Velu Pillai's Mesopotamia

Me-so-po-ta-mia. A country that almost sounded like the notes of a song. It had a certain ring to it.

As a schoolboy from Hyderabad visiting his grandparents in Kerala during the summer holidays, one got to hear about a number of countries. Across the paddy fields there lived a grand-aunt who had spent much of her life in Malaysia. Many in the neighbourhood were working in the Gulf states - Saudi, Dubai, or Oman. Our chavadi - the airiest hall in the ancestral home -  had large almirah's stuffed with musty, moth-eaten National Geographic's and Readers Digest's from USA, and old textbooks published in Great Britain.

In the western room (Kizhakke-muri) an old, sepia tinted photo adorned one of the walls. It was of a bespectacled man in uniform with a medal pinned to his chest. "That is your valiya-appoopan (great-grandfather)", I was told, "He served the British Indian Army in Mesopotamia during the first World War".

Mesopotamia. In my imagination a country with such a name had to be a grand place. Yet there were no books from Mesopotamia. The country no longer existed in the school atlas either - it was now called Iraq.

I learnt later that the man in the sepia print was my grandmother's father, Velu Pillai. Details of his life were sketchy. He had served in the Army Postal Corps. My grandmother was four years old when her parents left her with relatives in Kerala and went to Mesopotamia. They had returned to India in 1927 with an infant who was born in Baghdad. This little boy would grow up to fight the next World War, serve in the swampy airfields of Burma and retire as a Wing Commander in independent India.

I had always wondered about the life and times of Velu Pillai. How did he travel with his young wife, Karthiyayani Amma across the Arabian Sea to that ancient land between two great rivers? What did he think of the people from other foreign lands to fight somebody else's war. Did he see himself as a cat's paw?

Last week I came across a book that gave me a glimpse of India's role in the First World War: George Morton-Jack's "THE INDIAN EMPIRE AT WAR - from Jihad to Victory - the Untold Story of the Indian Army in the First World War".

The big picture turned out to be quite dismal. Countless Indians had suffered for the white man's greed, his squabble for colonies across the world. 1.5 million Indian servicemen had served in the war - a number equivalent of the empire's military forces from Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, South Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore put together -- a sixth of all the empire's servicemen. No less than 34,000 of them died in some of the most brutal battles of the western front, Gallipoli, East Africa, Iraq and Palestine.

Velu Pillai would have been a part of the Indian Expeditionary Force D which faced the Ottomans in Mesopotamia. They had seized Basra in Nov-1914 and started pushing up the Euphrates and Tigris where they had  repulsed attack by 7000 Turks in Apr-1915 leaving 3000 of them dead in Shu'ayba, some 15 miles west of Basra.

Then the tables had turned. Pushed hard by an ambitious, and stingy, governor-general of India who wanted to retire as the 'Pasha of Baghdad', Force D found itself short of food and ammunition at Kut, by the banks of the Tigris. The besieged 6th Indian Division at Kut dug 30 miles of trenches, suffered 2200 casualties in keeping the Turks out, until they surrendered on 29 April 1916.

Whatever remained of Force D's 6th Division - 10,500 Indian and 2600 British prisoners-of-war - were then sent on a 600-mile death march from Kut through the Iraqi desert, to labour camps in Ottoman Syria outside Aleppo and in the nearby Amanus and Taurus mountain ranges. Only a few had survived the ordeal.

Revenge and retribution came a year later. From mid-December 1916 to March 1917, a completely revamped Force D was let loose by London to avenge the fall of Kut and to steamroll the Turkish Army for 200 miles up the Tigris to Baghdad. Another year of fighting in Europe and the war was over, on terms that were so humiliating for the vanquished that it took another horrific war 26 years later before things settled down.

What happened to the million Indians who returned home after the war? What we do know for certain is that the British continued to play one ethnic group against another most of whom remained loyal foot-soldiers for the British colonial apparatus:

• In 1919, men of the 54th Sikh, 59th Scinde Rifles and 9th Gurkhas carried out the massacre at Amritsar's Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April. 1650 bullets were fired in 10 minutes to kill some 500 Punjabis and wound 1200 more...some of the casualties were their own colleagues - Indian Army veterans, Sikhs and Hindu Jats who had themselves served the British Indian Army in France and Iraq.
• India's Commander-in-Chief Charles Monro massed 340,000 men on the Indo-Afghan border for the Third Afghan War, initiated as a jihad by the new Emir Amanullah following the assassination of this father Habibullah, and ending in his swift defeat.
• In 1921-22 seven Indian battalions with artillery and armoured cars 'suppressed' the rural Moplah Rebellion by Muslim villagers armed with swords; they killed 2400 Moplahs and wounded 1650.

