Two years ago, Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk was released to great acclaim. One would not know from viewing this film that the war that Britain remembers as the most glorious instance of the indomitable courage and endurance of its people in the face of the mighty German military machine was also fought by millions of subjects of the British Empire, including over two million Indian soldiers who served in Europe, Africa, and Asia (p. xiii). In India, if for different reasons, the story of the country's role in World War II was for a long time similarly eclipsed from the popular narrative, except for the outsized reputation of the nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army that he had raised in the quest of India's liberation. The Indian National Congress, the largest body of nationalist opinion, was from the outset committed to neutrality, and as a result of the “Quit India” Resolution of August 8, 1942, the leadership of the Congress was confined to jail for the next two years. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the chief initiator of the idea of Pakistan, was alone in characterizing the war as a “blessing in disguise” (p. 135) since it was during this period, with the Congress sulking in isolation, that the Muslim League gained ascendancy and the idea of Pakistan started to bear fruit.

The Oxford-based historian Yasmin Khan advances the view that the Second World War ought to occupy a much larger place in Indian historiography than it does at present because “the war delivered decolonization and the Partition of 1947—neither of which were inevitable or foreseen in 1939” (p. xvi). One might reasonably debate whether independence was truly precipitated by the war, but agreement with some of Khan's judgments is not required to recognize that the strength of her book lies in its meticulous yet creative documentation of the war as something that was central rather than peripheral to the experience of many ordinary Indians. Other scholars have underscored India's contribution to the war effort, but she renders visible the much lesser-known aspects of the sociocultural and military history of those years, adverting, for example, to the “Asian merchant sailors who kept the British ports going” (p. 319), and to the back-breaking labor of those who built the 500-mile Ledo Road through the mountains of northern Burma to link India to China (pp. 259–63).

Khan is perhaps most engaging in her sensitive representation of the untold number of ways in which the war impacted ordinary people throughout the country. Recruitment officers often made their way to the remotest villages, the “War Fund” imposed burdens on people already living at the brink of poverty, paddy fields were requisitioned—usually with inadequate compensation—to build over 200 aerodromes, and wardens patrolled the streets of major cities to ensure that blackouts were being observed. Many are unaware that India, already an exceedingly poor country, had yet room enough for 10,000 Poles escaping ethnic cleansing by the Soviets and Nazis (p. 123), though Khan's observation would have had more analytical import if she had framed their story within an Indian ethic of hospitality. At Ramgarh, Jharkhand, over 50,000 Chinese soldiers received training (p. 271), and the 22,000 American black servicemen in Calcutta were reminded of racism at home when the British-run swimming pool imposed “white days and black days” (p. 268). If previous histories have sought to convey the impression that the war barely touched India, Khan successfully puts this notion to rest.

Khan's ability to draw the reader into the lives of common people and her ear for nuance and irony lend her history poignancy. One of the most sensitive subjects for Indians was the recruitment drives, and Khan notes the moral pressure that women, in a patriarchal society, were successfully able to apply “in determining whether their sons left home for the war or not” (p. 227). In Rajinder Dhatt's family, two brothers who fought for the empire returned home safely but the third, whom the mother kept close to her bosom, died of typhoid (p. 312). The specter of the Bengal Famine, with the numbing accounts of bodies littering the streets, the skeletal bodies of beggars at every street corner, the acute shortages of food and clothing, and the requisitioning and destruction of boats that eviscerated a people and their lifestyle, haunts Khan's book. The Bengal Famine Inquiry Report, Khan says, was published the same week that VE Day was announced. Even as Khan indicts the British for their cynicism and callousness, she hints at the enormity of the tragedy in quoting a British woman in Calcutta who, when shown pictures of starved concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald, commented thus: “The German atrocities apparently do not compare with the Bengal famine so the pictures don't shock the folks out here” (p. 299). Khan's history has doubtless paved the way for a more complex understanding of the Second World War as India's war too.