Until last week, the only thing I’d known about World War II was that it was not India’s war. It was just something that happened parallel to our freedom struggle, something that made the British rulers of our country even nastier about our aspirations to Independence than they had been before. That’s all.
So when I finished The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War by Yasmin Khan, I was startled. I sat gibbering for a while, wondering over and over again: how can a country forget a whole world war?
I could not believe that World War II had done so much to and for India. It took our men. It created a famine that took even more of our people. It created the conditions for the future industrialisation of free India. It made the Indian Army an army of Indians. It displayed the stupidity of racism. It gave the women of our country a taste of freedom beyond the freedom struggle. It got the sun to begin to set on the British Empire. It did so much more than the things I’ve already mentioned in this paragraph… and here I’d thought it was not India’s war.
But in fact, India was almost the centre of the war. The Germans and Italians were inNorth Africa and West Asia, heading east. The Germans were also in Russia from where, if they were victorious, they’d probably aim south. The Japanese were knocking down European colonial possessions in the east like dominoes, heading west and south. India was bang in the middle.
And because of that, Khan argues, World War II had a greater impact on India than we choose to remember. In 321 succinct pages (not counting notes etc.), she tells us about our forgotten world war. Not only about the men who signed up to fight, but about the people they left behind. And what a startling story it is, with all the war’s ambiguity for Indians, and yet the clarity it left behind about the place of India in the world. World War II was the British Empire’s war, not India’s war, and yet it liberated India, just as the Empire helped liberate fascist-occupied countries.
But that’s precisely why we’ve forgotten our place in World War II, points out Khan. As does Raghu Karnad in Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War. Because the India that was plunged into World War II without its people’s agreement was the jewel of the British crown, and the India that emerged from it was nearly free.
Farthest Field is the result of Karnad’s hunt for the stories of his grandfather and great-uncles, three brothers-in-law who had been in World War II. None of them survived and Karnad knew nothing about them, until one day, he became curious about the three framed photographs in his grandmother’s house. Who were the people in those frames? Why had his grandmother, now dead, never spoken of them?
The young men in the photos turned out to be forgotten in more ways than one. Not only were they never mentioned in Karnad’s family, but their contributions to keeping India safe during World War II, like the contributions of all the Indians in the defence forces at the time, had been lost in the cracks between the era of Empire and the era of Independent India.
In his search for these three lost souls, Karnad covers much the same ground as Khan, but from a more personal perspective. Unfortunately, as he acknowledges, it was too late to discover much about his family’s contributions to the war. So the stories he has are slim. Though Karnad makes a good case for bringing back people like his family members from the farthest fields of memory, he has too little of his family’s stories to really make an impact.
Perhaps I feel this way because I’d read Yasmin Khan’s book before I’d opened Raghu Karnad’s book. Khan’s book is magnificent in its detail. Every chapter could be a book by itself. Khan used particulars from all sorts of records to chronicle a general history. Karnad aimed to write a history based on three particulars, with general history as the background, but had too little material to pull it off well – though Farthest Field is a very brave attempt at it.
But both books are essential reading for anyone interested in pre-Independence India. Because they tell you all you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
Book: The Raj at War
Author: Yasmin Khan
Publisher: Vintage Books
Pages: 448
Rs: 699
Book: Farthest Field
Author: Raghu Karnad
Publisher: Random House Fourth Estate
Pages: 320
Rs: 550
