Growing up in his grandmother's home in Chennai, the faded silver framed photographs of three unknown men hanging on the wall never really piqued journalist Raghu Karnad's interest.
Previously confined to a distant memory, his interest was aroused on the discovery that the men, one of them his grandmother's brother and the others his great-uncles, had enlisted to fight at the height of the Second World War for the British empire, at a time when the national mood was decidedly against the Raj.
Attempting to trace the history of these men, their aspirations, motivations and their lives, Karnad embarked upon a private quest which, "began from a pier in the Calicut seafront to somewhere on a battlefield in the hills of Kohima," a journey which culminated in the book "Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War."
"I was exposed to this hidden landscape of which I had never been aware, of Indians in the second world war and to events of such scale in the country and events of such magnitude that were only equaled by the magnitude of the crevasse that all of this history then disappeared and vanished from our national consciousness," says Karnad.
The author by tracing out the personal stories of his three protagonists, attempts to weave a larger story of the lives of the millions of faceless Indian soldiers who stood against the might of the Axis forces in the great theatres of the war- from the eastern front of Imphal to the distant shores of Eritria and Africa.
"I was happy because the story of this family managed to capture quite well the larger reflection of India in the second World War," he says.
These soldiers left behind a legacy that has gone unnoticed and forgotten by a nation, which is now quick to label them as mere mercenaries, fighting as agents of the British Raj.
"When it comes to the Second World War I believe it is a question of national legacy that we have denied ourselves, it is a question of retrieving a perspective that alters how we see the war, alters how we see the formation of the Indian army and profoundly alters how we understand the formation of this country," he says.
