Annual Booklist 2022 : Dr Vipul Dutta
Dr Vipul Dutta is an assistant professor who teaches modern history at the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati, India. His recent book Making Officers out of Gentlemen: Military Institution-Building in India 1900-1960 was shortlisted for the 2021 Templer Best First Book prize.
First on my list is Raghu Karnad’s Farthest Field – A Story of India’s Second World War (2015). This is a book that transformed the public’s historical consciousness of the Second World War in India. It was released not long after Karnad’s award winning essay published in the Financial Times in 2012 that documented the personal story of his uncles who took part in the battles of the war at various stages and roles. The essay and the book captured the imagination of many Indians at a time when many of them were looking askance at the Great War commemoration events across the world. This poignant, personal history of a clutch of Indians in the War brought the global conflict closer home. The book provided an anchor for many young Indians through which they could place India in the whirlpool of twentieth century history.
Santanu Das’s India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (2018) is a book of singular importance for First World War studies, and more generally for expanding the horizons of south Asian history. The book taps into a huge reservoir of untapped visual and literary sources to tell a less typical story of the Great War. Das’s work underlines the importance of documenting the profusion of Indian/subcontinental literary, aural and visual artistic material that was produced in the years leading up to and during the First World War. His work adds another dimension to our understanding of the First World War by making readers pivot to an Asian, less militaristic reckoning of this global event. It demonstrates the power of social and cultural factors of the soldiers’ lives in influencing the course of the conflict and uncovers the hidden cultural cosmologies of the countless non-combatants who lived and died along side the soldiers and officers of the First World War.
I would also highly recommend Yasmin Khan’s magisterial work The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (2015) and Srinath Raghavan’s India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-45 (2016). Both the books are absolutely riveting reads and pack in an enormous range of unconventional data on undivided India’s contribution to the prosecution of the war effort. Khan’s work incorporates the forgotten histories of several Indian actors like the Indian Women’s Auxiliary Force, who made the Second World War a truly international exercise of human mobilisation across several fronts. Raghavan’s painstaking research on the economic and diplomatic consequences for India during and after the war has given new direction and drive to scholars working on south Asian military history of the period.
Finally, Vikram Seth’s Two Lives (2005) – a work of non-fiction historical biography by a celebrated Indian writer which remains one of my favourite books on the intimate, human cost that war inflicts on our family histories. The book is Seth’s tribute to his grand-uncle who served as a doctor in the Second World War and later settled in England with his Jewish German wife, who fled Germany to escape the horrors of the Nazi regime. Part memoir, part historical documentation of post-war Britain’s tryst with intricate multi-racial realities, the book is a loving and moving recollection of Seth’s boyhood memories of suburban London and England while living with the couple as a student. It speaks of a world united by love even as it often appears segmented along the lines of race, colour and religion.
A book I’d like to see written? I’d love to read a book that revisits the battlefields of Europe to recover the lost histories of camaraderie between soldiers from south Asia, Britain, and other dominions as they struggled to survive in those unforgiving trenches and bunkers. Surely, at a time of immense suffering, there were instances of real friendship, help received-in-kind and given, and bonds of genuine trust that transcended the differences of nationalities and helped these men fight and live another day. A book perhaps also on the afterlives of soldiers who survived and remained in touch with their brother soldiers across continents will be eagerly awaited.