AT THE close of 1945 the British Raj could congratulate itself. Despite growing impatience for independence, the empire had still managed to muster a 2.5m-man Indian army, the largest all-volunteer force in history. Indian troops had served loyally at home to crush an incipient insurrection in 1942. They proved crucial to British victories in Ethiopia, north Africa and the Middle East; in Burma they eventually inflicted the biggest land defeat ever suffered by the Japanese imperial army. India also contributed materiel and money: by the warâ??s end Britain owed its prized but impoverished colony £1.3 billion, an eighth of British GDP.
Yet the war was also catastrophic, both for the Raj and for India. The relatively small scale of Indiaâ??s direct war casualtiesâ??some 90,000 soldiers killed in six years of fighting on three continents, 6,000 sailors lost and 1,400 civilians killed by Japanese bombsâ??belied far wider suffering. The Bengal famine of 1943, the prime cause of which may have been inflation fuelled by the printing of rupees to cover wartime deficits, left as many as 3m dead. Ignominious defeats in Malaya, Singapore and Burma undermined British prestige. Of the half a million Indian civilians who joined a chaotic exodus from Burma in 1942, perhaps one in ten also perished.
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