I have heard from my parents, stories
about people who had returned to India from Burma, crossing rivers and
mountains and jungles during the Second World War. A brother of my mother’s
father returned leaving everything behind. We were young children that time and
used to gawk at the stories of these people escaping horrors. On the way they
saw gold, jewels and other valuables lying around but no one was really
interested to picking these up, for everyone was trying to save his or her own
life, throwing away personal and valuable things, to lighten their burden, just
like sailors in a marooned ship would lighten it by throwing things out,
including the sacks of food grains. Many perished along the way, the few lucky
ones who survived the ordeal to reach the Indian borders had to start all over
again from a scratch.
It was a tragedy of epic proportions,
a people caught in the midst of fighting and enmity, obsession to hold more
land under control and the power that will flow to them from the control of
resources. But very few written record of this human tragedy exists. I recently
came across an Assamese book translated into English. The Assamese author is
Debendranath Acharya (died in 1981), translated by Amit R. Baishya and
published in 2018,[1] a
remarkable account of thousands of ordinary people fleeing under extreme
sufferings.
Around 450,000 to 500,000 Burmese
Indians walked to British India fleeing the advancing Japanese troops and to
escape the rising anti-Indian feelings among Burmese nationals. The Indians
from the subcontinent had gone over to Burma after it was incorporated into
British India in 1885. A lot of Indians migrated to Burma in search of
employment, many as indentured laborers and were quite poor. There were poor
farmers, laborers and petty traders who settled in Burma.
Chettiar money
lenders from Tamil Nadu also had settled there in search of riches. They had
grabbed control over some 3 million acres of paddy fields in the lowlands of
Irrawaddy River. This had created hatred for Indian banyas and when the opportunity presented, they spewed hatred and
vengeance on all people from India. All these impelled the Indian settlers to
flee Burma despite living there for generations. Some 50,000 people would die
during the journey.
The rich and the powerful escaped via air or sea, but the poor and the
ordinary had to walk it through Arakan range of mountains to Chitttagong or
through Chindwin valley into Manipur or through the hilly passes of Hukawng
valley into Lekhapani (Ledo) in Assam. This book, Jangam which means “The Movement,” describes the ordeal along the
third route.
During times of peace Indian settlers
and Burmese stayed in villages peacefully and in relative bliss. A peasant
Ramgobinda and his family consisting of his mother, wife and a 7 year old boy
were living rather peacefully in a village Manku. His wife was seven months
pregnant and a little parcel of land which he owned, he tilled and eked out his
living. But when the troubles broke out, along with the advancing Japanese
troops, atrocities committed against the Indian-Burmese started to increase day
by day. The Burmese’s goal was to drive foreigners away from Burma and to
rebuild Burma. This small family leaves with a few others and they start on
their long march to their motherland, which they had not seen in a few generations.
Ramgobinda’s mother dies on the way;
his second son is born in the midst of the jungle and along with his mother was
put in a jeep that came along with British military official for emergency medical
treatment. The father and the elder son continued their journey on foot. The
father ends up carrying the son on his back most of the journey. They discard
all valuables on the way to lighten their load, the only load they could carry
was their own bodies. Saving themselves with their ‘life’ intact was the only thing
that mattered. It was the stubborn will of human survival that carried the
survivors through.
The way was treacherous, red clay
soil, which deteriorated with the onset of monsoon, when people sank up to
their thighs in the mud. The sultry heat was unbearable. Leech bites,
dysentery, malaria plagued them even as they walked. Many just lay down and
died, they could not be buried even. The escape route was strewn with corpses.
A poignant one was of a mother and infant frozen in the act of suckling the
baby. No animals or vultures were there to greet them or pick their bones of
the dead clean. But scores of beautiful butterflies covered the dead bodies,
feasting off the juices oozing out of these decaying bodies.
Once what they brought from home was
finished, they ate what was available on the way, bamboo shoots, leaves and
fruits of wild banana trees. They kept walking pushing themselves to the utmost
of human endurance for to stop would mean death. Their feet became swollen and
blood oozed out. With some more loss of life the small group reaches the
refugee camp after some 25 days’ walk. They were skin and bones when they
arrived. The husband and wife do meet in the end, but unfortunately both had
lost their minds in the ordeal and anxiety and had become insane and couldn’t
recognize each other. The little boy and the small baby of 21 days survive, but
are being taken care by others, who had walked along with them in the journey.
These tragic tales of human beings
push us to wonder why do men do this to each other. The same country which goes
by the name Myanmar now, has thrust out some 500,000 Rohingya people of Muslim
faith, from their country as refugees. They were driven off because they were
not recognized as citizens of Myanmar. These unfortunate people are living in
Cox Bazaar in Bangladesh in refugee camps in untold misery. They have been
driven away, with no place to go, no citizenship and no identity, another human
tragedy of recent times.[2]
It is tantamount to genocide.
Where is the world going? Where is
compassion and love for the sufferings for others, which almost all religions
teach? How can one set of human beings inflict such pain on another set of
humans? Have they no compunction left in their hearts? Is there no fear of God
in the breasts of the people who commit such atrocities? Don’t we realize that
one day we will have to stand before the Judge of the whole earth and give an
account of all the wrongs we have done in this life?
All that people like us can do
sitting far away from the scene of such actions is to pray for these displaced
people, who suffer so much for no fault of theirs, so that God would strengthen
them through their trials and tribulations, and for the authorities and powers
that be, to wake up to such human tragedies and desist from such actions and
provide succor to these suffering people.
God be with them all.
[1] Debenranath
Acharya, Jangam: A Forgotten Exodus in
which Thousand Died, trans. by Amit R. Baishya, Vitasta Publishing Pvt. Ltd.,
New Delhi: India, 2018
[2] I
have written about the Rohingya refugees in an earlier blog, The Fate of Rohingyas, dated 27.2.2018, which gives an account of
their tragic story.
