That this is Karnad’s first book just goes to show that well-crafted writing needs no authorial pedigree. It was simply because I wanted to savour his prose. It was not because the dazzle of Karnad’s imagery had obscured some vital piece of information or compounded his jumble of nicknames and proper names, though this is not the sort of book you want interrupted by uncertainties. In the case of Farthest Field, resisting the narrative pull, I turned back at page 65. It’s not unusual on finishing a particularly striking book to turn to the beginning and start again. They deserve better, and both Karnad’s Farthest Field and Khan’s The Raj at War do much to set the record straight. Theirs are the names that independent India now reveres, while the many who died for a king and country they could hardly call their own would be remembered by their comrades and grieved by their families, but signally forgotten by their nation. In the postwar British show trial of these so-called ‘defectors’, Nehru himself led for the defence. Congress’s heroes were not the two million ‘mercenaries’ of Britain’s Indian army but the 43,000 patriotic men and women of the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army, led by the strutting Subhas Chandra Bose. After all, it was not their war: they hadn’t been consulted about it and they objected to dying for an empire they were trying to get shot of.Īs Karnad puts it, Nehru, like most of his colleagues in the mainstream Congress party, ‘could not accept that Indian soldiers would die for the freedom of a nation which denied that very freedom to India’. But if the wartime sacrifice has seldom been recognised, it is because so many Indians were ambivalent about the cause they were serving. Acts of bravery were applauded, medals were won and loved ones were lost. In 1942 some 80,000 Indians perished in the chaotic exodus from Burma and in 1943 several millions starved to death in the war-induced famine in Bengal. Cities such as Calcutta and Vishakhapatnam were bombed, ships were sunk and dockyards were shelled.
They pushed the Italians from the rocky heights of Eritrea, trudged back and forth through the minefields of North Africa, quelled an insurgency in Iraq, and in the ‘Forgotten War’ for Burma suffered heavier casualties than all the other Allies combined. The two million Indian combatants (according to Raghu Karnad) – or the two and a half million (according to Yasmin Khan) – comprised the largest volunteer army in the world.
Seventy years after the guns fell silent, India’s part in the Second World War is finally receiving the attention it deserves.
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