The Making of a Cosmopolitan Jangi Qaidi: A Leaf from Sohan Singh’s Prison Notebook written in Annaburger Stammlager D/Z in German captivity during the Second World War (1942- 45)

Table of Con­tents
The Prob­lem of Method­olog­i­cal Nation­al­ism | Euro­pean Archives: Prove­nance and Per­ti­nence | The Prison Note­book as a His­tor­i­cal Source | The Lega­cy | Cos­mopoli­tan Sol­dier­ing | Colditz Oflag IV C | Dr.  Biren­dra Nath Mazumdar’s Sound Record­ing | End­notes | Bib­li­og­ra­phy

This piece is ded­i­cat­ed to the mem­o­ry of pris­on­er Sohan Singh and his transna­tion­al nur­tur­er, the ‘hob­by his­to­ri­an’ Volk­er Kum­mer, a mem­ber of the Annaburg Asso­ci­a­tion for the Preser­va­tion of local his­to­ry and Her­itage (Annaburg­er Vere­in für Heimat­geschichte und Denkmalpflege) who relent­less­ly searched for eye­wit­ness­es of WWII in India. I am indebt­ed to Pro­fes­sor Rahul Peter Das, the cus­to­di­an of Volk­er Kummer’s pri­vate col­lec­tion, who entrust­ed me with it. While hand­ing over his col­lec­tion, Kum­mer urged Pro­fes­sor Das to give it to a ‘real’ his­to­ri­an. I am hum­bled to be its recip­i­ent and hope that I have been able to do jus­tice to it. Kummer’s insti­tu­tion­al col­lec­tion is housed in Annaburg­er Amtsmu­se­um.

The above image is tak­en from the prison note­book of a British-Indi­an Pris­on­er of War, jan­gi qai­di, in con­tem­po­rary Ger­man par­lance[1], Sohan Singh. He spent three years in the cas­tle prison of Annaburg locat­ed in Sax­ony. Dur­ing his cap­tiv­i­ty he filled 64 pages of his prison note­book. Annaburg had the largest con­cen­tra­tion of jan­gi qai­dis and was the recruit­ing ground for Sub­has Chan­dra Bose’s INA or the Indi­an Legion dur­ing WWII. Accord­ing to British sources, out of 12,000 British-Indi­an pris­on­ers, who land­ed in Ger­man camps, not more than 3200 trained ulti­mate­ly as the 950^th Reg­i­ment under the SS.[2] The Inter­na­tion­al Red Cross vis­i­ta­tion report’s high­est tal­ly of Annaburg inmates record­ed on 15.5.1943 puts the total strength at 4323 of whom 2736 were out with labour detach­ments.[3]

While the Legionar­ies have been a sub­ject of sev­er­al books in India and abroad, ordi­nary jan­gi qaidis who did not defect have attract­ed lit­tle aca­d­e­m­ic atten­tion. This neglect can be attrib­uted to both method­olog­i­cal approach­es and lin­guis­tic bar­ri­ers of the mul­ti-lin­gual Euro­pean archives.

The Problem of Methodological Nationalism

Sol­dier­ing in orga­nized twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry war­fare spilled over the bound­aries of nation-states, yet nar­ra­tives of war have been penned with­in the frame­work of method­olog­i­cal nation­al­ism.  The irony of the nation­al­ist par­a­digm becomes glar­ing in view of the fact that the num­ber of British-Indi­an sol­diers reached the mark of 2.4 mil­lion and became the largest army ever raised by any war­ring force. Britain fought the war as an empire, yet when it comes to mythol­o­giz­ing the war, the tight skin of British nation­al­ism squeezed in the expe­ri­ences of a diverse British-Indi­an army, ren­der­ing the colo­nial sol­diers invis­i­ble in his­to­ry, mem­o­ry and memo­ri­al­i­sa­tion. Britain was quick to mythol­o­gise the war as “people’s war” cel­e­brat­ing “the Blitz spir­it of wartime British cities”, “the Colditz myth” and the British soldier’s sto­ic mas­culin­i­ty. How­ev­er, colonised sol­diers trained and fought with the same spir­it, ethos and cul­ture were large­ly kept out of the pol­i­tics of rep­re­sen­ta­tion and myth­mak­ing. Sol­dier­ing in cap­tiv­i­ty added yet anoth­er lay­er to the whiten­ing of his­to­ri­og­ra­phy. Despite the suc­cess­ful escape attempts of a few Indi­an offi­cers, Kochavi (2005) men­tions British-Indi­an sol­diers in three pages in total as mere sta­tis­tics and Macken­zie (2005), while bust­ing the Colditz myth, does not even reg­is­ter the pres­ence of British-Indi­an soldiers.

