Book Title: The War Diary of Asha-san: from Tokyo to Netaji’s Indian National Army
Author/s:Lt Bharati Asha Sahay Choudhry; translated by Tanvi Srivastava
Publisher: Gurugram: Harper Collins 2023.
Pages & Price: Pp. 225. Rs. 399
June, 1943. Netaji visits Tokyo, Japan. Bharati Asha, who is just 15, is bowled over by his personality. She decides to join the freedom struggle under Netaji’s leadership. Two years later, she joined the Rani of the Jhansi regiment of the Azad Hind Fauj or the Indian National Army. The 17-year-old girl leaves her home and family in Japan, travels to Thailand and trains to fight for India, a homeland she has never seen before.
During the next few years, she spent with the INA. Bharati Asha jots a diary, recording her experiences amid World War II. Born of Indian parents, but brought up in Japan, she writes her diary in Japanese. The book under review is an English translation of this war diary, which has also appeared in Hindi translation earlier.
This gripping book takes readers through the INA activities and the freedom struggle headed by Netaji from the early 1940s to the time following Japan’s surrender and Netaji’s death in an air crash. But it offers more than just a record of the war history; it is also a personal narrative that foregrounds how common people like Asha and her family fared in those tempestuous years. This is the story of an Indian girl growing up in Kobe and Tokyo in the pre-war years, living a life steeped in Japanese culture; it is also the story of how ordinary people sacrificed everything for Mother India even though many of them had never stepped on Indian soil, as the translator aptly writes. It is also the coming-of-age story of a teenager who lives at home and family to discover the world, war and herself.
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Asha was born to parents steeped in the nationalist ethos. Her father, Anand Mohan Sahay, and her mother, Sati Sengupta Sahay, were long-time activists with the Congress before they switched loyalties to Netaji. Anand Mohan helped set up several branches of the Indian Independence League across Asia and worked closely with Netaji. He was part of the Provisional Government of Azad Hind and was involved with the Azad Hind government in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Burma. Asha’s mother, too, was intimately involved in the freedom struggle.
Given this background, it comes as no surprise that Asha is seen to transgress, challenge and dismantle conventional gender roles at random throughout the text. She has been enamoured of war since her childhood and cannot wait to join the INA and see how many enemies she can kill before she is martyred. She betrays unqualified admiration for the Japanese soldiers who are committed to doing hara-kiri the next day, when they plan to ram their aeroplane into the Allied warships, exchanging one Japanese life for hundreds of Allied lives, one Japanese plane for dozens of Allied planes. She has nothing but contempt for Japanese women who have taken themselves the subordinate role in the family, and who think it is their only duty to be obedient servants to their husbands. She writes of Romantic literature and says that to her: ‘The beauty and romanticism I see in rifles, uniforms and news of war far exceed what I see in nature or the wild’!
The War Diary of Asha-san deftly captures the passionate fervour aroused by Netaji and the INA and the support it got from people in Southeast Asia.
The narrative deftly captures the dilemmas and conflicts of growing up in these trying circumstances. Time and again, we see the young Asha trying to manage her adolescent emotional crises. On the one hand, there are occasions when she misses her mother and her family very much but feels ashamed to give vent to her emotions, for she has been brought up as a strong girl who has no business luxuriating in emotional outbursts. ‘Soldiers do not have permission to cry’, she reminds herself.
The most telling episode in this regard is when her father leaves her camp without informing her. She tries to convince herself that as a soldier she has no business trying to find out where he has gone, yet, as a daughter, she cannot help feeling cheated that he did not meet her once before he left. The insecurities she faces while growing up, not knowing if and when she will see her father next, come out well, as do the want and deprivation of the War days in Japan, and her efforts to carve out meaningful relationships in the training camp. The emergence of romantic feelings is again hinted at briefly, but she tries to stifle these emotions immediately, for these have no place in the life of a soldier fighting for independence, the narrator tells herself.
The War Diary of Asha-san deftly captures the passionate fervour aroused by Netaji and the INA and the support it got from people in Southeast Asia. It is a paean to patriotism and offers a portrayal of Netaji from the pen of someone who interacted directly with Netaji and who was part and parcel of Netaji’s struggle. It also records the pivotal role the diarist’s family and family friends played in Netaji’s struggle to wrest independence from the British, as well as the relationship between the INA and Japan during the War years. Asha’s diary captures in dazzling colours the mindset of the Japanese people, and in particular, of the Kamikaze pilots who are ready without hesitation to sacrifice their lives in the interest of the country. The writer’s memories of the Japanese response to Emperor Hirohito’s surrender after the atomic bombs decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the response the defeated Japanese soldiers face on returning home from the war front throw new light on the Japanese psyche and social context of those times.
The book also features a series of historic photographs and documents related to Asha’s life and the INA and weaves in testimonies of Asha’s father, mother and other associates; all of this provides a larger context within which the diary can be read. A bonus is the cover featuring a historic photograph of Asha in an INA uniform. Intelligently packaged and slickly produced, the book is also priced economically. It is a pleasant surprise to see that the publishers have managed to keep the price within these limits, given that the volume carries so many photographs. This one is not to be missed.
One also notes the alacrity with which the publisher is focusing on Indian bhasa literature in translation. Another ‘war’ volume the publisher has brought out recently is the World War I memoir by Nariman Karkaria—these two volumes together make an exciting addition to war literature from the Indian bhasas. Watch this space for our review of the Nariman Karkaria volume soon.
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