To grow up middle-class in a big Indian city in the 1960s also meant growing up in the slipstream of the recently departed Raj and among things British. This included the many books and comics about World War II, which were written not from the viewpoint of one of the victors of the war but from the peculiar position that it was, after all, the plucky, honourable, redoubtable, indomitable English (plus some Scots and white colonials) who, armed with great courage and a sense of humour, single-handedly stopped the Germans and the Japanese (plus some clownish Italians) till the perfidious Russians and the slow-witted but brave-honourable Americans were obliged to join the hostilities; after which it was, again, the English who led the final charge against the Nazis and the Japanese Army.
To the victor belong not only the material booty of war but also the spoils of historical memory. Post-war, the popular fiction industry aimed primarily at a British male readership also caught many of us desis in its scatter-blast. Thus, we had films, novels and not least the small, square comic books churned out by Fleetway Library and their competing publishers, Commando.
What was palpable across all these heroic stories of fighting against great odds was the hatred towards the enemy, the Germans and the Japanese.
Marinaded in empire
Looking back now, every single thing about the Nazis and the Tojo Empire was indeed hatred-worthy: they were murderously racist, power-hungry, greedy with ideas of controlling the world, and completely inhuman in their quest for this domination. What was completely left out of the English and American narratives, however, were several inconvenient facts. Churchill was no less racist than any Nazi; he believed in the superior qualities of the White man as much as Hitler; only, being more educated and marinaded in the effluvients of a centuries-old empire, he had a different mode for deploying that racism.
The Americans were no less hungry for world domination than the Germans, Japanese or the Soviets, only their preferred method at the time was to establish and protect global capitalism and to control that capitalism, keeping the big battleships visible but in the background.
The British were undeniably highly courageous in the face of the Nazi onslaught, especially when defending their island; they were less so when slammed back by the Japanese in Malaya and Burma; and in almost every theatre their brown and black colonial troops helped save their bacon; the South Asian and African soldiers who remained unsung, whose dark faces were hardly ever depicted in the comics (just as you’d rarely see black or Native American GIs in the American comics of the time), and hardly mentioned in the novels or the war movies.
Equally important — what you never got from Anglo-American fiction — was the leading role the Soviet Union played in defeating the Nazi war machine or how the Chinese armies and civilian population bore the brunt of the Japanese onslaught.
Sitting in Berlin in 2017, all this comes flooding back at the click of a link. Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk has been released to a lot of acclaim in certain quarters and I am curious to see the trailer on YouTube. The action starts, very nicely shot, the soundtrack both suitably modern, minimalist and yet dread-inducing. The soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force are almost encircled, trapped on a huge beach in northern France, trying to get back to England as the Wehrmacht closes in on them.
It’s a scenario I’ve been familiar with since I was 10 or 11: the brave Tommies fight their way back to the beach, their comrades dead or captured, their units in tatters; the German dive bombers scream in from above, the Wehrmacht artillery pounds them on the sand, the Royal Navy ships evacuating the troops are blasted out of the water by bombs and torpedoes.
Suddenly, a British officer turns to another and asks “Why have their tanks stopped attacking?” The reply is, “Why bother, when their bombers can pick us off on the beach?” I register shock only after I realise I’m reading English subtitles, the entire dialogue between the two English officers is in German , dubbed no doubt by the best actors in the Federal Republic.
When the RAF fighter pilots in their Spitfires are jumped by the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt fighters, the RAF man again goes, “Achtung, achtung, Messerschmitt!”
On IMAX scale
For a person of my age and background, there’s something deeply unsettling about this, yet it’s completely unsurprising. Of course, many American and British blockbusters are now dubbed in German; of course contemporary Germans have been happily co-opted into the worldwide audiences who are by default anti-Nazi, so, in dubbed films released in Germany, both the good guys and the bad guys naturally speak German.
When I finally see Dunkirk on an IMAX screen in central Berlin, I make sure to see it in the original English version without any sub-titles.
There are a few Black French soldiers used as extras but otherwise it’s a film full of thousands of White males (and about two or three White women). There is, as I’ve been warned by many critical reviews, no trace of the Indian soldiers who so bravely helped to hold the perimeter in order to let the bulk of the BEF escape.
Watching it, hardly the ‘greatest war film ever made’ as it has been touted, all sorts of competing ironies surrounded me on IMAX scale and in full Dolby sound. After the World War, Europe and the U.S. came quickly back together to continue the war they’d been waging against most of the rest of the world for over 200 years.
There may have been rivalry against Soviet Russia but even in this rivalry there was a continuation of the domination of the North over the South (except for the White settler bits).
Buried by time
Whatever the state of the defeated nations in 1945, today the tables have massively turned. Both Japan and Germany are in a much better position than, say, the U.K. and France, despite neither country having a serious army to speak of. Despite problems, Germany today is far more socially cohesive than the U.S. under a crypto-fascist, White supremacist regime.
Time buries old enmities, turns them into absurdities; forget any schoolboy competition about flying the larger flag at border crossings, you can now hardly tell when you drive across the border between Germany and France. It’s not that there aren’t any neo-Nazis in Germany, but there are now far more of them in France, Britain and the U.S.
While Charlottseville unfolds in the U.S., with White men and women proudly waving the Nazi swastika and giving fascist salutes, in Germany a drunken American tourist who tries the same stiff-armed Hitler salute gets punched in the face. The German police then charge the tourist for making the gesture (illegal in Germany, along with all other Nazi symbols) even as they look for the man who assaulted him.
The subtitles all around me tell me that the Germans have won a huge struggle against their older prejudices in the same last 70-odd years that India and Pakistan have been independent. Perhaps, we desis need to get over the comic book wars, not go through the mistakes that Europe has already gone through for us, and take on the huge challenges that we really face today.
The columnist and filmmaker is author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Poriborton: An Election Diary . He edited Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and was featured in Granta .
