In this interview from 1987 Gillian Wright asks Major General Dharitri Kumar Palit about his experience in the Indian Army during World War Two. The Indian Army was responsible for defending the British Indian Empire until it was decommissioned in 1947. The British also used the Indian Army in World War Two, with forces fighting in Africa and South-East Asia. 

The Indian National Army

Wright and Palit discuss the Indian National Army (INA), which aimed to secure Indian independence from British rule. The INA was led by former Indian National Congress president Subhas Chandra Bose, with the support of the Japanese, between 1943 and 1945. With 43,000 Indian soldiers, including prisoners of war who defected from the Indian Army, the INA fought under the Imperial Japanese Army against the British in South-East Asia. When asked if the formation of the INA damaged the morale of Indian Army troops, Palit recalls that the soldiers did not know about the formation of the INA, and therefore its formation could not have damaged morale. Palit states that he only learned about Bose’s organised attempts to form an army when he began working in intelligence in 1944. 

The Indian Army and World War Two

However, Palit describes how British setbacks in World War Two did affect the morale of the Indian Army troops. He tells Wright how the surrender of Singapore particularly affected the soldiers, with feelings of shame arising if any members of their regiment surrendered. Palit also explains how Britain’s defeats strongly challenged British propaganda that portrayed the Japanese as inferior to the British. He states that these defeats undermined many soldiers’ beliefs that the British were ‘supermen’. 

About the India Office Library and Records Interviews collection

The India Office Library and Records Interviews is a collection of over 120 interviews recorded in the late 1980s for the India Office Library and Records department of the British Library. The interviews were conducted mainly with British civil servants, officers of the Indian Army, business, religious, legal and medical professionals, and their families, who worked in India before independence. There are also 14 interviews conducted by Gillian Wright on behalf of Trevor Royle for his book The Last Days of the Raj and 10 interviews, donated by BBC Radio Scotland, recorded for its 1987 6 Return to Contents programme Going Home. The interviews capture personal recollections of British rule in India, including the Quit India movement, Indian independence, and Britain’s legacy in India. The full recordings from the India Office Library and Records Interviews are archived at the British Library Sound Archive, with collection reference C63. Copies of the interviews in this collection are also lodged at SOAS.

GILLIAN WRIGHT:

So you were there in Quetta until when?

MAJOR-GENERAL DHARITRI KUMAR PALIT:

June to November ’45.

GILLIAN WRIGHT:

So can you tell me first of all from your memories of the Baluch regiment, which is an infantry regiment, what the effect was on the morale of the men, of the setbacks during the war, of the defeats that Britain saw in Europe and particularly in South East Asia, and of the formation of the INA, which the men must have known about, did it have much effect on the morale of the army?

MAJOR-GENERAL DHARITRI KUMAR PALIT:

One or two assumptions you’ve made, one is that the men didn’t know straight away that the INA was being formed. In fact, I didn’t know until I took on this intelligence job in 44 that there was any such organised attempt to get Indians to fight against the Indian army. Now what had happened was that many, we had, the Baluch regiment had, the 5^th battalion, sorry the 2^nd battalion, taken in Singapore. Thereafter all contact was lost, we didn’t know exactly what was happening, it took us some time to realise even the atrocities committed on the battlefield and we didn’t come across any INA until well into 44.

GILLIAN WRIGHT:

So until then you would say there was no effect and there was no effect also of the various defeats that were suffered in Southeast Asia?

MAJOR-GENERAL DHARITRI KUMAR PALIT:

No I didn’t say about the defeats. Yes the surrender in Singapore had a tremendous effect on people in that, I suppose it varied in regiments, if there were regiments whose, one of whose battalions had been taken we felt the shame, the sharam of it, that we surrendered. Secondly, the fact of the tremendous defeat inflicted on the till then omnipotent British had an underlay of…difficult to really pinpoint, an underlay of feeling that, “Oh, well these white races aren’t all that superior”. I think till then, especially because of the British propaganda, “All Japanese are bad and they’re not good fighters”, to really just drove through Malaya like a knife through butter was surprising. And of course later knowledge that they in fact defeated the British with much smaller numbers but we didn’t know that at that time, it did have a tremendous effect on those who were, who had always, especially the other ranks who always felt that the British were tremendous supermen.