Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War

'This book tells us that we all have two deaths: when we die and when we are forgotten. But there is also a possibility of two births the second being recreated in an extraordinary book. This is one of those rare and extraordinary books which bring people alive again. It has been written with imagination and is engrossing to read'

Michael Holroyd

The photographs of three young men had stood in his grandmother's house for as long as he could remember 'beheld but not noticed as angels are in a frieze of mortal strugglers'. 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.