Retired Army officer pens historical fiction on India

The Chapekar brothers - a trio of followers of freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak - had shot dead in 1897, W C Rand an Englishman and the then plague commissioner of Pune after he hosted a ball to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of the coronation of Queen Victoria.
The three were caught and hanged to death and memories of the event was buried deep in the annals of the country's history, says Brigadier Samir Bhattacharya who in his debut book attempts to bring to life such forgotten real-life incidents through fiction.
"Nothing But!" - a magnum opus of six different novels spans over 100 years from 1890 to 2002, each devoted to one particular period from the country's past was launched here recently at the Press Club of India.

"There are a lot of stories that we don't know about in Indian history. So, I decided to write this book in a manner where I got hold of eight families of fictional characters, all from different religions," says Bhattacharya.
"Their families and their five generations are telling the story in the book of what they have seen in their lifetime," he says.
Characters in the book etch out stories with close friends and comrades forced to turn into foes under compelling circumstances.

A big chunk in the fiction has been dedicated to the state of Jammu and Kashmir, where the author was posted for a large part of his career. His last posting was as Deputy General Officer Commanding Maharashtra and Gujarat Area in Mumbai from where he retired in January 1993.

In "Love has no Religion," the fourth book of his massive
work has been set in the period between 1971 and 1984.
"It is a tragic love story of two couples from the fourth generation with different religious and cultural backgrounds and how it affected their lives and those of their countrymen," says Bhattacharya.
The book was launched by the former Army Chief General V N Sharma, the former Air Force Chief A Y Tipnis, former High Commissioner to UK, Ronen Sen, former Ambassador to Austria and High Commissioner Singapore Yogesh Tiwari, and former Deputy Chief of Army N S Malik besides journalist and author Rahul Singh, the son of late author and scribe Khushwant Singh.

"Samir has written in a fluent style. In an interesting way he has made Indian history into a fascinating novel by bringing into it human snippets, so that it can be called a historical fiction," Sharma said.
Bhattacharya's book he says is the result of a decade of research and four years of writing and editing.
The first volume of the book titled "The Awakening", which documents the British Indian Empire from the freedom struggle to the end of World War 1 besides the Jalianwala massacre has been published by London-based Olympia Publishers and republished by city-based Creative Crow Publishers.

The remaining five volumes have been brought out by US based Partridge.