Three Famines by Thomas Keneally

magazine in 1936; a lean giant of a man, six feet seven inches tall. He was born of a notable Tory family and his godmother was Queen Victoria. He hadbeen a lord of the Admiralty and involved in government bodies dealing with the distribution and pricing of agricultural produce. He had turned down the governor-generalship of Australia. (His father had been Australia’s first and not very successful governor-general, Lord Hopetoun.) He accepted the supreme position in India in 1936. His imagination and empathy were not, however, of any great stature. He was not a friend of and had no warm feelings for Mahatma Gandhi, as his predecessor Lord Halifax had. Nor did he aspire to such intimacy. He would write, ‘If India is to be really capable of holding its own in the future without direct British control from outside, I’m not sure that it will not need an increasing infusion of stronger Nordic blood, whether by settlement or inter-marriage or otherwise.’
    His personal life was as unblemished as Trevelyan’s had been and he went on to be a particularly fond grandparent. He kept a pet turtle named Jonas, to whom he fed worms. Nor was he venal or corrupt. He was perhaps an incarnation of a type about whom Gandhi had written in 1922. After defining British occupation as a criminal endeavour, Gandhi declared: ‘Englishmen and their Indian associates involved in the administration of the country do not seem to understand they are engaged in the crime I have attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many Englishmen and Indian officials honestly believe that they are administering one of the best systems devised in the world and that India is making steady but slow progress.’
    Linlithgow was appointed as viceroy to make sure the new Indian constitution of 1935, by which provincial legislatures would be run by Indians under a British provincial governor,was decreed and began functioning properly. In February 1940, when the war in Europe had already begun, even if it was rather quiescent, Gandhi wrote to Linlithgow, in answer to the viceroy’s ‘dreary, prosaic’ assurance that Britain had an ultimate ‘dominion status’ in mind for India, that, ‘The vital difference between the [Indian] Congress and the Viceroy’s offer consists in the fact that the Viceroy’s offer contemplates final determination by the British government whereas the Congress contemplates the contrary.’ Nor did the left wing of the Congress party treasure this promised ‘dominion status’, which would still leave India loyal to the crown of Great Britain.
    Gandhi argued that there should be no British troops in India, nor (once the Japanese entered the war) any Americans, until India was free. The Allies should withdraw and India could make a peace with Japan and become free and neutral. It was an unlikely scenario – Japan was not disposed to stop advancing. But many Indians agreed with it. For a time, the British considered deporting Gandhi.
    By May 1942, the news that disturbed Linlithgow did not concern any omen of famine in Bengal, but the disastrous loss of the city of Rangoon and all of Burma, one of India’s eastern neighbours. There was now an apparently imminent Japanese invasion of Bengal, and of Assam to the north of Bengal. A shared, though lesser, consideration of Britons and Indians was that Burma had been exporting food into India, and now would not be doing so.
    By this time, a number of British warships had been destroyed off the Bay of Bengal by the ships of Admiral Nagumo, the leader of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,and approaches to the province of Bengal were largely controlled by the enemy. The fall of Burma, in the context of the earlier losses of Singapore and Hong Kong, preoccupied Linlithgow and the cabinet of the government of India. They considered that the Indian political leaders, especially the forceful Mahatma Gandhi, the more moderate Jawaharlal Nehru and – indeed – the entire Indian National Congress