Acts of Remembrance: Memories of the 'Forgotten Battle' in India's Northeast

The Second World War is an important historical reference point for people’s multiple groups in the Northeast of India. For the Nagas, it was a great awakening because one of the ‘fiercest’ and ‘decisive’ battles was fought in their homeland, though the war was not theirs. Many books have been written on the impact of the war but considerably as perspectives from military accounts penned by war veterans. Recently, the emergence of some interesting written works of literature has provided ‘insider’ perspectives on how ordinary citizens saw the large-scale war. This paper proposes to critically examine some of these works, both fictional and non-fictional accounts. But for the sake of space, it would be limited to the Naga experiences of the Second World War: the Battle of Kohima. Borrowing Jay Winter’s idea of how women and laymen have emerged as active participants in reading historical events, this paper argues that witnesses’ accounts of the historical past as a genre hold immense importance in the re-imagination of the event, and how they impact individuals and the community at large.