Farthest Field Read online

  Copyright

  William Collins

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

  First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

  Copyright © Raghu Karnad 2015

  Raghu Karnad asserts his moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work

  Maps by John Gilkes

  The Author and Publishers are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others and have made all reasonable efforts to trace the copyright owners of the images reproduced, and to provide appropriate acknowledgement within this book. In the event that any untraceable copyright owners come forward after the publication of this book, the Author and Publishers will use all reasonable endeavours to rectify the position accordingly.

  A catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

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  Source ISBN: 9780008115722

  Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008115715

  Version: 2015-04-28

  Dedication

  For my mother,

  who didn’t let me forget

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Prologue

  PART ONE: Home

  1. Everybody’s Friend: Calicut, 1936–39

  2. Hukm Hai: Madras, 1939–40

  3. Savages of the Stone Age: Miranshah, November 1941

  4. The Centre of the World: Madras, February 1942

  5. Madras Must Not Burn: April 1942

  6. Things Sacred Between Us: Mhow, August 1942

  7. Do or Die: Thal, August–October 1942

  8. The King’s Own: Roorkee, August–December 1942

  PART TWO: West

  9. Second Field: Baghdad, March 1943

  10. The Jemadars’ Story: Eritrea and Libya, 1940–41

  11. The Lieutenant’s Story: El Alamein, July–November 1942

  12. Kings of Persia: Baghdad, April 1943

  PART THREE: East

  13. Enter the Hurricane: Imphal, May 1943

  14. No Heroes: Madras, May–June 1943

  15. Fascines and Gabions: Calcutta, October 1943

  16. The Jungle Book: Arakan, December 1943–March 1944

  17. Fight with Your Ghost: Kohima and Jotsoma, April 1944

  18. The Cremation Ground: Kohima, April 1944

  19. The Elephant: Tiddim Road, June–October 1944

  20. The Road Ahead: Madras, November 1945

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Appendix 1: Timeline

  Appendix 2: The Indian Army

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  I had known their faces my whole life, but never asked their names till it was too late. Their portrait-style photographs, full of grain and shadow, were not in albums – that would have placed them somewhere in the train of family history, and when the albums were opened, we’d have asked, ‘And who’s that?’ Instead they were isolated in dull silver frames on table tops around the house in Madras; beheld but not noticed, as angels are in a frieze full of mortal strugglers. I never even noticed that I looked like one of them.

  I still can’t believe I was so late. By the time I asked, not only were those men long gone, but my grandmother was too, and her sisters, and most of their generation. Nugs, my grandmother, could have told me everything, though she might have refused. I think she had banished her youth from her mind by the time she died, though I don’t actually know. I never asked. I was a child, curious about anything but family. All I’d wanted from her was the hoard of gold which I believed was hidden under a clicking tile in her bedroom. She told me I could have it after she died. So, after she died, I knew precisely where to look for what had never existed. And what had existed – her story and the stories of those young men in the photo frames – I had to search for without her.

  There was an injustice in it, which I sensed as it dawned on my mother how little she knew of their stories either – though one of the men was her own father, and the others her two uncles. She and my grandmother were always close, as I’d imagined a single child and bereaved parent had to be. Half a lifetime they had spent together, but neither one asked or told about what happened. My grandmother, a doctor, had sutured that past shut. Eventually they were both doctors, and when my mother moved away to work in New York for nearly twenty years she wrote back every week, and in the house in Madras I found every one of the thousand letters, bound up into bricks that could build a playhouse. Everything my grandmother could save of my mother’s, she had. But of the men, there was almost nothing.

  Still my mother did know the names of those who, in the late hours of their lives, held onto strands of the story. With visit after visit, we followed the thinning thread of those lives, right up to the point where it frayed, came apart, and came to an end.

  What I learned first, before I even learned their proper names, was that they had been in the Second World War. That was surprising. It was almost outlandish, because Indians never figured in my idea of the war, or the war in my idea of India, and I thought I had a good idea about both. There was certainly no public notion of it; nothing we were taught in school or regaled with from the silver screen, even though the Indian Army in the Second World War was the largest volunteer force the world had ever known. Personally, I hadn’t thought Madras could even be mentioned in the same book as Pearl Harbor; I was accustomed to thinking of the war as Western Front, Eastern Front and Pacific. When I looked through the eyes of Indian soldiers, however, the globe turned, revealing new continents.

  The larger story was the key to retrieving what I could of their private stories. From the start, to learn what happened to my grandfather and grand-uncles was to discover the lost epic of India’s Second World War, as well as the reasons we chose to discard it. I started with names. To the family, they were Bobby, Manek and Ganny; their proper names, which I’d never seen in writing, I confirmed from a registry of Commonwealth soldiers. The registry also listed the units to which they belonged. With luck, I found those units’ diaries. This meant that in my desperate pursuit, even at times when I lost sight of them, I still knew the road they had taken.

