Facing an inexorable enemy, they fled - the lucky ones flying out, some over the sea, while most others had to trudge across difficult terrain with a range of predators, including two-legged ones, to reach safety. Left behind in all cases were properties and businesses built painstakingly over the years while ahead was an uncertain future. They were not the Partition refugees but victims of a earlier displacement - Indians fleeing Burma as World War II arrived.
However, their story, occurring just a few years before 1947, is less-known, as is of the glittering Indian presence in Burma (renamed Myanmar only in 1989), and a part of British India till 1937.
Till the war, ethnic Indians made over half of Rangoon's population and 16 percent of the whole country - including a large chunk not technically British subjects as they hailed from Portuguese Goa. Survivors have now thinned out and memories obliterated but there was a time when catchy Hindi film song "Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon" would have not been strange for Indian audiences as well as the setting of the Ashok Kumar-starrer "Samadhi" (1950). (Courtesy of bignewsnetwork.com)
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