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The missing gaps

Northeast in WWII: Too many gaps to fill

By Manimugdha S Sharma,

The Times of India, 04 March 2013

The Times of India

In March 1941, the government of British India revised the national defence plan. Mounting concerns over Japan’s aggressive designs on South-East Asia forced the government to raise seven armoured regiments and about 50 infantry battalions to supplement five fresh infantry divisions and two armoured divisions. Indians signed up for the army in large numbers.

Amar Singh of Tuto Mazara in Hoshiarpur joined the British Indian Army as Lance Nayak. Born to Ram Singh and Partap Kaur, Amar married Kartar Kaur of the same village. But when he turned 20, Amar had to leave for the deserts of North Africa with his regiment, the Royal Bombay Sappers and Miners. He saw action in Libya as part of the 21 Field Company. Amar never returned from the front. He was killed on July 6, 1942. He had just turned 21.

The wait never ended for Dharam Singh and Chunia of Netanandour Nangalia village in Bulandshahr (UP), too. Their 21-year-old son, Puran Singh, was a Sowar with the 2nd Royal Lancers and was killed in Libya on March 14, 1941.

Not many of us in Assam and the rest of the Northeast remember (or like to remember) or talk about the Great War. The reasons for this vary from not having much knowledge about the war to a total lack of interest in history. Our textbooks could be blamed for this as much as our national conscience: nowhere in India do school, college and university-level textbooks shed much light on Indians in the Great War. That has ensured that millions of our people grow up oblivious to the role of those 2.5 million troops that fought for the British Empire in a war they had absolutely no stake in. This is something that war veterans rue and loathe.

Many would know Lieutenant General (retired) J F R Jacob as the former governor of Punjab and Goa. Old timers still remember him as the hero of Bangladesh War of 1971: the man who surrounded Dhaka with just 3,000 troops and forced Pakistani general A A K Niazi to surrender unconditionally. This WWII veteran recalls: “My unit took on the might of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in North Africa. We faced the Panzer divisions without any tank support and were cut up quite badly. We had to regroup,” the general recounted with the most hair-raising details. But he was very critical of our role as journalists in disseminating information about the war. “I wonder why your media always harps on the Bangladesh War to glorify the Indian Army. Our army achieved far greater glory in WWII than anywhere else. Why not talk about that?”

There were many soldiers from the Northeast in WWII who went to the war wearing khakis, fought the Japanese in Burma and Malaya, and in Kohima and Imphal; there were many civilians, too, who gathered intelligence, acted as messengers, helped build air strips, and took care of the commissariat; but where are their records?

So far, whatever photographic evidence of the war in the eastern theatre has come to the public domain, most of it has originated from one source—the Imperial War Museum in London. Subaltern studies undertaken in the Northeast have been few and far between. It’s not surprising, therefore, that public libraries in the region don’t have much material about locals participating in the War. The Assam State Museum has an array of WWII weapons on display, but it’s difficult to access the documents section. At least in Assam, the emphasis seems to be more on preserving the legacy of the Ahom rule than anything else; but that, too, is turning out as a shoddy job without any effort to separate fact from fiction. The vast volume of literary and cinematic works coming out from the region, too, leaves aside the War.

A Manipuri filmmaker is an exception in this regard. Mohen Naorem has been [trying to make] a trilingual film (it will be made in Manipuri, Japanese and English) on the Japanese invasion of India during WWII. Titled My Japanese Niece, the movie has actors from Manipur, Japan, Korea, and Britain, and highlights a little-known aspect of the War—that the people of Manipur were sympathetic to the Japanese, and that many Japanese had stayed back after the defeat of the imperial Japanese troops.

Even the Japanese have a similar problem. They have grown up without knowing much about the Great War.

Information from readers

Dekhu says:

Who can ever forget that Congres which was the only party that mattered was so angry with the British Viceroy who had just declared that India too had joined the war on behalf of the Allies that it asked its Chief Ministers to resign forthwith in protest against this declaration and they did so dutifully rather obediently. But that does not obviate the supreme sacrifice made by hundreds and thousands of Indians who enlisted with the Indian army and went to fight in the deserts of Africa.

