,' Karnad writes.Ĭolonial India gained its independence in 1947. 'Indonesians, armed by the Japanese, would fight Indians, commanded by the British, on behalf of the Dutch.

Some INA soldiers became revered figures in postwar India.Īfter their defeat, some Japanese commanders were 'more inclined to surrender their arms to natives than to Allied victors.'Īnd that created new complications for Indian troops, who were deployed to help European allies hang on to their colonies. It has the stamp of imaginative truth about it, and we can ask nothing more of any kind of writing., fascinating is both a poignant memorial to his lost family and a gripping account of how India contributed to the allied victory and sowed the seeds of its independence.Thousands of Indians also fought with the Japanese in the 'Indian National Army,' which sought India's independence from Great Britain. The writing of history intersects gloriously with several other genres in this moving, eloquent, intelligent work., From the very first page it is the brilliance of the writing that stands out. It has been written with imagination and is engrossing to read., is an exquisitely written memoir of the wartime lives of the young Indian journalist's grandfather and two great-uncles, and is so heart-stoppingly beautiful I want all around to read it., Like a superior commander himself, Karnad marshals and orders a huge range of materials, locations, and actions with apparently effortless skill, making everything cohere not only through a galloping and affecting narrative but, crucially, through a passionate moral core that repeatedly exposes the numerous ways in which Indians were treated as fodder by the Empire. This is one of those rare books that bring people alive again. But there is a possibility of two births, the second being re-created in an extraordinary book. Unforgettable., This book tells us that we all have two deaths: when we die and when we are forgotten. Romance and the attendant grief of loss permeate the book alongside passages that are unexpectedly moving. In prose that verges at times on poetry, he writes with the imaginative gift of a first-rate novelist in order to deliver the truth. I wasn't prepared for its extraordinary aesthetic qualities and emotional power, as well as its serene mastery of outsize, intransigent material., pectacular. Raghu Karnad's Farthest Field seemed at first to me a worthy new book, filling up the large blanks in the hegemonic Anglo-American view of World War II, part of a necessary excavation of suppressed and ignored histories.

Farthest field book