How I helped Captain Mohan Honawar’s family find out more about their uncle’s bravery in a PoW camp

Captain Mohan Honawar left India in May 1941, one of the thousands of men in the colonial Indian army defending the British empire in Malaya and Singapore. He did not return.

The official record states that he died in New Guinea on October 31, 1944, but does not mention how. With his wife and five siblings all dead, and without any children, the memory lives through his nieces who believe he was perhaps beheaded by the Japanese.

In a family memoir published in 2020, there is a chapter about Mohan Kaka that incorporates letters kept by his wife and mother, and memories from his brother Prem who embarked on a crusade to find out what happened to him.

Mohan Honawar was born on January 25, 1911, and grew up in Dharwad where he served with distinction in the Territorial Army, a volunteer unit of civilians. After studying in Pune’s Law College, he joined Lever Brothers in Mumbai. He and his wife Ratna lived in the Matunga neighbourhood. But he continued his military connection, becoming a reserve officer in the Indian Army attached to the 5/14 Punjab Regiment. When World War II broke out, Honawar was called up.

Correspondence with his family shows that soon after going to Malaya, Honawar returned home for a training programme. He sailed again for Singapore in January 1942. His ship, it turned out, would be part of the last reinforcement convoy to reach the island, beleaguered by the Japanese. It was too little, too late.

The last letter his parents in Dharwad received from Honawar was written on January 14, 1942, just before he sailed from Bombay. “Please do not worry too much,” he wrote. “I will take good care of myself. You will always be on my mind…Goodbye dear Daddy and Mamma.”

After Singapore surrendered to the Japanese in February 1942, the army reported that Honawar had been taken prisoner of war. In 1943, he was declared missing in action.

There was no further news for next two years. It was an anxious time for his family, especially for Honawar’s wife Ratna.

Then in March 1945 they received a telegram from the Allied Headquarters of Southeast Asia citing unconfirmed reports were that he had been executed in October 1944. But it was still unclear what had happened to him.

Meanwhile, his brother Prem Honawar became an army photographer and went in his search of his missing sibling. Prem Honawar was part of the Allied reoccupation force that landed in Malaya in September 1945, a month after Japan’s surrender.

In Singapore, Prem Honawar learnt that the Japanese had sent his brother to hard labour camps in Papua New Guinea, and that the survivors had been liberated by the Australians. Prem Honawar got himself transferred to Australia.

In Sydney and Brisbane, he met the few survivors of the brutal camps, including an Indian soldier who said he had seen Mohan Honawar being shot by the Japanese. Many in the camps had reportedly been shot for signalling to American planes flying over them.

Back in Bombay, Mohan Honawar’s wife Ratna learnt of an Indian officer, Major JH Patel, who had been with him. She sent him a letter to ask what he knew.

In December 1945, Patel replied: “We were staying together in the same hut and we shared the sufferings of each other.”At their last meeting on September 7, 1944, Patel said the Japanese had ordered all the Indian prisoners of war in their camp in New Guinea to march to a new location the next day. It was a month’s walk away over mountains, a certain death sentence given their precarious state of health.

At first, all the prisoners made a plan to escape that night. But at the last minute Honawar decided to instead seek the help of Papuans to hide in the jungle. That was the last time Patel met with Mohan Honawar.

That night, 80 men including Patel escaped from the camp. Mohan Honawar and others stayed behind. Both options were fraught with risk: 42 of Patel’s 180 men died before they could be rescued. As it happened, all those who stayed behind also died – from sickness, starvation or being shot while attempting to escape later.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records that Mohan Honawar died on October 31, 1944, though the cause was not mentioned.

As it turns out, I actually had a little more information about Mohan Honawar. When I was researching my book The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II, I had chanced upon more details about his life.

I knew that Mohan Honawar had joined the Indian National Army under its first commander, General Mohan Singh. The force had been fostered by a pre-war alliance between Japanese Army Intelligence and Indian nationalists outside India.

But when Singh realised that the Japanese were not serious about fully arming his men and supporting them in their campaign to free India from British rule, he refused to cooperate and was arrested. The Indian National Army was disbanded.

When the Indian National Army was resurrected in 1943 under Rash Behari Bose, Honawar declined to rejoin the organisation. He was shipped off to hard labour camps in New Guinea. Of the 3,000 Indian prisoners of war there, over 2,800 died.

Accounts in the National Archives of India described how Honawar had bravely stood up for his men.

It still isn’t clear how Captain Mohan Honawar died. It is likely that he was either shot by the Japanese in a mass-killing or beheaded in an incident related to escapes.

However, I had been unable to find any members of this family to tell them what I knew.

In November, when I spoke about my book at the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, I told the audience about my inability to trace the Honawar family. Astonishingly, someone in the audience put up his hand and said he knew them very well.

Two days later, I met Captain Honawar’s niece Naina Jayaram in Delhi. All that she and her cousins knew about their uncle was what his siblings had told them – and that was only snippets of their story. I was able to tell them what I’d learnt from the archives of his life in captivity.

Eight decades after he had left home, the Honawar family learned the truth of his war: his suffering, his bravery and about how he had possibly met his death. It provided closure to the family mystery about their fabled Mohan Kaka.

Gautam Hazarika is a Singapore-based researcher and the author of The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II (Penguin Random House India & Pen & Sword UK). His email address is ghazarika70@yahoo.com.sg. He will speak about his book at the Sarmaya Arts Foundation in Mumbai on February 21, Captain Honawar’s grandniece Radhika More will also speak at the event.