The real Ranis of World War II

Book review: <i>Women at War: Subhas Chandra Bose and the Rani of Jhansi regiment</i>

WOMEN AT WAR

SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE AND THE RANI OF JHANSI REGIMENT

Vera Hildebrand

HarperCollins

321 pages; Rs 499

The Indian National Army (INA) retains a certain mystique within the Indian independence movement, partly because of its misguided heroism but mostly because of the adventurous life and times of its commander, Subhas Chandra Bose, and his controversial death in an air crash in 1945 at age 48. Lurking in the background with an almost ghostly presence was the INA’s remarkable all-female infantry unit, the Rani of Jhansi (RJR) regiment.

The RJR short-lived history tends to get subsumed in the INA’s ignominious military reputation as a marginal fighting force, ineptly led by Bose, that ended up on the losing side. It survives in some histories built on the heroic and often outright fanciful memoirs of some former members. The principal value of Women at War is that it abstains from the temptation to sensationalise the RJR’s story. The careful research, which includes interviews with 22 surviving “Ranis” plus access to hitherto unseen INA Interrogation Reports, occasionally makes for heavy-going reading but author Vera Hildebrand lives up to her promise that “the facts are nearly as impressive as the myths”. 

The RJR was raised in October 1943 and disbanded in August 1945 and, at its height, had 450-500 recruits — scarcely more than battalion. Unlike their male counterparts in the INA, the Ranis were not regular soldiers from the Indian army under the British Raj who were persuaded to “turn”. All of them were rookie volunteers drawn from the expatriate community in South East Asia. 

They came from backgrounds as diverse as RJR’s glamorous and famous Commander, Captain Lakshmi Swaminathan, daughter of a Harvard-trained lawyer and Ammu Swaminathan, later member of the Constituent Assembly, to middle-class daughters to indentured women workers on the plantations. Some were as young as 12 or 14 years old.  In 21st century India, the RJR would have attracted attention as a beacon of women’s empowerment; in Asia of the 1940s, the mobilisation of an all-women’s military unit in collaboration with the Indian community was nothing short of extraordinary. 

Many of the Ranis who signed on to this unconventional project were fired by Bose’s rhetoric of women’s power embedded in self-sacrifice for the independence of the “motherland” — though not a few, Ms Hildebrand observes wryly, were undoubtedly attracted to the handsome young firebrand, and others, especially the plantation girls, by the prospect of a better work environment.  

The RJR, named for the intrepid tragic heroine of the 1857 revolt, is frequently dismissed as an auxiliary nursing unit masquerading as a combat unit. It is true that the RJR’s nurses were among the Ranis who came closest to the frontline in the disastrous battle for Imphal and Kohima — but they were stationed 300 miles away at Japan’s battle headquarters in the picturesque Burmese town of Maymyo. It is also true that the Ranis, unlike their Soviet sisters on the Eastern Front, never went into battle or fired a weapon against the enemy, though not for want of trying on their part. 

This latter point, of whether the Ranis were meant to be a fighting unit, remains contentious principally because Bose had INA documents destroyed after Japan’s retreat from South East Asia. And the RJR was entirely a Bose project, no small tribute to his radical progressive social outlook. As Ms Hildebrand writes, “Bose had not consulted any officers about creating a unit of female combat infantry. Plans for the Regiment as well as its training programme also seemed to be entirely Bose’s concept.” The Ranis were certainly instructed by INA regulars in all the arts of conventional combat — there are plenty of photographs of them training and drilling to corroborate this. 

The RJR, however, was never incorporated into INA’s chain of command and remained under Bose, who maintained a paternalistic concern for the Ranis’ welfare, including their safety during the perilous retreat from Burma ahead of allied forces. This circumstance could partly be a result of the Japanese refusal to finance the RJR — the tab was picked up by the Indian Independence League (IIL), which played a stellar role in recruiting Ranis. 

So what, really, was the RJR’s mission? Even if we dismiss the crude misogyny of contemporary comment that, “Honestly, they were only decoration, that’s all”, we have a Sikh INA veteran’s assessment. Bose’s idea, he said, was that “the sight of the Ranis would make the Indian soldiers on the British side lay down their weapons…simply by parading as well-trained soldiers ‘the Regiment would have become a fantastic asset because it would raise the spirits of Indians in India on Indian soil’.” None of this ambition was realised, of course, because of the Japanese Army’s ignominious defeat.

Whatever the truth, the RJR’s existence was impactful enough for the British to suppress mention of it in the press in India, where war was impacting women’s mobilisation in its own way, as Yasmin Khan shows in The Raj At War. Whether it saw combat or not, the RJR’s brief history represented a notable, if abbreviated, episode of emancipation in an era when the status of women was scarcely worth celebrating in the West, let alone in Asia. Its story remains one of the more inspiring sidelights in that savage theatre of war that the Japanese optimistically called the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.