Phepya (Delhi) says:

I remember my mom telling us, when she was a young girl, her father acted as a guide to the British troops in the then dense jungles of Margherita area.

ABC (Hyderabad) says:

Indians were confused about entire WWII, especially in eastern theater. Indian sympathies quickly shifted from anger to sympathy for Subhas Bose's INA. Japanese Imperialism was certainly worse than British Imperialism. While Indian National Congres opposed fascism and Axis Powers, they jumped to defense of INA.

Anjan Roy (USA) says:

There are some relevant books to read: 'The Springing Tiger' by Hugh Toye, 'His Majesty's Opponent' by Professor Sugata Bose, 'Brothers Against The Raj' by Professor Leonard Gordon, and 'The Jungle Alliance - Japan and the India National Army' by Professor Joyce Lebra. The strength of the Indian National Army (INA) was approximately 45,000, raised mainly from the soldiers and officers of the Brritish Indian army who were captured by the Japanese in Malaya. Many of them died fighting the British on the Manipur front. They were Indians of all provinces and all religions, including Anglo-Indians.

RGS (Houston, Texas) says:

US Army had helped build the Ledo road. a website has been created for 'Merrill's Marauders' - 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional unit) US Army. many of the roads (that still exist) in Assam and in the NE were built by the British during WW II.

Reconstructing the history of WW II in the North-East

Adapted from a prize-winning essay by

By Raghu Karnad

Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize runner-up

December 28, 2012

Financial Times

Millions of Indian soldiers served the British during the second world war, yet their experience has been largely forgotten

Gurkha soldiers in Imphal in May 1944 cutting bamboo stakes to defend their positions ©AP

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains the Imphal war cemetery, one of six in North Eastern India.

On the plaque at the head of each grave brass letters rise to a shine against black [cast] iron:

Godrej Khodadad Mugaseth (Bobby)

Godrej Khodadad Mugaseth (Bobby)

Godrej Khodadad Mugaseth (Bobby)

Lieutenant Godrej

Khodadad Mugaseth

King George V’s Own Bengal

Sappers and Miners

Below that an epitaph:

He lived as he died, everybody’s friend.

May his beloved soul rest in peace

Raghu Karnad, the author of the essay that this article is based on, had never seen his real name in writing before. He was Karnad's grandmother’s brother, and among family he was spoken of as Bobby, though even that was rare. In fact, the Karnad family had almost forgotten that Bobby existed at all.

Bobby grew up in Calicut on the Malabar Coast, part of its tiny community of Parsis, or Indian Zoroastrians. Karnad knew that he had trained to be an engineer, and in 1942 had taken a commission in the British Indian Army. He had gone to war with the Bengal Sappers’ 2nd Field Company. Two years later, he had evidently run out of luck near Imphal.

When the family received the letter carrying news of his death, it was the third letter of its kind in as many years. His sisters had both had their husbands die in service in the preceding years; Nurgesh, Karnad's grandmother, lost her husband a month before their child was born. The war wiped out the young men of the family, and the decades after wiped clean the memory of them. Karnad was nearly 30 before Karnad learnt about Karnad's family’s losses, when it slipped out as a wisp of anecdote over dinner. By then Karnad's grandmother was gone, along with anyone else who might have told Karnad about the war abroad and the private apocalypse at home.

Karnad began to dig around this gap in family memory, and straight away Karnad dropped to the bottom of a deeper pit: a lapse in remembering the war, not just by Karnad's family but by Karnad's entire country. The largest all-volunteer army in the second world war was India’s, but no public memory remains of those men and women, their lives at war or their deaths. There is no monument and no Memorial Day, and there’s no notion at all of the dilemma they faced, fighting for the Empire at the very hour that their countrymen fought to be rid of it.

The heroes of India’s freedom struggle spent most of the war years in jail, refusing to endorse India’s involvement. From among the soldiery, the only admitted heroes are the members of the Indian National Army, led by Subhash Chandra Bose and armed by Japan against the British Empire. Forty thousand men served in the INA; 2.5m in the British Indian Army. Yet the experience of the latter has sunk with all hands. Between the closing chapter of imperial history and the first volume of the national record, Karnad let drop the page that had Indians fighting on both sides.

