“The First World War Adventures of Nariman Karkaria”, translated Murali Ranganathan

The First World War Adventures Of Nariman Karkaria, Murali Ranganathan (trans) (HarperCollins India, April 2022)

In 2012, Murali Ranganathan, a historian and translator of Gujarati and Marathi, came across the memoir of Nariman Karkaria, a Parsi from Gujarat, titled Rangbhoomi par Rakhad, published in 1922. The book recounts Karkaria’s travels throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and his experiences in the First World War. The memoir,  Murali Ranganathan writes, “is the only Indian war memoir from the First World War to have been discovered thus far.” Though initially skeptical of Nariman Karkaria’s story, and unable to independently confirm the accounts of Karkaria’s war experiences, Ranganathan believes the accounts therein  are genuine.

Karkaria grew up in the small town of Navsari in the southern part of Gujarat, an Indian state located south of what is today Pakistan on the west coast of the Indian peninsula. Karkaria’s father was a Zoroastrian priest, and as a young man Nariman Karkaria was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. But Nariman had other ideas. He wanted to see the world, and in 1910, at the age of 15 or 16, he left his home and began the fascinating journey that is the subject of this book.

 

And what a journey it was. The young man traveled by train and ship to Mumbai, Hong Kong, and mainland China where he stayed in Beijing (then known more or less universally as “Peking” , the term used in this translation), saw the Great Wall, and listened to people talk about the war. He recalled having read “tales of battles in the Burjornama” (a set of books about heroic exploits in ancient Persia), and wrote, “I just had to fight, and fight I would.” His journey to London to join the British army in the Great War took him to Manchuria, Siberia (where he remembered the bitter cold and the ubiquitous snow), St Petersburg (“Petrograd”), Sweden, Finland, and Norway.

When he finally arrived in London, he was surprised to see the city in darkness and the extent of the damage done by German bombing by Zeppellins and warplanes. We sometimes forget that London’s civilians suffered a “blitz” in both world wars of the 20th century. Karkaria was excited to become a “Tommy”, and joined the 24th Middlesex Regiment based in Northampton. He underwent training and departed for what he accurately called the “killing fields of France”.

Karkaria saw action on the Western Front at the Battle of the Somme. He described life in the trenches (the rain and mud), survived artillery and poison gas attacks, going “over the top” to assault German trenches, and watching other soldiers die. He was wounded by shrapnel and shipped to a hospital in London. After recovering from his wounds, Karkaria saw more action in Egypt, Palestine (during which he toured historic and religious sites in Jerusalem, calling Christ, as Muslims do, a “prophet”), and Mesopotamia. He described the differences between trench warfare and desert warfare. And Karkaria’s final tour of duty was in the Balkans, where he was a member of a medical unit that treated wounded soldiers at Salonika.

After the war, Karkaria’s journey home to Navsari took him to the Caucuses (Tiflis, Baku), the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, Constantinople (Istanbul), the mountains of northern Italy, France, London again, Egypt, and the Suez Canal. His book is as much travelogue as war memoir.

Ranganathan notes that Karkaria served as a military instructor for Indian troops during World War II. He reached the rank of major. He died on 7 August 1949, two years after India gained its independence.


Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney and an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University.