Rumours and History

Rumours have had an unfortunate fate; they are often labelled as misinformation, which must be ‘squashed’, ‘debunked’ and ‘fought against’. They also often carry the tag of being ‘unfounded’, which cloud the ‘truth’ of historical events and processes. Why then do historians around the world continue to be fascinated by rumours?

One of the reasons for this is the evolution of our understanding of history writing as a process that goes beyond the ‘hard facts’ of historical events – a simple recounting of events that occurred on specific dates is no longer enough. Historians are now very much interested in the long and short term socio-political and economic processes that animated those events. People’s experiences, their reactions, beliefs and emotions, all are now seen to be key constitutive forces in history. In 1932, writing about the French Revolution, when Georges Lefebvre first published his ‘The Great Fear of 1789’, he noted perceptively, that more than what had happened, more than the actual ‘truth’ as to what people thought the aristocracy could and could not do, what mattered was what the townsmen and peasants believed to have happened that stirred them into revolt. [1] Fear and rumour, wrote Lefebvre, were ‘potent springs of collective behaviour’ that marked the entire course of the French Revolution. Similarly, Harald Fischer-Tine and Christine Whyte have argued that panic and anxiety, which very much constitute rumours and how the latter are born, are often characterised as ‘irrational’ or ‘overblown’, but historical study of their expression, especially in colonial contexts, reveal a great deal about the workings of empire and how it was experienced. [2]

My own research into rumours during the Second World War echo these points, and offer a window into how the experience and image of the British empire in India changed during the course of the war, especially in light of Japanese military advances, and the thrust this gave to political mobilisations in the province of Bengal in the eastern part of India, which became part of the ‘Eastern Front’ during the War. I focus on circulation of rumours through letters, and what interests me most is the sociability of rumours. Letters were intercepted by British Intelligence officials, and they carried an interesting mix of rumours, as well as information which was classified as rumours (basically anything that did not chime with the official war propaganda of the British). One such letter, written between two brothers in December 1941, talked of the war being an ‘abnormal time’ and that ‘the whole of Calcutta (a city in eastern India) would be handed over to military control, that ‘everyone would be subject to military control and will have to move under their compulsory evacuation.’ Another letter, intercepted and retained in January 1942, talked of returning evacuees from Rangoon in East Asia (after its fall to the Japanese) fearful that the bullets recovered from these injured evacuees were actually British bullets, and that the British were ‘practicing’ on Indians. Intelligence officials labelled this letter ‘highly objectionable’, and police were directed to arrest the writer for spreading anti-British propaganda.

Letters also spoke of the rumoured friendship professed by Germany and Japan towards Indians and hopes of deliverance from British domination by Japan. In January 1942, a young man wrote to his friend of the ‘happy news’ he had recently heard, that after Penang (Malaysia) was thrown to the mercy of the Japanese, the latter encouraged Indians there to continue their everyday life as usual. This benevolent treatment of Indians by the Japanese soldiers formed a common thread in rumours circulated through letters. In February 1942, Intelligence officials reported a rumour that was doing rounds in Calcutta, which said after the Japanese had looted a post office in Burma and found out that the Indian Postmaster was not pro-British, he was left unharmed. In January 1942, a radio announcer was arrested in Calcutta for spreading a rumour on the radio that Hitler had assured Indians that he would not lay down his arms without making India free. [3]

What do these rumours tell us? While colonial officials engaged in an elusive chase to gain control over these rumours, either by withholding letters or arresting the ‘rumour-monger’, the potential for these rumours to cause lasting impact was immense. Firstly, rumours such as the vignettes outlined above, reveal a general state of anxiety around the War and an apprehension of what was to be expected. Secondly, they reveal growing anti-British sentiments, and, in most cases, hopes of help from the Axis powers, especially Japan, in freeing India. Anxieties, panic and rumours hence created a combustible mix, creating a cinder box of discontent. Frustration against the British mounted, in which pro-Japanese and pan-Asian sympathies were fostered. This was compounded by British military losses against Japan, which generated belief that the British were on their way out. The old adage, that one’s enemy’s enemies were one’s friends, found fertile currency in several circles. This cinder box of discontent was what nationalist leaders tapped into while mobilising for the Quit India movement, that shook the British empire in India in 1942.

So, the next time you hear a rumour doing rounds, listen carefully. It might just tell you more than you think!

Dr. Anwesha Roy is a Lecturer of Modern History at the School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities, University of Sheffield. She is the author of Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Her latest book, titled Imagining Quit India: War, Politics and the Making of a Mass Movement, is forthcoming in the summer of 2025.

References

[1] Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (New York, Schocken Books, 1973), p. xiii, emphasis mine.

[2] Harald Fischer-Tine (ed.) Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Cambridge Imperial and Post Colonial Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 6

[3] All rumours mentioned here have been sourced from letters written during WWII between friends and family members, usually from urban centres to the countryside in Bengal. These letters, sometimes detained by Intelligence officials and colonial censors and sometimes released after a copy was made, are neatly classified as ‘War Rumours’ in the Special Branch (Police) Archives in Calcutta, India. They can be accessed by researchers and history students after a special permission from the Calcutta Police Commissioner.

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