Kavita Puri’s work across award-winning series Three Pounds in My Pocket, Partition Voices and Three Million has illuminated forgotten or unheard stories from South Asia so, looking at the Second World War, it was inevitable she would land on the region’s “Forgotten War”.
Trying to understand the reasons behind this forgetting drives much of the series.
Was it simply a matter of distance? As a schoolboy, Peter Knight had put up a map of Europe in the living room of his Bromley home, to chart the course of the war. Then after the invasion of British Malaya in 1941 and the opening of a new front in Asia, he put up “the second map”. In the series he describes it as a “far away war, not our war. We had bombs falling on our head. That was the here and now.”
Another interviewee, Maurice Naylor, who’d been forced to work on the Burmese railway, stood at his parents’ door in 1945 as a 24-year-old weighing only five stone. There was almost a code of silence, with PoWs told not to upset their families with stories and the families told not to say anything to upset the men. Maurice didn’t say a word until he was 61.
The moral ambiguity of empire certainly played a part. While the war in Europe was seen as a heroic fight against Nazism, in Asia it boiled down to the British Empire fending off Japan’s imperial ambitions for its colonies. And the fact that the 14th Army’s victories at Kohima and Imphal in India – which Puri describes as “some of the greatest battles we’ve ever fought” – are largely unknown has led some historians to say there’s “racialised forgetting”, as the 14th Army was formed of more than 75 per cent non-white troops.
It’s this knottiness that attracts Puri. “I’m always interested in complexity. History has become such a culture war football, but I don’t see it that way. History is not one thing and life is complex. I try to tell a small story through a person, and in that small story, I’m telling a bigger story of the history and the context. But it’s notdefinitive – no account of the war is ever going to be definitive.”
There are plenty more remarkable small stories in The Second Map, including that of Ursula Graham Bower, the first woman to lead a combat unit in the Second World War, which Puri surmises as “straight from the movie screen”. Graham Bower was a budding anthropologist living with a Naga tribe in north-east India when the Japanese reached the border, but the phlegmatic 28-year-old soon took up arms, sending a cable to the Army: “Going forward to look for enemy. Kindly send guns and ammunition, soonest.”
Recalling her conversation with Yavar, a dapper 104-year-old, Puri says, “He feels pained at the wars happening now. He fought a war in the name of freedom and he would say, ‘What was that for?’ I do think there’s a connection between the postwar order shifting at the moment and the generation of people who remember the horrors of war dying out.”
But The Second Map is marked by how much testimony is from the archive – which plays on Puri’s mind: “What makes me sad is that we are asking questions just when that generation is dying. We’ve lost so many stories already, I don’t have time to hang about. It’s a significant anniversary so I had to get this out quickly.
“There was a moment when I was talking with Peter in his living room, and he takes me right back to the war, what was happening, how he felt. It’s so evocative. I couldn’t believe I was sitting there listening to this 98-year-old man telling me a story of the war. And I thought, how long can I do this for? Not much longer. I felt so lucky.”
Hence then, the article about the far away war was published today ( ) and is available on Radio Times ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The far away war )
Also on site :