Does Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk ignore the role of the Indian army?

Christopher Nolan's epic World War Two film, Dunkirk, which tells the story of the mass evacuation of Allied troops from the northern coast of France in 1940, has been getting glowing reviews in India.

But many are glowering over Nolan turning a blind eye to the role of Indian soldiers in the battle. The Times of India wrote that their "significant contribution" was missing from Nolan's "otherwise brilliant" work. Writing for Bloomberg View, columnist Mihir Sharma said the film "adds to the falsehood that plucky Britons stood alone against Nazi Germany once France fell, when, in fact, hundreds of millions of imperial subjects stood, perforce, with them".

Few can deny the role of the subjects. Some five million Commonwealth servicemen joined the military services of the British empire during WW2. Almost half of them were from South Asia. Indian soldiers played a key role in major battles like Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Kohima and Imphal. A multinational force of British, Indian and African units recaptured Burma (Myanmar) for the Allies.

What happened with the Indian soldiers in Dunkirk is less clear. Yasmin Khan, historian and author of The Raj at War: A People's History of India's Second World War, says she has often wondered why there is very little factual data on their role in the battle, which many say cost Germany the war.

What is well known, she told me, is that four companies of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, including a unit of the Bikaner State forces, served in France during the campaign on the Western Front, and some were evacuated from Dunkirk. Among them were three contingents of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps. One contingent was taken prisoner by German forces.

According to one account, India also provided more than 2,500 mules - shipped from Bombay (now Mumbai) to Marseilles - to the war effort as the British animal transport companies had been phased out. An Indian soldier, Jemadar Maula Dad Khan, was feted for showing "magnificent courage, coolness and decision" in protecting his men and animals whey they were shelled from the ground and strafed from the air by the enemy.

The Indian soldiers and the mules were eventually ordered towards the coast. Many of the men could not take their animals on the retreat and gave them away to local people in France, according to the same account.
Historian John Broich says the Indian soldiers in Dunkirk were "particularly cool under fire and well organised during the retreat".

"They weren't large in number, maybe a few hundred among hundreds of thousands, but their appearance in the film would have provided a good reminder of how utterly central the role of the Indian Army was in the war," he told Slate. "Their service meant the difference between victory and defeat. In fact, while Britain and other allies were licking their wounds after Dunkirk, the Indian Army picked up the slack in North Africa and the Middle East.

'Survival story'

To be fair, Nolan has said that he approached the story "from the point of view of the pure mechanics of survival rather than from the politics of the event". "We don't have generals in rooms pushing things around on maps. We don't see Churchill. We barely glimpse the enemy," he told the Telegraph. "It's a survival story."

Historian Joshua Levine, who is also the film's historical consultant, told me that Dunkirk was a work of fiction and "it isn't a film's job to tell the full story of Dunkirk... and nor, in the time available, could it even try to do so".
"This film focuses on a few protagonists whose paths cross occasionally, each one of whom experiences just a tiny corner of the whole story. As Hilary Mantel says about historical fiction, 'The man who is fighting can't see over the hill, out of the trench.' What I'd love to see, though, is an Indian film about Dunkirk, or WW2 generally, and I sincerely hope Indian filmmakers are working on it."

But what about the criticism that the role of Indian and their South Asian counterparts in WW2 has been forgotten? Yasmin Khan says that their "sheer scale of the contribution" has become apparent in Britain in recent years. "No longer is it simply an island story of heroic, plucky British fighting against Nazi-occupied continental Europe; it has now become increasingly customary for historians to refer to the contribution made by Asian, African and Caribbean servicemen in the 1940s", she writes in her book.

A memorial to honour the role of these soldiers came up on London's Constitution Hill in 2002. There have been museum exhibitions, oral history projects and TV documentaries to "reveal how crucial they [the soldiers] often were to the action, the sacrifices that they made in the face of terrible odds, and also to divulge individual stories of great bravery and intrepid action".

"It is no longer true to suggest that this is an entirely forgotten story," she says. Meanwhile, Indians are flocking to watch Dunkirk, which opened at 416 screens, including 10 Imax screens, across the country, on Friday. Unlike most Hollywood films, Dunkirk hasn't been dubbed in any Indian language for wider viewership. Still, says Denzil Dias of Warner Brothers (India), the film raked in $2.4m (£1.84m) over the weekend. "This is the biggest opening of an English language-only film in India," Mr Dias told me. Clearly, viewers are not fretting about the lack of Indian soldiers in Nolan's tour-de-force.