What did Velu Pillai think of all this? How did his experiences change him after he returned home, to serve the maharaja of Travancore as a Dy.Tehsildar? Unfortunately none of his notes or letters survived in the damp and humidity of the chavadi with fungus and termites for company.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* The book - https://www.amazon.in/Indian-Empire-At-War-Victory/dp/1408707705

* Kipling's poem "Mesopotamia" - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57430/mesopotamia-56d23af3008a7

* Word War I Records - https://livesofthefirstworldwar.org/

* Etymology - Mesopotamia - "Land between rivers" - aka Do-ab!

Along the Mughal Road

11 March, 2014

"Head-Lights Off; Body Lights On" 

We are in the domain of the Ace of Spades, the 25th Infantry Division of the Indian Army.  It is a three hour drive from Jammu to Rajouri, and this perhaps in the most prominent roadside sign you will see along the highway. Words painted in terse block letters mark the iron gates guarding military camps, all along a route that has long been known as the Mughal Road.

A drive like this would have been a breeze in any other Himalayan river valley, but this is J&K, a magnet to assorted, armed fanatics from across the border. If you happen to arrive at one of these gates at night with the wrong lights on, chances are that you will be shot first and asked questions later.

Having been warned not to travel after sunset,  we had  out in pre-dawn darkness, driving through un-seasonal rains, along the Akhnoor plains and the Chenab river-valley, and over hills overlooking an endless chain of sodium vapor lamps that mark the Indo-Pak border.

As the rains eased and darkness gives way to dawn, army trucks lumbered along the highway, dropping ROPs - Road Opening Parties - soldiers in parkas and assault rifles trudge up and down the roads. Places with evocative names keep coming up -- Sundarbani, Kalighan, Naushera and  Bafliaz.

The Ace of Spades is only the most recent in the long list of army divisions that had passed through these mountains and valleys.  In 1587 Jalaluddin Akbar went down this road to conquer Kashmir. He left behind large gardens and new townships. The Mughal army that accompanied his son, Jehangir, made its mark in a different way – it built a fortified Serai, and named it after the emperor’s royal intestines!

The story goes that that in the early 1600's, Jehangir, was on his way back from the Kashmir valley to Delhi when he suddenly passed away. Years of being an opium addict and an alcoholic had finally caught up with him. In any case the power behind the throne was his 13^th wife, Empress Noor Jehan. Given the precarious state of Mughal succession planning, this lady decided that the only way to survive the inevitable power struggle was to act as though her husband were still alive until they reached safer areas. So on the banks of the Rajauri Nullah, she had the body eviscerated, buried the emperor's decaying innards at Chingus Fort, propped his body on a caparisoned elephant, and carried on in royal splendor, until they reached Lahore. 

Today, big changes are afoot in a region that has been racked by an insurgency spread across two decades. Despite the heavy army presence, or perhaps because of it, new institutions are slowly coming up to match the rising expectations of a new generation. Prominent among them is the Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah University.

The university is eight kilometers off the Mughal road, and a leap of faith in more ways than one. Named after a local Sufi saint, this seat of learning seems to rise from the middle of nowhere, at the foothills of the snowcapped Pir Panjal mountain range. It was started a decade ago by a retired Kashmiri police officer with a Rs.20 crore donation from local shrines. With additional public donations and government grants that followed, the university has been able to set up labs, hostels, classrooms and libraries.

The infrastructure and facilities does bring in local students in large numbers. Hostel food is not bad and cheering at cricket matches here does not attract sedition charges. However, in a state where parents are wary of sending their children to universities in distant parts of India, the biggest challenge is to attract – and retain – good professors. Local employment prospects continue to be grim.

On our way back to Jammu, a pink mini-bus zips past a hairpin bend. In hills and valley that have seen more guns and bullets than books or pencils, Simran Coach has a big banner quite different from those outside the army camps. It simply says, "O God Help Me".

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LINKS:

Mughal Road -- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Ancient-Mughal-road-is-a-new-big-tourist-site-in-JK/articleshow/22188250.cms?referral=PM

Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Road

Chingus Fort -- http://explorejk.com/heritage/chingus-fort/