The forgotten faithful

It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so often a book comes along that makes you think that something similar could be said of the English language. It would seem from Farthest Field’s dust jacket that this is Raghu Karnad’s first book, but if this assured and moving memoir of wartime India is an apprentice piece, then you can only wonder what is coming next.

From the very first page it is the brilliance of the writing that stands out. There is a very English control of irony that can suggest Forster — the Forster of A Passage to India — at his best, but there is nothing remotely Bloomsbury or comfortingly English about the imaginative power, intelligence and descriptive richness of a narrative that, again and again, startles by its originality before convincing by its utter fitness.

It is just as well that the writing is as good as it is, because Farthest Field inhabits that risky no man’s land between historical fact and imaginative reconstruction. There will inevitably be readers who dislike or distrust such an approach; but there are vast areas of history that can never be recovered through conventional sources, lives and truths that have slipped beyond the reach of regimental diaries, oral tradition or even family lore and can only be reclaimed through the imagination.

Such was the case with Karnad’s own Parsi family, and a history of which he knew almost nothing. As a boy growing up in Madras he was always vaguely aware of the three faces that stared out of their silver frames; but it was only when it was too late to ask anyone who could have told him their story that curiosity, family piety — indignation at an injustice done? — brought him to ask himself who those men were and why they had been so completely erased from family memory or the collective consciousness of post-independence India.