THE INDIAN
SPY
Mihir Bose
Aleph Books
2017 350 Pages
In the
course of their clandestine activities, the attitude of spies towards their
ostensible masters can evolve towards antagonism. However, the late Bhagat Ram Talwar
code-named Silver, the protagonist of The Indian Spy, started off
working AGAINST British interests before working for them. But then, the only quintuple secret agent of
World War 2, Agent Silver also “worked” for Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist
Italy and the USSR...
After a
successful track record of feeding disinformation to the Axis powers at the
behest of his Soviet masters, Silver was offered to the British as an asset in
place. Scarcely able to believe such a valuable gift, the Raj made full use of
his talents. He was rewarded for broadcasting fictitious military information thrice daily from the Viceroy's palace in New Delhi with a nice residence and paid holidays.
No James
Bond manqué (though his wartime handler was one Peter Fleming, older brother of
007 creator Ian), short and lean Silver’s rather nondescript appearance masked
a shrewd, resourceful, opportunistic and quick-witted operator, besides a
protean master of disguise. The author’s commitment to journalistic veracity
often clashes with unreliable accounts from the manipulative master dissembler himself
– but such is the nature of a successful spy.
Defying the
Gunga Din stereotype of unquestioning servility towards our late colonial overlords,
Agent Silver began his career in espionage as a radical nationalist dedicated
to clandestine subversion of the British Raj. Departing further from stereotype,
though of Punjabi-Pathan stock, he was a Hindu, the son of a respected wealthy landowner,
Gurdasmal, who despite the honours he received from the British had no love for
the Raj. The execution of his adored elder brother Hari Kishan for accidentally killing a policeman during an assassination attempt against the British Governor of Punjab helped push the young Silver towards membership of
the anti-imperial fringe communist Kirti party.
Silver’s
first major coup was in successfully conveying the fugitive Subhash Chandra
Bose from house arrest in wartime Kolkata to Kabul in neutral Afghanistan. His
fluency in Urdu and Pashto enabled him to masquerade convincingly as Rahmat
Khan, a supposedly Afghan cook, courier and guide. This proved to be but the
first of 24 spying missions that shuttled between Peshawar and Kabul, with the
slippery Silver eluding capture and certain death in the lawless tribal
badlands between British India and Afghanistan.
Mihir Bose’s
fascinating book lucidly recounts the murky exploits of a real-life Kim who
operated in a very fraught wartime environment well beyond the imaginings of even
Rudyard Kipling. As a serious work of popular history, The Indian Spy
constitutes a necessary antidote to the rose-tinted view of empire peddled by
the likes of Niall Ferguson and Lawrence James.
No uncritical admirer of the
British Raj, the author shows how political circumstances often make for
strange bedfellows – and how an Indian communist significantly helped a fading
empire he initially opposed against the Axis powers, under orders from Moscow.
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