Home front India: Women’s experiences in a Second World War battle zone

Women in a battle zone

A small number of photographs of the 1944 Siege of Imphal – the capital city of the state of Manipur, North Eastern India – can be found in the records of the Royal Air Force (RAF). A report of around 60 pages, held by The National Archives as AIR 23/1956, focuses on military logistics but also describes the living conditions of those posted there.

• From our collection

  AIR 23/1956

  Title

  Narrative on the Siege of Imphal, India, March to June 1944

  Date

  1945

Members of the British Army, the Indian Army, the RAF and the United States Air Force all found themselves in the city during one of the key battles of the Second World War. The Battle of Imphal was polled (jointly with the nearby battle of Kohima) as 'Britain’s Greatest Battle' by a poll from the National Army Museum in 2013.

In the course of the Second World War, the valley had received thousands of exhausted civilian refugees retreating from Burma (present day Myanmar) in early 1942, and had been bombed since December 1942 by the Japanese military. The wider state of Manipur had been partially invaded by the Japanese and subjected to a scorched earth policy by the Allies – the systematic destruction of resources that could later benefit the enemy. In some parts every single building was destroyed.

As a frontline of the war, the rice-growing valley became a military camp. North Eastern India received 340,000 Indian troops, 100,000 British troops, 90,000 African troops, 65,000 Chinese troops and 10,000 American troops. The Imphal valley alone at one point held 200,000 troops for 330,000 inhabitants. Over half of the houses owned by Meitei (the Tibeto-Burman people who make up the larger part of the population in the valley) were requisitioned for military purposes. New road infrastructures changed the landscape entirely, and food supplies and labour patterns were transformed.

The photographs show an airfield where women are working and talking, alongside the soldiers, planes and military technologies supporting an unprecedented jungle warfare campaign. Framed by an unknown photographer, these may be some of a very small number of images that show Manipuri women at work during the conflict.

Manipuris show a keen interest in long range petrol tanks.

While the impact of the Second World War on many places around the world has barely been recorded, the longer history of Imphal and Manipur has been politically contested and more closely studied. Historians have used both written sources and oral history accounts to bring better understanding of what that moment meant. In the military report in AIR 23/1956, and in the original captions for the photographs, the women are framed as exotic, attractive and useful to the war effort. Wider sources, however, invite us to consider the experience of the war from women’s own points of view.

Experiences of the conflict

Japan Lan (Japan War), as it is known in Meitei, was a moment of incredibly rapid change for individuals and society in Manipur. In first-hand accounts and in oral histories that have been collected we can see the ambiguities and contradictions, opportunity and desolation that characterised the experience of living in a battle zone. Many of those in this article come from How Women Remember War, a compilation of oral histories published in 2019 by Leisangthem Gitarani Devi.

Witness accounts demonstrate that the war brought violence and fear. The report in AIR 23/1956 mentions that bombing in 1944 killed ‘a certain number of civilian Manipuris’. Wider reports by the colonial administration and oral histories show that bombing by the Japanese destroyed entire residential areas and marketplaces. The only shelters from this threat were trenches with branches and leaves.

Forests and agricultural land were both requisitioned and destroyed by armed forces on both sides, and food was diverted to the troops.

Several accounts describe how the presence of large numbers of male troops was a threat to women.

In the face of all of this, the accounts show that the encounter with military technology was still enthralling.

For an orphaned Manipuri boy, who later wrote an autobiography, The Second World War in Manipur And My Childhood, it was captivating:

In Meitei society in the early 20th century women were important contributors to household income. One major market in Imphal was exclusively run by women vendors.

However, the war also shifted the kinds of work that women were likely to be doing. AIR 23/1956 describes women as loading and unloading transport aircraft that were bringing troops and supplies ‘a work in which the cheerful and gaily-clad Manipuri women would laughingly collaborate’.

Most accounts agree that labouring work for the Allied armed forces was well-paid, although some women reported being ashamed of taking on this kind of manual labour.

Dakota aircraft carried a wide variety of equipment to the Imphal Valley. Since all land communications had been cut by the Japanese, no M.T. could reach the garrison, and small vehicles such as jeeps were flown in by transport aircraft.

However, women were also involved in heavier labour such as the construction of the the vital all-weather airfield at Imphal.

As property was destroyed and their livelihoods disrupted more women took up sex work.

The war in context

Even these brief extracts describing the effect of the war suggest how Manipuri sources offer a more ambiguous picture of the Allies than we often encounter in the UK. Situating the years 1942 to 1944 in the longer history of the Imphal Valley give a better context to this moment of extreme conflict within the lives of the valley's inhabitants.

Manipur was only formally integrated into the British Empire as part of British India less than 50 years before the outbreak of the Second World War. At earlier moments Imphal had been part of the Toungoo Empire, centred around today’s Myanmar.

