The Forgotten Hearts of a Global War: Inside India in the Second World War

Harsh Agrawal
4 days ago
5 min read

India in the Second World War: An Emotional History

(Shortlisted for the 2024 RHS Gladstone Book Prize)

Author: Diya Gupta

Genre: History

Published by Rupa Publications

Pages: 330

MRP: Rs. 795/-

Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4p7a3SZ

Thank you Rupa Publications for a review copy of the book.

History, at its best, is not just about facts—it’s about feeling. In her luminous debut, India in the Second World War: An Emotional History, Diya Gupta invites us to rethink the wartime past not through dates and dispatches, but through the tremors of emotion felt by those who lived it: soldiers, civilians, poets, wives, and prisoners. The book is a revelation—a work of scholarly precision delivered with the storytelling power of lived memory.

The Second World War is often remembered as a global clash between fascism and freedom. But what does that binary mean for a colonized people like Indians, drawn into a war they did not start, under a regime they did not elect? That question simmers at the heart of Gupta’s book. Drawing from a kaleidoscopic archive sepoy letters, vernacular poetry, home-front novels, and forgotten memoirs Gupta builds a moving portrait of Indian lives touched, transformed, and often shattered by the war.

A People’s War or a Colonized War?

The book opens with a striking photograph: an Indian soldier leaning out of a troopship’s porthole, flashing the iconic “V for Victory” sign. But the fingers face inward a British obscenity. Was he mimicking Churchill or mocking him? That ambiguity sets the tone. This is not a book of neat loyalties. It is about contradictions: how the same soldier might proudly wear his uniform yet quietly ache for home; how a Communist might fight fascism while railing against imperialism; how famine and freedom were invoked with equal desperation.

Gupta’s thesis is clear. The war was not just fought on battlefields in Italy or Burma. It was fought in hearts, in letters, in rice fields. It was fought by those who stayed behind just as much as those who marched forward.

Themes Over Timelines

Gupta avoids the tired chronology of war campaigns. Instead, her book is thematically organized—each chapter a portal into a different affective landscape. The result is a history that pulses with empathy.

“The Thing That Was Lost” explores how Indian soldiers and civilians reimagined home during war. Letters from sepoys in the Middle East yearn for mustard fields and mango trees; a Bengali doctor in Burma dreams not of medals but his mother’s cooking. For many, the real war was distance—from land, from language, from identity.
“Every Day I Witness Nightmares” turns to the Bengal Famine. Through novels like Ashani Sanket and Communist poetry by Sukanta Bhattacharya, Gupta shows how hunger became a metaphor for political abandonment. “War, famine and colonialism are fiercely interlocked in these six lines,” she writes, and she proves it. A soldier overseas reads about famine in Calcutta and breaks down. Back home, peasants compose folk songs about husbands who left for war and never returned. The frontline, Gupta reminds us, had many forms.
“Close to Me as My Very Own Brother” is the book’s quiet masterpiece. It focuses on male friendships—between Indian POWs and their Italian or Japanese captors, between sepoys and comrades, between Hindus and Muslims thrown together in the trenches. These stories are raw, often intimate. A prisoner in New Guinea weeps as his cellmate dies of dysentery; another bonds with a Japanese guard over a shared cigarette. Gupta’s genius lies in refusing to sentimentalize these moments—they are rendered as complex and real, bursting with moral ambiguity.
“An Anguished Heart” shifts to the home-front, particularly the female gaze. Through the English poetry of Muriel Wasi and Tara Ali Baig, and Mulk Raj Anand’s anti-colonial novel The Sword and the Sickle, Gupta explores how Indian women processed a war that neither centered them nor spared them. Their lines are devastating: “A woman plunged in misery: an anguished heart, / An aching body rent today with cry / Of starving hollowness.”
“Crisis in Civilisation” takes the widest view, pairing Rabindranath Tagore’s last philosophical writings with the London-based Tamil poet M.J. Tambimuttu’s Out of This War. Both see the war not as Europe’s redemption, but its collapse. Tambimuttu’s lines crackle with the surreal horror of the Blitz; Tagore, writing shortly before his death, decries the barbarism of modernity. If the earlier chapters show war’s effects on the body, this one reveals its toll on belief itself.

Feeling as Evidence

Gupta’s most original move is methodological. She doesn’t treat emotions as soft add-ons to hard history; she treats them as evidence. Soldiers’ longing, widows’ fury, writers’ despair these are not just background sentiments. They are the war itself, experienced and inscribed.

Her archival range is staggering. Letters in Punjabi, Urdu and Bengali rub shoulders with forgotten war novels and anti-fascist poetry. Gupta gives primacy to Indian voices—not Gandhi or Nehru, but unknown sepoys, obscure poets, marginalized wives. This is bottom-up history at its best. She doesn’t just read their words; she listens.

The result is a history that’s as personal as it is political. One can feel the warmth of a mother’s remembered kitchen, the dust of desert warfare, the acid bitterness of betrayal. When a soldier writes home from Egypt to say, “Brave, virile soldiers… I could not bear it and tears started trickling from my eyes,” the war becomes flesh.

A Few Cracks in the Frame

No review is complete without quibbles. Gupta’s lens is intentionally literary, and some readers may wish for more concrete military detail. There’s little about strategy, logistics, or generals. But that’s the point. Gupta is writing an emotional history, not an operational one.

Also, her reliance on published or elite sources, especially poets and educated officers, means the rural subaltern remains elusive. She acknowledges this. Still, one wonders: what of the millions who never wrote, only marched and suffered?

That said, Gupta’s decision to prioritize affect pays off. By the end of the book, one realizes how much we’ve missed by not asking how war was felt, not just fought.

Why This Book Matters Now

In an age where nationalism is again on the rise and the meaning of “freedom” is hotly contested, India in the Second World War could not be more timely. It reminds us that war is never just a clash of armies, it is a disruption of lives, a crisis of memory, a battlefield of feeling.

Gupta's work also challenges the smug comfort of the “Good War” narrative. For India, the war was good for business elites, catastrophic for the poor, and utterly confusing for the millions forced to choose between Empire and hunger. This is not the WWII of Saving Private Ryan or Churchillian speeches. This is WWII in the grain queues of Bengal, the field hospitals of Burma, the love letters lost in Cairo sand.

It is also a landmark in Indian historiography. Gupta joins a growing list of scholars like Yasmin Khan, Santanu Das, Priyamvada Gopal, who refuse to let colonial memory dominate the archive. Instead, she carves out space for emotion, for empathy, for the unsaid.

Final Verdict

Diya Gupta’s India in the Second World War is a haunting, urgent, and gorgeously written book. It fills a gaping void in Indian and global historiography. It’s not just a book for historians—it’s for anyone who has ever wondered what war feels like when it comes knocking not with a gun, but with a letter, a ration card, a silence.

This isn’t just emotional history. This is history that makes you feel.

Rating: 5/5