Dunkirk without desis: Why should Christopher Nolan remind us Indians about our war heroes?
“Britain did not fight the Second World War, the British Empire did,” Oxford historian Yasmin Malik writes in her 2015 book The Raj at War.
That Indian men – as part of the British Empire – fought alongside allied troops in World War II is not up for question. Nor is the assertion that the Indian Army – then called the Royal Indian Army – willingly gave more to the war effort than any other country.
Starting the war in 1939 with less than two lakh troops, the Indian Army had burgeoned to become the largest volunteer force in history, ending the Great War with more than 2.5 million (25 lakh) personnel.
The Indian contribution to World War II is well documented, but isn’t spoken about enough, which is perhaps why master director Christopher Nolan has attracted criticism from some quarters – in India and outside – for ignoring the “desis” in his visual epic Dunkirk, which released last month.
But first, a little bit of history: towards the end of 1939, four animal transport companies of the Royal Indian Services Corps sailed from what was then Bombay (now Mumbai) to France. The estimated 1,800 men (mostly from Rawalpindi in today’s Pakistan) and 2,000 animals were then moved onward to the French coast, and three companies ultimately got trapped at Dunkirk where around 4,00,000 allied soldiers were stranded with Germans breathing down their necks from all corners.
While the three companies managed to escape from Dunkirk during the fabled Operation Dynamo, the fourth company, which was a little inland, was captured by German forces.
Since the release of Dunkirk, several articles have questioned Christopher Nolan’s not showing a single face on the beach of Dunkirk, from where the great evacuation was carried out. Some commentators have linked Nolan’s Dunkirk to the British Empire’s “amnesia” over the collective war effort while others have called the 70-mm spectacle yet another instance of Hollywood “white-washing”.
Journalist Manimugdha S Sharma made his position clear, with the title of his TOI piece on Dunkirk and its connection to India, “How Nolan forgot the desis at Dunkirk”. Columnist Dipankar De Sarkar was more brutal, writing in Mint about Dunkirk's "miserable failure in the way it airbrushes Indian soldiers out of it".
Yasmin Malik too wrote on the topic, for the New York Times, drawing a parallel between Nolan's failure to show Indians in his film and the “amnesia of the [British] empire”. The BBC was comparatively tamer, merely questioning if Nolan had ignored the role of the Indian Army.
So was journalist Mihir Sharma who, in Bloomberg View, wrote more generally about the "myths Britain has built up around its past" and how Dunkirk adds to the "falsehood that plucky Britons stood alone against Nazi Germany". However, Sharma also points out that Indians are yet to come to terms with the role played by their ancestors during World War II.
Sharma points that out in a different context. "Indians themselves have yet to come to terms with the notion that many, perhaps most, of their ancestors were passive or active collaborators with the empire...," he writes; but he may have unwittingly hit the nail on the head as far as India's memory of the years between 1939 and 1945 is concerned.
The charge of forgetting the Indian contribution to World War II lies not at Nolan’s feet but at our own. Why do we expect Nolan to carry the torch for the brave Indians who fought for the empire during the Great War?
Our 1.2 billion-people-strong nation boasts of the biggest movie industry in the world. Yet, none of our directors have churned out a movie celebrating or even documenting the Indian Army (the Royal Indian Army, as it was known then) and its role in World War II.
The closest we have come to producing a movie on the subject is Vishal Bharadwaj’s entirely forgettable Rangoon, which uses the World War II as a mere backdrop for what is essentially a convoluted love triangle.
The Indian film industry anyway seems to have an aversion to producing war epics. Our country has fought four full-scale wars since Independence - three with Pakistan and one with China - and one limited conflict, again with Pakistan.
The potential material from these wars, however, has largely gone explored. We've had movies showing the battles of Kargil (Lakshya) and those of the '71 war (Border, 1971). Other productions have focussed more on using a war to further its plot (Manoj Kumar's Upkar, set against the '65 war backdrop) or have concentrated on telling the story of Subash Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army (Bose: The Forgotten Hero being the most popular).
But, none, with perhaps the exception of JP Dutta's LOC: Kargil, compare to the sheer visual scale of, say, a Pearl Harbour or Dunkirk.
With Dunkirk, we have a movie about a World War II event most of us did not know about. Why are we squabbling over whether Nolan chose not to show any Indian faces in the film? If we are so concerned about India missing out on a glory moment in history, why don't we do something about it ourselves?
But that topic - World War II and the Indian soldiers at Dunkirk - seems to be one that Indian directors do not want to touch. For all you know, most of them might not even be aware of what the Indian Army’s contribution to the war was.
And it is not just those with an artistic bent of mind. Our politicians, who dutifully line up at India Gate every July 26 (celebrated as Kargil Vijay Divas) too partake in the collective Indian “amnesia”. They rarely invoke, commend or even mention the sacrifices the Indian soldiers made in the different theatres of World War II or World War I (in which around 1.5 million men from the Indian subcontinent participated).
History books in India make but a cursory reference to India’s contribution to the Great War – in fact, most of us probably know more about the politics behind India’s war effort (the Congress had made India’s participation in WWII contingent on the country getting freedom) than the actual effort.
And, talking about the subject at hand, even the Indian Army seems to have forgotten about its involvement in Dunkirk. The Army website’s page on World War II has not a single mention of Dunkirk.
Can we then really hold Nolan, a Hollywood guy making a Hollywood film for his Hollywood audiences, to account for missing out on a piece of history that we ourselves seem to have said “obliviate” to?
Also read: Why Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk is the war film the world needs today