246 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
force which will be powerful enough to attack the British army of oc-
cupation in India. When we do so, a revolution will break out, not only
among the civilian population at home, but also among the Indian
Army, which is now standing under the British flag. When the British
government is thus attacked from both sides—from inside India and
from outside—it will collapse, and the Indian people will then regain
their liberty.”^19
A large majority of Indian expatriates in Southeast Asia responded
with great fervor to this pa tri otic call for a revolution. At least eigh teen
thousand civilians, mostly Tamils from southern India, deemed non-
martial by the British as part of their mythology about martial races
and castes, enlisted in the Indian National Army. They received military
training alongside professional soldiers from the northwestern regions
of the subcontinent. Some forty thousand soldiers of Britain’s Indian
Army had forsaken their allegiance to the British king- emperor. Those
who had been unconvinced in 1942 were swept off their feet by “Ne-
taji” (as they came to call Subhas Chandra Bose), and swore loyalty to
him and the cause of India’s freedom. Many tens of thousands of civil-
ians joined the numerous local branches of the Indian Inde pen dence
League, which provided support functions of various kinds to this
newly formed army of liberation.^20
During his submarine journey, Bose had dictated a speech to Abid
Hasan which he planned to deliver to the INA women’s regiment that
he envisioned.^21 On July 12, he gave that speech to the first recruits
of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, which eventually enlisted a thousand
young Indian women from Malaya and Burma—mostly but not ex-
clusively Tamils.^22 The queen of Jhansi had died fight ing against the
British on horseback during the great rebellion of 1857. Bose cited
her as a shining example of female heroism in India, comparable to
France’s Joan of Arc. Lakshmi Swaminathan, a young medical doctor,
took charge as the commander of the women’s regiment. She belonged
to a distinguished family from Madras which had taken part in the
freedom movement since the 1920s. She had caught a glimpse of Bose
at the Calcutta Congress of 1928, and now promptly accepted his invi-
tation to raise a regiment of death- defying women. The Japanese were
aghast at the idea of a women’s regiment, and at first refused to supply