'Grandad fought the nazis too': Mobeen Azhar on WWII and Britain's forgotten soldiers

Growing up in Huddersfield, I travelled to Sialkot in Pakistan for huge family weddings, and I remember eating parathas with him for breakfast in an open-air courtyard in my father’s childhood home.

Dadajaan, as I called him – it’s a Punjabi term that denotes respect – was stoic and kind, but gave very little away. He had a reputation for being stern but he must have softened in his later years because, to me, he was a sweet old man.

As a child, I knew that he had fought in the Second World War, but little more. He died in 1989, when I was nine, before I was able to ask him about his experiences. In making The Soldiers that Saved Britain, I discovered that he had been a member of the signal corps in North Africa. My grandfather was part of the Battle of El-Alamein in Egypt, a momentous victory and a turning point in the fight against fascism.

He joined the British Indian Army when he was 20. In part, of course, this was because India was a British colony. My grandfather wasn’t alone in that respect. Some 2.5 million men from undivided India – what is now Pakistan, India and Bangladesh – joined up, in what’s seen today as the largest volunteer force in history.

The British Indian Army was involved in operations across the Mediterranean, Africa, the Middle East and Far East. The scale of their contribution was vast and undeniable but their stories have been overlooked in Britain for too long.

In researching my grandfather’s story, I travelled to Egypt and stood at the sight of the Battle of El-Alamein. I found shrapnel on the ground. It made me feel closer to him, so it felt like holy ground. But this was the battleground where he witnessed, in blistering heat and atrocious conditions, the hell of war.

To be on this intensely personal trip as this summer’s race riots unfolded was heartbreakingly poetic. It reminded me of what my parents, who settled in Britain because it was seen as the mother ship, endured.

My father was bottled by the National Front in a racist attack before I was born. The racism both my parents experienced became an expected part of life in Britain. Waking up one day this summer to reports of graves of Muslims being desecrated in Burnley, as part of the unrest, I asked myself, "Why does Britain fail to learn from its past?"

The history of so many black and brown people, including that of my family, predates modern notions of immigration. Entire chapters of history have been conveniently abandoned. Many of those involved in the riots this summer may be entirely ignorant of how so many people from around the world have defined Britain and its history.

Which is why I believe a memorial is an important step for contemporary Britain to acknowledge its own history. Having learnt about my grandfather and millions of others like him, it is shocking that there is no permanent memorial to those soldiers who sacrificed so much.

So that is why I am campaigning, with artist Mahtab Hussain, for a bronze artwork in London that will depict soldiers of South Asian heritage. Nothing currently exists on this scale as a dedicated memorial to the soldiers of the British Indian Army who fought in the Second World War. My grandfather’s story and those of his comrades is our collective history. Indian soldiers cannot be written out of our consciousness.

For me, Remembrance Day this year will be like no other. I have a renewed understanding of my family history as well as the history of Britain. It is one that I hope we can all learn from.

The Soldiers That Saved Britain airs at 7:10pm on Saturday 2nd November on Channel 4.

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