Definition of modern India: "A complex variety of factors shaped Indian forms of modernity, rather than suggesting that Europeans brought modernity to India.”
South Asia is divided into seven nation-states: India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Bhutan, with the island-nations of Sri Lanka and the Maldives
Dependent upon American support and resources
Limited in its ability to control the Indian population
Rabindranath Tagore
The British Empire was weak in 1942
Key Ideas
Slide 3
“Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore is one of the most revered figures in Indian history for his literature, non-fiction, poetry, and monumental social and political achievements. In 1913, he became the first Indian—indeed, the first non-European—to win the Noble Prize in Literature”
Rabindranath Tagore
Slide 4
“Subash Chandra Bose, who by 1942 had lived forty-five storied, and indeed, rather painful years.”
“Bose’s bravery was unrivaled. Fed up with non-violent nationalism, Bose sought to work with the Axis powers to unseat British rule in India”
“he turned to the Japanese with a proposal: drawing on the Indian soldiers of the British army the Japanese had captured around Singapore and other Indians in the area, Bose would build an army to march on India. ”
“The Indian National Army (INA) did not have much military success but it was a potent symbol of Indian resistance to British rule.”
“Subash Chandra Bose raising a rebellious army in Singapore; Gandhi and the entire nationalist leadership imprisoned in India; Rabindranath Tagore and Benodebehari steadily pursuing their artistic and social aims near Calcutta”
Subash Chandra Bose
Slide 5
“For in 1942, there was a giant “shiver” in British India.Despite the ties between Indian and Japanese nationalists, India was arrayed against the Axis powers in World War Two by virtue of its status as a British colony”
“Singapore fell on February 15, 1942. As the Japanese advanced on Burma, more than 300,000 members of the large Indian population residing there were forced to flee six hundred miles on foot in the rainy season”
“there were around a thousand casualties from Japanese air raids in India and minor damage to Calcutta”