Lost cities – Muziris, did black pepper cause the demise of India's ancient port?

Around 2,000 years ago, Muziris was one of India’s most important trading ports. According to the Akananuru, a collection of Tamil poetry from the period, it was “the city where the beautiful vessels, the masterpieces of the Yavanas [Westerners], stir white foam on the Periyar, river of Kerala, arriving with gold and departing with pepper.”

Another poem speaks of Muziris (also known as Muciripattanam or Muciri) as “the city where liquor abounds”, which “bestows wealth to its visitors indiscriminately” with “gold deliveries, carried by the ocean-going ships and brought to the river bank by local boats”.

The Roman author Pliny, in his Natural History, called Muziris “the first emporium of India”. The city appears prominently on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a fifth-century map of the world as seen from Rome. But from thereon, the story of this great Indian port becomes hazy. As reports of its location grow more sporadic, it literally drops off the map.

In modern-day India, Muziris was much more of a legend than a real city – until archaeological excavations in the southern state of Kerala, starting in 2004, sparked reports of a mysterious lost port. Though the archaeologists cannot be certain, they – and, with some exceptions, historians too – now believe they have located the site of Muziris.

“This was a centre of paramount importance for Roman trade,” says Federico De Romanis, associate professor of Roman history at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. “What made it absolutely unique was the considerable amounts of black pepper exported from Muziris. We are talking about thousands of tons.”

In addition to pepper, De Romanis says, exports included both local products – ivory, pearls, spices such as malabathron – and those from other parts of India, including semi-precious stones, silks and the aromatic root nard. “These attest to commercial relationships nurtured with the Gangetic valley and east Himalayan regions.”

In the other direction, ships arrived with gold, coral, fine glassware, amphorae of wine, olive oil and the fermented fish sauce called garum. But the value of this trade was lopsided: De Romanis says Pliny the Elder estimated Rome’s annual deficit caused by imbalanced trade with India at 50m sesterces (500,000 gold coins of a little less than eight grammes), with “Muziris representing the lion’s share of it”.

Maritime trade between Muziris and Rome started in the first century BC, when it became known that sailing through the Red Sea to the horn of Africa, then due east along the 12th latitude, led to the Kerala coast. “Muziris was entirely dependent on foreign, especially Roman, demand for pepper,” De Romanis says. So when the Roman empire’s economy began to struggle in the third century AD, he believes the trade in pepper reconfigured itself, and Muziris lost its importance.

Dr PJ Cherian, director of the Kerala Council for Historical Research, confirms there are few references to Muziris after the fifth century AD. It had been generally assumed that Muziris referred to the port of Kodungallur, which had been put out of commission by devastating floods in 1341 – but excavations there did not turn up anything older than the 13th century.

Travel 11 kilometres by road from Kodungallur, however, and you reach the village of Pattanam. For years, children there had been collecting beads that would rise to the surface during the monsoon season. After an initial dig in 2004, systematic excavations by Cherian and his colleagues began in 2007. Soon, he says, it was clear they had discovered a major archaeological site.

Over nine seasons of excavations, they have found Roman amphorae (for the first time on the Keralan coast), a wharf-like structure, a dug-out canoe that is approximately 2,000 years old – plus foundations, bricks and tiles, tools and artefacts made of iron, lead and copper, glass beads, gold ornaments and semi-precious stones clearly meant for export.

So, is Pattanam the site of fabled Muziris? There isn’t clinching evidence yet, but Cherian thinks it’s likely. He is also tired of questions about the Roman connection, asking: “When they excavate a Roman site in Europe, do they obsess similarly about whether it traded with India?” To him, an integral part of the excavation is what it reveals about the people who actually lived there.

Tathagata Neogi, of the Indian Institute of Archaeology, explains the stages of occupation in Pattanam using a large photograph of an excavated trench’s cross-section. Human habitation began there around 1000BC, marked by characteristic Iron Age black and redware pottery, while the period between 500 and 300BC marks a mixed phase.

“We think this is when Pattanam began making the transition from a village to a trade hub,” Neogi says. The period from 300BC to AD500 is densely packed with evidence for trade both within and outside India. Burnt bricks and tiles, terracotta ring wells and coins suggest a thriving settlement. Small amounts of west Asian pottery in the earlier portions of this segment provide evidence for pre-Roman maritime trade. After AD500 the record thins out – until AD1500, when Chinese and European ceramics are found.