A sec­ond prob­lem fac­ing researchers who wish to explore these hith­er­to ignored lives is that of acces­si­bil­i­ty to mul­ti-lin­gual Euro­pean archives, specif­i­cal­ly for the Anglo-Amer­i­can world’s his­to­ri­ans of South Asia. Though they have recent­ly start­ed address­ing the invis­i­bil­i­ty of British-Indi­an sol­diers by focussing on the impact of WWII on the home front, nar­ra­tives from Ger­man cap­tiv­i­ty still elude them as they have not been able to ful­ly use the diverse mul­ti-lin­gual Euro­pean archives.

A third prob­lem is that the South East Asian The­atre of War (com­bats in Bur­ma, Malaya, Sin­ga­pore, and India) has attract­ed rel­a­tive­ly more atten­tion due to the much larg­er num­ber of INA sol­diers raised in Japan and their actu­al com­bats against the British on the east­ern fron­tiers of India.[4] The Ger­man nar­ra­tive, with a few excep­tions such as Gün­ther (2003), too has been large­ly pre­oc­cu­pied with the INA and Boses’s activ­i­ties rather than the every­day life of ordi­nary captives.

European Archives: Provenance and Pertinence

Under­neath the rich nation­al and inter­na­tion­al prove­nance based Euro­pean hold­ings in the For­eign Office Archives, Berlin, Inter­na­tion­al Red Cross Archives, Gene­va, ITS, Bad-Arolsen, Mil­i­tary Archives, Freiburg,[5] to name a few, there is a lay­er of unuti­lized mate­r­i­al based on the per­ti­nence-prin­ci­pal, such as pri­vate col­lec­tions of Indophile his­to­ri­ans and activists, that has the poten­tial of adding new per­spec­tives and depth to the expe­ri­ences of war. This post com­bines these two types of sources, with a focus on the lat­ter as a case study, to recon­struct a uni­verse of cap­tiv­i­ty in Sax­ony, which saw the largest con­cen­tra­tion of British-Indi­an POWs.

Sohan Singh’s prison note­book is a rare piece of his­tor­i­cal evi­dence pre­served by Kum­mer. It is unique, illus­tra­tive, instruc­tive, and emblem­at­ic as I shall show in the fol­low­ing pages. Singh was one among the innu­mer­able Sikh sol­diers who served the impe­r­i­al army from its incep­tion. The Sikhs were cat­e­gorised as a mar­tial race by the British and nur­tured with benev­o­lence to serve the mil­i­tary needs of Empire there­by hop­ing to ensure their loy­al­ty. Singh was also a typ­i­cal young sol­dier who joined the army in the wake of an aggres­sive recruit­ment cam­paign, in which the phys­i­cal qual­i­fi­ca­tions were low­ered and the age brack­et expand­ed to mobilise larg­er num­bers.  Most of the new ordi­nary recruits were ‘peas­ants in uni­forms’ with few options of earn­ing a liv­ing in vil­lages. A career in the army entailed a promise of incen­tives, offers, recog­ni­tion, earn­ing while learn­ing, besides the tra­di­tion­al ben­e­fits of pay, wel­fare, and land grants.[6]

When Singh was tak­en pris­on­er, he was bare­ly 18. With lit­tle for­mal edu­ca­tion and train­ing, young recruits were sent to face the fury of Rommel’s high­ly pro­fes­sion­al and well-equipped Ger­man army divi­sions. Most of them were cap­tured in North Africa with­out offer­ing much resis­tance and were brought to Ger­man pris­ons via Ital­ian camps.

