“O Lord! Save us from the Parathas of a foreign land

And grant us the food of our home.”

These jocular, wistful lines reach out to us from some eighty years ago, penned by an Indian sepoy serving abroad in the Second World War, stationed at Crickhowell in Wales in 1941, and hungry for the familiar tastes of home. Poet Nawazish Ali, writing under the pseudonym Mushtaq, was Quartermaster of 42^nd Company and formed part of Force K6—comprising mainly four Indian animal transport companies that had travelled to France in 1939 with the British Expeditionary Force, accompanied by their mules. 300 such men were evacuated from Dunkirk—a fact persistently ignored in public memory, right from English comedian Bernard Manning in the 1970s to US filmmaker Christopher Nolan in 2017. Nawazish’s poetry, written in Punjabi and the Potohari dialect, dramatises in extraordinary ways the feelings of an ordinary north Indian soldier as he experiences the war and the West.

These unremembered poems are one of the gems brought to our attention by historian Ghee Bowman, whose remarkable new book The Indian Contingent: The Forgotten Muslim Soldiers of Dunkirk (2020) engages in a forensic act of recovery by revealing the lives and loves of the 4,000-odd Indian men who formed Force K6. Bowman is impatient with tired British stereotypes about Dunkirk. He notes for instance that, instead of the rescue operations picking up men from the beaches in small civilian-operated boats as the well-known story goes, most were actually collected from two concrete moles jutting into the channel to protect the Dunkirk harbour entrance.  ‘Even the very name of the battle is mythical,’ he writes, ‘… the town itself is spelt ‘Dunkerque’ in French.’

The Indian Contingent is a rigorous, meticulously researched and engagingly written challenge to the parochial whiteness of British Second World War memory. To make his case, Bowman undertakes a complicated journey of discovery—to villages in present-day Pakistan, German prisoner-of-war archives, Scottish museums, French municipal records offices and the Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research in India. The men whose lives he is so invested in retrieving were largely Muslims from villages in undivided Punjab and the North West Frontier Province (now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), many of whom would not have known how to read and write. This makes his job all the harder—unlike European and American wartime accounts, there simply isn’t the same copiousness of first-hand testimonials here.

Bowman himself notes that these men’s stories ;have been scattered like shards of a broken pot across British culture—in the office at Waterloo Station, in the Abergavenny Chronicle and the Northern Times, in the Pathé film archive and the Imperial War Museum, buried in fifty-eight graves.’ Nonetheless, he is able to juggle deftly the multiple genres of his source material: one of the highlights of the book is a series of photographs of Force K6 men in Welsh, Scottish and English towns and villages.

In Bowman’s book, we observe the world through the eyes of sepoys like Nawazish, who writes:

After reaching England, we saw a new system there;

The streets were clean and the behaviour of the shopkeepers good;

Everything was placed in order, with the power of knowledge and skill;

O Mushtaq! I saw lovers walking by holding arms and hugging.

We can imagine Nawazish the flâneur walking along English streets, approving of their hygiene and methodical arrangements, and astonished—and perhaps delighted too—by physical expressions of affection between men and women, which were not the norm in 1940s India. Mostly, though, these Indian men are talked about, filmed, photographed and remembered by others. Bowman, for instance, provides us with an excerpt from the childhood memories of Watkin Evans, who lived in a village near Porthmadog in northern Wales. Evans vividly recalls the bookish Malik Mohammed Khan, a veterinary jemadar or junior officer, stationed for four months there in 1942 with 1,000 other Indian men:

I remember there was a doctor there and he used to come up to the house, an Indian doctor, a tall chap, a big man…He was a nice chap, a very nice chap. Very polite. With quite good English. Some of them couldn’t speak English at all. And we all spoke Welsh. Communication was a bit patchy!…I shall never forget him.

Not all Force K6 men were as fortunate as Nawazish and Malik, however. The book also charts the course of 22^nd Company, which could not be evacuated from Dunkirk. Captured by Germans and becoming prisoners-of-war, the men of this company were repeatedly targeted by German and Indian nationalist propaganda. Political radical Subhas Chandra Bose—perhaps a little more charismatic than the ‘balding bespectacled Bengali’ termed by Bowman—was forming his Indian Legion from prisoners-of-war to defeat the British in military terms, opposing Gandhian policies of non-violence.

Bose left behind a complicated legacy, collaborating with both Germany and Japan during the Second World War in his single-minded pursuit of Indian independence from the British Raj. We learn in the book how Indian responses to Bose too were varied: Captain Anis, the highest ranking Indian officer in German captivity in 1940, was visited by Bose and refused to defect, whereas junior officer Dafadar Abuzar did in fact change sides and successfully navigated the ranks of German military hierarchy.

Bowman assesses that, although about 30 men eventually did join the German Army and 10 escaped, over 85% of 22^nd Company remained in captivity for a long time—as much as five years in some cases. Most of these incarcerated Indian men, not being officers, were employed in hard physical labour, such as levelling the ground for roads and railways. Bowman further highlights a tragic detail in the lives of these prisoners-of-war: when the German camps were eventually liberated, Indian liaison officers discovered 22,000 letters from loved ones that had never reached the prisoners at all—a real “store of undelivered anguish”. It is in such details, in the mixing of military history with social life and loss, that The Indian Contingent becomes a rich repository of Indian wartime experiences.

Perhaps the book’s most nuanced chapter is its epilogue. Bowman pushes against traditional narratives of war remembrance, such as that of Durnbach Cemetery maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, where five sepoys of Force K6 are buried. He writes, ‘… these men weren’t all young, they weren’t all heroes, they didn’t all choose to be there. The word ‘sacrifice’ implies a choice, and some of these men had very little choice.’

Observing that the same cemetery also contains three graves marked ‘Indian Legion’, he continues, ‘ultimately there were no heroes or traitors, only men and women doing their job, sometimes in pain and anguish, sometimes without having any choice. Ordinary folk in extraordinary times, not wholly bad nor good, but human like you and me.’ In arguing for twenty-first-century perspectives on the much-remembered yet little-understood Second World War, it is this humanity that the book restores to the men of Force K6.