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Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War, by Raghu Karnad
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A brilliantly conceived nonfiction epic, a war narrated through the lives and deaths of a single family.
The photographs of three young men had stood in his grandmother’s house for as long as he could remember, beheld but never fully noticed. They had all fought in the Second World War, a fact that surprised him. Indians had never figured in his idea of the war, nor the war in his idea of India. One of them, Bobby, even looked a bit like him, but Raghu Karnad had not noticed until he was the same age as they were in their photo frames. Then he learned about the Parsi boy from the sleepy south Indian coast, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the colonial forces and onto the front line. Manek, dashing and confident, was a pilot with India’s fledgling air force; gentle Ganny became an army doctor in the arid North-West Frontier. Bobby’s pursuit would carry him as far as the deserts of Iraq and the green hell of the Burma battlefront.
The years 1939–45 might be the most revered, deplored, and replayed in modern history. Yet India’s extraordinary role has been concealed, from itself and from the world. In riveting prose, Karnad retrieves the story of a single family―a story of love, rebellion, loyalty, and uncertainty―and with it, the greater revelation that is India’s Second World War.
Farthest Field narrates the lost epic of India’s war, in which the largest volunteer army in history fought for the British Empire, even as its countrymen fought to be free of it. It carries us from Madras to Peshawar, Egypt to Burma―unfolding the saga of a young family amazed by their swiftly changing world and swept up in its violence.
5 illustrations
- Sales Rank: #451597 in Books
- Brand: Karnad, Raghu
- Published on: 2015-08-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.60" h x 1.10" w x 6.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Review
“[Farthest Field] is an exquisitely written memoir of the wartime lives of the young Indian journalist's grandfather and two great-uncles, and is so heart-stoppingly beautiful I want all around to read it.” (Simon Winchester - New York Times Book Review)
“Raghu Karnad's Farthest Field seemed at first to me a worthy new book, filling up the large blanks in the hegemonic Anglo-American view of World War II, part of a necessary excavation of suppressed and ignored histories. I wasn't prepared for its extraordinary aesthetic qualities and emotional power, as well as its serene mastery of outsize, intransigent material.” (Pankaj Mishra - New York Times Book Review)
“Like a superior commander himself, Karnad marshals and orders a huge range of materials, locations, and actions with apparently effortless skill, making everything cohere not only through a galloping and affecting narrative but, crucially, through a passionate moral core that repeatedly exposes the numerous ways in which Indians were treated as fodder by the Empire…. The writing of history intersects gloriously with several other genres in this moving, eloquent, intelligent work.” (Neel Mukherjee - Financial Times)
“[S]pectacular…. In prose that verges at times on poetry, he writes with the imaginative gift of a first-rate novelist in order to deliver the truth. Romance and the attendant grief of loss permeate the book alongside passages that are unexpectedly moving…. Unforgettable.” (Juliet Nicolson - Daily Telegraph)
“[Karnad’s] fascinating [book] is both a poignant memorial to his lost family and a gripping account of how India contributed to the allied victory and sowed the seeds of its independence.” (Ian Critchley - Sunday Times)
“From the very first page it is the brilliance of the writing that stands out…. It has the stamp of imaginative truth about it, and we can ask nothing more of any kind of writing.” (David Crane - Spectator)
“This book tells us that we all have two deaths: when we die and when we are forgotten. But there is a possibility of two births, the second being re-created in an extraordinary book. This is one of those rare books that bring people alive again. It has been written with imagination and is engrossing to read.” (Michael Holroyd)
About the Author
Raghu Karnad is a journalist based in Delhi and Bangalore. He has worked as a reporter on the Indian magazines Outlook and Tehelka and is a former editor of Time Out Delhi.
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
An Embarrassment of Riches
By D B S Lakshmi
By D.B.S. Lakshmi
I use the phrase 'an embarrassment of riches' in the sense that there is such a wealth of charged, evocative prose to discover here, that it becomes difficult to choose the best from the rest. In Farthest Field: an Indian Story of the Second World War, Raghu Karnad artfully steers the stories of three close family members (doctor/grandfather Ganny and two grand-uncles, IAF pilot Manek and engineer-officer Bobby, who all died in the war and whom the author knows only from old photographs and others’ remembrances) to the history of the hundreds of thousands of forgottens who fought on the wrong (British) side in theatres of war stretching from Africa to Arabia to Asia at a time when India itself was in the thick of fighting the British for independence.
This sweeping narrative pauses to capture closer-ups of better-documented events and soldiers of war: With Madras under threat, the Police Commissioner orders a platoon to evacuate the zoo by shooting the lions and tigers and the lone polar bear; the jemadar and the Indian sappers in Eritrea who have a window of 50 seconds to emerge from behind their barricade and set explosive charges to blow up the Italians’ boulder blocks – 50 seconds being the time it took for old-fashioned guns to reload; the Sikh jemadar (who survived the massacre at Gazala) recounting rumours of Black Magician Rommel’s enchanted command vehicle (‘ The Elephant’) which could fly over minefields and a death ray weapon that could wipe out full battalions; in Kohima, the British lieutenant and the lance naik who blow up a bakery sheltering Japanese soldiers with a torn away hospital door pasted with gun cotton and plugged with detonator and fuse; the brave gurkha soldier fallen by the Chindwin river who singlehandedly holds off 10 attackers but who is saved just in time by strafing from Manek’s IAF squadron; and a further variety of heroic tales… even one of debrayed mules who are ‘half-warriors, half-carriers’.