The Prison Notebook as a Historical Source

Singh’s prison note­book has the size of a pock­et­book. It does not have a cov­er, the hand­writ­ing is fad­ed and smudged in places, and the edges of the yel­low brit­tle pages have frayed at the bot­tom. It has no page num­bers and dates to give us a sense of time. Nonethe­less, it is a rare ego doc­u­ment that gives us a peek into the mind of a reg­u­lar jan­gi qai­di and thus a valu­able piece of tex­tu­al evi­dence from the kind of pris­on­ers who found it chal­leng­ing to nav­i­gate through their every­day life in a cul­tur­al­ly and lin­guis­ti­cal­ly strange cos­mos and taught them­selves how to deal with it.

The note­book is per­haps the only sur­viv­ing piece of writ­ing by a jan­gi qai­di. It offers clues to his hopes, aspi­ra­tions, dreams, and desires although it is cod­ed at times. The first few pages show his efforts to learn words in Ger­man by not­ing their mean­ing in Urdu, the script he was most famil­iar with. He not­ed down Ger­man terms for body parts, ani­mals, cloth­ing, rela­tions and so on which he wrote next to their Urdu equiv­a­lents, as the cov­er page image shows. In the next few pages, one could see a tran­si­tion from Urdu to Eng­lish as he scrib­bled more words of every­day use in Ger­man and English.

His note­book entries from then on show a pat­tern of learn­ing from a bi-lin­gual Eng­lish Ger­man dic­tio­nary. Sev­er­al pages there­after con­tain beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten Sabads from Gur­bani (Guru Nanak’s preach­ing in the holy book of Sikhs, Guru Granth Saheb) in the Gur­mukhi script. This method of learn­ing was quite typ­i­cal for self-taught peo­ple in India until the very recent advent of the com­put­er, where learn­ing by watch­ing YouTube tuto­ri­als or vocab­u­lary train­er appli­ca­tions has become commonplace.

Chil­dren as also adults from ver­nac­u­lar schools crammed up words from the dic­tio­nary in the hope that one day they would be able to mas­ter the lan­guage of the elite. In wartime Ger­many too, Euro­pean pris­on­ers often car­ried a bi-lin­gual pock­et dic­tio­nary to facil­i­tate con­ver­sa­tions, espe­cial­ly with local women. It became an impor­tant tool, besides pre­vi­ous­ly learnt skills of plumb­ing, gar­den­ing and car­pen­try that almost worked as a social lubri­cant in cul­ti­vat­ing friend­ships by fix­ing locks, doors, bath­tubs, and the like for their Ger­man acquain­tances. Ger­man spo­ken with­out syn­tax and gram­mar became the lin­gua fran­ca of the camp uni­verse. Singh’s note­book is a rep­re­sen­ta­tive exam­ple of an alien’s desire to social­ize and blend in.

A few pages after these lan­guage lessons, he wrote down some dates with names of fel­low pris­on­ers, dead, lib­er­at­ed or those he was look­ing for. Sad­ly, the details of his men­tal pro­cess­ing are lost to us as we can­not deci­pher why he wrote down some oth­er dates and address­es. But one we know for sure: 24.4.1945, next to which he wrote, Chut­ti ka din in Urdu: the day of liberation.

