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Robert A McLain, Diya Gupta. India in the Second World War: An Emotional History., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 407–408, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae545
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Diya Gupta’s book India in the Second World War has assumed the daunting task of revealing the emotional impact on Indian subjects as they crossed the physical and mental terrain of global war. This is no mean feat, as the conflict’s effects on the socially and culturally diverse “Indian” subject defy any sort of blanket description. The war was felt in vastly different ways depending on one’s perspective, whether a hungry Bengali peasant, a Parsi woman in Bombay, an English educated member of the literati, or a sepoy, those myriad soldiers who fought for the empire. Indeed, the author summons them all in the service of this compelling work.
Gupta’s broad approach points to a salient fact: There was no singular Indian experience, no commonly understood national narrative of victory or defeat despite the shared economic depravations the war brought to the subcontinent. In the wake of World War I, B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit barrister and author of the country’s 1949 constitution, inadvertently argued as much in suggesting that India lacked nationhood since those who held no caste status, such as himself, by no means enjoyed the equality that enabled a population to imagine a common community. As he put it, “a government for the people, but not by the people, is sure to educate some to be Masters and others to be subjects.” Ambedkar saw the end of the British Raj as somewhat moot if it were merely swapped for an elite Brahmin Raj. Even the staid Indian Army, home of the traditionally recruited “martial races” of northern India, was highly stratified in terms of region and language. The Sikh solider, or sepoy, would have no way of communicating with a Gurkha from Nepal. Building an emotional history of wartime India then, as Gupta has done, is especially challenging.
