Using Social Postal History, this talk will elaborate India’s armed struggle during World War II, the British counter-offensive, and their combined role in hastening India’s independence.
It opens with the earlier geopolitical forces that shaped the revolutionary movement. Against the backdrop of World War I, anti-British sentiment fueled an attempted organized uprising—thwarted by British intelligence yet revived decades later in Germany and Southeast Asia during World War II. At its core, the story leverages the strategy that undermined British power in Asia—the defection of native soldiers from colonial service to the cause of India’s freedom. First seen in the 1857 revolt and attempted again during World War I, it reached its most decisive form after the Fall of Singapore in 1942, when members of the Indian Independence League and thousands of captured British-Indian POWs rallied under Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. Aligned with Japan in the Burma campaign to invade India, these forces turned the colonial army’s own strength upon itself, delivering a psychological blow that helped hasten the end of British rule.