Three Ger­man names fig­ure in it too. One that he tried to write him­self reads Maha­gret. Right below that two names were writ­ten in Ger­man style: Mar­garete Kurthäuser and Heinz Kurthäuser. These, I sup­pose were writ­ten by some friend­ly Ger­man who tried to teach him how to write their names cor­rect­ly, most prob­a­bly Mar­garete her­self. Anoth­er name found in his note­book was Hilde­gard Kossagk.

The Legacy

Singh’s sto­ry did not end after lib­er­a­tion. On 15.02.1974, he wrote a let­ter from Bazpur to Kurt Kos­sagk, Hildrgard’s hus­band.[7] By then he had tak­en the title of Sube­dar. He remind­ed Kos­sagk that he had worked on his farm. He told Kurt that he was the own­er of a big farm, had bought a Roman­ian trac­tor, and worked on the farm with his sons. This half page let­ter was writ­ten in Ger­man. Bar­ring a few gram­mat­i­cal errors, the let­ter was able to com­mu­ni­cate its pur­pose. He wished to trav­el to Ger­many to vis­it them at his own cost and request­ed for help with visa and oth­er for­mal­i­ties. How­ev­er, his wish did not mate­ri­alise due to trav­el restric­tions dur­ing the Cold War.

After the col­lapse of the Berlin Wall, his sto­ry took anoth­er turn. Volk­er Kum­mer, the hob­by his­to­ri­an of Annaburg, traced him and Singh became a reg­u­lar item on Kummer’s trav­el itin­er­ary along with Netaji’s Research Cen­tre in Cal­cut­ta. Singh host­ed him with great warmth and hos­pi­tal­i­ty on each vis­it. The local news­pa­pers in Sax­ony car­ried spe­cial columns on Kummer’s vis­its and report­ed about the great con­ver­sa­tions they had despite his school Eng­lish and Singh’s lim­it­ed abil­i­ties to under­stand him. It was report­ed that in 2008, the 84 years old Singh once again expressed the wish to vis­it Annaburg with a com­pan­ion. Kum­mer hoped to raise funds from Annaburg’s Asso­ci­a­tion, Ger­man-Indi­an Soci­ety (Deutsch-Indis­che Gesellschaft), and oth­ers. How­ev­er, his efforts and Singh’s wish did not bear fruit. Long after his return to his roots, his fam­i­ly, and tra­di­tion­al pro­fes­sion in which he made great advances, Singh’s spir­it sored high on a tran­scul­tur­al hori­zon despite his inabil­i­ty to cross nation­al borders. 

Cosmopolitan Soldiering

Through this illus­tra­tive sto­ry I would like to dwell on the con­cept of cos­mopoli­tan sol­dier­ing of the jan­gi qai­di in WWII. Although a few pris­on­ers made suc­cess­ful escape attempts, most real­ized it was a tough and futile exer­cise and tried to go on with their lives with as much accom­mo­da­tion and flex­i­bil­i­ty as allowed them to nav­i­gate through the camp life, monot­o­nous at best and cru­el at worst, along with find­ing venues for cre­ativ­i­ty and enter­prise where possible.

The large major­i­ty saw cap­tiv­i­ty as an oppor­tu­ni­ty for transna­tion­al, cross-cul­tur­al inter­ac­tion to mit­i­gate their dis­tress, amuse them­selves or ful­fil their wish­es. In Annaburg there were POWs of oth­er nation­al­i­ties too with whom jan­gi qaidis bartered, played, socialised, and indulged in for­bid­den activ­i­ties. Bose him­self vis­it­ed the camp thrice for his recruit­ment dri­ve. This brought along an oppor­tu­ni­ty to exer­cise indi­vid­ual agency. The camp became a cen­tre of rumours, spies, and mutu­al rival­ries for resources. Men were lured with bet­ter food, attrac­tive uni­forms, and local girls to join the INA and when this did not work senior legionar­ies gave lash­ings to the non-com­pli­ant ones. With­draw­al of the Red Cross parcels and post from home were oth­er meth­ods of reprisals. Even then, the major­i­ty stayed as ordi­nary captives.

