Zofia Pregowska, from Warsaw, Poland, was a teenager when she learnt that a king in faraway India had, during World War II, opened his home to over 600 Polish children, and hosted them for five years, at a time when no country was willing to accept them. The high school she attended had been renamed after “The Good Maharaja” as he is known in Poland. “Maharaja Jam Saheb Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji of Nawanagar was quite a difficult name, and we used to practise saying it,” says Pregowska.
Today, the filmmaker is making a documentary, A Brave Bunch in India, on the amazing story, which had slipped from the pages of history. Pregowska, along with her colleagues Monika Kowaleczko-Szumowska and Tomasz Stankiewicz, found 87-year-old engineer Wieslaw Stypula, who was one of the children hosted at the maharaja’s estate in Balachadi, now in Jamnagar, Gujarat, and is telling the moving tale through him. Stypula, say the filmmakers, has visited India seven times since he left the country in 1948 and refers to it as home. “When we were shooting in India, he was so happy, the years fell off his face. He told students of the Sainik School, which now stands at the site, that the school was his before it became theirs.”
The forgotten story has been revived by a grateful Poland in recent years, which wants its new generation to remember the help of benefactors like the king who took personal risks to save the children. The children were part of Kindertransport, organised to rescue orphans and those separated by war. “His was the only camp which was not funded by the Polish government-in-exile but by himself and Indian princes,” say the filmmakers. “The quality of care these children received is best shown by Stypula’s example. His older brother and mother remained in Russia, and when they were reunited after the war, the difference was stark. Stypula was well fed and well educated. He spoke English. His older brother lagged behind academically.”
Kowaleczko-Szumowska says these stories were suppressed during the communist years, but now, they can be told openly. She also realised that the story was not well known in India, either. India’s role in the two big wars was either suppressed or forgotten for decades, for various reasons, and it is only in recent years that these stories are being pulled out and presented before the world.
Squadron Leader (retired) Rana T.S. Chhina, secretary and editor, Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research, and Belgian researcher Dominiek Dendooven have brought out a coffee table book, India in Flanders Fields, on the occasion of the recent state visit of Belgian King Philipe and Queen Mathilde. An exhibition on India’s role in Flanders is currently on display at the National Museum, New Delhi.
Over one million Indian troops served overseas during World War I, and nearly 74,000 were killed, either in battle or because of the cold. Another 48,000 labourers worked behind the lines. Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief of the Indian Army from 1942, said that the British could not have come through both the great wars if they hadn’t had the Indian Army.
The Indian battalion was crucial to liberating Haifa in 1918, says Israel embassy spokesperson Avigail Spira. The centenary of the event, she says, will see many commemorations.
Chhina and Dendooven say that the events following the wars subsumed India’s role in them. Post WWI, for instance, the Indian freedom movement took on the demand of Purna Swaraj. “Even Gandhi thought the British would appreciate the help and, in return, work towards at least home rule, which didn’t happen. Instead, there was the Jallianwala Bagh massacre,” the authors recount.
“Even overseas, India’s contribution somehow faded or was erased from memories,” says Dendooven, who credits the Indian diaspora for having brought it back to the spotlight. “Diasporas are always keen to find a link between their first homes and present ones. They spearheaded the movement for India’s role getting recognised again.”
The centenary of WWI and 75th anniversary of WWII were occasions when people began taking renewed interest in the past and there is much more research being done on these subjects now. The Kohima and Imphal war cemeteries, the two sites on Indian soil where WWII battles were fought, are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, but few Indians were aware of them, thanks to insurgency and other unrests in the northeast, which kept it off the tourist circuit. Now, however, many more know, and they find good mention on websites such as TripAdvisor. The Hornbill Festival of Kohima, for instance, has put Nagaland on the bucket list of many travellers.
Dendooven got goosebumps during his research, when he accessed sound recordings of Gurkha soldiers, who were prisoners of war in Germany. “There it was, in a museum in Berlin, the man speaking from 100 years ago, he sounded so alienated, so far away from home.”
“India, itself, was shy of remembering its colonial past, but we have matured now to reclaim parts of our history,” says Chhina, adding their research has only touched the tip of the iceberg. Tracing the families of the soldiers who fought in Flanders and Haifa, in fact even researching on the labour corps, will reveal so many more stories.
And why is it important for us to know all this? “WWI had a big impact on India’s freedom movement,” says Dendooven. “It gave Indian soldiers the opportunity to go overseas and live together without caste and religious barriers. It helped them understand not all whites considered Indians inferior. And on their return, it gave new vigour to the independence struggle.” We study history, he says, not just for the past, but also for helping to navigate the future. “Does anyone, for instance, know that Flanders was the first place where chemical weapons were used in war and that Indians died of it?”
Courtesy: The Week
