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FARTHEST FIELD AN INDIAN STORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Author: Raghu Karnad
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Pages: 300
Price: Rs 550
By the end of the Second World War, nearly 2.5 million Indians had taken part in the action on behalf of the Allied war effort. The Indian Army was at the time the largest volunteer army in history. Indian troops fought in nearly every theatre of war in which Britain was engaged. Across three continents they battled German, Italians, Japanese, the troops of Vichy France and even other Indians who were fighting on the Axis side. In the aftermath of Independence, the stories of these Indians have been a reminder of a past the new India pointedly decided to ignore. There was too much incongruity in trying to remember those who had decided to fight for an imperialist cause.
This was especially true during the Second World War when the leadership of the Indian National Congress was much less forthcoming about extending its support for the war effort than it had been in the First. Burnt from that experience of false promises, the Congress demanded independence as a precondition for supporting the war and launched the Quit India movement when this demand was rejected. The conflation of this last bid for independence with the war effort meant that from 1947 on the wartime service of the men of the Indian Army was cast as one that had largely been wasted fighting on the wrong side of history. Those who survived and continued to serve in the Army fought new wars, this time for nationalist causes. Those who had died in the Second World War became casualties not just in their physical death but in the new nation’s memory as well.
Raghu Karnad’s gorgeously written, heart-breaking book, Farthest Field, seeks to excavate some of that memory. For Karnad, it is a personal story. He recounts how growing up in Madras (as Chennai was then called) he thought little of the sepia photographs of three men placed around the house, even though they were pictures of his grandfather and great-uncles (one of whom he closely resembled). His family never talked about them and the young Karnad never thought to probe. As curiosity about family history developed and he did ask about the stories of these men, it emerged that they had all fought and died in the Second World War. It was to Karnad a strange revelation. In his, as in most Indians’, view of history, the Second World War didn’t figure as something that had a direct impact on this country or its people. And yet, here was a family in which an entire generation had been wiped out by that conflict.
By the time Karnad became truly conscious of this family history, his grandmother was gone, along with most others who might have been able to give him their account of this very personal war. And so the Farthest Field inhabits a space between history and “forensic non-fiction”. Karnad uses interviews with survivors, memoirs, archives, diaries of army units and imagination to rebuild the lives of the three men and their families during the war years.
At the heart of the story are the Mugaseths — an industrialist Parsi family in Calicut. The story follows the lives of the four siblings — Godrej Khodadad (“Bobby”), the only son, the three daughters, Khorshed (“Kosh”), Nurgesh (“Nugs”) and Subur, Manek Dadabhoy, Bobby’s closest friend and Kosh’s husband, and Kodandera Ganapathy (“Ganny”), Nugs’ husband and, as we discover later, Karnad’s grandfather. Karnad traces the journey of the three men — Bobby, Manek and Ganny — into and through the war. The action spans the great theatres of the war that seem so remote even today — Eritrea, Libya, El Alamein, Basra, Arakan, Imphal, Kohima — but also looks closely at the home front and the horrors of war that were unleashed on families left behind.
If the Indian soldier’s role in the two World Wars has been largely forgotten today, it is because of the taint of the term mercenary that has always accompanied any remembrance of this participation. In the early chapters, as Karnad traces the journey of these men to war, it is easy to see why such participation in military service wasn’t viewed through the lens of nationalism at the time. Karnad writes: “Who was the Indian soldier today? A question mark. Why had he enlisted? A question mark.” Karnad draws a parallel with a war poster for recruitment from the First War showing a faceless figure surrounded by the potential privileges of war with its slogan asking “Ye roop-e-banduq aur wardi kaun lega?” (who will assume this figure with a rifle and uniform?). The story of Bobby, Ganny and Manek tell us how normal, even rational it was for these young men to take up the call to arms. The war gave them the promise of adventure, money, distinguished service allowing them to fill in that invisible figure with their image. These were just men trying to build a life.
So you have Ganny, a medical doctor, join the Indian Medical Service where he is sent to the Combined Military Hospital in Thal, in modern-day Pakistan. Manek becomes an officer in the Indian Air Force, spending the early part of the war flying missions over the north-west frontier. In some symmetry, he is sent in 1943 to the north-east frontier to support the mission of the “Chindits”, the special guerrilla force that was trained to operate behind Japanese lines in the depth of the Burmese jungles. And then there is Bobby, an engineer, who joins the Bengal Sappers under the 161st Indian Infantry Brigade and is eventually also sent to the north-east frontier to stall the Japanese invasion of India.
Farthest Field is perhaps at its best when recounting that campaign in the east. Karnad writes how even though the campaign in Burma and India’s north-east was the British Empire’s largest and longest-lasting campaign, by 1944 the men there already called themselves the “Forgotten Army”. Indians made up the bulk of the army fighting in the east and were soon fighting in horrendous conditions not just the Japanese but other Indians — the soldiers of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA). It was perhaps the role of this other Indian Army, marked enemy by the addition of an extra word, that stamped in stone a fate of oblivion for those Indians who fought on the side of Empire. After the war it was the INA that became a symbol of nationalism; Indian soldiers returning from the north-east were greeted with the sinking realisation that they had been on the wrong side of history. In Karnad’s words, “Between the closing chapter of imperial history and the first volume of the national record, we let drop the page that had Indians fighting on both sides.”
In an article for the Oxford Times, Karnad has said that he was glad that Farthest Field was published on the 70th anniversary of the War. “The 70th has a more human significance, reminding us to commune with a generation and its stories before they disappear together.” For bringing alive, with such beauty and skill, a small part of an almost forgotten story and reminding us to commune with all parts of our past — as a nation and as families — we owe Karnad thanks.
The reviewer is the author of ‘If I die here, who will remember me?’: India and the First World War
