The Fugitive’s Tryst with Destiny

IN 2015, I HAD ALREADY BEEN LIVING IN INDIA for five years when I reread Latin Lovers, the novel my great-un­cle Ottone Menato published in 1968 about his six years of cap­tivity in Egypt, Bangalore, and Yol camp, near Dharamshala, during World War II. Suddenly, I realised that my idea of India had also been formed in those pages. And I also connected the Italian prisoners of war’s (PoW) quest for freedom from British captivity with India’s fight for independence from the Raj in the same period. A commonality of intents that created interesting bonds.

Ottone, the heroic lieutenant of the Alpine troops who was a poet, journalist, and writer, manifested himself as charismatic and brilliant as I remembered him. Although he died in 1991, he spoke again to me through the character of his alter-ego in that novel, Diego Taranto. Literature is an efficient time travel machine if you know how to activate it.

The title Latin Lovers becomes clear only on the book’s last page, when a clerk tells the protagonist: “Italians… sorry… yes, Italians good! Good people, good workers, good musicians, good sing­ers, famed Latin lovers, yes… sorry… but not good fighters.” That casual dismissal drove ‘Diego’—and my great-uncle Ottone—to escape again and again, risking death to prove Italians were more than the stereotype.

As I travelled around India last year to research a book about this story by retracing the steps of my great-uncle who landed in India 80 years before I did, the irony struck me immediately: here I was, an Italian in India by choice, chasing the ghost of a dear relative who had been brought to Bombay in chains in December 1940, captured in Egypt by the British, then transferred to prison camps across this subcontinent after an adventurous escape attempt in Yemen, surviving a long and dangerous trek across the Sinai and Arabian deserts.

The truth is, I have been thinking about freedom lately. Not the abstract kind celebrated on August 15, but the daily, grinding kind that must be earned and re-earned. The kind Ottone claimed when he slid through sharp and rusty barbed wires in the first of his three adventurous British prison-camp escapes in the 1940s. The kind the entire country of India was grasping for at exactly the same moment.

August 1947. As Nehru spoke of India’s tryst with destiny, a few Italian prisoners in camps across the country were still wait­ing for repatriation ships. Two freedoms on parallel tracks—one monumental and public, the other quiet and personal. Both defy­ing the same colonial power that had decided who could move freely and who could not.

In the private archives of the Oral History Museum in Benga­luru, with the help of academic Indira Chowdhury, I uncovered testimonies of elders who, as children, would walk 10 kilometres just to see the imprisoned Italian football players, including Ottone, at the Sunday match against the British. Many Indians cheered for Italy, even chanting for Hitler—not out of Fascist or Nazi sympathy, but because of the ancient rule that the enemies of their enemies, the British who occupied their land, became friends.

The stories I uncovered revealed something unexpected: Indian villagers consistently aided Italian escapees. Imagine Ottone and his companions crossing the forests north of Bangalore, hunted by military police, poisonous snakes in the foliage of their makeshift beds, two panthers emerging from bushes. And then, of course, betrayal by fake friends arriving with gendarmes—but also a rich farmer hosting a banquet in his palace in honour of the fugitives.

These weren’t political gestures. They were acts of recognition. Indians and Italians both lived under the boot of the empire, both were categorised and dismissed by British administrators. Both deemed inferior. The empire’s bureaucracy that relegated Italians to “not good fighters” and “cowards” for having lost the war was the same machinery that had spent two centuries cataloguing Indians as unfit for self-rule.

From Bangalore, the British moved the Italian officers north to what was known at the time as the ‘Young Officers on Leave’ camp, or Yol, at the foot of the Himalayas, near Dharamshala. This impres­sive prison camp spread across 770 acres with hundreds of barracks. The relationship with locals remained generally good, though not all was rosy—one Italian officer who repeatedly refused to stop singing a Fascist song was shot dead and received, posthumously, the Medal of Honour. Killed for singing: so Italian.

At Yol, I found something extraordinary had emerged. Prisoners created an unexpected microcosm: theatres with actors performing in women’s clothing, open-air cinema, cultural debates, gardens where they cultivated vegetables and distilled grappa, delicious res­taurants (of course), dogs with Italian names like Paletto (little stick), visits to Indian friends in villages with shared meals and medicines.

After September 8, 1943, when General Badoglio took control of the part of Italy while Mussolini retreated to the north of the peninsula, the prisoners’ community split between anti-Fascists with greater freedom of movement and the so-called ‘Fascist Republic of the Himalayas’—non-collaborators held in Camp 25. Some collaborator prisoners helped map mountain heights during permitted treks, resulting in one summit being re-named ‘Cima Italia’ by the Italian PoWs.

In uncle Ottone’s elegantly handwritten diaries, enriched with period clippings, I found a man hungry for understanding, a schol­ar who wanted to grasp India’s geography, history, and above all its religions. There was love for that country, even though some jailers who killed his companions were Indian. Ottone studied sacred texts, which transformed him. Upon repatriation, he practised yoga for years, anticipating the hippie trend of the 1960s by decades.

The parallels became clear to me. Ottone kept a duty as an officer to continue attempting escape—“the only way a prisoner could keep the enemy busy,” he wrote in Latin Lov­ers. But he was also drawn by the magnetism of the mountains, meticulously documenting the Hi­malayan peaks in his drawing book, measuring altitudes, dreaming of the freedom of ascend­ing them. Indians fasted, marched, battled, wrote, and sang for Swaraj. Both were refusing containment, demanding self-definition in the face of the same empire.

My great-uncle found his freedom through fiction, transforming trauma into story. The novel­istic alter-ego Diego Taranto’s repeated escapes became a metaphor—not for success or failure, but for the human refusal to accept diminishment. Each time he was recaptured, he began planning the next attempt. Each time India faced setbacks after 1947, it chose to continue the experiment.

The British are long gone from both our stories now. The empire that once categorised and constrained both Italians and Indians ex­ists now only in archives, fading photographs and the nefarious leg­acy of British “divide et impera”, divide and conquer, even after they retreated to their island. But the impulse they tried to contain—the need to define oneself rather than be defined—persists. That’s the freedom worth celebrating, on August 15 or any other day.

Uncle Ottone’s escapes always ended in recapture, his novel published only 22 years after his repatriation. But in his stubborn, repeated insistence on moving freely through an Indian landscape that was itself yearning for freedom, he touched something larger than individual liberation. He participated, without knowing it, in the century’s great project of self-determination.

Yol still stands today. It is now lined with military barracks for the Rising Star, the youngest battalion of the Indian Army, which granted me permission to visit it last year. There are still monu­ments remembering the Italian PoWs, the base’s museum has a wall commemorating them. Locals still report finding corroded cans used by the Italians—mementos of a painful chapter when prisoner and nation both sought what couldn’t be caged.

From my home in a fishermen’s village in Tamil Nadu, where I have lived for 15 years, I see how India has economically surpassed Italy and other self-proclaimed developed countries. New highways, airports, skyscrapers, in­dustrial ferment. In the same areas where Ottone fled, I found ancient temples next to stalls where you can buy coconuts with the tap of a smartphone, in India’s Silicon Valley of Bengaluru. The real miracle is that it still retains the patient strength that Ottone glimpsed 80 years ago—a sacred relationship with the guest, a certain gentleness often misinterpreted by the British as surrender, a strong patience mistaken for resignation.

That’s what August 15 offers—not the end of struggle, but permission to continue it on your own terms. The prisoner and the nation both learned this lesson, marching hard against the wind, refusing to stay put.

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