Today, Pattanam is a village situated four kilometres from the sea. The vegetation is typical of the region: tall arcing palms, squat plantains, vines and creepers, near-flourescent monsoon grass. There are sporadic houses, a temple, a village office and sudden channels of water.

The archaeological mound at Pattanam is around 70 hectares; atop it sits a museum displaying finds from the excavations. It is curious, Cherian notes, that a village should be named Pattanam, a word that means market-town or trading port across south India.

Some historians – such as Rajan Gurukkal, author of Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade – have argued that Pattanam (which he believes is the location of Muziris) was likely nothing more elaborate than a colony of Mediterranean merchants, plus the inland traders and artisans who dealt with them. Gurukkal’s theory is based on the apparent absence of permanent structures, and the seeming disconnect of the materials and skills found at Pattanam with those of the wider region. He suggests the colony might even have been seasonal, inhabited only when ships arrived for trade.

Such a debate comes down to what is meant by a city or urban settlement. According to Cherian, “Urban is a complicated word – to me, it means ‘organised’, ‘thought out’, ‘planned’.” And he sees evidence of this in Pattanam: “It was certainly a city, but of its time.”

The excavations have revealed what appear to be toilets, drains and terracotta ring wells, and these – along with raised foundations aligned in one direction – suggest a planned settlement.

Cherian also thinks the level of technological accomplishment – the quality of mortar in a wharf structure; evidence of intricate glass and stone work – and the high density of potsherds (some 4.5 million have been recovered so far) all point to a settlement that was urban in character. The local coins suggest a monetised economy and a degree of political organisation.

Less than 1% of the site has been excavated. We have only touched the tip of the iceberg “We now recognise that ancient cities could look very different from their modern counterparts, even as they had the same functions of trade and economic integration,” says Monica Smith, professor of anthropology at UCLA, who studies newly emergent urbanism in the Indian subcontinent.

“It used to be felt, by 20th-century archaeologists such as V Gordon Childe, that monumental architecture was required before a site could be defined as a ‘city’. In addition, there was often a sense that a city should have a high density of concentrated populations at their core, in which that density was focused on a particular religious or administrative purpose such as a palace or temple.”

But Smith offers an example for a more spread-out idea of a city: the large Kumbh Mela camps in India, which come up only for the duration of the congregation, are well-planned, possess infrastructure, and have an “urban atmosphere”. She adds: “We can envision that temporary or sequential occupations could have been the case in ancient cities as well.”

Smith suggests such sites can grow in extent very quickly, especially when demand for a new commodity is high (black pepper, in the case of Pattanam). “This is why research of the kind done at Pattanam is particularly important. It can help us understand the dynamic changes over time, and evaluate the extent to which investments in features such as wharves and ring wells signalled a ‘core’ location around which surrounding suburbs grew.”

A more complete understanding of the Pattanam site – and its flavour of urbanism – will take a while yet, however. According to Cherian: “Less than one percent of the site has been excavated. We have only touched the tip of the iceberg.”

The quest for Muziris may or may not be over. But as De Romanis says: “Pattanam is the closest thing to Muziris we have got so far. Whatever it was, it should be treasured and taken care of.”

Bikers for Warriors

Sadashiv Rao Bhau with Ibrahim Gardi (left)
in a painting at Raja Kelkar Museum, Pune

    On Saturday, 550 descendants of Maratha fighters completed a 5,400-km long journey, retracing the route of their forefathers who fought in the Third Battle of Panipat. They want India to remember the story that got lost in history

    To Panipat — that was the route to begin with. So, on January 3, a group of youngsters left Pune on a historical journey. Their destination was the famous battlefield of Haryana. Saddled on motorcycles, these 550 individuals, 34 of them women, roared past the Western Ghats, the Narmada, and the Chambal ravines on their way to Panipat. To call it an adventure trip would have been a travesty of the emotion they were trying to articulate —it was their bid to relive the journey undertaken by their ancestors 252 years ago. It was also an attempt to put the record straight about the Third Battle of Panipat in which forces of the Maratha confederacy had taken on Ahmed Shah Abdali.

    Before the battle, the Marathas had begun a 10-month long campaign under the command of Sadashiv Rao Bhau to reach Panipat and take on Abdali’s forces. Now, their descendants want the country to hear the story which “hasn’t been told properly.” “We have participants from Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat. We all wanted to have first-hand experience of what the Marathas under Sadashiv Rao Bhau had experienced two-and-ahalf centuries ago. The story of Panipat needs to be told to our countrymen,” says Pandurang Balkawade, a historian who is one of the driving forces behind the Panipat Ranasangram Smruti Samiti that organised the rally which ended in a function attended by President Pratibha Patil and Punjab governor Shivraj Patil at Panipat on January 14.

