Lucien Febvre, in his A New Kind of History (1973) wrote, that “any attempt to reconstitute the emotional life of a given period is a task that is at one and the same time extremely attractive and frightfully difficult. But so what? The historian has no right to desert” (19). In her book, India in the Second World War: An Emotional History, Diya Gupta takes up Febvre's mantle head on.

Using a varied range of sources—photographs, letters, memoirs, and poetry—Gupta adopts an interdisciplinary methodology, encompassing cultural, historical, and literary analyses as well as a multilingual approach, to unravel the emotional responses of different sections of the Indian population to the experiences of World War II. Gupta produces a deep engagement with World War II's emotional history that transforms our very understanding of the War. This complex emotional terrain, the book reveals, was inflected by differences in military rank, political belief, race, class, caste, and gender (21), not only providing a new understanding of India's responses to the War, but also the layered impact of this historical crisis on Indian subjects of the empire. Gupta's work strongly complements new histories of World War II that have only just begun to emerge (Yasmin Khan).

The book begins by a critical exploration of colonial photographs, where Gupta's analysis goes beyond the colonial photographer's lens to explore the men being photographed as active agents in the photographs. She then moves on to analyze the emotional resonances of home within the framework of colonialism and war, by parsing through letters written to and by soldiers during the war as well as two memoirs—Arakan Fronte and The Men from Imphal. Gupta's analysis shows how both memoirs reflect on shifting ideas of home and how these translated to ideas of nationalism and a possible independent nation. Next, Gupta interprets wartime letters as texts, a form of life writing, analyzing the ways in which language shaped representations(s) of war emotions. While revealing different imperatives for military enlistment, anxieties, and the fragility of the soldier's self, Gupta's unpacking of the letters also give glimpses into a non-elite narrative around the War and “continuing entanglements” between colonial power structures and feelings evoked by home (43).

In chapter 2, Gupta examines the famine through the lens of its emotional legacy in life-writing and literature, and advocates for the place of the literary in historical knowledge. Moving away from colonial photographs and differentiating how the visual reframes the human at a time of crisis, she analyzes photographs by Sunil Janah. Gupta again explores letters by soldiers and civilians, arguing that this “written archive becomes a testament to the history of loss and death” (83). By exploring letters from different parts of India, she paints a picture of a country grappling with the impact of the War, especially on food shortages and price rise. Going beyond the Bengal famine, Gupta finds a nation interconnected through the trauma of hunger. At the same time, soldiers’ letters home point to their identification with an imagined community of sufferers affected by hunger. Moving on to an analysis of Ashani Sanket and poetry of Samar Sen and Sukanta, Gupta highlights their identification with public attitudes to war and famine; broadening a conception of war from simple battlefront violence to include colonized bodies on the Indian “home front” (115).

This theme of imagined community is, in fact, recurrent in the book, which chapters 3 and 4 carry forward. While in Salvi's memoir, Gupta points to the imagined community formed by Indian nationalism being destabilized to forge “affirming,” transnational male friendships, in Crasta's memoir, Gupta unravels a fraught relationship with INA soldiers, otherwise located within mainstream nationalist historiography through tropes of liberation and heroism. “Soft,” “tender,” “kind” are words not associated with war; yet, after the eviscerating experience of the famine in the previous chapter, Gupta takes the reader through a journey of male friendships and intimacy. The “imagined community” shown in the previous chapter as ties that bind soldiers to their hungry homeland are shown to lie fractured in this chapter through the two memoirs. In chapter 4, Gupta tackles aspects of gender in the writings of Mulk Raj Anand and the poetries of Muriel Wasi and Tara Ali Baig, delineating shifts in emotional and literary styles when one looks at writings by women. Wasi's feminized India, unlike that of earlier reformers who had felt the need to protect from the outside influence of colonialism, was broken, starved, and empty, that had been “acted upon” by the violence of colonialism. The war, acting upon this feminized “mother” India, had far-reaching consequences for the gendered violence of Partition and gender politics in independent India, something that Gupta should have alluded to.

The last chapter explores how poetry becomes testimony, analyzing wartime poems by two male poets—the lesser known Tambimuttu, who experienced the London Blitz, and the famous Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who experienced the early years of the war at the “home front.” Gupta argues that such a moment of “historical” crisis such as the war not only caused a “failure of imagination” but led the two poets to interrogate the meaning of “civilization” itself. This is, however, the only chapter that seems to be rushed and, to some extent, repetitive. Given that the author delves deep into Sukanta and Samar Sen's poetry around war and famine, it seems a little stretched to have a separate chapter on Tagore and Tambimuttu at the end. The author would have done well to incorporate the analyses around these two poets in chapter 2. Moreover, there is a missed opportunity in this chapter to interrogate narratives from the margins, such as Dalit life writing during the war. This would have complemented the analyses of gender that Gupta has engaged with in the previous chapter, and give further credence to her “non-elite” narratives that she explores through wartime letters.

India in the Second World War is innovative, poignant, and human. Diya Gupta brings to us a work which, truly, is a tour de force and a valuable addition to new scholarship on World War II.