1 FORUM: Wartime Globalization in Asia The transnational mission of an Indian war correspondent: P. R. S. Mani in Southeast Asia, 1944 – 1946 Heather Goodall University of Technology Sydney
[email protected] with Mark Ravinder Frost University of Essex
[email protected] Abstract: This article, based on new archival materials, reconstructs the experiences and observations of an Indian war correspondent as, from 1944 to 1946, he covered the advance of Indian soldiers of the British-led Indian Army from northeast India, through Burma to Malaya at the war's end, then to their eventual deployment with the South East Asian Command in Java after the Japanese surrender. As it transpired, Captain P. R. S. Mani worked as an enlisted public relations officer of the British-led Indian Army but also sustained his commitment as a patriotic Indian nationalist, who gathered intelligence on the Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia and on the impact of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. Relatively little scholarship has focused on Asian war journalism. Mani’s tension-ridden role as a self-styled ‘Indian Army observer’ provides an illuminating insight into the way Britain’s lines of communication were appropriated and subverted during wartime and beyond, and into the way his own nationalism was reshaped by his unofficial transnational activities. ……………………………………………….. The transnational mission of an Indian war correspondent: P. R. S. Mani in Southeast Asia, 1944 – 1946 Armies on the move have long generated lines of communication and flows of information that extended across vast distances. By the mid-twentieth century, the traffic in military information took the form of official dispatches, orders, intelligence and requests for supply, civilian propaganda, soldiers’ correspondence and war reportage, not to mention rumour.