Rewriting History by Revisiting Facts

We are living in the post-pandemic era having fresh memories of evacuation, lockdown, information, and disinformation—overall a situation of panic. At this moment the book under review draws our attention to a similar panic-stricken situation in colonial India in the 1940s during World War II based on public rumor of an imminent Japanese strike that never actualized, making it a story with an ‘irresistible twist of dystopian futility’ (p. xiv). Most interesting in that episode were the activities of the British colonial power that panicked and altered British attitudes towards India giving an impetus to the course of the Indian freedom struggle. Based on biographical accounts, extensive content analysis of secondary sources (Indivar Kamtekar’s The Shiver of 1942 and Srinath Raghavan’s India’s War:World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia among others), pictorial evidence, using the methodology of narrative history and deconstruction, the book presents a lively account of how events unfolded. The names of places, cities, towns and villages that were used at that time have been included for the sake of, as the author notes, ‘convenience and ease of reading’. In the introductory chapter the author unravels the motive of revisiting the history of 1942 by pointing out that although in British circles the event was known as the ‘Great flap of 1942’, ‘the magnitude and extent of this flap have not received the attention they deserve’ (p. xxi). If the British neglected the event, so too have historians of India from different schools of thought, putting the event in the margins as this Japanese scare ‘didn’t fit into the grand narratives of either the freedom struggle or that of decolonization’ (p. xxi).