This is the era of war.

So it would be germane to mention two chronicles that were written about the first of the Great Wars in the modern era, World War I, one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, which, according to some estimates, snuffed out the lives of nearly 10 million military men and women.

There are numerous reasons to direct public attention to these two books, not least because they are rather singular in character. Both books — perhaps this will make readers in this part of the world sit up and take notice — were written by Bengalis. Both writers hailed from Calcutta. One author was, astonishingly, an eighty-year-old lady; the other was a young man and a participant in one of the theatres of that global conflict. He had used a diary, which he had written in secret — and in captivity — after the disastrous British campaign in the Battle of Ctesiphon, as his primary source material. Both books, sadly, have faded into oblivion, into the unlit recesses of the public and the publishing minds. Both works — their merits are many — demand a resurrection, especially in these times.

Readers of Wild Fictions would, therefore, be beholden to Amitav Ghosh for doing just that; rescuing these two works from obscurity. Ghosh says that he had come across a reference to these two books in an essay, “Indians at home, Mesopotamia and France, 1914-1918: towards an intimate history”, by the scholar, Santanu Das.

Kalyan-Pradeep: Captain Kalyan Kumar Mukhopadhyay, I.M.S.-er Jiboni was brought about by piecing together the letters that Kalyan Kumar Mukherji sent home from the battle front by the remarkable Mokkhoda Debi, Mukherji’s elderly grandmother. Mukherji reached Mesopotamia in 1915; he died of an ailment two years later. He was awarded the Military Cross posthumously. But Mokkhoda Debi’s labour of love and grief, which was published in 1928, 11 years after her grandson’s death, has gone relatively unnoticed. The other book, Abhi Le Baghdad, was written by Sisir Sarbadhikari. Published in 1958, it brings together Sarbadhikari’s many wartime experiences — of battles, hardships, imprisonment and, of course, death. Apart from being a testament to a specific military campaign, what “makes the book so remarkable,” Ghosh writes, “[is that] it…” says “something about Sarbadhikari himself. Not only is he a fine observer, but he is also to a quite astonishing degree free of rancour and prejudice. Despite the horrors that he witnesses… he never loses his ability to perceive the humanity of others…”

Ghosh goes on to reveal the points of convergence and divergence between the two authors. Both Mukherji and Sarbadhikari were erudite and well-read. But there are perceptible — revealing — differences between the two men and their views. “Capt. Mukherji was in his early thirties at the start of the war, married and with a child. He was also a doctor and a career officer of the Indian Medical Service… Sarbadhikari was in his early twenties, and he volunteered to serve as a private in a hastily formed auxiliary medical unit…” Significantly, “Sarbadhikari mentions Capt. Mukherji a few times, but he himself never figures in Capt. Mukherji’s letters to his family.” This despite the fact that the two men traced their roots to the same city and, in fact, had marched together. Could Sarbadhikari’s absence from Mukherji’s letters be suggestive of, as Ghosh writes, “the professional’s scorn for the amateur...”? (Mukherji’s initial judgement of volunteers like Sarbadhikari was, Ghosh notes, harsh but, to his credit, he did change his opinion.) Or could the subtle cleavages of age, class, and professional competency have cast their shadow on their ties?

The potential differences in the outlook of the two writers do not, however, take anything away from the multifarious value of the literary works that were the result of their military experiences. The sociological-historical importance of these two books can be established by crunching some numbers. Ghosh writes that 8,77,068 combatants and 5,63,369 non-combatants of Indian descent were involved in the First World War. But the historiography of this conflict is disproportionately tilted in favour of the voices — literary, epistolary and so on — of White Europeans. Kalyan-Pradeep and Abhi Le Baghdad then seek to push the voices and the views of the colonised on a tumultuous event whose testimonials, memorialisations, and literary reconstructions have remained the fief of Empire and Race. New, emerging research into the contributions of Indians to the First World War in many forms would certainly benefit from revisiting these two works.

Ghosh writes that there is a possibility of texts similar to Abhi Le Baghdad existing in Marathi: this, he reasons, is because the war in Mesopotamia had witnessed the participation of Maratha soldiers. This makes accounts of the Mesopotamia campaign by two Bengalis all the more rare. The paucity of accounts of the Great War by Bengali chroniclers would, hopefully, be taken up as a challenge by Bengal’s community of intrepid scholars and researchers to unearth more material that awaits discovery. Ghosh’s inference, that Kalyan-Pradeep and Abhi Le Baghdad address an anomaly within the regional — Bengali — literary production of the War, is indisputable.

But there is a third, equally important, reason that demands the celebration of these two texts. Ghosh hints at this but the point needs to be expounded further. These two books — especially Abhi Le Baghdad — bring to the fore war as a tactile horror. Sample this passage from Abhi Le Baghdad: “In front of the trenches, along the lines of barbed wire, was where the greatest number of wounded lay. In some places men were hanging from the wires; some were dead (they were the lucky ones) and some were still alive. Here was a severed hand hanging from the wire; there a foot. One man was hanging on the wires with all his entrails tumbling out...” The whizz of flying bullets, the rumble of weaponry, the constant spillage of blood, bodies being split open by shrapnel and the aural register of human suffering, the barrenness of the land over which the war was being fought and always, always, the unquenchable thirst of the survivors — Sarbadhikari’s use of the sensory, not as embellishment or a fetish, to convey the brutality of war is both frightening and gifted.

The willingness to portray the terror and the tragedy that is war, with an emphasis on all that is corporeal and its obliteration, seems to have been jettisoned by the modern, overwhelmingly visual, renditions of contemporary conflicts. The coverage of India’s recent military confrontation with Pakistan on television is a case in point. In their reconstruction of the events, Indian television studios, propelled by a crude cocktail of jingoism and theatricality, reduced war’s chilling rituals to pageantry. So much so that the government had to issue an advisory to media channels to restrain them from using Civil Defence Air Raid Sirens sounds in their programmes. Sensitive ground reports on the death, destruction and displacement that conflict inevitably brings to the vulnerable — such as the residents of Poonch who live close to the international border — were far fewer than the deluge of misinformation and complementary pyrotechnics that were dished out for mass consumption. These techniques of telling the story of war are not meant to bring war’s depravity into the drawing room; they are designed to insulate viewers from grasping war’s evilness and futility by reducing conflict to caricature.

Neither Kalyan-Pradeep nor Abhi Le Baghdad can be accused of indulging in such subterfuge and deception. Their ability to convey the truth about war in all its gruesomeness thus has a renewed urgency in this era of war.

uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in