Review: India in the Second World War: An Emotional History by Diya Gupta

Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British, whose account is blurred first by a Eurocentric memory of the war in the UK, and next overshadowed by nationalist histories of independence from the British Empire in South Asia..

On the other, a different social history the arrival in India of soldiers and nurses from around the world, the recruitment and overseas service of thousands of Indian soldiers, the employment of millions of labourers, the panic and rumours about possible Japanese invasion and the profound economic hardship (or windfall profit for some) remained outside the loop of South Asian history writing..

She sources them from a wide array of people combatants and non-combatants, civilians and prisoners-of-war, poets, novelists and intellectuals taking varied and often overlapping stands in relation to Indian involvement in the Second World War as a British colony..

The emotional world is prised open through the Second World War letter extracts documented in the censorship reports, where a typical Indian soldier talks of Hitler, expresses wonder and pleasure on seeing Europe for the first time, and describes the hardships of life in the desert..

In Indias War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia, Srinath Raghavan stated that the mountain of monographs on Indian history in the decade preceding 1947 treat the Second World War as little more than mood music in the drama of Indias advance towards independence and partition..

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