    But retracing the path of the Maratha warriors was not easy. The bikers faced the same problems their ancestors might have in the 18th century. As they entered the Gangetic plains in January, the winter chill froze their bones. “At Agra, about 250 people had to turn back because of the cold,” says Dr Sandeep Mahind, who took care of the logistics through the 5,400-km long journey.

    The rally entered Delhi on the 10th day of their journey. Back in 1760, it took the Marathas 120 days to reach Delhi from Sindkhed in the Deccan. The Maratha retinue exceeded the number of combatants. Also, the Marathas then were no longer a highly mobile cavalry army that believed in the shoot-andscoot doctrine. They had heavy artillery that slowed down their march.

    “The cold definitely played a part in the Maratha debacle at Panipat. The army wasn’t sufficiently provisioned to beat the chill. In comparison, the Afghans came from a cooler climate and could easily fight here. But it was the dwindling supplies that seriously impaired the Marathas. The Maratha command structure was faulty, too. While generals like Scindia and Holkar preferred the traditional mode of guerrilla warfare, Bhau himself and Ibrahim Khan Gardi believed in European style combat with effective use of artillery and musketry,” says Dr Uday S Kulkarni, the critically acclaimed author of Solstice At Panipat: 14 January 1761.

The bikers on their way to Haryana

    On October 25, 1760, Abdali crossed the Yamuna at Baghpat, surprising the Marathas. Their route to Delhi blocked, the Marathas dug in at Panipat for two months. “Both sides played a waiting game and decided to starve each other down. On the diplomacy front, too, they failed. After that, it became difficult for the Marathas to sustain. They had to fight,” Kulkarni says.

    On January 14, 1761, the Marathas came out of their defences and began the attack at 9am; by 3pm, it was all over. Most of the top commanders, including Peshwa’s son, Vishwas Rao, and Bhau himself, lay dead.

    Considering the importance of this battle in Indian history, very little has been done to preserve its legacy. “It was impossible for us to do anything. Our family was banished to Bithoor after the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817-18. Until the 1930s, we were required to obtain permission of the district collectors of Bareilly and Poona before leaving Bithoor and going south. But the other sardars, the so-called rajas (Holkar, Scindia, Gaekwad and Bhonsle), were better off. Nobody, not even the government of India after Independence, did anything to preserve the legacy,” rues Uday Sinh Peshwa, a scion of the Peshwa family.

    But others realised the importance of this battle. The British studied it keenly and though they understood they could beat the Indian forces, they retained their admiration for the great Maratha generals, including Ibrahim Khan Gardi. “The governor of Bombay would visit my family every year to pay respects to my great ancestor. The practice continued until Independence,” says

Rehan Abbas Ali Sardar, a direct descendant of Ibrahim Gardi. “My great grandmother had willed it that none of us should ever go to Panipat. She feared some evil might befall us, the way it did on Ibrahim Khan, who was captured by the Afghans and tortured to death. There should be some memorial of all those who perished at Panipat.”

    How much of the battle do our own universities remember? “As a faculty of defence studies in a couple of civilian institutions, I observed that the element of military history was missing,” says Maj Gen (retd) Shashikant Pitre. In most universities in the West, where military history is a separate branch of study, they talk about even lesser known Indian battles. The same is, however, not true of our universities. The general also hoped the government would do something to preserve the legacy. “The memory of Panipat still affects people in Maharashtra. The name itself has become a byword for disaster or great loss,” Pitre says.

    The bikers from Pune may just have rekindled an interest in the legacy of their great ancestors, revisiting an episode that changed the history of India.

FACE-OFF AT PANIPAT

ARMY STRENGTH

Marathas

40,000 light cavalry, 15,000 infantry, including 8,000 Gardi musketeers; 15,000 Pindaris; 200 cannons

Afghans

42,000 heavy cavalry; 38,000 infantry; 10,000 reserves; 4,000 personal guards; 80 cannons

TOP COMMANDERS

Marathas

Vishwas Rao, Sadashiv Rao Bhau and Ibrahim Khan Gardi

Afghans

Ahmed Shah Abdali, Shah Wali Khan and Najib Khan Rohilla

जिजाऊंच्या पत्रातून इतिहासाला उजाळा!