Still, were I to pick favourites, it would be the Eastern chapters and within that the triumphant defence of Kohima, as Bobby Mugaseth who having yearned to prove himself a ‘real’ soldier like family and friends, comes face to face with the war a full year after becoming a commissioned officer in the Bengal Sappers:
“Out here on the green baize of the Naga Hills, the gods were rolling dice for men’s lives and limbs. Each day the brigade brought in its dead, Jat Sikhs, Hazarawals, Punjabi Mussalmans – to be burned or buried in the wilderness. At any moment, Bobby could fall to the snap of a bullet or the sighing arrival of a mortar shell.
“In the evenings the wind towed clouds over the ridges… through a blindfold of rain, Bobby first heard then saw the white bursts spouting from the blue shadow beyond the wire. His mind emptied of thoughts it had been working on the instant before, of the words on his lips. As the roar of voices and gunshots rose around him, his life behind him went dark…
“He sat down hard and for a minute, or how long he didn’t know, he only sat. He watched the battle and he could see himself watching the battle and then for a moment saw someone else, far away and in the future, watching him watch himself at this moment”… Someone else, and now us too.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
A poignant and moving read
By K Murthy
'Farthest Field by Raghu Karnad -- novelistic non-fiction, history and biography -- reconstructs the lives and stories of his own family -- his grandmother, her sisters, a brother, their lives and loves, and the journeys that took the men from their homes to distant battlefields as soldiers in the second World War at the crux of India's Independence.''
What we learn is not only that Indians were in the second World War, but what it means for Indians to have been in that war. Consigned to a fate of death and obscurity, these soldiers were sent by the British to fight in the name of the crown, even as the battle for independence and freedom from British rule waged on in India. History has made few attempts to dig them up again, so it is refreshing to witness a writer of Karnad's calibre attempt the undertaking.
The book is heart-stopping at moments, sharp and full of edges and revelations that hint at other neglected histories of unknown Indians and the Second World War. To have crafted the story of the personal loss in his family and through it discover the historical at this scale can only have been done by intelligent and sensitive writing, and Karnad manages this beautifully.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
'The forgotten War..revived
By royal_guju
lthough you won’t get an idea of it from following the commemorations of the two world wars in Britain, a large part of the manpower of the British empire’s armies came from its colonies. Cicero referred to money, the sinews of war; in a more literal sense, Indian soldiers formed the sinews of the British empire’s global conflicts, from the opium wars in the mid-19th century to, say, the securing of Basra in 1914 (and again in 1941).
By the end of the second world war more than 2.5m men served in the Indian army, making it the largest volunteer force in world history. Yet they were treated worse than second-class humans and Winston Churchill was adamant about not giving India her independence, which the Indian National Congress had demanded as a requisite for India providing the men Britain so desperately needed to fight. President Franklin Roosevelt was keenly aware of the systemic double standards involved: Europe was facing the biggest threat to the very freedom it wouldn’t consider for other races.
The unwritten, expunged and marginalised lesser people, written out of white histories, are now making a comeback — from Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy to Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War (2010), which documented the shameful role played by the British prime minister during the 1943 Bengal famine in which 3m Indians died, a growing literature is filling out what has been a woefully skewed picture.
Into this context steps the Indian journalist Raghu Karnad, whose debut history Farthest Field focuses on the trajectories of three related Indian men’s lives during the second world war. Karnad opens up the story to take in the great theatres of the war — Singapore, Eritrea, Libya, El Alamein, Basra, Arakan, Imphal — but this is a narrative in which public and private are always interlaced: we will discover that his maternal grandfather, Kodandera Ganapathy (“Ganny”), is part of the trio. Ganny marries Nurgesh Mugaseth (“Nugs”), one of four siblings — three daughters (Subur, Nugs and Khorshed) and one son (Godrej, aka Bobby) — from a prosperous industrial Parsi family based in Calicut in southern India. Khorshed (“Kosh”) marries a dashing daredevil, Manek Dadabhoy. Karnad’s book is the story of these three friends, Ganny, Bobby and Manek, brothers-in-law and brothers-in-arms, Bobby and Manek
Ganny, a doctor, is recruited by the Indian Medical Service and sent to the Combined Military Hospital in Thal in July 1942. Within five months, he is dead, from asthmatic bronchitis, at the age of 26; he did not live to see the birth of his daughter. Unlike Ganny, Manek, an officer in the Indian Air Force, sees real action in the war: he is sent to Burma... He dies inside Indian lines in May 1943, his plane coming down while returning to base through thick monsoon cloud.
Bobby, an engineer, joins the Bengal Sappers under the 161st Indian Infantry Brigade. More than a year after his commission, Bobby, who “regard[s] his life as an anti-suspense novel: How will our hero escape his monotonous safety, and find his way to danger?”, is sent to the dreaded North-East Frontier as the army plans a full offensive against the Japanese to prevent their entry into India. In a bravura feat of literary-historical imagination — the kind that one would normally associate with a novelist — Karnad recreates the Imphal-Kohima front, filling out the lacunae in the story of how Bobby meets his end in November 1944.
Like a Comissioned Office himself, Karnad marshals and orders a huge range of materials, locations and actions with apparently effortless skill, making everything coheret not only through a galloping and affecting narrative but, crucially, through a passionate moral core that repeatedly exposes the numerous ways in which Indians were treated as fodder by the Empire. It seems reasonable to conclude that Karnad has been inspired to investigate his family’s recent past by this moral impulse to balance the history books; that inextricability of the public and private again.
In closing, a great read and can hardly wait for the next book by this emerging writer
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