Raghu Karnad, in his debut book brings back memories of World War II through the lives of three men from his family.
Hyderabad :
For my mother, who didn’t let me forget,’ reads the dedication to Raghu Karnad’s debut book Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War.
The much-acclaimed book that hit the stands last year tells us a story, a part of history that almost slipped out of public memory. In his prologue, Karnad writes: ‘People have two deaths: the first at the end of their lives, when they go away, and the second at the end of the memories of their lives, when all who remember them have gone.’
Thus, people also have two burials – one physical and another when their names and then photographs are forgotten. When their memories had become mere pictures in his grandmother’s home in Madras, Karnad discovered the existence of Bobby (Godrej Khodadad Mugaseth), her brother, trying to cross ‘the farthest field of all’, the second death.
In frames alongside his were photographs of his maternal grandfather Kodandera Ganapathy (Ganny) and Manek Dadabhoy, his brothers-in-arms in the Second World War, one of the first things the family recalled about the three.
So Karnad began with the registry of the Commonwealth, visited their graves and retraced their lives through interviews of those who knew them individually or as part of the British armed force. For, he writes, ‘the larger story was the key to retrieving what I could of their private stories’. But somewhere along the way, this became the story of not just the story of three men of his family, but the untold story of the tens of thousands of soldiers who fought for the British in World War II.
Hyderabad Express interviews the author-journalist before he heads to the Jaipur Literature Festival to be part of a discussion on the forgotten role of India in the First and Second World Wars.
Excerpts
How long have you been working on the book?
I spent three years – a year on research, one year writing, and one year editing it, though it wasn’t that clean-cut. I was still interviewing WW II veterans, whenever I could find one, even in the final lap.
How old were you when you first started asking questions about the photos of Bobby, Ganny and Manek in your grandmother’s house?
I’d seen those photographs right through my young life, but I never did ask questions about them – not while my grandmother, who’s at the centre of the story, was still alive. It wasn’t until four years ago, when I was 28 and working in Delhi, that it slipped out as a wisp of anecdote in a family conversation. But even then, it was just a hint of what would turn out to be their full story.
You write that you couldn’t believe you hadn’t noticed you looked like Bobby. After tracing the threads of their lives, how much do you think you and Bobby have in common?
In some ways, not much – Bobby was a wild, reckless young guy by everyone’s account – he liked to gamble, he really liked to tempt fate, and I doubt he liked sitting still. He wouldn’t have made much of a writer. But there’s a deeper level on which I do imagine I share something with Bobby, which has to do with his loose sense of identity – with not feeling like he belongs too firmly to any of the camps around him – in terms of community, language, national identity.
Do you think of these three as family, or as characters you recreated from the brink of their second death?
I struggled sometimes to reconcile the fact that these young people, who felt like my characters, were also close members of my family. But knowing that helped me check myself when I drifted towards clichés, or got carried away by sentiment. It’s easy to take liberties with the lives and deaths of perfect strangers; it’s not as easy when they’re family.
There are moments in their lives, including a secret romance and a shotgun wedding, which some of my relatives think should not have been shared. But to me those moments were the most valuable and the most moving in the book.
Where all did the research take you?
I travelled quite a lot across the country, from Calicut to Chandigarh and Roorkee. And of course to Manipur and Nagaland – the only parts of mainland India that the fighting actually reached. These were most exciting, because in Manipur, the oldest living memory is of the war – for tribal societies, modernity arrived overnight in the form of hideous industrial war machines. The novelist Easterine Kire described it as being, for the Nagas, like the Big Bang.
It was a chance encounter with one elderly man, Yangmasho Shishak, that opened my eyes to some of the themes that run through Farthest Field. He lives in a village near the Burmese border. He was a teenager when the war came, and found himself serving one side – the British – and then the other – the Japanese. A perfect, one-man symbol of Indians in the war.
The Characters
Bobby, or Godrej Khodadad Mugaseth was a Parsi native of Calicut. He was Raghu Karnad’s maternal grandmother Nurgesh’s (Nugs) younger brother. Of the three, Bobby,who studied to be an engineer, saw most action in the war. He signed up with the British Indian Army (Bengal Sappers) in 1942, and went to Sudan, Abyssinia, North Africa, Iran, Iraq, before going towards Imphal, where he is buried. He died in 1944.
Ganny, or Kodandera Ganapathy from a Kodava family, was a Karnad’s grandfather, and studied medicine like his wife. Recruited as a military doctor, he was posted deployed at the Northwestern Frontier, home to the Pashtun tribes, in present-day Pakistan. He died of asthmatic bronchitis in December 1942, a month before his daughter, the author’s mother, was born.
Manek Dadabhoy, also a Parsi, was a friend Bobby made in Madras. He married Nugs’ younger sister Kosh (Khorshed). Always fascinated by speed, and signed up with the RAF as a pilot. He was sent to the Northwest Frontier and later, when the Japanese invaded, to Burma where he died in 1943, when his plane crashed.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Hyderabad / by Chetana Divya Vasudev / January 26th, 2016
