The
Operator

OPERATOR DOSSIER Rajat K. Luthra Founder, Studio, Custodian — YoddhaLabs

The first novel I read as a child was The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams. I was nine or ten. I read it in a single sitting in my bedroom in New Delhi, and when I finished, I read it again. After that I could not stop. Brickhill. Reid. Neave. Higgins. MacLean. Stacks of Commando comics. The prisoner-of-war escape became the landscape of my imagination.

But a question nagged at me, even as a boy: where were the Indians? India contributed two and a half million soldiers to the Allied forces in the Second World War — the largest volunteer army in human history. Thousands became prisoners of war. And yet, in the vast library of escape literature, I could not find a single Indian face. The millions who served had been written out of the narrative.

That question became this studio.

“I wrote this because the boy who read The Wooden Horse in his bedroom in New Delhi deserved to know that an Indian was there too.” RAJAT K. LUTHRA — FOREWORD, THE INDIAN AT COLDITZ

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