Family photographs at the home of Karnad’s grandmother including Bobby Mugaseth and KC Ganapathy, his great-uncle and grandfather who died in the war

In the family home, the trunks burped dust when they were forced open, but they produced no more than a few sepia portraits of soft-featured young men, their hair waxed and moustaches bayonet-sharp in readiness for adventure. There were no letters, no movement orders; nothing that would tell Karnad why Bobby had chosen to fight, or where he had served, or who had chosen his epitaph, and what it might mean to be a soldier at war and yet be everybody’s friend.

Into this silence arrived an email, a reply from the War Graves Commission. In it, Casualty Enquiries suggested Karnad might visit the grave of Godrej Mugaseth, the man Karnad hadn’t expected to find, in Imphal, a place Karnad had never expected to go.

The Second World War sites of Manipur

Imphal is the capital city of Manipur, one of the seven states in the wizened limb of northeastern India, where the border with Myanmar crawls through hills as steep as in a child’s drawing.

Indeed, the last time the world paid much attention to Imphal was when Bobby arrived here. A tangled line between Imphal and Kohima, the capital of the neighbouring state of Nagaland, was the ultimate extent of the Japanese advance across Asia. The battle for Kohima was as desperate as any in the war, and although seldom remembered, it was as fateful as Tobruk or Normandy. When the Emperor’s army was repelled from the two towns in the summer of 1944, it began the great rollback that concluded with Japanese surrender.

Two days in Imphal had left Karnad as eager as any Japanese conscript to leave. From the cemetery, it wasn’t hard to find the Manipur Mountaineering and Trekking Association: its climbing wall, pronged out above surrounding roofs like a crooked antenna, was the only apparent architectural effort in that part of town. The MMTA was still developing its programme for tourists, as there were none, but it did have a car headed to a camp where local mountaineers were training to summit Everest. The next morning, Karnad marched behind them up to the hill of Laimaton, climbing through dripping forest and across breezy alpine pasture.

Near the top, Karnad had to spend a minute crumpled on the grass. When Karnad rose, his guide Surjit pointed out a web of shallow gutters in the hillside, all clogged with forest litter. “Japanese trench,” Surjit said. “Trench for men. There, for horse. There, trench for gun.” Karnad squatted down inside one, bobbing Karnad's head over the edge, and imagined a column of advancing Gurkha Rifles – or a platoon of Bengal Sappers, lifting mines from the tall grass. But the game grew old quickly; the drama and the dread of war were buried under too many seasons of soggy leaf-drop. Then Surjit pointed again.

Where Laimaton banked up, a granite rock-face, wet from a rain shower, shone in the morning glare like a beaten iron shield. On it was carved a samurai sword, 6ft high, inside a crude circle like the rising sun. It was an Imperial banner, left by some departing soldier, undiminished by 70 monsoons – or by the spray of bullet-holes added when British troops retook the hill.

Surjit could tell Karnad little about the sword. To him it was less a mystical relic than a natural feature of the landscape, one he did his best to protect from the rural quarryists whose chisels spiked the air like far-off, disordered birdsong. To Karnad it was something else: at the furthest and most frayed edge of the country, decorated not with wreaths but a lace of lichens and scratchy lantana, at last a monument to Bobby’s war.

. . .

The next afternoon, the sword was real. It materialised, laid across a woman’s palms, in the lakeside town of Moirang. Though Karnad’d never heard of Moirang, its history is famous by local standards, which means it has its own crummy government museum. It is thought to be the spot where the national flag was first raised on Indian soil, by a brigade of INA soldiers advancing with the Japanese 33rd Division. Manipuri activists had slipped down here to join the INA; after Independence some became successful in state politics, which is the fact principally celebrated by the museum. War ordnance has also been dumped in cabinets, where it rusts into ferrous cauliflowers.

