Farthest Field: An Indian story of the second world war by Raghu Karnad fourth estate; Price: Rs.550; Pages: 300 The re-telling in recent years of unsung deeds of valour of Indian soldiers and regiments fighting under the flag of imperial Britain during the two World Wars of the 20th century, has opened up a new, illuminating chapter in the history of the past century. Raghu Karnad reconstructs a family history that dovetails with the Second World War in the “farthest fields” of the West, in Iraq, Baghdad, Libya and Egypt and connects it with insurgencies in Manipur and Imphal on India’s eastern frontier. Karnad retrieves the stories of Godrej Khodadad Mugaseth, or Bobby, a Parsi from Calicut and his two brothers-in-law, Manek Dadabhoy and Ganny, married to two of Bobby’s three sisters. In a promising debut novel, Karnad brings the texture of social and political life in the backwaters of Malabar which sharply contrasts with life in the Madras presidency between 1936-1940, when young Bobby arrives there to go to college and stays on to continue his education in the engineering college at Guindy. Being young and a rare Parsi helps in making new friends who speculate about the imminent World War II even as they celebrate milestones in nationalist politics like the swaraj movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and the formation of the provincial government of Madras presidency in 1937. Bobby’s sister Kosh or Khorshed’s courtship and marriage with the dashing Manek is set off against that of his other sister Nugs (Nurgesh) who falls in love with Kodandera Ganapathy (‘Ganny’), a native of Coorg, in medical school. In some ways the siblings, including the Oxford-educated eldest, Subur, who had been disowned as she had married outside the Parsi community, live life in Madras on their own terms, away from parental disapproval, enjoying every moment of their personal freedoms. In political terms, imperial Britain’s declaration of war against Nazi Germany, followed by then Viceroy Lord Linlithgow’s declaration of India’s participation, creates conflicting loyalties and confusion. Should Bobby and his siblings support imperial policies or heed the voices of nationalist leaders calling for non-cooperation and Quit India? The family is confronted with the paradox of promoting the concept of freedom and anti-fascism in the European theatre even as the freedoms being fought for are denied to loyal Indian subjects. Declaring allegiances in the war either pro-British or pro-nationalist brings its own rewards and punishments. Ideology vies with opportunism, patriotism with loyalty even as the brothers are inducted into army training programmes. In 1941 after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Manek patrols the North Western Frontier, “cocooned in the cockpit of his Hawker Audax, 2,500 feet above the mineral sea of Waziristan” after he is commissioned into the Royal Indian Air Force. Retrained in Bhopal to fly Hawker Hurricanes, in April 1943 he is despatched to Imphal, the North-Eastern Frontier, to fly over Burmese jungles to locate the survivors of Gen. Wingate’s Chindit guerrillas who had been sent deep into northern Burma…
