Retracing the path of the INA: travelogue, pictures and a dash of history.

By Ashok Malik

THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
BY AKHIL BAKSHI (ODYSSEY BOOKS)
PAGES: 114

Netaji, "Dilli chalo", Azad Hind, a free India: it was a cocktail that intoxicated a generation. This book raises a toast to it. In 1995, a team of adventurous Indians, among them veterans of the Indian National Army (INA), retraced the march of Subhas Chandra Bose's forces half a century earlier. This is the story of the two journeys. It is an honest story -- and, to Akhil Bakshi's credit, it is told truthfully. There is little flamboyant prose. Description is straightforward, bordering on reportage. These perhaps are the book's best attributes.

The Road to Freedom is intended as a travelogue -- actually two travelogues, with an oscillation between past and present. In sum, a mere recounting of contemporary social conditions in Singapore, Malaysia, Burma and north-eastern India -- the expedition's route -- may have got tiresome. It is the juxtaposition of the march of 1995 with the tragic heroism of the INA which makes the book different.

Through the second journey, the INA veterans -- G.S. Dhillon, Lakshmi Sehgal and S.S. Yadava -- are reunited with comrades they thought they'd never meet again. There are scenes which make old soldiers cry, literally. The following extract will be illustrative.

"Returning to Maymyo (Burma), Lakshmi Sehgal and Dhillon found the red-brick house just as it had been 50 years ago. As they walked around the locked building and on familiar dusty paths, they chanced upon a crumpled old man drifting through the fields ... It was Dr Banerjee, the medical supplier to the INA." It is not quite stirring stuff but you have to possess a sensibility shaped in granite not to be moved.

It is equally difficult not to be gripped by the valour of the INA. Take the Battle of Irrawady, January 1945. It was a hopeless task, Dhillon's 1,200 lightly armed troops pitted against General William Slim's 30,000-strong 14th Army, with air force support. Nevertheless, "it became the longest-held river crossing in any theatre of World War II".

There is heroism and there is humour. On July 4, 1943, Netaji made his first appearance before the incipient INA at Singapore's Cathay Hall. When the expeditionists reached the spot, they found the Cathay Cinema instead -- screening The Bandit Queen if you please. Well, India wouldn't be India without that delicious sense of irony, would it?

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