A 96-year-old woman seated on a wheelchair sang Kadam Kadam Badhaye Ja, the Indian National Army’s marching song, at the Victoria Memorial.
Hair white and cheeks wrinkled, she sang the full song without missing a word.
Not surprising, because around eight decades ago, she would sing the song with the INA soldiers marching towards the borders of India to wrest freedom for the country from the British.
Lt Bharati “Asha” Sahay Choudhry, who joined the Rani of Jhansi Regiment of the INA at the age of 17, was part of a session on Wednesday on Day II of Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, in association with Victoria Memorial Hall and The Telegraph.
One of the most moving moments of the festival came when the entire audience — numbering more than 600 — at the Son-et-Lumiere gave a standing applause to Choudhry as she sang.
The session was titled “The War Diary of Asha-San”, the title borrowed from Sahay Choudhry’s memoirs.
Sahay Choudhry was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1928 and joined the INA in 1945.
Her father, Anand Mohan Sahay, was a minister in the cabinet of the Azad Hind Government and a political adviser to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in Japan. After the war, she was held under camp arrest before being released and reunited with her father in 1946.
“Written in Japanese between 1943 and 1947, The War Diary of Asha-san, is a memoir of courage, honour and love by a young girl who had to grow up quickly in the midst of war,” read a note from the organisers.
The book was translated to Hindi by Sahay Choudhry after she came to India. The Hindi translation was published in 1973. An English translation of the book, done by Tanvi Srivastava, was unveiled at the festival on Wednesday.
Srivastava had a brief chat with Sahay Choudhry.
“Where and when did you meet Netaji for the first time,” she asked the nonagenarian.
“When he came to Tokyo. India and Japan wanted to cooperate. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose was invited to Japan. How to win the war was consulted. It was a very proud thing that I could fight for India’s Independence,” said Sahay Choudhry.
“Netaji used to call all of us in the regiment ranis. War was going on. Every day, there were bombings. We all could fight, all Indians in Southeast Asia — Bangkok, Singapore, Burma. We reached the India-Burma border. By that time, the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was over. We were kept in jail. We were so happy. We used to sing ‘Kadam kadam badhaye ja’ and ‘Delhi chalo’,” she recalled before Srivastava requested her to sing.
Srivastava read an excerpt from the book. The excerpt was set in February 1945, a few weeks before she went to join the Rani of Jhansi regiment.
It was a detailed and poignant account of World War II in Japan, which was, by then, staring at defeat.
She wrote about sirens warning of air raids and “swarms of American B29 bombers” — called “mosquitoes for the buzzing sound they made — in the sky.
She also wrote how her mother “bartered cotton sheets for rice” amid a food crisis caused by the war.
Historian Sugata Bose, the grand-nephew of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, was present at the unveiling of the book.
