LIFE CHANGING CRISIS IN INDIA

Afternoon tea at the White Horse Hotel

June this year fleeted by at great speed, in July we were really pleased to see our dear friends, Sue and Ivor, who brought over some Australian sunshine from Adelaide, to dry out the damp and cold of our past half-year.  Many congratulations to Ivor and Sue, who celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary with us, before leaving on Sunday 7th July, to continue their six-week tour of Europe.

We organised a musical start to their visit to Hampshire, with DREAMBOATS AND PETTICOATS, performed at Portsmouth's Kings Theatre, a brilliant compilation of rhythms and sounds that brought out the best of British and the USA in the post-war years.
Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock', and many exciting hit songs by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran and a host of other Rock 'n' Roll and Twist numbers, which got us tapping our feet right through the show.

What a fantastic evening of music, that didn't just stop at shakin' and rolling, but took us past the Twist Again and back to the Great Balls of Fire, into our own teenage years wherever we were.  We had not been so well entertained since last April, by The Top Hats performance in London.  We left the Kings Theatre with uplifted spirit, humming and subconsciously moving to the rhythmic music still echoing in our heads. I was transported back to my happy teenage years in Calcutta, where we held dance parties with friends in each others' homes at weekends, and we loved to dance and sing most of the hit songs of the era.

However, in 1950's India, there was very little teenagers could do after school, apart from helping parents in their commercial enterprises, like our family, or help look after younger siblings. Many poorer children didn't go to school, and those living in small villages didn't have the opportunity to rock or jive, or to wear Blue Suede Shoes.

India went through Life changing crisis 

When Japan stopped bombing India in 1944, WW2 ended for us before the rest of the world. I started attending Keen Kwock Chinese School, established by the Nam Soon Clan Society, under the auspices of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, Founding Father of the Republic of China, which deposed the Last Emperor of China and brought an end to the rule of the Qing Dynasty.

My father believed we should start our education in our own language, so he was wholly supportive of this Elementary and Junior School, and was its executive director for most of his life, he was aptly nicknamed, Mr. Meeting.  My elder brother Yee Leong and I walked about a mile each way to school, from 8 A.M. until 3 P.M., sometimes on our way home we stopped off at our godmother's, who was always glad to see us and listened to what we had learned that day.

We learnt our multiplication times tables by rote, which enabled us to tackle maths efficiently; writing the intricate strokes of Chinese characters with brush and ink is a discipline that not only helped to strengthen fingers but made it easier to use chopsticks at meal time, for which I was grateful when painting artwork in later years.  Chinese History through legendary stories of heroism and bravery, and Geography were my favourite subjects. Being at the top of the class was important to me and my parents, whose diligence and competitive spirit had rubbed off on us from an early age.

We had many disruptions to our school days. The 1946 Hindu/Muslim uprising began as an idea, proposed at the Muslim League Convention in 1930, to highlight the Muslim's minority state in the Hindu-dominated subcontinent.  In 1940 the British policy of divide and rule led to a firm demand for a separate Muslim State, and by 1946 the leader of the Muslim League, M. A. Jinnah demanded for the formation of an independent Muslim nation, and declared a day of action on 16 August 1946 to gain more power for the Muslims in India. As a result of mutual suspicion and fear growing among the Hindus and the Muslims, riots erupted in Calcutta, and the violence that ensued caused more than 5,000 death and many more injured.

Lord Mountbatten between Nehru & Jinnah

Public order broke down in Bengal and across northern India, and the British Colonial Administration was under great pressure to seek a political partition of territories to avoid full-scale civil war. Even the Cabinet Mission sent from London could not reach a compromise between the Congress members like Nehru and Gandhi who favoured unity for India, and the Muslim League's elites demanding an independent Pakistan.  On June 3, 1947, Viceroy Lord Mountbatten announced the decision to partition British India, at the same time he declared that India would be independent by 15 August 1947.

Map of India after Partition

On 18 July 1947 the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act that finalized the arrangements for partition, allowing several hundred princely states the freedom to choose between the two.  The demarcation of boundaries posed interminable problems, based on the majorities of Hindus or Muslims in the Punjab area in the North West, and the Bengal Province in the East, with governments to be set up for West Pakistan and East Punjab in the north, and again for West Bengal being retained in India and East Bengal to be East Pakistan, which recently became Bangladesh.

The largest mass migration in history

The sheer logistic of the partition involved the largest mass migration in human history of more than 14 millions people, and Pakistan was created in two halves, East Pakistan in Bengal and West Pakistan in Punjab, some 1,700 km apart, it was granted Independence on 14th August 1947, a day earlier than India's Independence on the 15th, so that the Viceroy could attend both hand-over ceremonies. The haste in which the partition and independence were granted meant that the two newly independent countries had to sort out the insurmountable problem of moving massive population exchanges in the months and years that followed.

