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Photo: Rajeev Bhatt

The raconteur Historian S. Muthiah

Gill had the guts. To stand up to action, uprightness, and the call of duty to the last dot. “In today’s times, he would very well have been a misfit.”

This impression is what well-known journalist and Chennai city historian S. Muthiah offers readers in his latest book, “Born To Dare”, a biography of a little known Army general Inderjit Singh Gill. Cover-to-cover, it is the story of the man and his guts. Rather the maverick and his moral fibre. Long hidden in a chapter of history very few know today.

Born to a Sikh Army doctor and a Scottish mother, Gill, in Muthiah’s notebook style account — just published by Penguin India — comes across as someone who found himself in a regiment by chance. But he loved adventure with the distinctiveness of a professional. Adorned with the Military Cross and PVSM, Gill first served the British Army and then the Indian Army. The first Indian instructor to be appointed at the Indian Military Academy, he played important roles in both the wars against Pakistan.

Relates Muthiah, “Gill joined the British Army as a volunteer during the Second World War, not out of patriotism but because it challenged a person to excel. Our man was just 19 then.” Muthiah, who knew this late Madras resident for two decades as part of the library committee of Madras Club, says it was by chance Gill was in England then. “Though he was born in the U.K., he studied in Madras because his father Gurdial Singh Gill was the head of prisons there. Gill’s (Inder) mother Rena took the children for a holiday to England and they couldn’t return because of the War. So he started studying there and it was during that period that he enlisted himself as a War volunteer. He was one of the youngest to have done so,” Muthiah elaborates. With a laugh he adds, “Though Gill was a paratrooper all his life, he had only two half-days of training to count!”

A reservoir of historical facts, Muthiah, sitting on the lawns of New Delhi’s India International Centre, states, “Besides bringing to light the character that Inder was, I wanted to bring to light the important role he played in Operation Harling in 1942, one of the biggest offensives in Greece to cut off German supply lines to North Africa.” Their strategic charges damaged a vital bridge which took the Germans almost six weeks to repair, weakening their logistics in North Africa. This won Gill the Military Cross.

“The British Army was to evacuate them after this, but they were told to keep the enemy engaged. This gave the Germans the impression that they were going to be attacked through Greece, though the plan was do it through France.” This, the seasoned journalist feels, was an important contribution to the success of the Allied attack and an Indian soldier’s role in it needs to be recognised. Gill and his gang not only learnt Greek and kept the Germans engaged in fire fights but also clandestinely built an airstrip in case an aircraft came to take them away!

“For 15 out of the 20 years I knew him, I was not aware of this part of his life. By chance, I spotted a photograph of a reunion in his house. The next day he sent me six books and two video tapes on the Gorgopotamos bridge operation.”

Many see Gill in the character of Lieutenant Kip in Michael Ondaatje’s famous book “The English Patient”. “Though Ondaatje had denied having known about Gill, I have listed 20 similarities between Gill and Kip in the book. It is rather uncanny,” says Muthiah.

Since Gill never wanted a biography on him, Muthiah started on the book only after he passed away in 2002. “It took me three years to compile everything. Throughout, Gill’s ghost was at work. The computers crashed, my enquiries took a lot of time to come. And now, when I wanted his wife to be here for the book’s launch, she fell down in the bathroom the other day and couldn’t come.”

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