The Trial That Shook Britain: How a court-martial led to India's freedom

The Trial that Shook Britain: How a Court Martial Hastened Acceptance of Indian Independence

By Ashis Ray

Published by Routledge India

176 pages ₹1,295

 

Time moves differently in certain moments of history. In early 1945, the future seemed to stretch endlessly before British India. As the empire celebrated victory over fascism abroad, it continued to imprison freedom fighters at home. Bloodied but victorious, it seemed as permanent as the monsoons. Complete independence — purna swaraj —remained exactly what it had always been: Tomorrow's promise, next year’s possibility, next decade’s dream.

 

What happened in the next few months, then, that Indian freedom would become a tangible, historic reality? How did the British, so eager to maintain India’s dominion status, end their colonial rule in a hurry? That is fundamentally the story Ashis Ray’s The Trial That Shook Britain ventures to answer. History, that most contested of disciplines, suffers from our human need for clean narratives. The writing of history is itself a political act, and nowhere is this more evident than in the contested narratives of decolonisation. Indian independence has been claimed by pacifists, revolutionaries, secularists, communalists, socialists and capitalists, each group highlighting their preferred version of events. Mr Ray refuses this false choice, understanding that the end of the empire was neither purely moral triumph nor purely revolutionary victory, but a confluence of intended and unintended consequences, of careful planning and historical accidents working in ways that none of the participants fully understood.

 

 

To understand Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army (INA), Mr Ray first traces the long lineage of armed resistance in British India, from the 1857 revolt all the way to the Ghadar Movement. While these movements saw success in spurts, Mr Ray writes that “given the dangers involved and the consequent reprisals, the masses largely shied away from participation. There was also no outreach to entice countrywide involvement. Secrecy being imperative in the revolutionaries’ and Ghadarites’ operations, it precluded greater active public association.”

 

The tactical contradictions that doomed earlier revolutionary movements found their dramatic resolution in Bose’s audacious gamble with the INA. Mr Ray documents how Bose, after his Congress presidency being ruthlessly mowed down by Mahatma Gandhi and subsequent escape from India, solved the mass participation problem by constructing an alternative Indian State complete with its own army. The INA’s formation in August 1942, drawing on Indian prisoners of war and Japanese military support, represented the logical extreme of armed resistance, an attempt to fight the empire with its own weapons.

 

Bose, whose “heart ruled over him,” whose “sanguineness got the better of him”, and in whom “a fiery patriotism prevailed over pragmatism”, attacked British territories with Japanese support but achieved only limited success. By the time of his death, most of his forces had surrendered, with the remainder following suit shortly after.

 

What the British failed to understand was that their own judicial theatre would complete what Bose’s military campaigns could not. “The British choice of INA officers, who had defected from the British Indian Army, Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Dhillon, as the first three to be court-martialled—that, too, as co-accused in the same trial—was unwittingly a Himalayan blunder. A Muslim, a Hindu and a Sikh, respectively, represented the three prominent Indian communities. Consequently, a spark became an inferno,” Mr Ray writes.

 

Faced with a shifting political climate and upcoming elections, Nehru's leadership chose to rehabilitate the reputation of Bose — the same man they had helped drive into exile, the same militant whose methods they had publicly repudiated —by embracing and amplifying the story of INA. The end of wartime censorship meant that the INA story, suppressed for years, entered public consciousness with accumulated force, spreading like wildfire. The blend of historical truth with mythmaking created a story, a ferocious concoction that would shake the Empire’s very roots.

 

The cruel mathematics of political martyrdom meant that “Bose had accidentally and posthumously achieved what he failed to accomplish in his lifetime.” The man who couldn’t unite India through military victory and died in obscurity with his army scattered suddenly became the most powerful symbol of Indian unity. As Mr Ray writes, “The British Raj had tackled many a defiance to its authority from Gandhian mass movements over a quarter of a century with wily circumvention. Rarely, if ever, was it outflanked as by the public outpouring over the trial.”

 

What followed was a spontaneous mass uprising . Moreover, thousands of naval ratings revolted, chiefly in Bombay, and spread throughout India’s military infrastructure. Mr Ray’s research through archives, memoirs, and courtroom proceedings reconstructs everything that happened in the courtroom and everything that happened outside, the waves of resistance that spread far beyond any single location or community.

 

The trials had created a “revolutionary situation”, a moment when the normal rules of political engagement no longer applied, when previously unthinkable actions seemed not just possible but necessary. “Knowledge of the INA campaign, the provocative INA court martial and the disaffection in a section of the armed forces had converted a previously mellow public mood to one of militancy.”

 

The INA trials, therefore, accomplished what decades of political organising could not: They made continued British rule practically impossible rather than merely morally objectionable.

 

Thus it was that India, still shackled in 1945, still dreaming of purna swaraj, would—at the stroke of the midnight hour—rise to discover itself once more.

 

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The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor. Instagram/X: aroomofwords