By the time of the Japanese invasion in 1942, Manipuri women had succeeded in turning back British colonial policy twice, in events known in Meitei as Nupi Lan (women’s wars). In 1904 women had successfully protested forced labour that had been imposed as a form of collective punishment. In 1939, at the outbreak of the war, thousands of women had conducted a market boycott to resist the export of rice that was causing famine conditions in Manipur. After several days of protest and enduring armed violence, they succeeded in this too.

While these photographs show the women working for the Allied forces, it might be wrong to interpret that they supported the Allies' cause.

In dry weather the difficulties of rain and mud are replaced by the dust hazard. At Kangla, a fair-weather strip near Imphal, hundreds of transport aircraft landed daily, and at times the dust raised an impenetrable fog. The photo gives a good impression of conditions. In the foreground, are Manipuri women who are employed by the Air Forces and by the Army.

Some Indians in the 1940s saw co-operation with the Japanese as a faster route to self-governance than loyalty to the British. Historians have shown that some Manipuris joined the Indian National Army, and fought on the side of the Japanese at Imphal. Intense propaganda campaigns were made by both sides. Records from the British administration and Japanese forces show that they were both keen to keep the people at the centre of the destruction in the Imphal Valley on ‘their side’.

A letter from the representative of the British Indian government in Manipur describes the destruction of Manipuri communities taking place in Imphal in 1944:

He describes the effect of the Allied ‘Scorched Earth’ policy on the Imphal valley and asks for more attention from the military to the living conditions of the communities that have been displaced.

Economically, the piling up of villagers in increasing crowded conditions presents an immediate problem and the destruction of paddy and the prospect of considerable areas of paddy land being cultivated inadequately or not at all is one which forces one to envisage famine conditions in the devastated and evacuated areas. These so far are approximately all areas near the foothills to the north, north-east, south-east and south of the valley, as well as the area south of Bishenpur. Politically, the Manipuris have already had their confidence severely shaken by the Japanese invasion of their country, great play having been made in the last few years that they must not mind giving up their houses to the military who were here to defend them from the enemy. If many more of them see their houses, property and food destroyed by us, they can hardly be expected to remain enthusiastically pro-British.

The tensions of being at the site of conflict between empires are reflected in oral history. Some accounts from men and women speak favourably of their relationships with the Japanese invaders.

Ambiguous legacies

The extent of the destruction caused by both Allies and Japanese mean that for many Manipuris, the surrender of the Japanese forces did not mean a ‘win’. The end of the war left the Imphal valley entirely transformed.

Record revealed

Japanese Instrument of Surrender, 1945

After six years of brutal global conflict, this document marked the end of the Second World War.

Some eventually received compensation to rebuild with, first from the Manipur government, and later from the independent Indian government. Other changes were permanent. Still a borderland territory, the new infrastructure meant that post-war Imphal was far less rural. It was now at the centre of a road network connecting India and Burma. The strengthening of the British presence and social change had meant a weakening of the Manipuri royalty. In 1947 Manipur became the first princely state in Asia to have democratic government.

Separatist movements remain active in Manipur, which has been governed under a state of emergency since it was declared a ‘disturbed territory’ by the Indian government in 1958. The fairly rapid retreat of the Allies left weapons behind, and the roads network into northwest Burma became and remains an important route for drug-smuggling.

For most of the 80 years since the Second World War, women have continued to survive alongside armed conflict, most recently insurgents and counter-insurgency forces. Some of the Manipuri women whose oral histories of the Second World War have been recorded were among the Meira Paibi movement (women bearing flaming torches). They have been campaigning for citizens’ rights, particularly protection for women against violence, through night-patrols and protests since the 1970s.

The images in AIR 23/1956, far more than the words in the report, open up reflection on how ‘Britain’s Greatest Battle’ was lived on the front-line by the women who found themselves caught up in that short moment, and in its legacy. They point to the ongoing work that is needed to build a fuller understanding of the impact of the Second World War in India, and of the complex legacies it has had in South Asia and beyond.

Further reading

• Leishangthem Gitarani Devi (2019), How Women Remember War: Unearthing Memories of the Second World War in Manipur, Zubaan Publishers Pvt. Ltd: New Delhi, India
• Berenice Guyot-Rechard, (2018), ‘When legions thunder past: The Second World War and India’s northeastern frontier’, War in History 25 (3)
• Hemant Singh Katoch (2018), The Battlefields of Imphal: The Second World War in North East India, Routledge: Oxford
• Yasmin Khan (2020), Women and War in the British Empire, War and Society 39 (3)
• Khuraijam Nimaicharan Singh (2012), The Second World War in Manipur and My Childhood, Imphal, India