Everybody’s Friend

by Raghu Karnad

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, we let drop the page that had Indians fighting on both sides.

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.

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.

“Whenever you are confronted with an opponent conquer him with love.”