These loy­al ‘peas­ants in uni­form’ under­went a trans­for­ma­tion of their own kind under the influ­ence of their mates, inter­na­tion­al pris­on­ers and employ­ers, if they hap­pened to be kind, as was the case with Singh. Despite lan­guage bar­ri­ers they assumed, con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly, habits and ways of doing things as they were done by oth­ers around them. This cre­at­ed a cos­mopoli­tan envi­ron­ment of learn­ing by doing. Singh’s exam­ple shows that jan­gi qaidis learnt the lin­gua fran­ca of the camp uni­verse. Singh may not have been alone in spend­ing some qui­et time in the library learn­ing Ger­man with the help of a bi-lin­gual dic­tio­nary. He came out of cap­tiv­i­ty a self-taught poly­glot, how­ev­er lim­it­ed in his com­mand of Ger­man. His spir­it to learn taught him to nav­i­gate in his every­day life in mul­ti­ple lan­guages, so much so that he even wrote a let­ter to Kurt Kos­sagk in Ger­man in 1974. 

The larg­er point that I am mak­ing through this micro case study is the cross-cul­tur­al, transna­tion­al cos­mopoli­tanism that brought to bear its influ­ence on the jan­gi qaidis. Look­ing at the expe­ri­ences of sol­dier­ing in cap­tiv­i­ty through the lens of the sol­dier, which Singh’s note­book helps us in doing, we can dis­cern that the con­cerns of ordi­nary sol­diers were at vari­ance with those of the polit­i­cal elite whether British, Ger­man, or Indi­an nationalist.

Colditz Oflag IV C

Let us zoom out of the prison note­book and zoom into anoth­er Cas­tle prison, Colditz, also locat­ed in Sax­ony. This Renais­sance style hunt­ing lodge was turned into Oflag IV C which housed “incor­ri­gi­ble” offi­cers from all pos­si­ble nation­al­i­ties who had attempt­ed escapes on ear­li­er occa­sions. Rev­erend Courte­nay, a British inmate of Colditz, called it a pun­ish­ment camp where all pris­on­ers with nui­sance val­ue were thrown in and were reg­u­lar­ly beat­en for bad behav­iour. This did not damp­en their spir­it and they con­tin­ued with their pranks, escape attempts, adven­tures, and amus­ing activ­i­ties. The Rev­erend remem­bered hav­ing laughed the most in his life in Colditz because of the peo­ple there. He described the nui­sance mak­ers as tremen­dous­ly skilled, deter­mined, aggres­sive, and spir­it­ed, who, among oth­er enter­pris­ing activ­i­ties, even formed an escape com­mit­tee to help who­ev­er want­ed to escape and devel­oped a great sense of sol­i­dar­i­ty.[8] Courtenay’s wit­ty and light-heart­ed ren­di­tion of life in Colditz offers quite a con­trast to my sec­ond case study, an Indi­an medic, also an inmate of Colditz, Dr. Biren­dra Nath Mazumdar.

Dr. Birendra Nath Mazumdar’s Sound Recording

Dr. Mazum­dar from the Roy­al Armed Mil­i­tary Corps was cap­tured in Eta­ples, France, and tak­en through six­teen or sev­en­teen Sta­lags before final­ly land­ing in Colditz. At Colditz, Mazum­dar suf­fered unusu­al men­tal agony and phys­i­cal tor­ture due to his colo­nial Oth­er­ness, for being labelled a spy and a Gand­hi chap by British inmates, and also because of his stub­born­ness and refusal to join the INA. The high­point of pres­sure came when he was escort­ed to Berlin to meet Bose in per­son. After mak­ing him com­fort­able by con­vers­ing in Ben­gali, Bose said in Eng­lish, “You know why you are here? We are form­ing the Indi­an Legion. I want you to join us.” Mazum­dar said, “I can­not, and I would not”. “Why? I have done it”, said Bose to which Mazum­dar replied, “You had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to resign and escape. I was taught, a promise once made, you have got to abide by”. Bose left him with the words, “I do not think we should meet again”.[9] After his return from Berlin, he went on a five-week hunger strike demand­ing his free­dom and even­tu­al­ly escaped. He reached Gene­va with the help of a French resis­tance fight­er, con­tact­ed the Swiss Immi­gra­tion Office, got the per­mis­sion to stay and pur­sue fur­ther stud­ies. Soon he start­ed dat­ing a Swiss girl. He was then forced to dis­rupt his stud­ies and go to Locarno with oth­er Indi­an soldiers.

