Introduction to the Internet edition

‘Alec Johnson’ was my mother’s brother, Dick Toms, who died recently aged 93. When he wrote this book, in Calcutta in 1946, he was in the British Army, aged 33. I’d always known he’d written a book about India, but I didn’t see it till after his death. It’s a rarity, because the British authorities in Calcutta did their best to suppress it, destroying all the copies they could and even arresting the printers and the publisher for a token period.

It’s a remarkable testament. It documents a moment in the decline of British imperialism, the moment when it was completely obvious that Britain wasn’t rich enough or powerful enough any more to run an Empire in the face of US opposition. It describes the state of Bengal, the richest part of India, the Jewel in the Crown, three years after a devastating famine from which it hadn’t yet recovered. It gives the lie to anybody who might claim that British imperialism was a good thing for the Indians, showing that the British, even after two hundred years of occupation, couldn’t run Bengal fairly in the interests of its population.

It’s a book of its time. Dick was a Communist, and it shows. The Kisan Sabha in Bengal, the organisation which took him round Bengal, was strongly influenced by Indian Communists. Some of his remedies, like splitting India according to linguistic boundaries, might have been worse than the Partition that the British eventually imposed. Some of his enthusiasms, like taming the rivers, seem antique in an age when we have learnt (or we think we have learnt) that we ought not to try. But overall the burning idealism of his conviction that the future of India could be bright and its people free shines through. Anybody who thinks that Communists were corrupt followers of a tarnished star should read this book, in particular to find sympathy, as Dick did, with the demands of the Muslims of Bengal as well as those of Congress.

It’s well written, too, and it paints a picture of Bengal that might make you want to go there and see for yourself.

Anybody who has read a novel of the Second World War will realise that the British Army, like the US and the Soviet Armies, was out of the control of its government—hence the fact that Dick could write this book and remain unpunished despite the very recognisable photograph and biography on the dust-jacket. Whilst he was in India Dick helped peasants dig drainage ditches by recruiting bored and underused platoons of Royal Engineers, commanded by somebody he met in an Army mess in Calcutta. Before that he’d travelled across India in a special Army railway carriage fitted out as a sitting room. When he got to Calcutta he was welcomed by a fellow Communist Party member in Army Intelligence.1 Perhaps that’s why they didn’t catch him.

Notes on the editing

I don’t at the moment have a copy of the book and this edition has been prepared from a rather poor photocopy. Dick’s pen-and-ink drawings have suffered especially. I think some of the problems are down to the original printer not inking some of the pages very well.

Dick told me it was Walter de la Mare, but clearly that couldn’t be the poet. His widow Mary confirms that it was a de la Mare, but can’t remember the first name. If anybody knows who it might have been, please let me know.

In producing this edition I’ve tried to reproduce the format of the original, as far as LATEXwill let me. I changed one or two things—‘today’ for ‘to-day’ and ‘nowadays’ for ‘now-a-days’—and I’ve rationalised the use of punctuation in quoted and bracketed phrases. I standardised on the ‘ise’ spelling, where Dick had wavered between ‘ise’ and ‘ize’. I’ve fixed all the typos in the original that I could spot, but unfortunately the scanning process has introduced lots more of its own.

I haven’t yet found a Type 2 font that looks like the original.

Units under British occupation

A Bengal maund was 82 pounds 2 ounces, just over 36 kilos. A Bengal bigha was 1600 square yards, about a third of an acre or a bit more than an eighth of a hectare. The Indian rupee in 1948 was 13 31 to a British pound (one and six in old money, 7 12 p in new) and 3.31 to a US dollar (about 30 cents).

An anna was one sixteenth of a rupee.