“The Swaraj Spy” by Vijay Balan

Vijay Balan

When Vijay Balan was a young boy, his father would regale him with stories inspired by family history. One of these centered around Balan’s grand-uncle, a police officer in 1920s and early 1930s India who later went on to Singapore and became a spy for the Japanese military during World War II. Balan has turned this tale into his first novel, The Swaraj Spy. The title refers to the Hindustani word for self-rule, and it’s this wish that drives the main character, Kumaran “Kumar” Nair. The book is less a mass market spy thriller and more of a character-driven story of a man who hopes to do right by his family and country. 

Kumar is a dedicated police officer—a jamadar, equivalent to an English lieutenant—who leads a platoon in the Malabar Special Police (MSP). His career comes to a halt when his British commandant orders him to violently break up a demonstration of women who are protesting the execution of freedom fighter, Bhagat Singh.

 

The odd serenity puzzled Kumar. Women sat calmly in lines like mannequins glued together. He had always seen protestors flee when MSP arrived. The unit’s reputation, as the British Empire’s brutal weapon scattered adversaries with scant regard for life and limb, was well known.

 

The Swaraj Spy, Vijay Balan (HarperCollins India, November 2022)
The Swaraj Spy, Vijay Balan (HarperCollins India, November 2022)

But something comes over him and he cannot use his platoon to attack unarmed women. For disobeying orders, he is let go and returns home to Calicut, or present day Kozhikode. His disdain for the British grows after this experience.

Kumar’s mother and sisters are surprised when he returns home after almost a decade in the MSP. His mother worries about his future and finds a wife for him named Maalu. Their honeymoon trip to Ooty is just one example of the cinematic way Balan writes about place.

 

The little train with four blue miniature carriages and a vintage engine climbed very slowly up the steep mountainside. A sawtoothed rack-and-pinion track between two narrow gauge rails ensures that the carriages did not slide back down the gradient. The train crawled, like a caterpillar clinging precariously to the backbone of a giant, spiked reptile. Great bamboo clumps soared over the track in graceful arches. Pink, orange and yellow bougainvillea flowers flashed from the lush green forest like decorative light bulbs.

 

After a series of misfortunes back in Calicut, an opportunity opens in Singapore, thanks to a brother-in-law in the Royal Air Force, and Kumar goes there first while Maalu stays back in India with Kumar’s mother. The plan for them to eventually reunite is undone by the outbreak of war. In Singapore, Kumar runs into a friend who is on his way to Tokyo. The friend is vague about his trip, but tells Kumar in so many words that he’s working with the Japanese against the British, all towards the goal of Indian self-rule.

 

The first half of the book shows how Kumar got to the point of working with the Japanese army to sabotage the British in India and help India gain independence, while the second half is the actual spy story and begins with Kumar taking another train, this time from Singapore to Penang for intelligence training.

 

Late in the evening, the train pulled into Butterworth, the mainland harbour opposite Penang Island. After downing a bowl of fiery curry laksa at a noodle stall, he caught a ferry to George Town. Grey warships lined both sides of the channel. Submarines painted in dark, metallic colours rested in a neat line along the George Town jetty; their conning towers arrayed like stout, sooty chimneys.

 

Kumar makes his way to the Penang Free School, where he and thirty-three Indian men train with Japanese intelligence at the newly-formed Indian Swaraj Institute. The spy network is not very large, but it is terribly unsuccessful. The Japanese send some of the Indian spies to parts of India where they do not fit in due to language and culture, while others are sent overland to Burma and captured by the British almost immediately.

Kumar grapples with his role under the British in India and the Japanese in Malaysia. He realizes later that the Japanese use of him was more symbolic than strategic, ie, to make the British military think that Indians are turning against them in the war. Towards the end of the story, Kumar reflects on his role in all of this.

 

Maybe joining the Indian Swaraj Institute was my way of proving to myself that I was right all along to resist the British—secretly in my mind at first, and more tangibly later. Did I choose this life, or did it choose me?

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.