These are snip­pets from a two-and-a-half-hour oral inter­view, record­ed in 1996, of the then eighty-year-old RAMC medic in the sound archives of the Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um. This was the first time ever that a British-Indi­an offi­cer spoke to his erst­while mas­ters about his tri­als and tribu­la­tions dur­ing his Ger­man cap­tiv­i­ty. The twists and turns of his colour­ful and adven­tur­ous sto­ry give us insights into the per­ils and prospects of Indi­an cap­tives, not just in Ger­man Sta­lags (prison camps for ordi­nary sol­diers) and Oflags (camps for offi­cers), but also at the hands of their own British fel­low inmates and the Raj in the form of sub­tle racism, veiled threats, loom­ing sus­pi­cion, polit­i­cal taunts, pro­fes­sion­al rival­ry, and sheer neglect in the post-war era. Many a British-Indi­an cap­tive may find an echo of their own voice in Mazumdar’s rendition. 

Like the prison note­book of Sohan Singh, this rare pri­ma­ry source from the sound archives of the Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um opens anoth­er win­dow to the micro­cosm of cap­tiv­i­ty for those ‘promise keep­ers’ who resist­ed all lures and pres­sures to join the Indi­an Legion dur­ing cap­tiv­i­ty and were moved in and out of the grey zone of col­lab­o­ra­tion until after their repa­tri­a­tion. Hav­ing said that, Mazum­dar was an offi­cer, who despite fac­ing iso­la­tion, hos­til­i­ty, and con­stant accu­sa­tions of espi­onage from his British coun­ter­parts on the one hand, and tor­ture or temp­ta­tions from his Ger­man cap­tors on the oth­er, enjoyed access and oppor­tu­ni­ties to things sel­dom avail­able to an ordi­nary pris­on­er in Ger­man cap­tiv­i­ty, such as social­is­ing with White women, con­tin­u­ing his stud­ies in Switzer­land after a suc­cess­ful escape, and even­tu­al­ly, return­ing to the UK, where he lived with his wife until his death.

As a source, the eye­wit­ness account of Singh’s prison note­book gives us a visu­al expe­ri­ence with sev­er­al gaps, cod­ed nota­tions, inter­rupt­ed tex­tu­al flows, and lack of coher­ence, where­as Dr. Mazumdar’s detached and monot­o­nous aur­al ren­di­tion is char­ac­ter­ized by the accu­ra­cy of details, flu­en­cy of speech, polit­i­cal aware­ness, and unwa­ver­ing deter­mi­na­tion. These dif­fer­ences owe to their dif­fer­ent class ori­gins and train­ing that offered them dif­fer­ent sets of tools and oppor­tu­ni­ties of social mobil­i­ty. In sev­er­al oth­er ways, how­ev­er, the expe­ri­ences of these ‘promise keep­ers’ inter­sect. Despite the lures and threats by the legionar­ies and the guards, both stuck to their guns. Both sought transna­tion­al con­tact, main­tained pro­fes­sion­al ethos, and showed com­radery in the face of adver­si­ty. Mazum­dar got his clue to why he was being ostracised by British inmates. The French and Dutch inmates told him that they called him a spy. Until then he thought he was just being teased as the ‘bloody Gand­hi chap’. Mazum­dar then over­heard the word spy in the wash­room. He went up to Major Hen­ry and asked, “Did I hear you say I am a spy?” Then he gave him five min­utes to with­draw his state­ment after which he hit him on his head. The six feet tall British offi­cer fell flat on the floor. The Ger­mans on their part also con­tin­ued to exer­cise pres­sure tac­tics such as not shift­ing him to an Indi­an camp which might have end­ed his sense of iso­la­tion and feel­ing of vic­tim­iza­tion[10] at the hands of his own British col­leagues. He final­ly made a suc­cess­ful escape attempt from a mov­ing train and reached Gene­va. While in Gene­va, he con­front­ed anoth­er British offi­cer when the lat­ter told him not to socialise with a Swiss girl and only with his coun­try­men. Majum­dar retort­ed, “You can­not chain me. I am a free man”.[11]

