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.
Their nation’s involvement in that war is largely forgotten and unrecorded. In penetrating nonfiction prose, Raghu Karnad retrieves from obscurity the epic of India's Second World War-a war the world reveres, but India would choose to forget"-Provided by publisher.Ī nonfiction epic narrated through the lives and deaths of a single family describes India's experience of World War II, discussing how the country, its army, and the ruling British Empire were transformed by the war.Indian journalist Karnad delves into his family’s past, learning that three ancestors-ones he knew only from faded photographs-died during WWII. The Farthest Field reveals how the war transformed India, its army, and the British empire that had ruled the country for so long and would, barely two years after the end of the war, abandon it to the horrors of partition. The narrative travels from Madras to Eritrea, Iraq, and Burma, unfolding the saga of a young family amazed by their swiftly changing world and devastated by its violence. His army fights for the British empire, even as his countrymen fight for freedom from it, and Indian soldiers end up on both sides of the vast conflict. A young man from the sleepy south Indian coast, sensing adventure and opportunity, follows his brothers-in-law into the army-and onto the front lines of India's Second World War. "A brilliantly conceived nonfiction epic, a war narrated through the lives and deaths of a single family.
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