While newspapers in India and Australia were reporting on the same incidents, there were significant differences in how they represented Indonesians, Indians, and Surabaya itself over the course of the conflict. Indian seamen in Australia tried to intervene through the imagery in newspaper photos and films to demonstrate their rational demands, but they were ignored at the time. Indian-owned newspapers in India addressed some of the same themes as the Indian seamen in Australia, eventually identifying and expanding upon at least some of the issues the seamen were trying to raise.

This chapter pays attention to the same Indian-owned, English language newspapers, focusing on the three dailies: the Free Press Journal of Bombay, the Madras-based Hindu, and the Calcutta-based Hindusthan Standard. The Delhi-based Indian Communist Party paper, The People's War, had less access to news of the particular battles and addressed the overall Indonesian campaign for Independence rather than localised struggles. In the three dailies, shifts in the narrative are clearly correlated with specific day-to-day events on the front lines.

As a comparison with the Australian papers, this chapter considers the sources from which these Indian papers gained their copy, the context they gave to the Indonesian conflict, and their reactions to the course of the Battle. Another focal question concerns the meanings embodied in the term ‘extremist’. This term was used commonly in the Australian (and British) media, and its use has persisted in recent British analyses such as the 2014 work by David Marston, in which the term ‘extremist’ is used unproblematically for virtually all Indonesian military opposition to the SEAC force. While the Indian media in 1945 used the word almost as commonly as the Australian and British papers of the time, the Indian-owned press understood it to have very different meanings.

Sources

The Battle of Surabaya took everyone by surprise when it exploded on 28 October. There had been other fighting after the SEAC landings in early October, but Surabaya had appeared to be stable. The initial accounts were from the British military and the Netherlands News Agency, and then from journalists in Batavia associated with the London presses or agencies like Reuters and AAP.