In Moirang Karnad had asked to meet anybody very old, and was brought by mid-morning before Oinam Mani Singh. Of course he remembered the invasion, he said, as he pleated a white cloth around his legs and waist; he’d barely survived it. For five weeks, his family lay in a dugout in the forest, while he would swim across Loktak Lake, under shelling, to retrieve from hidden stores of rice. Mani Singh made a gesture, and at the door, his wife lifted something down from the lintel: their “samurai sword”, really a Japanese officer’s sabre, now a family heirloom.

She also fished out a book of smudged type, which related the story of Koireng Singh, one of the rebels “due to [whose] support the INA and the Imperial Japanese army could liberate two-thirds of Manipur and the whole of Nagaland from the clutches of British imperialism”. The rest of the book hailed wartime Moirang as the “advanced headquarters of the Provisional Govt of free India”; a strange thing to read in what may still be the least free part of the country.

Karnad would discover that in Manipur and Nagaland, anybody old enough remembers the war. In every village, war memory is the oldest of all living memory; thus it has a status approaching legend, and is still related in tones of amazement. In Shirui, when the planes began crossing overhead, they thought the sound was bees, but seeing none, were mystified. At the Khankui Caves, after Japanese stragglers took refuge in the deep caverns, British soldiers pulled off their uniforms and pursued them naked, so their skin would be visible to each other in the darkness. Everywhere, roads were laid. Trees reverberated with the engines of lorry convoys. Advancing Japanese columns stole the livestock, yet sometimes a soldier let you taste fish that came out of a metal box. Metal had been rare to the tribes – now it fell deadly from the sky.

Folklore has it that the Japanese gave Manipur the name “Takane No Hana”, or “the flower on lofty heights”: a thing for which you reach but cannot grasp. Every empire that reached for Manipur has left it manhandled but never truly held.

Ukhrul

Ukhrul, near the border with Nagaland, has a single road that runs along a ridge; the town slopes away to the left and right, and the gaps between houses flash impossible views of the giant green chest of hills across the valley. Karnad stayed here awhile, hiking in the mornings, then hitting the town to scour the shops for medicine for diarrhoea. One afternoon, a man hurtled out at Karnad from the shade of a pharmacist’s shop. He wore a floppy hat and his face seemed wrinkled less by age than by the exertion of his gleeful, non-stop grimacing. He talked in a gale of pidgin English, Hindi and Nagamese, from which Karnad could snatch some sense – he too had seen the war – though it was really too hot an hour for indulging an affable old loon. Karnad backed away, apologetic. His face fell. Karnad halted.

Karnad's driver, Freddy, was a pastor in his thirties, with sidelines in a taxi service and managing a local metal band. Alert and curious about his passengers, Freddy offered to act as interpreter. At once the man in the hat grew coherent and calm, and so Karnad discovered that Yangmasho Shishak didn’t just live through the second world war. The war lived through him.

. . .

Yangmasho Shishak’s membership card for the Indo-Japanese Friendship Association ©Anmol Tikoo

April 1944, the 4th Mahratta Light Infantry reaches Ukhrul

In April 1944, when the 4th Mahratta Light Infantry rolled into Ukhrul to form the defending line, they recruited a Naga tribal boy as a runner. Shishak, just 14 years old, carried messages between outposts, until one day he was captured by an enemy patrol. He was brought before General Iwaichi Fujiwara, the head of intelligence of the 31st Division, and one of the rare Japanese commanders whom history credits with seeing the strategic profits of empathy and restraint. After the surrender of Singapore, he had negotiated with prisoners of war and raised the first brigade of the INA. Now, instead of having Shishak shot, Fujiwara asked if the boy would run messages for him.

Like a tiny, speedy figure of the Indian nation, Shishak worked for both sides of the war. The forests he grew up in were shredded and incinerated in the fighting but, through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy, Shishak remembers only a time of pure glory. When the armies ultimately rolled away, leaving him to a life as a provincial schoolteacher, Shishak did not surrender his memories. Instead, he made remembrance his true vocation: he became an unknown, one-man custodian of the war in the Manipur hills.

