Raghu Karnad
Autor de Farthest field: an Indian story of the Second World War
Sobre El Autor
Raghu Karnad is an award-winning journalist who lives in Bangalore and New Delhi, India. His writing has appeared in Granta, the international New York Times, the Financial Times, the Caravan, and n+1.
Obras de Raghu Karnad
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
Miembros
Reseñas
Premios
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 3
- Miembros
- 106
- Popularidad
- #181,887
- Valoración
- 3.6
- Reseñas
- 3
- ISBNs
- 10
Many, many Indians fought and died fighting the Japanese. Many fought and died fighting the British -- as Japanese allies! And after the war, many continued fighting and dying working with both the Japanese and the British to subdue (I almost want to use the American term "pacify") local populations in Indonesia and elsewhere.
One of the great accomplishments of Raghu Karmad's book "Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War" is how calmly he keeps judgement at bay while the describing the horrors his characters experience in the jungles of Burma. With the perspective of time we can all too easily conclude that Indians who fought on either side of the war were pawns to imperial interests and we can pity them for it.
But one thing we should not do -- and I think this is Karnad's great message -- is forget them, no matter how we judge them. Their wartime service had an important role to play in the coming independence of India and its aftermath.
I have not read such a moving experience of war since I left Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy. I can almost hear the buzzing of metal flying through the air. I feel the dread the Indian soldiers experienced, and the Indian sappers, must have felt when they knew that the dreaded Japanese, the Japanese soldiers they had been taught were consummate warriors, inhuman butchers, pitiless, and consumed with hatred, that these same Japanese were just beyond the ridge and coming for them now.
Between the rains, the dirt, the cry of the sick and dying, the sleeplessness, the pain, the diarrhea, the thirst, the terror, the loneliness, the heat, and the utter hopelessness, the soldier had a gun to his face and a gun to his back. No matter what he felt about the British Empire.… (más)