Hello!

When I was young, stories of the atrocities suffered by the people of Malaya in the hands of the Japanese circulated in my family. From those heartfelt stories told in the passing among my elders, I figured that my maternal grandfather and his elder brother were "engine drivers" with the Malayan Railway who were forced to work for the Japanese occupying forces. Apparently, they and their two grown-up sons witnessed a samurai style slaying of an European family in the bushes somewhere near Sungai Petani, Kedah that made them change their mind about working for the Japanese. As the story goes, they escaped from Bangkok (and that could be anywhere in Thailand for my folks) and travelled along the railway lines for two weeks and ended up at the Bukit Berapit woods of Taiping. They shaved their heads and eye-brows to escape recognition and lived off the land thereabouts. During this period, they contracted malaria of which my granduncle died in the jungle. Thereafter, his son died in an accident in one of Bukit Berapit's waterfalls. When they emerged from their hiding sometime before the defeat of Japan, it was told that they bore with them a large quantity of British chocolates! My own grandfather died many years later but I never met him but the one uncle whom I loved very much would have this debilitating bouts of malarial fever all his life.

About five years ago, by sheer accident I found a battered book of short stories based on the oral accounts heard by a Mr Shanmugam from Teluk Intan. I never got to meet this gentleman whom I believe is presently residing in Malacca. It was then I began looking for any proper research done by Asians and it dawned upon me that there were none. I wrote to a few people who were maintaining a website for the PoWs and received a somewhat curt replies, something like "go ask your own government." It occured to me that Mr Shanmugam's work was an important oral history that needs to be interpreted; and that my "own government" is not going to be really bothered. The Burma-Siam Railway is really an issue of the Indian immigrant population. Why should a Malaysian Government bother? I can understand the curtness of the PoW survivors because they lived and perhaps still do live in a world where everything political is interpreted along racial lines. I live in Malaysia.

I am grateful for Mr. David Boggett who was working in Kyoto-Seika University for his deep interest in the Asian aspect of the Railway. Mr. Ron Beattie the curator of the Museum in Kanchanaburi was not only sensitive to my request for information and were able to interprete for me the British racial mindset. Of course, there is a quasi-official narrative of the Indians in the Burma-Siam Death Railway which has been repeated over and over again by Indian writers in modern Malaysia. My work took me in different and surprising directions, some of which challenged the prevailing politically correct views.

On a tragic note, it needs to be mentioned that the questions I am trying to answer are simply academic since the people who would be most concerned about this would have died or are too old to care. But I want to tell this story, from the point of view of a man who is witnessing the passing away of a generation of Indians in Malaysia who has some remembrance of that calamitous years. Thousands of these people, mostly Indians and Malays, went out there forced and lured to slave at a military project, and died miserably away from their loved ones.

I call them voiceless because they were too poor to be of any political significance. Even the families of the victims or the survivors who were educated did not know better to sue for any compensation. After the War, the British in India were preoccupied fighting Indian nationalist forces to care about their Indian victims; the British in Malaya were too concerned about getting the Indians back into the plantation labour force to worry about rights and complaints; the Indian Government after their Indpendence in 1948 had an interest to shut up because it would besmirch their nationalist presence in Malaya, the Thais would naturally be not concerned because the victims were not their people; and after Independence in 1957 Malaysian leaders had their interest focused on the post-war Japanese foreign-aid. Everyone had an interest in keeping the matter out of official recognition except the victim.

My personal interest in this project is also motivated by my conviction that all minorities in the world live in various degrees of danger from extreme violence. I think the Indians in Malaya is a suitable subject, and the Burma-Siam Death Railway is a case in point.

As I think about this atrocity, I also feel that this is a rite of passage for those who would be a man in a world of violence and betrayal. We carry the wounds of our people in our hearts. In my family we light a lamp for the souls of our departed ancestors. I hope by telling these stories of my people, and remembering their pain, their souls may now rest in peace. It is not important that a monument should be built for them, monuments are built for heroes and heroism, not for betrayals and lost souls... they need prayers.