In his own courtyard in Sangshak village, he has seen to the construction of two memorials: one to British and Indian dead, funded by British regiments, and another to the Japanese. His wood-plank house has become a museum of wartime scraps and fragments. And though nobody knows who he is in Ukhrul, let alone in Delhi, he’s spent his life sporadically in touch with British and Japanese officers who have returned to Sangshak since the war ended.

1972, Gen Fujiwara visits Imphal

In 1972, the newspapers reported that Gen Fujiwara himself was visiting Imphal. Shishak rushed to the capital and petitioned to meet him but, of course, he was flicked away by state officials. Shishak would not give up. Having gathered that Fujiwara would travel to Kohima next, he caught a bus and got there ahead of the general. At the war cemetery he waited, and when finally the general entered, he greeted him; do you remember me, the Naga runner you made your friend?

In the village of Sangshak in Manipur, Yangmasho Shishak’s living room doubles as a war museum

“It has been too many years,” Fujiwara replied. “I don’t know if you are who you say you are. But – if you can recall my final words to you, then I will know.”

Shishak did not miss a beat. “You told me, ‘You are young. Continue with your studies now. Sayonara.’”

Hearing those words, Fujiwara wept.

Shishak’s trusteeship of war memory produces other sentiments besides tears. Here, in his museum, is a photograph of himself, middle-aged now, with a Captain Cowell and a Major Harrisman, singing “You Are My Sunshine”, the song they’d taught him at the camp. Here is a folder of paperwork pertaining to the Indo-Japanese Friendship Association, of which he is chairman and possibly sole member. Here are gasmasks and helmets salvaged from the forest, and grainy photos printed at an Ukhrul cyber café. Taken together, they are as true a gallery of the forgotten war as could be: built by a forgotten man who spent his life in a forgotten place, and who, at that point so remote from all memory, remained everybody’s friend.

By the time Karnad left him, the hills had swallowed the sun, and Freddy was fretting about army checkpoints. Karnad torqued along roads curving into the night, to Jessami and from there, like the Japanese 31st Division, west to Kohima. Karnad had followed the war-front, a route like a great old nerve of pain and heroism, set deep in the heavy hills but leaping back to life at a touch. And in Kohima, as in Imphal, the first sight recommended to visitors was the cemetery.

The Commonwealth War Cemetery in Kohima, Nagaland

Moving again between the rows, Karnad read the headstone of every fallen farrier and fusilier. Karnad felt a pang for the solitary East African, a black man buried amid brown men who fought yellow men at the orders of white men. Yet in truth Karnad’d begun to feel worn out and estranged. It was Karnad's last day of travel, and there had been no sign of Bobby since the first, at his grave. Now Karnad approached the end of the last row, where an embossed iron sign stood behind a fringe of creepers. Karnad parted them to read it.

Erected by their comrades of 161st Indian Infantry Brigade Group in proud and undying memory of the officers and men of the following units of the 5th Indian Division who fell in the defence and relief of Kohima March to June 1944

Inscribed at the bottom:

2nd Indian Field Company KGVOS and M

Bobby had been at the siege of Kohima, just before he died. The fact of his death was all Karnad had known, and then the place of his burial. Before Karnad left Kohima, Karnad learnt of his finest hour.

The second world war in India’s northeast is twice forgotten: as a time that fell between the spans of separate eras, and as a place that falls past the reach of empires. To be damned as collaborators or else as mutineers, to be everybody’s friend and nobody’s – that dilemma has been shared, murmured through the earth by the last soldiers of the Raj, who lie buried there, to the people who live there today. Now, as the gunpoint lifts away from Manipur and Nagaland, Karnad may begin to receive that vast memory they have held in trust. It is carved on the hillsides, and hangs above doorways. In a courtyard outside Ukhrul, a man pulls his floppy hat down against the setting sun, and remembers Bobby and his brothers in arms.

Raghu Karnad, 29, is a journalist based in Delhi and Bangalore. He has worked as a reporter on the Indian magazines Outlook and Tehelka and is a former editor of Time Out Delhi.

This essay has been uploaded in response to a suggestion to that effect received from Mr. Leishangthem Surjit.