Raghu Karnad’s mixed ancestry prompts him to call himself a nice South Indian blend. He’s also surprised to hear that he resembles Bobby Mugaseth, the Parsi-protagonist of his debut book, Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War. He holds it up with Bobby’s photograph on the jacket, adjacent to his face, for a keen examination, perhaps. But he does relate most to his Parsi heritage, Karnad admits. “My father’s family is Saraswat from Matheran and I grew up in Bangalore — not in the Konkan, or Calicut, Madras, or Coorg. My Parsi connection is through my maternal grandmother and so I’m twice excluded from it probably. But the path that I’m most likely to be excluded from, is the path that I probably received the most from,” he says.
Through the engrossing story of his family and a nation swept by the Second World War, Karnad, in his book, takes us to places as familiar as Calcutta and the Guindy Engineering College, Madras, and as far and alien as Libya and Miranshah. From Calicut to Tiddim, including West Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, Karnad traces the journey of the Mugaseth family, following the thread for about three years. The three related men’s trajectories — Manek and Ganny become Bobby’s family by marriage — become separate once they enter the Second World War. The women — Subur, Nugs (the author’s maternal grandmother) and Kosh — learn to bury their memories deep and rearrange their lives.
Writing about events that happened 70 years ago is, needless to say, a fastidious task to undertake. Yet, Karnad manages to do it with inspired detail and, what looks like effortless skill. But he brushes it off, calling it overwhelming. “It has been three years since I last wrote about anything else but the Second World War. At the end of it all, I had to do a bibliography and footnote my sources. It was a catastrophe — I hadn’t kept my sources in order at all. But being a journalist, especially if you have some experience writing longer forms, is good training at managing information. This book, fortunately for me, offered itself to be in very clear chapters, either defined by geography or by certain limits of time and event. And so essentially, I was collecting information and at the same time was thinking through it,” he explains.
The imagery in the book is almost lyrical; even Karnad’s description of Madras suffering in its accustomed humidity, is poetic. His telling of the military action is palpitating and Farthest Field builds up to a sort of anti-climactic ending that isn’t disappointing. Instead, you’re left wondering if you have just read a work of fiction or non-fiction. Filling in the cavities that separate the two, Karnad says, the physical experiences were often very far removed. “I’ve actually never flown in a two-seater plane, let alone fly one. I’ve never set up an explosive device and I’ve never been a doctor in war and I know so little about life in the army. A lot of that is the synthesis of different kinds of reading and I’ve drawn from different kinds of sources. Ultimately, I often felt lucky if I could find just one source that provided me with what I needed.”
To follow the lives of the three men, through their eyes, not only needs a bit of soul-searching, but to trail their path, was to trail the Indian Army’s path in the war. A war they fought for the British Empire even as the country struggled to disconnect itself from it. “I went to each of the locations that came up in India. And I noticed that a lot of the places, where these boys went and where the scene of the Indian Army’s world war abroad played out, are places that aren't very easy or necessarily safe to visit even today. And I was struck by this thought, that all of these places are still in the grip of conflict. What’s that about?”
For a book that also features global conflicts while concentrating on the lives of the brothers-in-arms, to report in chronological order was out of the question. “This sort of paradoxical situation of trying to recreate the life of someone who has almost completely disappeared from recollection meant that I started at the end and went backwards,” he says. When Karnad first encountered Bobby, he didn’t know his grand-uncle’s real name; in fact, Karnad wasn’t even aware of his existence. Once he took the information to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in the U.K., Karnad learnt that Bobby was buried in Imphal. “So I thought ‘ What on earth was he doing in Imphal?’ because that was the level of my Second World War history at that point. I didn’t realise that the story of so many Indians carried them over there and that Imphal was this incredible climactic point in the war for the Indian Army. So the reporting began, when I went to Imphal with a friend and we were standing over Bobby’s grave that was beautifully engraved in iron.”
It is rather fair to place Farthest Field as a book that belongs to Madras — five out of the 20 chapters are set in the city that “kept simmering” and was the genesis of the characters. And having to manoeuvre a large volume of information, and as a consequence leave out sizeable chunks, one of Karnad’s challenges was to avoid overburdening the book, especially a “part of history that is as captivating, full of surprises and conjuring narratives. So, one of the places that I allowed myself to indulge was when writing about Madras. It was both improbable and intimate. I put in almost everything that I could find out about the Madras experience. But it’s a whole country that was going through this and I had to leave out a lot.”
The spoils of the research combined with its narrative pull, meant that Karnad had to tread a fine line between fact and reconstruction. But he dismisses the idea of a fine line. “When you are writing, you understand very keenly the difference between interpretation and invention. And the only person that I needed to trust in this regard was myself and I did not want to do any invention because what I found, as fact, was already way more surprising and outlandish than anything I could’ve invented. Fact is diffused at the edges; it’s all storytelling at the end.”
Journalists-turning-authors seem like a natural progression, but Karnad admits that he wasn’t focused on writing a book, especially on something like this, but he is sure of one thing — he never doubted why he was doing it. On a subject as serious as this, Karnad only has prophetic lines to say: “There’s an adage about writers with your first book — write what you know, and this was as far from that as can be. But I think the answer is if you’re lucky, you don’t choose. If you’re really lucky then the story chooses you.” The story that chose Karnad was an emotional one for obvious reasons and he often asked himself if these were family members or just characters in the book. And the answer came naturally to him — that they were characters, then and now. “And that’s how it should be. It simultaneously felt intimate and sometimes very removed. What often felt emotional was meeting people, who were at their very later stages of life talk about their early exciting stages. It was very moving, because I could think about Bobby, Manek and Ganny as the old men that they never really were.”
