Beating the Rhetoric
In recent times there has been renewed interest in stories of the World Wars that were previously never unearthed. These are stories of resilience of the human spirit and victory even in defeat. Moving beyond the paradigms of right and wrong and the side they have focussed on the other stories of war. And one such heroic story which unfolded during World War 2 was the evacuation of Dunkirk. The Axis forces had surrounded Allied troops holed up in the small seaside town of Dunkirk in France. Against all odds however the Allied troops were able to escape. In the face of imminent death it was one of mankind’s finest moments.
Around the same time however a similar story of resilience was unfolding in the other side of the planet. The theatre was Burma and the event which seemed to trigger a similar story of heroism was Japanese attack on Burma. It was March 1942, as the World War 2 began to unfold in Asia the Japanese forces began to make light of the Allied colonies of Asia. After establishing their dominance in the rest of South Asia the Japanese forces began to move rapidly towards Burma and India.
It all started when Japanese air forces started bombing Rangoon on December 23, 1941. It was subsequently bombed again on December 25, 1941. As the Japanese began to cross over to Burma, the British and the Indian citizens began a long arduous journey back home. What was to be was a three month trail on foot through hills and jungles. What unfolded was not the journey alone but a story that is nothing short of a drama. Some 2, 20,000 refugees survived the journey which was almost 300 miles or almost 500 kilometres long. More than 4000 people are believed to have lost their lives in the journey some from exhaustion others from malnutrion or drowning, yet the true numbers of those dead will never be known.
The 500 kilometres long journey was through the Hukawng Valley in the Mytikinia district of Kachin state. From here one had to proceed to the treacherous Chaukan Pass at the northwestern end of the mountains which divides Bhutan from India. One also had to cross the extremely erratic Daphla river on the way. Prior to that March in 1942 very few had ever crossed through that route. Faced with Japanese onslaught others took the Chindwin river up to Tamu in Manipur and eventually entered Dimapur from where they could proceed to the rest of the country.
The evacuation continued from March till late September as people kept pouring in. In the midst of those treacherous times a few heroes emerged whom history had perhaps forgotten. One of them was 60 year old railway engineer Sir John Rowald who successfully led a party of survivors to safety. There were other heroes as well – the British planters of Assam who provided relief to those who were passing through the forest, the tallest among them being perhaps celebrated planter Gyles Mackrell. Yet there would be no doubt that the most forgotten of the heroes were those impoverished tea garden workers who despite their own pitiable condition didn’t hesitate to help the refugees.
The war and the escape altered the political landscape of South East Asia forever. A glaring example at this point would be of the famous Assamese merchant and adventurer Purnakanta Buragohain. It would be unthinkable today that just 70 years ago a merchant from Assam had been able to set up shop in Burma and subsequently border areas of China. In his travel diary Nine Years beyond the Patkai he articulates the tension and the subsequent relief when he was able to cross over to Assam once the Japanese attacks had started. Such human stories of people moving seamlessly across borders would not be possible anymore. Given the present tension between India and China such incidents seem all the more improbable. Historians also recorded of harmonious relations between different South Asian communities in the pre war era. Punjabis , Tamils ,Sindhis lived in peace and traded in Burma and China. There were Axomiya villages spread across Burma which dated to the Burmese invasion of Assam. South East Asia was truly a place of confluence. Yet merely 70 years later such stories do not reverberate anymore.
From a political point of view perhaps the Burma march was a failure for the Allies. For the imagined communities of South East Asia it was perhaps the loss of a time gone by. Yet more than 70 years later the story of the trek from Burma stands out as a story of human resilience. Faced against the odds of both man and nature, of Burmese bandits and the cholera of Japanese war shells and the tricky Daphla river the people who took the journey stood firm. It was truly a story of victory of the human spirit that needs to be celebrated. The trek that moment was truly the Dunkirk of the East.
( The author looks for stories of North East India)