The forgotten heroes of Dunkirk
There is a hole in the new film Dunkirk: the Indian troops who served with such distinction.
Should a film director tackling a historic event feature all of the protagonists or just tell the story from the angle that he or she chooses?
That is the question some Indians are asking over the absence of any Indian faces in Christopher Nolan’s epic, Dunkirk.
The film is a portrays the mass evacuation of Allied troops from the northern coast of France in 1940. It has received rave reviews in India and has been playing to packed audiences.
The debate was kicked off by an article in The Times of India a week ago pointing out that for the Dunkirk withdrawal, the British needed assistance with animal transport.
They issued an order for mules and their handlers to travel from India, which was under British rule at the time of the Second World War. The mules were essential for moving arms and ammunition overland in France .
“Four Indian animal transport companies of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps were sent to aid the British expeditionary force from Bombay,” the article said.
“Of these four companies, three were successfully evacuated from Dunkirk, but the soldiers in the fourth contingent were captured by the Nazis and died in prisoner of war camps.”
The article lamented the fact that this “significant contribution” was missing from Nolan’s film.
Another writer, Mihir Shar, was more acerbic, saying the film added 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”.
The topic was soon picked up by other writers who pointed out that Indians had rarely featured in any Second World War movies even though, according to historical data, about 2.5 million – from India and what was to become Pakistan – served with the British army in the war.
In 2015, in reviewing The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War by Oxford historian Yasmin Khan, writer William Dalrymple said the book finally did justice to “the crucial contribution of the Indian army” to the defeat of Germany.
“The British always liked to believe they stood alone in 1940, a plucky little island defying the massed ranks of fascists and Nazis,” Dalrymple wrote. “What we tend to forget, as Khan reminds us, is that Britain did not fight the Second World War, the British empire did.
“No fewer than five million citizens of the British empire joined the military services between 1939 and 1945, and almost two million of these were from South Asia.
“At many of Britain’s greatest victories and at several of the war’s most crucial turning points – El Alamein, Monte Cassino, Kohima – a great proportion of British troops were not British at all, but Indian.’’
Other Indians took a different view of Nolan’s “exclusion” of Indians in Dunkirk.
After all, when Hollywood was making Vietnam War movies such as Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter and
Platoon, they presented the war entirely from the perspective of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam, not from the viewpoint of the Viet Cong or of ordinary Vietnamese people.
On a lighter note, The
Hindustan Times newspaper lent its voice to the debate by calling Dunkirk “a celebration of the bravery shown by common people.
“And if Indians were involved, the film, however abstract it is in its ways, pays homage to them too”.
Film director Alankrita Shrivastava, who is basking in the success of her film Lipstick under my Burkha, said that both points of view were justified.
“Directors have a certain responsibility when presenting a historical issue to get things right. That’s fair,” Shrivastava said.
“But they must have absolute freedom to present whatever perspective they wish. Films can’t be put to the same test as history books.
“You can’t tick off all the boxes to please every section of society.”
Producer Nitin Tej Ahuja (Bullett Raja and Revolver Rani) agreed. Dunkirk, he pointed out, is a feature film, not an exhaustive documentary.
“Christopher Nolan is not required to be comprehensive,” Ahuja said. “The storytelling is his and his credentials are such that you can’t question him.
“Anyway, if we feel strongly about the Indian contribution to Dunkirk or the war generally, then we should make those movies ourselves.”
The debate does not seem to have affected filmgoers.
“Every country tells its own stories according to its own lights,” said computer science student Alisha Barua, after she had watched the film on Friday night in the Indian capital.
“We should be more aware about our own history and tell those stories ourselves instead of bashing Nolan for not doing so.”