Mazum­dar final­ly set­tled in the UK with his wife after the war while Singh became a suc­cess­ful farm own­er. What they both prac­ticed long there­after was derived from lessons they had learnt in cap­tiv­i­ty: resilience, adven­ture, and reci­procity across lines of nations, colour, and faith. This piece is a small trib­ute to the ‘cos­mopoli­tan spir­it’ of the jan­gi qaidi.

Endnotes

[1] This is how Indi­an POWs were addressed in camp notice boards and offi­cial instruc­tions. The camp lan­guage was Hin­dus­tani writ­ten in Roman script.

[2] TNA WO 208/802

[3] ACICR, C SC, Sta­lag IV D/Z 15.05.1943 

[4] For recent lit­er­a­ture on the vis­i­bal­i­sa­tion of British Indi­an sol­diers in WWII, the impact of the war on the home front and mil­i­tary-soci­ety rela­tion­ship in South Asia see: Barkawi 2017, Bay­ly 2005, Douds 2004, Ragha­van 2016, Khan 2015 and Khan et. al. (ed.) 2017.

[5] Das poli­tis­che Archiv Auswer­tiges Amt (PAAA), Inter­na­tion­al Trac­ing Ser­vice (Inter­na­tionaler Suche­di­enst) archives in Bad Arolsen (ITS), Fed­er­al and Mil­i­tary Archives in Freiburg (Bun­de­sarchiv — Abteilung Militärarchiv/BA/MA Freiburg).

[6] For recruit­ment strat­e­gy and cam­paigns dur­ing WWII, see Khan 2015, pp.40–49, Ragha­van 2016, pp. 64–78, Bay­ly, 2005 281–5

[7] Bazpur is locat­ed in the Himalayan foothills of Kumaon, Uttarak­hand. It is an afflu­ent city whose inhab­i­tants are main­ly Pun­jabi migrants from the post­war, post-Par­ti­tion era. These indus­tri­ous and enter­pris­ing migrants turned the Tarai (wet­land) into an arable agri­cul­tur­al land and became large estate own­ers. Bazpur is close to Naini­tal, a famous colo­nial hill sta­tion, and Rudra­pur, an indus­tri­al town.

[8] Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um (IWM), Sound Archive, 10771 

[9] Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um (IWM), Sound Archive, 16800

[10] PAAA R 40985. On 21.5.42 the Ger­man Mil­i­tary High Com­mand (OKW) wrote to the For­eign Office in response to the Swiss delegation’s rec­om­men­da­tion that it was out of the ques­tion to trans­fer Mazum­dar to an Indi­an camp due to spe­cial rea­sons. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion also stat­ed that doc­tors and spir­i­tu­al lead­ers could be grant­ed spe­cial priv­i­leges such as spe­cial rooms, dou­ble let­ters, post cards, week­ly 2.5 hours walks out­side the com­pound if their behav­ior was unob­jec­tion­able. The denial of such priv­i­leges was a rou­tine pun­ish­ment giv­en to trou­ble­mak­ers, besides beatings.

[11] Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um (IWM), Sound Archive, 16800

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