Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

SPEAKING VOLUMES

In the popular imagination, World War Two was a white war, fought by soldiers from across Europe; in the Hollywood version, of course, World War Two was fought and won almost exclusively by Americans, never mind that the Yanks got into the game as late as December 1941.

In the Indian imagination, World War Two is a gaping black hole, papered over by a hundred private family histories. Calcutta, where I grew up, had its share of stories from Flanders veterans and tales from the trenches of Africa.

In villages even now, you'll meet young soldiers who can trace the family tradition of joining the army right back to Dadaji who limped home from WW II with a trunkful of memories and a hatful of medals.

But in literature, the long silence on the subcontinent's contribution to the war is an accusing absence. We've shown up in brownface here and there: in Paul Scott's tale of soldiers in Burma, in Kipling's Kim, where Hurree Babu doubles as comic relief and "fearful" but ultimately intrepid spy, in Spike Milligan's autobiographical stories, in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, where sapper Kirpal "Kip" Singh plays a central role.

The only mainstream novel""privately published memoirs and fast-fading war romances excepted""of note in English by an Indian about WW II was the late Mulk Raj Anand's Across the Black Waters, the second in a trilogy of novels that followed Lal Singh's journey from his village to Flanders and beyond.

It was a strange piece of fiction, a novel only just beginning to emerge from the shadow of Untouchable, Coolie and Anand's other, more popular works.

Anand, whose father served in a Dogra regiment, followed the trials and tribulations of an ordinary bunch of Indian soldiers as they crossed the "Kala Pani" to fight in the service of a "God-Emperor", whom they owed neither religious nor, properly speaking, political allegiance.

He brought home the camaraderie and loneliness of these troops, twice-exiled""once by war, once by the then unimaginable distance between home and abroad.

It's hard to read Across the Black Waters as a "straight" war novel, though; the conventions operating when Mulk Raj Anand wrote this as a young man have changed sharply.

It has to be read in its time, just as the oldfashioned Boys' Own stories, punctuated by cries of "Gosh!" and "Good golly!" and peopled by sinister spies and intrepid small boys cannot be read any more without irony.

The Babu, from Kim, has survived the years rather better: those aspects of his character that are caricature can now be read in the pure dissecting light of postcolonial criticism (alas, poor Kipling, he knew no better).

And passages like this, intended to provide comic relief, can now be read with a certain degree of irony: [Hurree Babu] became thickly treasonous, and spoke in terms of sweeping indecency of a government which had forced upon him a white man's education and neglected to supply him with a white man's salary.

He babbled tales of oppression and wrong till the tears ran down his cheeks for the miseries of his land. Then he staggered off, singing love-songs of Lower Bengal, and collapsed upon a wet tree-trunk. Never was so unfortunate a product of English rule in India more unhappily thrust upon an alien."

This truncated list of war novels would have been depressing if it hadn't been for a few straws in the wind. Some of them are slightly bizarre, such as Anoop Chandola's The Second Highest World War: The Rama Theatre.

Chandola's father fought in World War II, and his novel is an attempt to put the bravery of the Indian soldier back on the map. What's really fascinating about the book is the cover, which depicts Lord Rama wrestling Hitler.

Shauna Singh Baldwin is in a different league: the author of English Lessons and What the Body Remembers stumbled upon the half-forgotten, half-distorted story of Noor Inayat Khan.

Noor, also known as Nora and as Princess Noor (though she wasn't of royal blood, precisely), was one of the more fascinating figures of the Second World War. She trained as a radio operator with British intelligence, served in France with the Resistance, and was captured by the Germans, and, according to reports, died in Dachau.

Baldwin's chief task was disentangling myth from reality: Noor Inayat Khan's story had been exoticised, as had her persona. She was seen as a kind of Mata Hari, which is moderately amusing given that one of the stories that archetypal female spy spread about herself is that she was an Indian dancer.

"For me," writes Baldwin, referring to the myth of Noor as some kind of exotic Oriental siren, "these non-fiction accounts of Noor raised more questions about Noor than their facts could answer."

She chose""wisely, in this reader's opinion""to fictionalise Noor's story rather than to attempt a non-fiction biography. The fictionalisation allows her to enter into Noor's feelings and imagination without bending the truth too greatly; it also allows her to question, sometimes indignantly, the kind of discrimination that Noor faced, as a woman, and particularly as a woman of "Colonial" origins.

The Tiger's Claw is straightforward war romance, backed by deft writing and a visible effort on Baldwin's part to understand the workings of the Resistance and the twists and turns of war.

She said in an interview that she saw some similarities between Noor and her: both were writers (Noor wrote children's stories), both were women who shuttled between nations and nationalities, always facing down the need to explain themselves, and both were, to some degree, iconoclasts.

The Tiger's Claw, taken in isolation, would be enough to compensate for some of the neglect of that portion of our country's history. But readers interested in this area of relative darkness will look forward to two works in progress.

Vikram Seth's memoir of his uncle and aunt, who met in wartime Germany, will be out later in 2005. And Ruchir Joshi's second novel, still in the pipeline, is set in the Calcutta of World War Two, a time when the city saw troops and blackouts and was a small hub in the war effort.

From Kim to Kip to Noor, it's taken a while for us to begin writing about the Indian experience in the wars""but this is a start.

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