Enakshi Sengupta’s The Silk Route Spy is billed as a “true story” of her husband’s grandfather, Nandlal Kapur, who simultaneously spied for the British Raj and helped the Indian independence movement in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. It is a story passed down from Nandlal Kapur to his grandson Vijay Kapur, who in turn conveyed what he recalled to the author.
Sengupta, who earned a PhD and an MBA from the University of Nottingham, admitted in a recent interview with The Telegraph of India that the book is based in part on “storytelling” and in part on her research of the historical context of Nandlal Kapur’s life. Sengupta explained that she wrote what she “heard”, what she “felt”, and “what remained unsaid”. The Silk Route Spy, in other words, is perhaps better approached as historical fiction.
In the book’s prologue, Sengupta writes that “[t]he story took shape in bits and pieces” in her mind as she recalled her husband talking about Nandlal “till the wee hours of the morning”. When her husband died, Sengupta was determined to tell Nandlal’s story based on her husband’s storytelling, many of Nandlal’s photographs, and her “reconstruction” of the details of Nandlal’s life.
In Sengupta’s account, Nandlal Kapur was a double agent—spying for the British but also providing assistance to the surging independence movement in India. He was recruited as a spy in his native Firozpur district in Punjab. Nandlal agreed to spy for Britain because he and his family needed the money. But his heart was with the independence movement, and his first assignment was to work as a newspaper clerk and infiltrate a group of young “revolutionaries”. He was paid 30 rupees a month to “befriend the revolutionaries, win their confidence and report their movements” to British authorities in Amritsar, which, Sengupta writes, “was considered a hotbed for revolutionary activities by the British.” Nandlal not only gained the trust of the young members of the independence movement, he also fell in love with a woman named “Vimla”. And while he provided information about the group to British authorities, he also helped members of the group plan and carry out an assassination attempt at an engagement party attended by members of the British elite.
After the botched assassination attempt, Nandlal fled to Delhi, where he re-established contact with his British handlers who next assigned him to Calcutta, where he infiltrated a group of professional revolutionaries who were committed to using violence to gain independence for India. Sengupta writes that in Calcutta, Nandlal continued to provide information to British authorities but made sure that he gave them “nothing that will harm my countrymen and their mission.”
Future assignments took Nandlal to Rangoon, Shanghai and Kobe. At each location, Nandlal continued living his double life as a British spy and promoter of Indian independence. As war clouds gathered in the Far East, the British stopped using Nandlal’s services. Nandlal married a woman in Japan and later returned to India after it gained its independence, where he raised his children, worked a farm, and became a grandfather who told stories to his only grandchild about his remarkable double life.