From My Bones/Preface

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From My Bones

Book by Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon (1998):

New Delhi: Aryan Books International. ISBN 81-7305-148-8.

Contents

The Indian struggle for freedom from the British Raj covers more than one and a half century of sustained effort in various ways. On the eve of World War II the Indian soldier in the British Indian Army had reached a stage of political awareness to think for and do something for the national liberation, What they lacked was an army oftheir own. The so-called Indian Army at the time was in fact an Army of occupation of India by a foreign nation. The personnel of the Indian army owed allegiance to the British Crown and not to India. The Indian soldier, one of the best in the world, took pride in his fighting skill and loyalty. He would die rather than go against his word. He loved his honour the most. He was however oblivious of the fact that his loyalty to the foreign Crown was the cause of perpetuation of a foreign nation's domination over India. Thus he was the protector of the slavish status of his own.

During World War II early victories of Germany and Italy in the West followed by the Japanese victories in the East created a combination of circumstances that favoured the formation ofIndia's Army of Liberation. This army came to be known as the Indian National Army (INA) or Azad Hind Fauj. This army waged war against the British for emancipation of the Indian nation. Out of its sixty thousand soldiers, I was one.

Ever since the end of the war, friends and well wishers irrespective of their nationality urged me to write my memoirs. Writing memoirs I thought was an exercise in egoism. Hence I could not persuade myself to recount my past, which I held was part of my dayyto-day mundane activities in the discharge of my duties as a soldier. Gradually it dawned on me that action and the fate of an individual cannot be isolated from those of his country and the people, and what IS more, an individual cannot understand his own self without historical......