indian national army

Lt Bharati “Asha” Sahay Choudhry or Asha-san’s war diary is an engaging account of her teenage years when she joined the Indian National Army’s (INA) Rani of Jhansi Regiment to overthrow the British Raj.Born in Kobe in 1928, Asha-san (san is an honorific suffix meaning “dear” in the Japanese language) wrote this evocative account of her teenage years in Japanese, her first language. In 1972, she rewrote her war memoirs in Hindi – “from scraps of paper” and from memories of her “tumultuous teenage years in Japan”.…

Colonization and its reversal are strategic phenomena. Eventually, colonization is about the domination of a population by an external or foreign power. It is achieved by force, and ends when the dominating force is not sufficient and the resistance is more powerful. The British Empire in India was no different. It was based on the foundations of military force, which predominantly comprised of Indians. One cannot fully understand the British Empire without delving deeper into the instrument that enabled the Empire in…

With The Forgotten Army — the new five-part Amazon Prime Video miniseries that follows the Subhash Chandra Bose-led Indian National Army — creator and director Kabir Khan (Bajrangi Bhaijaan) wants to shed light on what he thinks is an overlooked chapter of our history. This isn't the first time he's tackling the story, having directed a staid six-part eponymous docu-series in 1999, which has aged poorly. Khan has been trying to revisit the topic ever since and his dream has finally come true, over two decades later. And…