My wife and I spent the new year vacations in Malaysia. The choice was borne out of ignorance and lack of preparation as much as anything else. We had planned to go elsewhere, but visa issues with Indian passports being what they are, we had few choices left by the time we got around to planning things. Malaysia seemed close and warm enough, and the food sounded appetising, and so our decision was made.

Transiting through Kuala Lumpur, we flew to Sandakan, the capital of Malaysia’s second biggest province, Sabah. It was only when we landed there that I confessed to my wife — who had left the planning to me — that I had no idea of what to do there. Sabah is part of Borneo, famous for its wildlife, orangutans, pygmy elephants and a host of other species that sounded exotic and worth seeing. It was only when we started walking around the town that I wondered about the Indian presence there, the spread of our world that we no longer recall.

The first hint of this was the gurdwara we saw, but the second was the commemoration of a prisoner-of-war (PoW) camp. During World War II, a number of Australian and New Zealanders were imprisoned by the Japanese on this island. As an Indian, I have a complex reaction to such things. It is hard to weep for European PoWs when you know that the British were engaged in policies that led to the devastating Bengal famine, in which millions of Indians died, and during which then PM Churchill authorised the use of air power against Indian protesters.

It was more complicated for me because my grandfather served in that War, from 1940 to 1945. In fact my father and his twin brother were born prematurely, I am told, because of the shock my grandmother felt when her husband was summoned for military duty. The Burma front was one of the most vicious fields of battle during that war, where the collapsing British forces, overwhelmed and savaged by the Japanese, finally held the line. It would be under US leadership that the combined Allied forces would finally trounce the overstretched Japanese troops.

In his five years of service in one of the most brutal theatres of war, my grandfather, a doctor, would not have the opportunity to care for, or even advise on, the treatment of his sons. As the British oversaw the death by starvation of millions of Indians, 2.5 million Indians went on to serve the Allied forces — or save them from the Axis powers. My grandfather would have marched with the victorious Army across this land on the way to Singapore, freeing PoWs on the way.

Although authors such as Shrabani Basu, Srinath Raghavan and Raghu Karnad have started writing this history, it still seems to take us by surprise. It is with amusement that we learn of anecdotes such as the one in Cairo, where one form of saying “You think I am easy to cheat?” is to ask, “Ana al-Hindi (Do you think I’m Indian)?” because Indian troops deployed in North Africa were fairly well-paid, and the Egyptians were good at fleecing them.

One of the effects of democracy is to focus our thoughts internally. This means that we sometimes forget the spread and reach of our history, even relatively contemporary history. Reading a biography of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, I was struck by the fact that he had canals built in present-day Iraq, and a retinue of female bodyguards from Africa. The breadth of vision that was displayed by such rulers spanned the world, a vision that we — far richer and living in an age of faster travel and better infrastructure — seem to have difficulty imagining.

Talking to a friend’s father, who is from Leh, I marvelled at his stories of how the caravans of tribute and trade would travel from Leh to the Dalai Lama’s court in Lhasa. Today Lhasa seems very far-off, ringed by the 4,000-km-long disputed border with China. Although I hope to visit it someday, I wonder whether in my lifetime those caravans will resume, and the routes will once more be navigated by yaks and ponies. What a delight it would be to ride that route, to see the Potala Palace as it once was, to have freedom where we now have fences, and to see ourselves as part of a world that our predecessors saw as an open one — one to be travelled fearlessly, and with delight.

Omair Ahmadis the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas

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