BENGALURU:  It’s been 81 years since World War-II  changed global history, but few know the role played by over 2.5 million Indians in it. Prof Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s photography project, The Unremembered: Indian Soldiers from the Italian Campaign of World War II, is a compilation of many such stories. Now, the project, which was ready in 2019-end, has been captured in a short film by three city-based filmmakers – Ganesh Shankar Raj, Sujit Nair and Arjun Kumar – who are co-founders of Mindia, a digital production house.

The short film, titled Searching For The Unremembered – The Forgotten Indian Soldiers of World War 2, was released on August 13 on their YouTube channel. Matthew, a professor of art (photography) at University of Rhode Island in the United States, says her quest for this research started on the opening day of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in December 2018, when her friend got to know that she was exhibiting an installation on the Indian soldiers of the Italian Campaign of WW-II.

“She sent me a photograph of her grandfather, Lt. Col. Goal Chakraborty, posing casually in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in his Army uniform. The striking photograph gave me an immediate face and a visceral connection to those 2.5 million Indians. This has led me down a rabbit hole of sorts to crowd-source and collect family photos of these Indian soldiers,” Matthew, who grew up in Bengaluru and moved to the United States for higher studies, tells CE. It took her almost three years of research to finally put it all together last year. 

The idea of making her project into a digital film came about when Raj attended a session by Matthew in Bengaluru. Fascinated by the stories that were brought to light, he approached her to do a short film about her findings. “The world has become very small by going digital. And this was a story that had to be brought to a larger audience,” says Raj, who has been a filmmaker for over two decades. The movie features Matthew as the narrator who brings the stories to the audience. The whole process took them around three months which were spent in conceptualising, getting file footage from various sources, and shooting. “Since it was a vast subject, the biggest hurdle was to put everything in five minutes,” Raj adds.

Italian connection
When the Italians signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, the camp’s Italian guards disbanded, and a number of POWs fled before the Germans took over. Five POWs – Chacko, D’Souza, RG Salvi and brothers Sharafat Ali and Murrafat Ali – were tasked by the German soldiers to capture escaped POWs and bring them back. But they decided to escape themselves.

They walked all night following a railway line. After over four hours they were exhausted and were about to sleep in a ditch when they heard the early morning chime of church bells. Realising that there was a village nearby, they pushed on and discovered the tiny town of Villa San Sebastiano. One of the Indians spoke Italian and was able to convince an Italian soldier, Romano Berardo (who had just deserted his army unit and was returning to his home in Villa San Sebastiano) to shelter them.

He hid the five men. That started an ordeal that lasted over a year but saved their lives. The Indians also made friendships that continued after the war ended, after they left the town. Salvi and his wife, Hansa, returned to meet and thank his Italian friends. Salvi’s grandson, Samar, who lives in Bengaluru, was captivated as a young boy by these stories and always wanted to visit the village to meet the people who had saved his grandfather’s life. Nearly 70 years later, in 2010, he had that opportunity, while living in England.