  Graham Greene describes Henry James as once saying that a writer with sufficient talent need only look in through the mess-room window of a Guards’ barracks in order to write a novel about the brigade. James didn’t say anything about non-fiction, but the challenge of this book felt similar. Could one write a true story on the basis of only glimpses into the lives of forgotten men?

  I might have tried to write a novel, but I knew there was nothing I could invent that would outdo the true, brief course of their lives. Instead I approached this book through what I think of as forensic non-fiction: I started out with three unknown, dead men on my hands. Who were they? How did they die, and where, and what took them there? The result is my best shot on the case of the three brothers-in-l
aw turned brothers-in-arms. To deal with their interior lives, which I was determined to do, I took a sort of forensic licence, using fragmented evidence and testimony to build an account of their thoughts and beliefs. This was a compromise, but one that helped me confront the paradox, which only grew in magnitude, of becoming familiar with forgotten men. That apart, I have limited all incidents, anecdotes, speech, and details of movements, operations, environment and milieu to what I learned from interviews or records, or could generally establish as fact.1

  Even what I have categorised as facts are often themselves a kind of fiction, reshaped and revised during their long storage as personal and institutional memories. Nothing drove this home like my face-to-face interviews with Indian veterans of the war. Most were in their nineties. Many remembered their twenties as well as I do mine, but their answers, especially to the question of why they joined a colonial army, seemed to have been mentally corrected over their much longer service in the army of free India. In general, their memories, like all memories, were smoothed and polished by time, as pebbles in a stream. Many of the claims of Army histories and memoirs may be just as unreliable: shaped by agenda, nostalgia and pride.

  So this story is imperfect, live flesh drawn over skeletons rebuilt from scattered bones. But it is one in which the lives of a few might stand in for many others. One of the felicities of these men’s lives was how they captured, in reflection, the hidden landscape of India’s Second World War. But whether or not any single book could document India’s engagement, this book does not. It is not a scholar’s history, no more than it is a traditional biography. Rather it is an exercise in reaching into darkness and considering what is retrieved.

  I have not strained to depict events too far outside the circumference of the characters’ lives – especially not those which are best remembered, such as the explosion of the freighter Fort Stikine in Bombay harbour, or the battles of the Italian campaign. This book is less about the devastation of total warfare than about private apocalypse reaching people in places very far away from the war as we have come to imagine it. The limits of documentation mean that many elements of their personal lives are missing, such as relationships within their units, especially with orderlies, jemadars or other ranks. These would have been powerful bonds, but were recorded nowhere that I could find. This is a story about being lost in the middle, and one way that this appears is that its characters are from a middle class. It was a class better informed and generally more politicised than Indians of the ranks; it was the class that staffed the leadership of the Freedom movement as well as of the Indian Civil Service. Their legend is not one of heroic conviction and unity, but of ambivalence and division, which only grew deeper over the course of the war.

  When the war was over, the Indian Army – and the more than two million men and women who served in it – found that they had spent the past six years on the wrong side of history. Ever since, having fought for free India would be the price of admission into national memory. Those who survived still had a chance to earn that coin, and many did, in the new wars that began almost at once. But those who died would be left to lie, in silent cemeteries where words carved in marble insisted to nobody: ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’. Their faces were lit by the candlelight of private memory, till even that dwindled and was gone.

  People have two deaths: the first at the end of their lives, when they go away, and the second at the end of the memory of their lives, when all who remember them are gone. Then a person quits the world completely.

  War brings the two deaths close, because it chooses young people most deliberately to die. If he died at twenty-five, those who loved him still had long journeys to make, with little of his to carry with them. He had barely begun to live in the first place. Their lives had barely begun either. Eventually he is kept more as a photograph than a name, and even the photo sinks under the layers of their life’s increase. People can have two burials.

  Countries keep alive the memory of the war dead: their own and their enemies’. Usually the war dead are remembered best of all, killed more easily than they are forgotten. But sometimes even countries try to forget their wars, and the second death, of the idea of you, closes in.

  Death is a field from which no one returns. The second death is the farthest field of all. That was where I found Bobby, trying to cross.

  PART ONE

  Home

  1

  Everybody’s Friend

  Calicut, 1936–39

  It is said that the news of the world war reached Calicut along with the morning eggs. Perhaps that isn’t true at all. Perhaps it’s only true that the price of eggs was the first the Calicut Parsis saw of the costs of war; the first of many. Maybe they remembered what happened to the price of eggs, even years and years later, because they wanted to forget what happened to the boys.

