The Many Afterlives of the Second World War in the Indian Northeast

Remembering and recalling the Second World War is a thriving preoccupation in the contemporary borderlands of the Indian Northeast. Broadly clubbed together as the ‘North Eastern Region’ (NER) today, the erstwhile British ‘frontier’ had been an integral part of the ‘India-Burma’ (IB) theatre of operations within the ‘China-Burma-India’ (CBI) theatre of war between 1941-1945. Unsurprisingly, the wartime is survived by an extensive afterlife in the form of personal, familial and collective memory, a vibrant vernacular material culture that is at once local and transnational, and interesting efforts at the memorialisation of a war that was, in more than one way, an imperial war. These memories also appear in the form of literary and archival output, such as the Anglophone and vernacular writings in the region which continually return to the wartime as a fertile and malleable imaginative space, numerous veteran memoir and biographies, popular histories, textual and audio-visual archival documents and state-sponsored veteran projects. Remarkably, these memories and subaltern narratives remain understudied. My dissertation investigates the various ways in which the memories of the ‘India-Burma’ theatre of war continue to assert itself and be actively resurrected, transmitted and transmuted to the present. It seeks to uncover the effaced narratives of WWII, the limits of History, and the productive plasticity of memory as it presents in the writings on the war in the region. It locates, argues for and discusses three cognate formations which constitute the most prominent and enduring strands of the contemporary afterlives of the war in the region: a preoccupation with wartime objects, or ‘things’ of war, and its use as an evidentiary antidote to the region’s absence in the broader narratives of the Second World War (chapter 1); the representations of the interspecies intimacy and alliances shared between the witnessing and labouring native tribal communities and animals who were ‘conscripted’ into the war efforts (chapter 2); and finally, the ‘forgotten’ memoirs, produced largely by the Allied veterans who served in the CBI theatre (chapter 3). In doing so, my dissertation also tacitly curates a novel archive of the Second World War from a ‘forgotten frontier’, and by extension, offers a local history of a global war.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Tekseng, Lily

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gopal, Prof Priyamvada

• Allied Powers in Asia
• Borderland
• British Empire
• China-Burma-India Theatre of War
• Contemporary Writings from Indian Northeast
• India-Burma Theatre of War
• Indian Northeast
• Memory practices
• Second World War
• Visual Archives

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/949ff3a1-d4af-4010-b7f0-3f2204e14bcb/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.119933

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/386978