India At War
The Subcontinent and the Second World War
Yasmin Khan
Reviews and Awards
"This new book is an elegant and gripping evocation of the war's transformative effects on Indian society, braiding together the stories of soldiers, activists, and citizens as they navigated a conflicting morass of political and social expectations. Crafted with great clarity and sympathy...Yasmin' Khan's lucid narrative complicates received nationalist accounts of the war....As these historians seek to understand the circulation of ideas, goods, peoples, and armies in these harrowing and electric years, Yasmin Khan's India at War will serve as an invaluable primer."--Benjamin Siegel, The Historian
"[T]his is an important work for any serious student of the Second World War, the last days of the Raj, and modern South Asia."--The NYMAS Review
"Superlative...India at War breaks new ground on almost every page...Written in beautifully polished and often moving prose, Khan's book is the first detailed study. It succeeds brilliantly...Her work has the detailed research, economic rigour and theoretical superstructure of heavyweight academic history; yet it also has the narrative momentum, prose style and humanistic and biographical insights of a more literary work."--William Dalrymple, Spectator
"Wonderfully detailed and original...Khan achieves almost complete success: India at War is a striking example of people's history, packed with anecdotes, memories and information about a shared but largely unwritten global past."--The Guardian
"Khan...balances analysis, history and human compassion in a narrative that leaves one shaken."--Daily Telegraph
"Splendid....Khan's richly readable book takes apart and rewrites the conventional narratives of imperial historians....Democratic in her approach and largely suspicious of grand narratives, Khan tells her stories from the ground upwards....[H]er chronicle is, in the main, tragic in this seminal and timely book."--The Independent
"[Khan's] new work makes salutary but unpalatable fare for any remotely sensitive modern British reader....[Khan] tells a host of stories about India's wartime travails that should be known to a wider western audience."--Max Hastings, Sunday Times
"The value of Yasmin Khan's fine book is to tell us something of what the war did to India..."--Financial Times
"This is a much-needed general treatment of the Indian Empire's last war."--CHOICE
"India at War is a careful and nuanced work of history."--Manu Bhagavan, H-Net
"An engrossing and fluently written social history that crosses lines of gender, region and class, public and private. [Ms. Khan] shows us India's war through the eyes of peasant women waiting for soldiers on far-flung battlefields, heroic winners of the Victoria Cross, enragé young British civil servants, legendary political activists, nurses, refugees and impatient young socialites confined to the Hill Station of Simla. In reconstructing this mass of stories Ms. Khan greatly enriches our stock of testimony through which to understand this vast struggle."--The Wall Street Journal
