They were members of the so called “Paiforce” (the Persia and Iraq Force), tens of thousands of whom (soldiers, military officers, bureaucrats, cooks, police, mapmakers, surveyors, you name it) were relocated to a sprawling bureaucratic occupation of Iraq. Raghu Karnad’s astonishing history, Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War, casts the Indians like my grandfather who served the British Empire in Iraq during World War II in a far more prestigious role. Besides, my grandfather’s much longer-lived reality-he returned to his wife and children, worked, retired, and then died in ripe old age, all without saying much about Baghdad-made his actual stint there seem not just unglamorous but uninteresting. This anomaly-to the best of my knowledge, he never left South India for the rest of his life-had awakened little wonder in me, perhaps because my father’s family is not especially communicative. For some years during the Second World War, my paternal grandfather, a mid-level employee of the Survey of India, worked in Baghdad.
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