The Second Map is on Radio 4 on 18 August at 11am, and is on BBC Sounds from 15 August.
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”.
But she was shocked when she told people she was making The Second Map for Radio 4, to mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day. “I couldn’t believe how many people said, ‘What’s VJ Day? Did we fight the Japanese?’ People of all ages, and people who are well educated, some of whom may even have studied history at university.”
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.”
But are there more complex reasons? Was it the humiliation of part of the British Empire falling to the Japanese, whom many Brits saw as racially inferior? Or the ignominy of the Allied retreat from Burma (now Myanmar), with troops forced back across hundreds of miles of British territory, and the shame of when brutalised prisoners of war returned home looking, as Knight recalls, like “miserable specimens”?
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.
That moral ambiguity deepened with the war ending after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan has a reluctance to face its wartime past, but even in India it’s not easily commemorated, because a country that gained independence from Britain in 1947 doesn’t want to remember fighting alongside its colonial masters.
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.”
Puri has even unearthed never-before-heard testimony from a Japanese commander, Renya Mutaguchi, in the BBC archive. Yet it’s Yavar Abbas who personifies the series’ complexity. As a supporter of Indian independence, he agonised over whether to join the British fight. He eventually did and, assigned to a combat film unit, captured the aftermath of the atomic bombs, which he calls a crime against humanity.
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.”
A mark of her work is intimate conversations and each series has led to the next, thanks to what she’s told – the Indian immigrants in Three Pounds in my Pocket who would repeatedly talk about Partition; a chance remark in Partition Voices that led her to the Bengal Famine; talking to Peter Knight for Three Million (he’d served on a merchant ship taking grain to Bengal) led to the war in Burma.
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.”
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