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An Indian Story of the Second World War
W.W. Norton
September 2015
On Sale: August 24, 2015
321 pages
ISBN: 0393248097
EAN: 9780393248098
Kindle: B00OD8Z2VM
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
A brilliantly conceived nonfiction epic, a war narrated
through the lives and deaths of a single family. The photographs of three young men had stood in his
grandmother’s house for as long as he could remember, beheld
but never fully noticed. 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.
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