I have a retraction to make and I better do it right away. Last month in my article about J.P. Dutta’s L.O.C./Kargil, I included his film BORDER in my tirade. I got it mixed up with Anil Sharma’s GHADAR. I apologise unreservedly for the faux pas.
Needless to say I had not seen BORDER and when I collared Javed Akhtar at the Nehru Centre on his recent visit to London, I put to him in person the question I had posed last month in my article about LOC.: What motivated him, with a reputation to guard as a progressive and secular person, to lend his name to LOC? Had he not seen the script before agreeing to write the lyrics? He said he had not. But he also said that he had no need to as he respected J.P. Datta as a filmmaker. Javed then asked me if I had seen Datta’s REFUGEE or his BORDER and what did I think of them? I said I loved REFUGEE but hated BORDER. and Javed said “You could not have seen BORDER”.
So I went out and got a video of BORDER. I was horrified. I had made a terrible mistake. This was not he film I would have condemned. BORDER is a good film. It depicts the Indian Army I am familiar with. It took me back to my army days with the 11th Sikh Regiment way back in the 1940’s. I identified with the newly commissioned Dharam Vir of the film, as I too had left behind a sweetheart in her teens and had gone off to the front with dreams of heroic deeds and of coming back, a knight in shining armour, to reclaim my first love (I was barely out of my teens myself). Either that or I will die defending the honour of my country.
Of course I did not attain martyrdom. Instead I finished up in Japan with the Allied Occupation Forces after the end of the War, which came in August 1945 when the first ever Weapons of Mass Destruction were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was in Rangoon at the time with General Slim’s victorious 14th Army, and came in contact with the remnants of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s defeated Indian National Army, INA. I have vivid memories of spending hours talking to them about their experiences. If ever there was a clash of loyalties, that was it for me, and a most poignant one. I wanted desperately for my country to be free of the British yoke and yet I had sworn an oath of loyalty to the British Crown. I had been deeply inspired by the vision of Netaji, yet I had been instrumental in defeating it on the battlefields of Imphal and Kohima and the advance on Mandalay and Rangoon. I could have lived with all that, because I felt that by fighting on the side of the democracies and against the tyranny of dictatorships I was fighting for the freedom of my country, which by then, I could sense, was imminent. And I had the satisfaction that I had contributed, in my own way, to achieving that goal. I was going to be part of that history when “India will awake to life and freedom”.
But my dreams were shattered when that freedom did come. Everything I had lived for, most of the twenty-five years of my life, was destroyed in a few short months in 1947 with the holocaust of Partition.
And here I am, still alive, still waiting for the day when real freedom will come, still cherishing the day when my estranged people will come together again to live in reasonable harmony with each other, as they had done for many hundreds of years in spite of all the pressures of the time.
But that’s another story which I will be taking up again in these columns.
In the meantime I salute J.P. Datta for REFUGEE and BORDER, but I think in LOC he has gone over the border.
-Yavar Abbas
Date: Friday, 13 February 2004