This episode of HistoryChatter takes the audience to India and South East Asia during the Second World War.
It explores the production of a series of films through which British soldiers were found sending warm private messages to their families at home, called Old Blighty films, they were commissioned by the British government agencies, as a means to boost the sagging morale of the isolated British soldiers at the Burma front.
Yet, these films rarely consider the fact that a majority of soldiers of the Fourteenth Army were Indians.
Indeed, Indians or soldiers from elsewhere were sometimes used as lifeless props. Historian Steve Hawley, while researching these films, arranged for a reckoning with such memories and silences.
HistoryChatter concludes that this is how History is to be read and engaged with. It will always deliver significant but incomplete messages, and the reader and the listener must pay keen attention to what it leaves out.
Hosted by Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay
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