Diary of a peacekeeper: An art show traces India’s forgotten role in a Korean war

The experiential exhibition – put together by an artist whose father was part of the 1950s peacekeeping effort – merges fact, myth and memory to tell the tale.

In a sense, it is a war that never ended.

Hind Nagar, the temporary Indian peacekeeping base set up at the DMZ.

Hostilities have raged between North Korea and South Korea since 1950. India played a role as peacekeeper, in the early years. This forgotten slice of history was recently revived at an exhibition at Lalit Kala Akademi in Chennai.

In Limits of Change, a 70-minute “museum experience”, the daughter of an army general who was involved in that effort merges memory, myth, fact and fiction to revisit his story.

Before we get to what visitors experienced, a bit of background.

At the end of World War 2, Korea, then a Japanese colony, was divided into two occupation zones. The North came under Soviet control, the South under the US. As in divided Germany, suspicion was rife and tensions mounted. By 1950, hostilities had broken out between the two Koreas. By 1953, the conflict had reached a peak, with 2.5 million killed over three years, amid cross-border shellings, firings and amphibious landings in key coastal cities on both sides.

That’s when the United Nations stepped in. Led by the US and China, it began pushing for a peace treaty, an idea that was rejected by South Korea. Then-president Syngman Rhee still dreamed of a reunified nation. Without such a reunification, the hostilities would never really end, he argued.

He wasn’t wrong. Both sides continue to simmer behind the 250-km-long, 4-km-wide border known as the Korean De-Militiarised Zone (DMZ). Every year, incidents of firings and landmine explosions, incursions and suspected espionage are reported.

Back in 1953, with no treaty in sight, a truce was brokered instead. A major element involved the return of prisoners-of-war on both sides. To aid with this, the UN set up a Neutral Nations Repatriation Committee, and asked if the newly independent (and non-aligned) India would like to lead it.

India has since led international peacekeeping efforts in countries ranging from Somalia to Sri Lanka, with admittedly mixed results. At that early stage, however, this was an opportunity to establish a presence on the world stage, and a leadership role in the neighbourhood.

The Repatriation Committee tasked with getting 23,000 prisoners of war home was led by Major General SPP Thorat and a core team that included General TNR Nayar.

All these years on, Nayar’s daughter, the visual artist and filmmaker Parvathi Nayar, is using elements of theatre and the spoken word, painted scrolls, canvases, artefacts and installations to revisit this bit of history.

The show is also meant as an exhortation to hold on to hope, says Parvathi Nayar.

Material Memory

Work on her exhibition, Limits of Change (the title is borrowed from an essay her father wrote on his life in the army), began in 2019.

That year, she was going through old trunks of family memorabilia and found letters, notes, photographs and even videos shot on 8 mm film that she had never seen before, all depicting her father’s time at the DMZ.

As she began to piece his account together, she turned to her niece, Nayantara Nayar, a UK-based researcher and playwright, for help. Over six years, they worked with the non-profit cultural organisation InKo Centre to create their physical multimedia experience.

More details emerged at the Nehru Memorial Library in Delhi, via letters, official documents, archived articles and even a memoir by General Thorat.

“We talked to army officers and historians too,” says Parvathi Nayar, 61. “The more we tried to find information, the more we realised that it was such a deeply forgotten episode. This is a work of fictional history, not in any sense a hagiographical biography, but something that is relevant today.”

Fact meets friction

In the museum experience that Parvathi and Nayantara Nayar designed, two actors serve as narrators, leading the audience around a fictional museum represented by nine “rooms”. One of these narrators is named Curator P, and is on a personal journey to uncover details about this chapter in the life of her father, Captain N.

The experience opens at Hind Nagar, the temporary Indian peacekeeping base set up at the DMZ in 1953. A 3D photo installation serves to represent it, forming the first of the “rooms”.

Subsequent rooms hold memorabilia, including letters both real and fictitious; a barbed wire installation (there is mention here of the belligerence of the prisoners-of-war and the rioting that the Indian troops faced); dairy entries; even a wooden recreation of a metal turtle that General Nayar brought back for his daughter from Korea.

The narrative, with its mix of myth, fact and fiction, is a reminder that history alters with each perspective, with time, and with the sheer act of retelling.

The show is also meant as an exhortation to hold on to hope, Nayar says.

As the futility and consequences of war dominate the news, this can be hard to do, she adds. But history shows that good humans can make a difference. “Unfortunately, conflict is recurring,” Nayar says. “But if all we carry is hate, then there really isn’t an ending, is there?”