India's War
The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945
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- CHF 12.00
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- CHF 12.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
Between 1939 and 1945 India changed to an extraordinary extent. Millions of Indians suddenly found themselves as soldiers, fighting in Europe and North Africa but also - something simply never imagined - against a Japanese army threatening to invade eastern India. Many more were pulled into the vortex of wartime mobilization.
Srinath Raghavan's compelling and original book gives both a surprising new account of the fighting and of life on the home front. For Indian nationalists the war has tended to be seen as a distraction from the quest for national independence - but Raghavan shows that in fact the war lay at the very heart of how and why colonial rule ended in South Asia.
By seeing the Second World War through Indian eyes, Raghavan transforms our understanding of the conflict - with famous battles such as those in North Africa and Iraq reinterpreted, as well as fascinating and little known campaigns such as the destruction of Italian northeast Africa. Time and again, it was Indian troops that made Britain into a global power and, as the war came to an end, it was the Indian army that fought the final battles which marked the end both of the Japanese empire, and of the British.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this durable and occasionally thrilling account of India's role in WWII, Raghavan (War and Peace in Modern India), a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research and a lecturer at King's College London, restores significance to a period of modern Indian history often left out of dominant narratives on both WWII and the rise of the Indian nationalist movement. Dragged into the war as an unwilling participant, India would muster the largest volunteer army in history in the service of the British Empire, while leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar simultaneously condemned the war effort and sought to leverage it for political gain. Raghavan's retelling of this hugely important story tends to become submerged in the details of military campaigns, with the promise of the book's subtitle remaining largely unfulfilled, despite the attention paid to India's regional sub-empire and the effect of the warfare state on postwar political mobilization. But the book provides a much-needed window into the wartime experiences of ordinary Indians. As imperial subjects fighting Nazi tyranny, yet denied freedom themselves, the subalterns of the Indian Army found themselves caught between sovereignty and liberty in unknown lands. In making these forgotten voices heard, Raghavan succeeds admirably. Maps & illus.
