Raghu Karnad - Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War

I had known their faces my whole life, but never asked their names till it was too late. Their portrait-style photographs, full of grain and shadow, were not in albums that would have placed them somewhere in the train of family history, and when the albums were opened, wed have asked, And whos that? Instead they were isolated in dull silver frames on table tops around the house in Madras; beheld but not noticed, as angels are in a frieze full of mortal strugglers. I never even noticed that I looked like one of them.

I still cant believe I was so late. By the time I asked, not only were those men long gone, but my grandmother was too, and her sisters, and most of their generation. Nugs, my grandmother, could have told me everything, though she might have refused. I think she had banished her youth from her mind by the time she died, though I dont actually know. I never asked. I was a child, curious about anything but family. All Id wanted from her was the hoard of gold which I believed was hidden under a clicking tile in her bedroom. She told me I could have it after she died. So, after she died, I knew precisely where to look for what had never existed. And what had existed her story and the stories of those young men in the photo frames I had to search for without her.

There was an injustice in it, which I sensed as it dawned on my mother how little she knew of their stories either though one of the men was her own father, and the others her two uncles. She and my grandmother were always close, as Id imagined a single child and bereaved parent had to be. Half a lifetime they had spent together, but neither one asked or told about what happened. My grandmother, a doctor, had sutured that past shut. Eventually they were both doctors, and when my mother moved away to work in New York for nearly twenty years she wrote back every week, and in the house in Madras I found every one of the thousand letters, bound up into bricks that could build a playhouse. Everything my grandmother could save of my mothers, she had. But of the men, there was almost nothing.

Still my mother did know the names of those who, in the late hours of their lives, held onto strands of the story. With visit after visit, we followed the thinning thread of those lives, right up to the point where it frayed, came apart, and came to an end.

What I learned first, before I even learned their proper names, was that they had been in the Second World War. That was surprising. It was almost outlandish, because Indians never figured in my idea of the war, or the war in my idea of India, and I thought I had a good idea about both. There was certainly no public notion of it; nothing we were taught in school or regaled with from the silver screen, even though the Indian Army in the Second World War was the largest volunteer force the world had ever known. Personally, I hadnt thought Madras could even be mentioned in the same book as Pearl Harbor; I was accustomed to thinking of the war as Western Front, Eastern Front and Pacific. When I looked through the eyes of Indian soldiers, however, the globe turned, revealing new continents.

The larger story was the key to retrieving what I could of their private stories. From the start, to learn what happened to my grandfather and grand-uncles was to discover the lost epic of Indias Second World War, as well as the reasons we chose to discard it. I started with names. To the family, they were Bobby, Manek and Ganny; their proper names, which Id never seen in writing, I confirmed from a registry of Commonwealth soldiers. The registry also listed the units to which they belonged. With luck, I found those units diaries. This meant that in my desperate pursuit, even at times when I lost sight of them, I still knew the road they had taken.

Graham Greene describes Henry James as once saying that a writer with sufficient talent need only look in through the mess-room window of a Guards barracks in order to write a novel about the brigade. James didnt say anything about non-fiction, but the challenge of this book felt similar. Could one write a true story on the basis of only glimpses into the lives of forgotten men?

I might have tried to write a novel, but I knew there was nothing I could invent that would outdo the true, brief course of their lives. Instead I approached this book through what I think of as forensic non-fiction: I started out with three unknown, dead men on my hands. Who were they? How did they die, and where, and what took them there? The result is my best shot on the case of the three brothers-in-law turned brothers-in-arms. To deal with their interior lives, which I was determined to do, I took a sort of forensic licence, using fragmented evidence and testimony to build an account of their thoughts and beliefs. This was a compromise, but one that helped me confront the paradox, which only grew in magnitude, of becoming familiar with forgotten men. That apart, I have limited all incidents, anecdotes, speech, and details of movements, operations, environment and milieu to what I learned from interviews or records, or could generally establish as fact.

Even what I have categorised as facts are often themselves a kind of fiction, reshaped and revised during their long storage as personal and institutional memories. Nothing drove this home like my face-to-face interviews with Indian veterans of the war. Most were in their nineties. Many remembered their twenties as well as I do mine, but their answers, especially to the question of why they joined a colonial army, seemed to have been mentally corrected over their much longer service in the army of free India. In general, their memories, like all memories, were smoothed and polished by time, as pebbles in a stream. Many of the claims of Army histories and memoirs may be just as unreliable: shaped by agenda, nostalgia and pride.