought in by the British to further complicate India’s independence. Ironically, not far away from the session venue in Ramgarh, the British were building a camp for accommodating Italian and German internees from Egypt and the Dutch East Indies. Two years later, the internment camp was turned into a military training centre for the Chinese troops. What makes Ramgarh a convergence site for the Indian nationalists and the Chinese troops during the Second World War was its infrastructure and topographical features. As a small town in the mountains of southern Bihar, Ramgarh was suitable for the INC agenda of launching its annual session in villages. The mountainous terrain of Ramgarh also means that the climate here was relatively dry and cold, therefore ideal for accommodating European internees and recuperating ailing Chinese soldiers. Furthermore, since Ramgarh sat on a coalfield, railways had been built in the town in the early twentieth century to connect the region to major cities in India. The convenient transportation in Ramgarh gave Indian nationalists, British policymakers and commanders of the Allies further motivation to set up the session venue, the internment camp and the training centre there. In sum, it is the specific local virtues of Ramgarh that interweaves the national (the INC session) and transnational (the building of the internment camp and the Chinese Expeditionary Force training centre) histories. This article elaborates that seemingly irrelevant events of national and transnational level might actually be interlinked if we go deep into specific local context.

The local perspective also refreshes our understanding of the Chinese and Indian experience during the Second World War. For a long time, India and China have not been the focus of Western scholars who study the Second World War. For historians of modern India and China, their interest lay in the wartime experience of Indian and Chinese people and the transformation of Indian and Chinese society, culture, economics and politics during the war. Even if some studies highlight the transnational features of both countries’ involvement in the war, few integrate India’s Second World War with that of China, and vice versa. One of the few exceptions might be Chiang Kai-shek’s visit to India in February 1942 and his conversations with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru over the Indian nationalist movement (Chan 1975; Deepak 2014; Han and Du 2006; Samarani 2005; Takushu 2012; Wu 1987). This article argues that the high politics between politicians is not the only entry to make sense of the interactions between India and China during the Second World War, a local perspective combined with transnational concerns offer us a chance to examine how the interactions looked on the ground and how China’s Second World War experience became entangled with that of India.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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