The Hitler Indians should know
Sometime in the early nineties, a security official at Mumbai airport pointed to a photograph of Adolf Hitler on the cover of a book I was reading and offered an unsolicited comment. “Very good man,” he said. “Very bad man,” I replied disbelievingly, “He murdered Jews.” “But he was very kind,” the official persisted.
The man’s hazy grasp of history made argument futile but this novel view of Hitler pointed to a popular cult. And so it was. Bal Thackeray, Shiv Sena’s supremo, a casual investigation (in pregoogle days) revealed, considered the racist dictator a role model. His followers, many of them middle class Indians, transposed Hitler’s murderous aversion for minorities to the Indian context with gusto.
Half knowledge can be a dangerous thing so Shiv Sainiks and thinkers like them would be dismayed to know the depths of Hitler’s racial contempt for Indians. It’s all there in Mein Kampf, his memoir-cum-political testimonial, which is a best-seller in India today for reasons that remain a mystery. Germans found it unreadable; few read it even at the height of Nazi power, though its enforced distribution earned Hitler considerable royalty. The book does not improve in English translation.
Vaibhav Purandare is one of those hardy souls who has waded through Mein Kampf ’s turgid prose — that too, in several versions of English translations. Having encountered the crude commentary about Indians, he realised that Hitler’s view of India was “a completely forgotten chapter in history.” This wordily titled book is a timely revelation of an inconvenient truth.
Indians were “gabbling pomposities” and “without any realistic background” (whatever that meant). Hitler’s contempt for Indians was a subset of his political worldview that was expressed in a wide-eyed admiration for the British Empire.
He ascribed this superpowerdom, first “due to British national sentiment, which is absent in our people” and, two, through “racial purity in the colonies. The Englishman always knows how to be lord and not bother.” He was contemptuous of the freedom movement, and never understood why the British didn’t just shoot Gandhi, as he suggested to a horrified Lord Halifax.
The exploitative grammar of Empire was the template for his terrible vision for the Third Reich, which is why he made overtures to Britain when he came to power. It may have worked, since much of the British elite (including members of the royal family) admired the man, had it not been for another arch-imperialist who also made no secret of his contempt for Indians (“a beastly people with a beastly religion”), Winston Churchill.
Mr Purandare reminds us that Hitler’s view of India was shaped by another Briton, a political philosopher called Houston Chamberlain, a champion of the discredited Aryan invasion theory. White-skinned Aryans entered in India from the north-west some 1500 years ago and had “reached the height of metaphysical thought”. But their racial purity had been ruined by mixing with the local population. Indians, therefore, were degraded Aryans. This notion was extended to the farrago that passed for Nazi ideology by Alfred Rosenberg, a charlatan ideologue in Hitler’s inner circle.
Mr Purandare’s account begins with some forgotten history — the arrest and torture of several Indians — including the brother-in-law and son of Sarojini Naidu — within hours of the burning of the Bundestag by a Dutch communist. Neither was formally charged but after news of their plight appeared in the left-leaning Guardian, they were abruptly released.
Several other Indians were arrested on more serious charges: A plot to kill Hitler (a staple ruse of insecure authoritarian leaders). One was poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s grand-nephew Saumyendranath Tagore, a card-carrying communist, and D K Gupta, a student at Berlin University. Gupta was released after 18 harrowing days in prison, and so was Tagore after his plight was raised by Labour MPS in Parliament.
Part of Hitler’s enduring legitimacy in India is the notion that he supported Indian independence. This belief is the result of renegade Congress leader Subhas Chandra Bose’s storied wartime stay in Berlin and meeting with Hitler to gain Axis support for India’s freedom. Mr Purandare’s account of Bose’s almost two-year stay in Nazi Germany is somewhat limited. He suggests that Hitler and the Nazi regime gave him short shrift. But as Romain Hayes shows out in his 2011 book Bose in Nazi Germany, had that been the case, Bose would not have been a guest of the regime, openly living with an Austrian woman in contravention of racial laws, nor would Hitler, seriously short of materiel in 1943, have spared a submarine to transport him part of the way to Japan.
It is true that Hitler did most of the talking during the meeting, which was par for the course, and that he did not accede to Bose’s request to expunge racist comments about Indians from Mein Kampf. All he got was a submarine, Mr Purandare writes. But Hitler’s view of Indian independence was entirely an exigency. In 1942 with the British Empire on its knees in Asia and the Germans ascendant in Europe, a march to India via the Caucuses and Afghanistan to free — at least in Bose’s vision — Indians seemed a doable project. Whether Germans would conquer India from the British only to hand it over to Indians for self-rule is another question.
The weakest parts of the book are the publisher’s: The reprehensible lack of an index and the under-marketing of an important book in today’s political context.