Fellow white officers ‘racilly abused’ British Indian
BIRENDRANATH MAZUMDAR FACED ‘BROWN SKIN’ SLURS WHILE AT COLDITZ, NEW BOOK REVEALS
AUTHOR and journalist Ben Macintyre has revealed how the only Indian officer in the British army during the Second World War was subjected to sustained racism by white officers on his own side when he was taken prisoner by the Germans.
In Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle (Viking; £25), Macintyre has written about the abuse Birendranath Mazumdar suffered from fellow British officers who called him “Jumbo”, made him endlessly cook curry for them and discouraged him from thinking of escaping because of his “brown skin”.
Colditz was the castle in Saxony where the Germans incarcerated their most difficult prisoners. Notable occupants included Group Captain Douglas Bader, the RAF flying ace and double leg amputee who was the hero of the film Reach for the Sky; Lt Airey Neave, Royal Artillery, later a Conservative MP who was killed by the IRA; and Lt Col David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Service.
In the early 1970s, the BBC TV drama on Colditz helped perpetuate the myth that the camp was full of brave British officers who could hoodwink the Germans by escaping what was meant to be most secure prison set up by the Nazis. That there was a dark side to British behaviour was completely suppressed.
Macintyre told Eastern Eye about the appalling way Mazumdar was treated by British officers who simply could not treat him as an equal. He said: “The fascinating thing about Mazumdar’s story is that it has been completely obscured.
“It’s not just that he was treated very badly by some of his fellow British officers because he was the only Indian national in the British Army who was an officer – there were some (Indians) who were not officers. There were obviously Indians (officers) in the British Indian army from India. And yet he was really badly treated by the British who regarded him as a second-class citizen. Wouldn’t allow him to escape. Made him cook curries the whole time, nicknamed him ‘Jumbo’, teased him. It’s a pretty sad story in lots of ways.
“But the other aspect of it is that the story has not been told for 70 years, because he was just a person with a brown skin, didn’t really fit into the accepted story of Colditz. That’s what shocked me.”
Asked how he stumbled across Mazumdar’s story, Macintyre replied: “Well, first of all, his name stands out. His is the only Indian name that you see in the rolls of prisoners in Colditz so that struck me at first. He is briefly mentioned in some of the earlier histories, a sentence here and a sentence there.
“I contacted his widow, Joan. She had lots of material about him. And then she directed me to some tapes, some recordings that he had made shortly before his death in 1996, which are now held in the Imperial War Museum. And those really tell his full story for the first time.”
During his time in captivity, the Germans tried to persuade him to join the Indian National Army of “Netaji” Subhas Chandra Bose. But Mazumdar stayed loyal to the oath he had taken to serve King George VI. Despite this, he was always treated with suspicion by British intelligence. He escaped and managed to find his way back to Britain, where he was interrogated by MI5.
Mazumdar could have returned to India after independence, but chose to settle in Britain. He worked as a GP in Wales and Essex, before retiring to the home in Devon where his widow still lives.
Macintyre spoke to Joan, now 96, who told the author: “Biren was my life, in a sense. We got married on the first day of spring – April 21, 1953 – because I wanted to see our life go straight from spring to autumn to winter.”
Some of Mazumdar’s fellow prisoners of war were profoundly racist, she said. “From the moment he arrived, he wasn’t accepted. The senior (British) officer was immediately racist and said, ‘With your colour scheme you can’t possibly escape.’”
He was mocked for supporting Indian independence. “These were the days of empire, when the lowest menial worker felt superior to anyone with brown skin,” she said.
Joan is delighted her husband’s story has finally come out. “It is so very good for other people who are Indian.”
At one stage, the couple considered emigrating to Canada, but instead remained in Britain. “Biren never thought of himself as British, but he never felt like an outsider here, as he did inside Colditz.”
Macintyre’s book tells of Mazumdar’s journey from India to Britain, and how he ended up in Colditz. He “was a doctor, and a very good one”, according to the author. “The son of a distinguished surgeon from the city of Gaya in northeast India, he was a Brahmin born into the high noon of the British Raj, well educated, with elegant manners and fastidious tastes. Round-faced and soft-voiced, Mazumdar spoke English with a refined accent, as well as Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, French and German.
“His more anglicised father, whose patients included officers of the British East India Company, encouraged the young Biren to read aloud from the Times every evening. The boy was educated at elite schools modelled on the English education system. The Mazumdars had prospered under the Raj, but Biren grew up to become a committed Indian nationalist, fiercely opposed to British rule in India.”
He was a supporter of both Mahatma Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose. In 1931, he left Gaya for London, intent on becoming a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Despite his opposition to the British empire, when war was declared he came to its defence.
Some 2.5 million Indians served on the Allied side during the war, mostly as uniformed soldiers of the British Indian Army. Mazumdar, however, being resident in London and British-trained, joined the British Army, which was still almost wholly white. In September 1939, he volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps, swore an oath of allegiance to King George VI, and was despatched to France with the rank of Captain, the only nonwhite officer in the corps and the only Indian officer in the British Army.”
He was posted to the 17th Base Hospital at Étaples as general medical officer. In May 1940, with German forces closing in, Mazumdar led a convoy of 40 ambulances carrying 500 wounded soldiers towards Boulogne in the hope of joining the evacuation. Outside the village of Neufchâtel, their path was blocked by 20 Panzer tanks, which opened fire. Two of the ambulances were hit. Mazumdar helped to pull the survivors from the burning vehicles, then tied a khaki handkerchief to his baton, held it above his head, and walked towards the German tanks.
The Panzer commander was most polite and spoke perfect English: “I’m sorry. I’m afraid you won’t reach Boulogne. And, please, don’t try to escape.”
These were words Mazumdar would hear repeatedly over the coming years, when he was a German prisoner of war.
