Farthest Field

Starred review from June 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.