Clive Branson: British soldier who wanted freedom for India

Sent to India just before the Quit India Movement, Branson was not at all like India’s British rulers. His letters reveal a man deeply in love with the country

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It’s February 1943. The Japanese are advancing on India from the east and the country is in the middle of the Quit India Movement. Not the best time to be a white sahib in India, but an English soldier camping in Karwar, Karnataka, is winning hearts.

He’s a poet and painter, and visits the local school one day to talk to the children about Wordsworth’s poetry. One of the boys asks him, “Britain has ruled India for 150 years – if India conquered Britain, how long would it rule?”

Instead of being annoyed, the soldier is impressed. “The brightness and intelligence of these children is splendid,” he writes in a letter to his wife Noreen.

It’s not the first time he has expressed his admiration for Indians to her. While based in Gulunche near Pune, he sees women making a road, and writes: “What dignity the women labourers here in India give to the very primitive making of a country lane.”

Who is this man, so out of character with Indian’s British masters? His name is Clive Branson. Born to a British army officer in Ahmednagar in 1907, he has returned to the country after 35 years.

While in India, Branson writes many letters to Noreen. They are published as a book, ‘British Soldier in India’, after his death in 1944, and it’s through them we know his views about India.

Sensitive to suffering

Almost the first thing Branson does on arrival in Bombay, in May 1942, is search for a book on Hindi. Then, on the road to Gulunche near Pune, he sees how poor most Indians are and writes: “After 175 years of imperialism in India, the conditions are a howling disgrace.”

Later, while based in Dhond, he expresses the same feelings in stronger words: “However much people at home believe in British imperialism, there are 400 million (Indians) who know by bitter daily experience the reality.”

As ‘rations corporal’ of the Gulunche camp, he goes to town daily to buy provisions, and uses the outings as an opportunity to make friends with the locals and learn Marathi. But in the camp, he has to tolerate the older soldiers who are hostile to Indians. Branson calls them “bloody idiots” and writes he is ashamed to think of himself as one of them.

When riots break out after the arrest of Congress leaders at the start of the Quit India Movement, the troops at Gulunche are sent out on law and order duty, but Branson avoids it because he regards it as “warfare against the people”.

His sympathies are with the Indian rioters: “Even though one does not agree with what the people are doing, one understands why they do it.”

He is a communist who has fought in the Spanish Civil War and spent time in a concentration camp. A keen observer of politics, he mocks the British Labour Party for urging the Congress leaders to call off the movement.

“How brilliant! doesn’t the Labour Party know that the Congress leaders are in jail, and that is why the rioting is going on – anarchistic because without leadership?”

Likewise, when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill implies in a speech that the riots in India are a Congress conspiracy to help the Japanese, Branson writes: “Churchill’s speech on India was just filth.”

When a soldier at the camp tells him he is lowering ‘white prestige’ by being friendly with the Indian tea and fruit sellers, Branson retorts: “The fact that white sahibs go into cheap brothels with native women must do much to uphold this prestige.”

He can’t stand the condescending manner Englishmen assume towards Indians. He tells Noreen: “When this war is over, we must come back to India as civilised friends.” In another letter he says: “I know I shall want to come back to India, where I can feel I am with humanity and not just one of a stuck-up little part of it.”

One night, he loses his cool when white officers hit and shout at a young Indian. “I am certain I shall not end my tour of duty in the army in India without getting into some trouble through sticking up for the Indians. But I know who is right,” he writes.

Part of a painting by Clive's daughter, Rosa Branson. She made it as a tribute to him in 2009. It shows him against the backdrop of the British war cemetery in Myanmar (Burma)

Politically conscious

Branson’s letters also record interesting political events in India. For example, his letter of September 26, 1942 mentions a campaign in Gujarat’s Kaira district (home to Amul) to collect 1 lakh signatures from 700 villages to demand the release of Congress leaders from jail.

When the British propaganda machinery tries to tar the image of student protesters with a rumour that some of them have raped a woman, Branson writes, “fancy Congress students demonstrating for the release of Nehru by raping women”.

The poverty of the countryside pains him. “A journey through this country is indeed painful – there is such a vast mass of human happiness, human intelligence, gone to waste.”

So when an officer asks him to paint scenes from army life, he writes: “If I paint at all, I want to paint the Indians...my conception of life is my conception of painting. I don’t paint things I want to forget.”

At the end of 1942, when Bombay is gripped by food shortage and workers are spending up to eight hours a day in food queues, Branson feels depressed at his inability to do anything to meet the “huge situation… so little able to atone for the stinking, filthy, crooked, hypocritical bastards of so-called Englishmen who rule this great country.”

The seaside break in Karwar in 1943 is a pleasant interlude on his tour. “I shall never forget these fishermen, these peasants, these children and their little town,” he tells Noreen. But he doesn’t know he has only a year left to live. On February 25, 1944 he is killed while fighting the Japanese in Burma.

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When Chandigarh was a fort, and Sukhna a river

Chandigarh is a city without a sense of local history. Founded by fiat, designed by a foreign hand and built on a greenfield site, it was born without an umbilical cord. Its first-generation residents came from outside and felt the rootlessness acutely. Their children also grew up in the dark because the school curriculum developed in Delhi didn’t touch upon Chandigarh’s history.

So, the belief that Chandigarh is a city without a history persists, but is it true? What was Chandigarh like before it became City Beautiful? Was it a jungle, or did people live there? What was their daily life like?

Some answers to these questions may be found in the tour reports of British officers. One of them, Dr Bateson, visited the area 154 years ago. He was the civil surgeon of Ambala, and was sent to investigate the reasons for the high rates of goitre and spleen (caused by malaria) in the region.

