Books & Culture, Reviews

From The Frontline

Nariman Karkaria was a Parsi born in Navsari, Gujarat. Thirsting for adventure, he left home at 16, armed with the royal sum of fifty rupees.

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Book Title: The First World War Adventures of Nariman Karkaria: A Memoir

Author(s): Nariman Karkaria; translated by Murali Ranganathan, with a foreword by Amitav Ghosh

Publisher :Gurugram: HarperCollins 2023.

Pages and Price: Pp. 230. Rs 399

A couple of weeks ago, we focused on the war diary of Lieutenant Bharati Asha Sahay Choudhry, who was with Netaji’s INA. This week, we focus on another war memoir. This one centres around World War I and presents the writer’s experiences as a soldier fighting for the British Army.

War itself comes out in its worst, dehumanising form—there is no time to mourn one’s friends. “Each man was on his own and could not be bothered about anybody else. Others would advance, stepping on those injured soldiers who had fallen to the ground. We had no option but to move forward.”

Nariman Karkaria (1894-1949) was a Parsi born in Navsari, Gujarat. Thirsting for adventure, he left home at 16, armed with the royal sum of fifty rupees, and travelled to China. He spent a couple of years there. Then, he sailed to England and joined the British Army in 1915. He saw action on three fronts—the western front, the ‘Middle Eastern’ front, and the Balkan front. After his discharge, he returned to India and wrote Rangbhoomi par Rakhad in Gujarati, (published in book form in 1922). The book has only recently been excavated by Murali Ranganathan, who has now translated it into English.

The First World War Adventures of Nariman Karkaria is an exciting read and an ‘astonishing find’ as Amitav Ghosh writes; it is also historically an important document. This is the only existing account of World War I written by an Indian soldier. It narrates the writer’s experiences and documents the War as it unfolds. It takes us through the uncertain times of a soldier’s life as Nariman fights the War not knowing if he will the next casualty. The book has elements of the picaresque novel, featuring, as it does, the young protagonist on his own, trying to somehow survive in a cruel and unforgiving world.

Political correctness is not the writer’s forte, and this adds to the charm as we are treated to a series of unguarded comments about the Japanese and the Chinese. His reactions to the food habits he encounters in China, and to the practice of Chinese girls binding their feet, for instance, belong to his times; they lack the cultural sensitivity that we expect today.

The many difficulties the narrator faces communicating with people abroad provides the occasion for many a comic interlude. Apart from the linguistic hurdles, a series of cultural difficulties plague him. When he pays a shopkeeper and is handed back a few paper sheets as change, he berates the man, thinking he is trying to cheat him. It is only when bystanders start laughing at him that he realises that this is paper money used in Russia, which he is unaware of!

Karkaria’s descriptions of life on the frontline are illuminating and gripping. The reader can easily visualise the difficult days he and his regiment spends in the trenches in France, and in the sand in Egypt, waiting out enemy assaults and then counterattacking at great risk.

During the course of these adventures, the writer cheats death every time and finally returns home. But the tough conditions, the scarcity of food and water on the frontline, the infestations that plague soldiers in the flooded trenches, and the regimented life of a soldier at war are all amply compensated by the experiences, and indeed by the adulation he and his colleagues get from people, particularly womenfolk—“At the station, girls would offer us baskets full of chocolates and cigarettes! For free!” and “…high-class ladies from local families were equally keen to keep us entertained.” Still, this adulation is temporary, and as Karkaria records in the later part of the memoir, once the War gets over, the soldier is rendered hungry and homeless, and the very women who had once lavished their attention on him now forget all about him.

War itself comes out in its worst, dehumanising form—there is no time to mourn one’s friends. “Each man was on his own and could not be bothered about anybody else. Others would advance, stepping on those injured soldiers who had fallen to the ground. We had no option but to move forward.”

The narrative is also important for the details it provides about the war dynamics. The narrator often makes digressions from the main narrative and goes on to present catalogues of guns being used in the War, or to elucidate how aircraft were being used in the war to seek out enemy soldiers and help direct fire in the correct direction.

The book is also important for the light it throws on the Parsi idea of identity in colonial India—the fact that Karkaria chooses to volunteer for the British Army in England, and not the Indian Army back home is significant in that regard. One intriguing feature of this memoir, as the translator perspicaciously identifies it in his introduction, is the way it says almost nothing specific that could individuate the characters of the narrator’s fellow soldiers. What could possibly be the reason behind this reticence? Perhaps we shall never know the answer.

Sayantan Dasgupta

Sayantan Dasgupta is an academic, translator and writer. He is a former journalist, who fancies flirting with his old profession now and then, and stg-thespaceink-tstodaystg.kinsta.coud offers him the perfect opportunity to do so.