Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War

by Raghu Karnad, Kahlil Joseph (Read by)

Overview

“I have not lately read a finer book than this—on any subject at all.… A masterpiece.”—Simon Winchester, New Statesman

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781511372749
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	06/14/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.50(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Maps viii

Prologue xiii

Part 1 Home

1 Everybody's Friend: Calicut, 1936-39 3

2 HukmHai: Madras, 1939-40 14

3 Savages of the Stone Age: Miranshah, November 1941 29

4 The Centre of the World: Madras, February 1942 43

5 Madras Must Not Burn: April 1942 55

6 Things Sacred Between Us: Mhow, August 1942 65

7 Do or Die: Thai, August-October 1942 69

8 The King's Own: Roorkee, August-December 1942 81

Part 2 West

9 Second Field: Baghdad, March 1943 97

10 The Jemadars' Story: Eritrea and Libya, 1940-41 105

11 The Lieutenant's Story: El Alamein, July-November 1942 118

12 Kings of Persia: Baghdad, April 1943 126

Part 3 East

13 Enter the Hurricane: Imphal, May 1943 139

14 No Heroes: Madras, May-June 1943 147

15 Fascines and Gabions: Calcutta, October 1943 156

16 The Jungle Book; Arakan, December 1943-March 1944 170

17 Fight with Your Ghost: Kohima and Jotsoma, April 1944 183

18 The Cremation Ground: Kohima, April 1944 196

19 The Elephant: Tiddim Road, June-October 1944 207

20 The Road Ahead: Madras, November 1945 220

Epilogue 227

Afterword 233

Acknowledgements 245

Notes 249

Appendix 1 Timeline 275

Appendix 2 The Indian Army 281

Select Bibliography 287

Index 295

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/22/2015
Indian journalist Karnad delves into his family’s past, learning that three ancestors—ones he knew only from faded photographs—died during WWII. Their nation’s involvement in that war is largely forgotten and unrecorded. More than a personal history, Karnad’s account encompasses theaters on three continents as he uncovers diaries, logbooks, requisition orders, and correspondence from the “largest volunteer force the world had ever known.” Just as the broader outlines of India’s pre-independence, pre-partition war effort have been forgotten, individual families also tended to elide their own involvement: “Everything my grandmother could save of my mother’s, she had. But of the men, there was almost nothing.” The tense, subservient relationship with colonial Britain defined the daily rhythms of army life; Karnad’s prose, heartfelt and hauntingly poetic, evokes an India at the crossroads, sending battalions of its young men to die in defense of the British Empire even as Gandhi and Nehru laid the foundation for its independence. “Maybe the whole country was like that,” Karnad writes, “split between loyalty and liberty, subordination and treason.” Karnad shows that in fighting for Britain’s freedoms—freedoms Britain steadfastly refused to extend to Indians themselves—these forgotten soldiers wrote the final chapter of Britain’s grand and cynical colonial project. Illus. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

[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

[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

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

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

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

06/15/2015
The roles of India, China, and Burma in World War II are beginning to receive more attention after decades of neglect. Journalist and debut author Karnad explores India's complicated position in the war by sketching out the contributions of his grandfather and two of his great uncles, who all died while serving in the Indian Army. The author shows how the defeat of the British at the hand of the Japanese helped India and other colonial nations gain their independence after the war. Meanwhile, Indians who fought alongside the Allies against Germany and Japan were soon forgotten in their own nation, which preferred to remember its struggle for independence rather than its fight on behalf of the British empire. VERDICT Readers may remain skeptical of Karnad's attempt to draw a moral equivalency between Nazi fascism and British colonialism, but the tragic story of his own family members helps us to understand the moral ambiguity of even our most celebrated wars. Readers who enjoyed Madhusree Mukerjee's Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II will find this work equally rewarding.—Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, FL

Library Journal

2015-05-16
Discovering that his grandfather and two grand uncles had served in World War II, Indian journalist and editor Karnad (Everybody's Friend, 2013) decided to write about their experiences. Since the author's subjects left no personal documents, the result is less a biography than a docudrama, but it is an engrossing, revealing account of his nation's role in that war, a subject that receives only a passing mention in many history books. The Bangalore- and New Delhi-based author's family was Parsi, one of a dizzying number of ethnic minorities; they were not Hindu or Muslim, largely middle-class, and not opposed to British rule. Financial need and a yearning for adventure directed the brothers to officers' training for Britain's Indian Army, a force that ultimately numbered 2,500,000, the largest volunteer army in history. One joined the Indian Air Force, where his first assignment was bombing Afghanistan from bases in what is now Pakistan, an activity still in progress 75 years later. He never left India and died in a crash before the end of the war. A brother, who was a doctor, also died on the Afghan frontier, probably of pneumonia. The third, a lieutenant in the sappers (combat engineers supporting the infantry), fumed at his inactivity for years until he was caught up in the vicious and immense campaign (Britain's largest and longest of WWII) to recapture Burma, where he was killed in late 1944. The author re-creates their lives and thoughts through unit records, memoirs, and interviews with elderly survivors. An appealing, if necessarily fictionalized in places, portrait of three officers who did their best fighting a war widely opposed by many countrymen and that provided little benefit to the nation and was quickly forgotten after Indian independence in 1947.

Kirkus Reviews

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