Thousands of displaced families everywhere

Further violence and slaughter took place during the migration, and the death toll could only be estimated at 500,000 or more. Other conflicts that also took place included strikes over pay, naval mutiny and the post-partition conflict over many Princely States, the most persistent one being in the state of  Kashmir, where a small section of its border between India and Pakistan continued to be fought over, right up to the 21st Century.

With so much unrest happening around us in India, it was amazing that my father finally located the rest of our family in China in 1948.  The radio and the BBC Overseas service helped to keep us abreast of the ongoing strife in China, and indeed around the world. Since WW1 broke out in 1914, Japan had increased her influence over various parts of China, and whilst fighting on the allied side, the Japanese took the opportunity to seize the industrialised German holding of Shandong Province, and in 1915 the Japanese forced the so-called Twenty-one demands on the Warlord Government in Beijing, making that part of China a Japanese protectorate.

The people of China was made up of many tribes and races with different cultures, dialects and feudal warlords that waged war on each other from time to time, and the task of unifying all these diversities could only be described as a mammoth task, an undertaking that Dr. Sun Yat Sen, leader of the newly founded Republic of China, envisaged could be achieved under the Kuomintang Nationalist Party, which quickly formed the governing body in the chaos that followed the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, and set up Nanjing as its capital.

Great strides were made in education, to unify Chinese societies by popularising the national language of Mandarin, and setting up facilities to overcome dialect variations and to encourage a sense of unity and pride among the people.  Public health facilities were energetically modernised, with legislation in place against traffic in narcotics, and industrial and agricultural production augmented.  Many of the harsh aspects of concessions and privileges demanded by foreign powers in China, were successfully moderated through diplomacy.

By the decade of  1928 to 1937 the Kuomintang Nationalist Government was making good progress, achieving a period of consolidation and accomplishment under General Chiang Kai-Shek from their capital in Nanjing.  However, with the Chinese Communist Party steadily gaining strength and the Japanese continued to gain territory from South of the Great Wall into Northern China and the coastal provinces, the work of the Nationalist Government over two decades were being jeopardised.

The Japanese seized Manchuria in September 1931, and established the deposed Qing Emperor, Puyi, a mere youth at the time, as head of the puppet regime of Manchukuo in 1932, the loss of this vital productive area was a blow to the Nationalist Government's economy and the fury of the people turned on the Kuomintang for failing to contain Japanese aggression, causing more disillusioned people to join the Communists.

Mao Zedong was a librarian in Beijing University when he became a Marxist communist, with firm belief in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, which he advocated for China rather than the urban proletariat theory of the Soviet's Comintern.  In 1931 he proclaimed the establishment of the Chinese Soviet Republic under his Chairmanship in Jiangxi Province, and despite the annihilation campaigns being waged against his Red Army by Chiang Kai-Shek's forces, the Communist movement attracted more than 100,000 followers by the time of the epic Long March that began in October 1934.

Mao ensured his place in history when he led this march, some 12,500 kilometres, through 11 provinces, 18 mountain ranges and crossed 24 rivers from South West China to the North West, selecting Southern Shaanxi Province as his final destination. They arrived in Yan'an in October 1935, where they set up HQ, and were joined by droves of people from Jiangxi and surrounding areas, as well as those who had escaped the Japanese aggression, which enabled the movement to grow rapidly for the next ten years, significantly undermining the progress made by the Kuomintang Nationalist Government, and putting Mao firmly into the driving seat of Chinese Communism.

In 1940 Mao outlined a programme for the Chinese Communists to seize power, by teaching his Party Cadres to lead the masses by living and working with them, eating their food and thinking their thoughts, while the Red Army fostered an image of conducting  guerilla warfare in defence of the people against the Japanese as well as the Chinese Nationalist army.  This psychology worked well and these tenets became the central ideals of the Communist doctrine, that later became formalized into Mao's Thoughts. With skilful propaganda, the Chinese Communists Party increased its membership from 100,000 in 1937 to 1.2 million by 1945.

By the time my father located our family in China, they had already experienced the ultimate hardship of starvation as they moved from one town to another, from Guangdong Province on the coast, northward inland to escape the Japanese occupied areas, whose aggression had turned into invasion of China.  They walked for days carrying a little rice they managed to salvage, and for miles each day just to avoid contact with the Japanese aggressors.  Eventually they arrived at a safe place, to make contact with our cousins and uncles who were also making their escape, and father's business agent in Hong Kong was able to arrange their sea passage to India.

More of this in the next episode, thanks for visiting me.