Heading to Oscars, movie on forgotten Indian soldiers

Almost all the films that are celebrated as war movies in world cinema are from Hollywood or Europe. Retrospectively, one is tempted to ask the question: Whose world and war do these feature?

- CS Venkiteswaran

Some distinct features mark the war movie genre. A majority of them are about the two ‘World Wars, mostly World War IL They revolve around the bravery and sacrifice, the tactical manoeuvres and strategic failures of white men and their armies. The rest of the world constitutes the white man’s war arena, where the natives are part of the background, either as informants and helpers or, more often, as mere fodder.

For instance, over a million Indian troops served overseas during World War I and around 2.5 million in World War II, of which more than 74,000 Indian troops died in the former and about 87,000 in the latter. These soldiers were fighting as members of the native regiments of colonial armies or as mercenaries for whom the army was an employer or a way out of poverty. They were rarely celebrated as war heroes or martyrs. Few memorials were built for them, and no sagas valorised them. They were all fighting someone else’s wars. If their side won, they got paid; if they were on the side of the vanquished, they were killed or taken as prisoners of war (POWs) to face an uncertain future. In his essay, An Indian POW in Italy, Amitav Ghosh recalls watching war movies with his father, who was a WWII veteran: “When I think back now, it strikes me that some of the best of these ‘war movies were actually prisoner-of-war movies.”

Papa Buka