One of the interesting points in his report – submitted on March 28, 1868 – is that the name ‘Chandigarh’ existed even then, although it was not the name of a city or a village but of a fort on top of a hill.

Back then, the area was called Ilaqa Mani Majra. If you are not familiar with Chandigarh, Mani Majra is an old town that’s part of the Union Territory of Chandigarh now. In Bateson’s time it was the only town there, and it was surrounded by 69 villages.

When Bateson visited Mani Majra town it was already more than a century old and had 2,325 houses with 6,045 inhabitants.

The Gazetteer of Ambala district from 1884 says Mani Majra was part of the Sirhind province of Punjab under the Mughals. When the Mughal governor Zain Khan died in 1762, a Sikh leader named Garib Das seized 84 villages around Mani Majra, and made the town his capital.

The new ruler of Mani Majra got the title of ‘raja’ from the Afghan invader Ahmed Shah Abdali. Later, the British confirmed it when his successors helped them in their war against the Gurkhas.

The popular temple of Mansa Devi outside Chandigarh was also built by Mani Majra’s kings, and twice a year it used to draw about 80,000 pilgrims to fairs held in March and September. They were quite large gatherings for that era.

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Just as Delhi grew up along the Yamuna, Ilaqa Mani Majra was dependent on water from the Ghaggar, which used to be a perennial river.

Most of the land was low-lying so the river water could be easily channeled to the villages for irrigation. But though they depended on the Ghaggar, the locals believed its water was harmful. The British settlement report of the area from 1859 says, “The villages are frightfully under-populated for the reason that the irrigation is most pernicious to health.”

It also noted that fever and goitre were extremely prevalent. The medical condition of cretinism, in which thyroid deficiency causes physical deformity and mental weakness, was common too. It was not unusual for a village to have four, five or even six cretins.

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Bateson began his tour of Ilaqa Mani Majra in Mauli village, about 3km south of the town, on March 22, 1868. He found that 17 men and 6 women in Mauli had goitre. The rate was higher among men because they were all locals. They had grown up in Mauli, unlike their wives who had come from outside. So, it’s not surprising that people connected the high rate of goitre with local conditions, chiefly the water from the Ghaggar.

Next morning, Bateson travelled to a large village named Pabhat (pronounced Pubhaat) about 8km south of Mani Majra. It lay across another river called Sukhna and had 357 houses with 1,630 residents.

Yes, Sukhna is only known as a lake now, but back in Bateson’s time it was a small river that started near Pinjore and joined the Ghaggar at Mubarakpur after a journey of about 25km. It was easy to cross and even in the rains it had only about 3 feet of water. Unlike the Ghaggar, the Sukhna had little water in March. Bateson says it was broad and nearly dry.

If Mowli was a sick village, in Pabhat the “inhabitants looked remarkably fine-looking and healthy”. It had only two goitre patients, and both had come from outside.

Bateson found out that Pabhat had 11 wells, and the locals drank water from them. They irrigated their fields with water from the Sukhna, and believed they were healthy because they stayed away from the Ghaggar.

It’s interesting that opium was one of the chief crops of Pabhat.

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Bateson mentions several other villages in his report that he covered within a few days. Remember this was the 1860s and he was doing all his travelling on horseback and on foot.

In sharp contrast to Pabhat, Abheypur village, which was entirely dependent on the Ghaggar, had 11 goitre patients among its 393 residents. The patwari of Abheypur told Bateson that some years earlier there had been 20 goitre patients in the village.

Chandigarh’s Sector 8 was once called Kalibar village. It was far from any stream and completely rain-dependent. And Bateson found it had neither goitre nor spleen. But in Barra Firozpur, about 5km away from Mani Majra, everyone drank from the Ghaggar and there were 14 cases of goitre. Bateson records: “Children died young. Some of them grew up deaf and dumb and daft.”

On the 24th of March, Bateson came to Mani Majra town, and found that 6% of its population had goitre. He doesn’t give the exact number, but there would have been about 360 cases in a population of 6,000. Even the dogs in Mani Majra’s streets had goitre!

The locals again blamed the Ghaggar for the disease and Bateson says whenever they detected symptoms of goitre arising, they tried to shift to a relative’s town or village “out of the influence of the Ghaggar” for a few months till the “incipient goitre recedes”.

Back in the 1980s, Mani Majra had Chandigarh’s swankiest cinema hall called Dhillon, which later became its first multiplex. It also had a large automobile repair market, but in Bateson’s time the Ilaqa was famous for its rice.

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What about Chandigarh, perhaps you are wondering. Bateson visited a village called Chandi on March 25, 1868. He describes its precise location: “I am just below the old fort and close to the grand trunk road from Ambala to Kalka – the seventh milestone from the latter place being right opposite me.”

So, Chandi was exactly 7 miles or about 11km before Kalka. And it was completely dependent for water on the Ghaggar. However, the fort on the hill above it, which was called Chandigarh, used water from a rain-fed tank and was free from goitre.

Bateson also visited a village called Dara near Chandi where water was so scarce 3 months in a year that its residents drank milk instead. None of them had goitre.

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So, Bateson returned convinced that the Ghaggar was the root cause of goitre in Ilaqa Mani Majra but his superiors were not so certain. They said chemical testing had found the Ghaggar to have very good water.

The problem seemed to be that the villagers were drinking contaminated water from irrigation ditches. The British administration concluded that the “composition of the subsoil had entirely changed the character of the Ghaggar water.”

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There’s more to Chandigarh’s past than goitre, malaria and a “pernicious” river, but the point of this story is that even if the city is young, it is not bereft of history.

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