  If, however, it is true, then it must have begun with a commotion at the Marshall house, nearest the pier. The noise would have been swallowed by the rowdy waves of dawn, on a sea swollen by the late monsoon. If Bobby had been in Calicut, he would have been there in an instant. Rounding the corner to the beach road, he would have spotted the egg boy cowering behind his bicycle; then the Marshalls’ cook, aggrieved, wiping his neck with the tail of his checked-cotton mundu; then Keki Marshall, hollering as though he meant to argue the sun back into its bed. He would bloody well not pay four annas a dozen. Not for eggs. Whatever conspiracy of grocers, hoarders and bastards thought they could double the price of eggs overnight, they were going to learn differently from him, war or no war.

  But did someone say war?

  The egg boy may have been told that rationing and shortages were expected, and eggs would be priced up as a precaution. But he couldn’t have explained about the Panzers in Poland, the craven declaration from London, or the Viceroy in Delhi already committing India and Indians to the fray. Instead the egg boy fled. He wobbled his bicycle a safe distance from the gate and rested a moment, calming himself down. Ahead of him was a full street of Parsi homes. He knew precisely how many eggs they took. He knew he was going to catch hell at each doorstep. He couldn’t imagine the hell he was going to leave there.

  News, like almost everything, travelled slowly to Calicut, though it was the largest town in Malabar. The province lay in the narrow lap of the western coast, with its head leaned up against the high range of the Western Ghats, and its feet dipped in the Indian Ocean. The town was a minor entrepôt for timber, pepper and cashew coming down to the sea, and fish, petrol, shop goods, and the post going back up. Once it had mattered more. It had been the seat of the Zamorin of Malabar, whose rule extended south as far as Cochin, and it was here that Europe first trod on India’s soil, when Vasco Da Gama scraped up on the beach at Kappad.

  The centuries since had left Calicut to turn in its own slow eddy of trade.1 Its provincialism concealed the scale of its wealth and commerce, and the rhythms of the town played like a drowsy accompanist behind the full-lunged score of the sea. Arab dhows rode at anchor, waiting to unload sacks of dried fruit from Yemen, then raised their sails and blew away like kites on the horizon’s glittering string. Coconut trees crowded the shore, and further inland all was covered in layers of matted green. Pink lotus wilted in the temple pond, and in the courtyards stood elephants, black and mottled and as brilliantly daubed as the lingam within. At the market, Maplah wives in long-sleeved blouses and headscarves mingled with bare-breasted Ezhava women selling clams and jackfruit. The town had no garrison, no real port. So Calicut concerned nobody but the sahibs who owned plantations on the Wynaad Plateau, the many local castes and creeds, and the Parsis.

  The Parsis: pale as scalps, mad as coots, noses like commas on the page. They were devoutly civilised, consummately lawful, and still abided by the spirit of the first contract they made in India,2 as refugees shin-deep in the surf. Parsi: it meant from Persia, and the label never peeled away; the centuries only stiffened their pose, polite and helpful, as India’s permanent housegues
ts.

  They were friends to all, up to the King and down to the cobbler, and while they could be silly buggers, there was always a politesse, acceptance of the King’s law, distaste for conversion or preaching aloud. They were sporting in business, and businesslike at sport. What Gurkhas were in the Army, Parsis were in civilian life – the exemplary race, making the best of British command without any desire to usurp it. So they retained the state of public grace that best served private wealth. Humata, hukhta, huvrastha: Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

  Bombay was their metropole, Karachi too; further south they got a bit native. In Malabar the men all spoke Malayalam, could gallop it in their mouths, but the women were not exposed too much, for the sake of their complexion, and their accents remained. Women wore saris but the men wore shoes indoors. Like Anglo-Indians, they were attentive to cutlery; unlike Anglo-Indians, they were content – a creed of Oneness had chased them out of Persia, and a creed of Innumerables had received them, and they had prospered, most major of minorities. At the beginning of the new war they were as numerous as they would ever be, and that was only 100,000, a homeopathic dose for India: a thimble of sweet milk set down beside its vats of steaming oils and syrups.

  Away from the pier, near the Heerjees’ soda factory, was the house in which Bobby Mugaseth grew up with his three sisters. The pier was where Bobby staged one of his classic pranks: going down at dawn, when the boats knocked against it like toddy-drunks clutching at a rail, and dropping into the water for a swim, against his father’s rules. Afterward he splashed up the beach to circle the Marshall house, tapping at the louvred windows until Bacha Aunty suffered him coming in to bathe.

  Bobby, properly Godrej Khodadad Mugaseth, did believe himself a good Parsi. If his hand was easily turned to mischief, that was not necessarily un-Parsi-like – only unlike the paragons of Parsi merit who occupied the nearer branches of his family tree.