Yodha- Illustrated Military History of India the Epics (BCE) to the Uprising (1857)

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Thirteen years had passed since independence. My father, Ashok Kalyan Verma, then a captain, was posted at Walong, and though he was on the road trying to get to my mother, Usha, he was not by her side when I arrived on this planet. In those days, getting into or out of the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) region was a massive exercise that could take days, if not weeks, and India, then, was a very different country from what it is now. Yet, there is a timeless side to our history that is a part of our collective DNA, which goes back hundreds of years. For most of us, our grandparents' generation is, perhaps, as far back as we can see.

India's military history is a complex subject. The subcontinent, as the name implies, is physically vast, perhaps too vast a canvas for individuals to relate too easily. Forget about an Apatani or an Adi in Arunachal, even an Assamese living in Guwahati has little or no knowledge of what is happening in say, Trivandrum, Poona, or Calcutta, and if I may hasten to add, vice versa! With the emergence of an India that belonged to all of us, regardless of which part we were in, the creation of West and East Pakistan, combined with the abrupt appearance of China on our northern borders, made the situation even more complicated.

For a start, it is vital for all of us be we students or ageing grandparents-to first try and understand the geography of our surroundings. The subcontinent binds us together in a manner which is amazingly unique. The great mountain chains to the west, north, and east box us in, while the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea hem in the main peninsula that juts out towards the south. Only when we can see the larger geographical picture each and every time in our minds' eye, will we be able to relate to the way life has played out through the generations before us.

When we look at any battle or period in history piecemeal, we come away with a picture that is quite different from what we see if we view the same event against the larger framework. Even after independence, besieged as we were with the problems we inherited in the post-colonial vacuum, India's military history, unfortunately, was never given its due for various reasons. Much that happened over the last 2,000 years and more was left buried in the sands of time. On the contrary, we were led to believe that British and Mughal history, the two immediately preceding periods, were all that we needed to concern ourselves with. To be fair, a lot that we now know was not available then.