He was shuttled from one camp to another, more than a dozen in all. He was moved to Colditz on September 26, 1941, in the middle of the night, the castle rear
ing up above him bathed in searchlights, a vision that “would fit naturally in the pages of a Bram Stoker novel”.
Mazumdar’s attentive medical care and willingness to confront the Germans ought to have endeared him to his fellow inmates, but he was always a creature apart, treated with suspicion, and occasionally outright discrimination, Macintyre discovered.
“I was the sole Indian in whichever camp I went to,” Mazumdar wrote. “All the other prisoners were English or Dutch. I had read so many books of the First World War and the camaraderie. That was absolutely missing here.”
When the Red Cross parcels arrived, Mazumdar was left without. “They had food, but they wouldn’t share it. These were so-called educated people. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
From the German standpoint, Mazumdar was not just an oddity, but an opportunity. Several thousand soldiers of the British Indian Army were captured during the fighting in north Africa. If these prisoners, and other Indians resident in Germany could be persuaded to throw in their lot with the Nazis, that might simultaneously undermine British rule in India, boost Germany’s military forces and deliver an important propaganda victory.
Mazumdar had made no secret of his nationalist sympathies, and so the German officers set about trying to persuade the only Indian officer in the British Army to switch sides, but failed.
At Colditz, Mazumdar was allocated a top bunk at the back of the uppermost attic in the British quarters, which meant that if he needed to use the bathroom in the night, he tended to wake his roommates by clattering in clogs across the wooden floor and had to endure a flurry of curses. “What the hell is the matter with you, Mazumdar?”
As an Indian, he was assumed to be able to make curries, though he had seldom cooked a meal in his life.
When the Indian doctor approached the escape committee run by senior British officers and said he would like to be considered a candidate in future attempts to get out of Colditz, the suggestion was greeted with derision. “You? Escaping from here? With your brown skin?”
On June 23, 1941, Mazumdar was taken to Berlin where he had a surprise meeting. A balding, bespectacled figure wearing a civilian suit rose from behind the desk and extended a hand. An admirer of Bose since childhood, Mazumdar was suddenly star-struck dumb.
In a soft, authoritative voice, Bose made his pitch. “Join my Legion,” he said. “Come and fight for the freedom of India, our motherland.” Mazumdar pointed out that he had pledged an oath of allegiance to the king: “I have given my word of honour and cannot go back on this.”
He was returned to Colditz. At night, on a scratchy mattress in an uncomfortable bunk, he wrote poems in Bengali, searching for a way out of his dilemma: In the darkened light the awakened soul / Seeking for a path Which direction to take / Disturbed, he starts to think/ What to do He then realises the need for a companion/ The question is where to find one/ They are so precious. / At last he pleads with the Gods to find him one.
In accordance with the Nazi insistence on racial stratification, the Germans had set up a handful of camps in Germany and occupied France containing only Indian prisoners, mostly soldiers of the British Indian Army captured in North Africa. The security at such places was well below Colditz standards.
If Mazumdar could get himself transferred to an all-Indian camp, he calculated, there might be a better chance of escaping. If not, he would at least get away from the rumours of disloyalty that dogged him in Colditz, find someone to talk to in Bengali and resume his medical work. After a 16-day hunger strike, the Germans agreed to move him to a camp for Indian prisoners on February 26, 1943. While he was being shifted, he jumped out of a moving train but was recaptured.
Meanwhile, MI5 set up a special unit, Section Z, to investigate Indian subversion, and a file was opened on Mazumdar. When he did escape and found his way to Switzerland, the British were not convinced of his loyalty. Officers who had served in British India regarded Mazumdar with mistrust. Some referred to him as a ‘Bengali Baboo’, a pejorative term for an Indian perceived as over-educated and ‘uppity’. He was told not to fraternise with white Swiss women. In November 1944, he was transferred to Marseilles, and put on a troop ship back to England.
He had been back in Woolwich barracks for just two weeks when the suspect now identified as ‘Z/240’ in a file labelled ‘Indian Subversion’ was summoned to the War Office. The interviewer concluded that Mazumdar posed no security threat and deserved “credit for remaining loyal”, yet the odour of suspicion still clung to him. He was discharged in 1946.
In 1947, India won its independence. Mazumdar might now have returned to the country of his birth, but he chose to remain in England.
In the bank one day, he was served by an attractive young cashier named Joan, who recalled their first meeting: “He stood there at the counter. He was always beautifully groomed – three-piece suit, gloves; never smoked without his gloves on.” They married and moved to Wales, where Mazumdar worked as a GP, and later to Essex. They had two sons. After Biren’s retirement, the Mazumdars settled in the village of Galmpton in Devon.
Shortly before Indian independence and still in British uniform, Mazumdar visited his hometown of Gaya. His brother’s family was also staying in the family house, and on the day they were leaving, Biren bought first-class tickets at the station, installed them in a compartment on the train to Calcutta [now Kolkata], and went to buy food for their journey. He arrived back at the train to see his relatives being hustled out of their first-class seats by a British sergeant-major to make way for an Englishman and his mistress.
“What happened?” Mazumdar asked. “They told me to get out,” his brother replied. Mazumdar rounded on the British soldier and gave vent to all the frustrations built up over so many years of captivity and prejudice.
“Stand to attention! Salute a senior officer!” His tirade continued for several minutes, as the soldier cowered. “You are dismissed.” Mazumdar turned. The packed platform had fallen silent. The porters had dropped their bundles and the Indians were staring in awe. Then the applause started, building to a deafening roar, as they stamped their feet and cheered. “Shabash!” they shouted. “Shabash!”
Macintyre told Eastern Eye: “Someone really should do a whole book on Birendranath Mazumdar.”