Captain Mani's War

In March 1944, the Japanese invaded northeast India. There followed some of the fiercest battles of World War II, with as many as 60,000 Japanese and more than 17,000 Allied soldiers killed. The battles of Imphal and Kohima marked Japan’s greatest land defeat of the War, shattering their ambitions to invade India and turning the tide in the Burma campaign.

While the Allied 14th Army was staffed with British soldiers as well as many trained soldiers from the traditional Indian fighting clans, it was the first time recruits from all over India were tested. They more than proved their mettle. Documenting the War was an extraordinary Indian journalist called PRS Mani, who had left his AIR broadcasting job to become a public relations officer for the 14th Army and subsequently the Southeast Asian Command.

Throughout this period, he lived closely with the soldiers on the front, risking his life as they did, facing danger, hunger, exhaustion, fear, homesickness, and also found solace in friendships and camaraderie. His vivid dispatches, distributed by the Army’s public relations department and relayed also in the Indian and British media, are the only eyewitness accounts of these battles written by an embedded Indian war correspondent.

Superbly written, these dispatches remain one of the great works of war writing by an Indian and one of the few eyewitness accounts of India’s war in the Northeast against Japan. This is the first time his dispatches have been published in book form.

PRS Mani (1915–2011) was born in Chittoor, Madras Presidency, into a middle-class Tamil family. In 1942, he moved to the capital to work on All India Radio’s wartime programmes and, two years later, joined the British Army to become a public relations officer with the rank of Captain with the 14th Army. He subsequently travelled with the Southeast Asian Command in Java.Post his return to New Delhi, there followed a number of IFS career postings to Manila, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Goa, Bonn, Kathmandu, Colombo, and Mauritius. PRS Mani died in 2011.

Dr Prof. (Retd.) Inderjeet Mani is an awardwinning author of two novels, numerous short stories and translations of Indian poetry. His acclaimed thriller Toxic Spirits and novel The Conquest of Kailash reflect his deep engagement with culture, philosophy, and global politics. A scholar of linguistics and AI, he has authored nearly 100 scientific papers and the book Narrative and Generative AI. He has held positions at Georgetown, Yahoo, Cambridge, MIT, and IISc, and now divides his time between Thailand, India, and the US.