A tribute that hopes to bridge a pain

Reclaiming history may not just always be an exercise in triumph, of discovering truth and vanquishing lies. It may also pose questions of justice and seek closure to wrenching pain. One such troubling chapter in south-east Asian history is the Death Railway, involving thousands of Tamil migrants to Malaya.

For the nearly 150,000 Tamil labourers who perished unsung, in obscurity, building the 415 km stretch of railway network between Siam (now Thailand) and Burma (now Myanmar), ordered by the Japanese Imperial Army in WWII, and the surviving family members, a moment of fulfilment finally arrived in June, 78 years after the war, with the inauguration of a memorial in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, dedicated to these workers.

P Chandrasekaran, president of the Death Railway Interest Group (DRIG), Malaysia, who has been at the forefront of a decade-long struggle to get India, Malaysia, other SE Asian nations to formally recognise these silent, nameless labourers, calls it “an unprecedented” step towards “a pilgrimage” that should have been undertaken several years ago.

“Lying buried in mass graves along the railway track, Indians, Malays, Burmese, Indonesians, Indo-Chinese, Javanese endured the most inhumanework conditions, battling not just the cruelty of their captors but also diseases such as cholera and dysentery,” said Chandrasekeran, at the inauguration on June 3.

At 23, Chandrasekeran was stunned when his father who had worked as the locomotive railway assistant in the Siam-Burma railway, divulged to him the shocking details of the lives of thousands of Asian labourers working at the site.

Unable to come to terms with the fact that a young distraught worker killed himself under his engine, Chandrasekeran’s father had become a recluse. “He was traumatised by the sight of decapitated bodies near the camps,” says Chandrasekeran. Lack of proper food, no medicines, harsh, muddy terrain where workers walked for miles, and a relentless and ruthless army extracting work from even the most sick people led to a catastrophic situation, thus lending the railway its abominable name.

As long as the labourers could stand, they were pushed to work. Once they turned extremely frail, they were thrown into mass graves. “If 100 Indian workers were taken from an estate to work at the site, in the end only 50 returned,” says Chandrasekeran.

As per official documents, says Chandrasekeran, Indians recorded the highest fatalities out of the 270,000 total gone in the project. While Kanchanaburi promotes the Bridge over River Kwai built on the Death Railwayand later bombed by the Allied Forces in 1944 as a tourist spot, the role of Tamil Indians in the railway finds little or no mention in the historical accounts or museums of this city.

The metre-gauge line started from Ban Pong, Thailand, to Thanbyuzayat, Burma, for transporting cargo and war supplies to the Japanese forces and the INA soldiers readying for battle against the British in Imphal Myanmar border. The Tamil Indians saw this as a journey to prosperity as the Japanese promised them three times the wages at the estates. Some even took their families along not knowing what lay ahead. But many were forcibly picked up from the estates.

The forced mobilisation of the Tamil workforce from the rubber plantations of Malaya for railway construction hide a very significant but brutal part of World War II history, which Chandrasekeran has been tracking with two emotional appeals: first, the Indian government’s formal recognition of the loss of its citizens while constructing the railway; and second, in order to bring honour to the forsaken dead, have a dedicated structure in their memory, near the Death Railway campsites. It was the latter mission that bore fruit.

The chief abbot of a Buddhist temple, Wat Tavorn Wararam, which manages the Wat Yuan Cemetery in Kanchanaburi agreed to allow DRIG to adopt the existing pagoda as a dedicated monument for the Tamil workers.
“We sought the temple authority’s consent to upgrade a pagoda built over the remains of thousands of workers,” says Chandrasekeran.

He adds that through several trips to the area, reading the maps and talking to historians, he learned that in 1943 several unknown bodies from hospital morgues, camp sites and nearby areas lay in mass graves around Kanchanaburi. The temple had later undertaken the task of recovering tens of thousands of remains from these graves and reburying them in the Wat Yuan Cemetery. In 1950, a pagoda was constructed over this mass grave, with an inscription in Chinese which translates to, ‘Grave of 10,000 souls’ with no information on them. “It probably has the remains of Indian Tamil workers. ”

Culminating their years of striving for some semblance of respect for their Tamil brothers, the DRIG group organised a trip to Kanchanaburi, for the inauguration of the plaque with a tribute in Tamil. The group retraced the same route through a train journey from Kuala Lumpur that their ancestors undertook in 1942. In all there were more than 40 Malaysians who joined this milestone event.

Arumugam Kandasamy, 98, who worked as a Japanese translator with the Japanese Army, and the lone Death Railway survivor to join the inauguration ceremony, gave a glimpse of a man ‘relieved’, on his return to KL after paying tributes to his Tamil colleagues at the pagoda. “It was my knowledge of Japanese that saved me then. But the same Japanese were responsible for the loss of my brother and many friends. ”

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