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I unabashedly judge books by their covers. On a recent visit to a bookstore, I was drawn to a book with a friendly cover design. It was a wartime memoir called The World War I Adventures of Nariman Karkaria, translated by Murali Ranganathan.

The book had originally been published in 1922 and was written in Gujarati. It claims to be the only (or maybe one of the only) memoirs set during the Great War, and I was interested because I hoped it answered a question I have always had. What makes a man or woman volunteer to face the terrors of war, especially when they are so far removed from the seats of power? I can understand Rani Lakshmibai picking up her sword – she was protecting her throne. But why would a young man from an ordinary family in a village, volunteer to fight on behalf of a King who wasn’t even in his land? What goes through your mind when you are fighting a war that is not yours or that has no clear moral grounds to stand on?

It turned out that this book could not give me any answers to the questions I was asking. It is more a travelogue than a memoir, because Nariman selfishly guards his inner thoughts and feelings throughout the narrative, leaving us with descriptions of what he saw and experienced. At the end of the book, I knew that Nariman liked pretty girls, liked travelling, and had a begrudging admiration for the Japanese, despite his prejudiced opinions of most Asian people, but I did not have access to his reaction to the horrors that he was seeing.

Nariman Karkaria was the son of a Parsi priest and was being trained in the priesthood when he decided to run away to Hong Kong. He does this quite on an impulse, selling the gold buttons on his kurta and other bits of jewellery that he was wearing to pay for the steam ship ticket. He was only 16 at the time. He arrived in Hong Kong in 1910, completely alone without any contacts in the city. He is soon connected with Parsi merchants in the city and gets employed. In 1915, he hears of the Great War in Europe and is carried away by the wave of enthusiasm for enlisting in the War effort. Unlike the next World War, in 1914, the general public was excited about the upcoming war on both sides of the conflict. There were lines outside recruitment offices in England and Germany.

But what drove Nariman? Was it just youthful naivete? Was he hanging out with British loyalists and was influenced by their nationalism? We don’t know. Nariman does not tell us about who he meets on his travels or what his peer group was experiencing at the time. He is the only character throughout the whole book, and so we know very little about the social influences on him.

In any case, Nariman gets on a train through China to Manchuria. In Manchuria, he gets on a Japanese train to Russia. Then he goes across Russia, Northern Europe, and France, till he gets to London. This is my favourite section of the book because he writes of his impressions of the trains he was on, the stations, the girls and the locals. These are parts of the world that I hadn’t even really thought about when I think about that time, and a first-hand account of a Russian wedding, or a tea party gives greater insight into a culture than a research paper.

In London, Nariman goes through a lot of trouble to enlist in a British troop, instead of an Indian one. Why does he not want to be part of the Indian regiment? He doesn’t ever explain, although I suspect, he didn’t want to be associated with the Indians. He may have wanted to be a white man in a white world. Nariman, it turns out, is a little annoying, especially because he doesn’t ever reflect on himself or explain why he does what he does. Is it that he lacks self-awareness or that he doesn’t think his reader should be allowed access to him, I do not know.

From this point on, the rest of the book is really about the horrors of War. Nariman is first on the Western Front in the muddy fields of France, and after recovering from an injury, he is sent to the Middle East where he fights the Ottomans. There is very little insight given about the political situation or the strategic decisions being made, and this is mostly because Nariman was a young man, far removed from these subjects.

He does, however, describe an altered London during the war, where women were suddenly wearing shorter hair and trousers, and the police force had to hire female Bobbies. He is perceptive enough to notice that the women seemed to enjoy this altered society that gave them freedom in the public sphere. He also comments about the many hurried romances where girls felt it was their patriotic duty to marry soldiers who were home convalescing, to cheer them up and send them off to war with some sense of hope, knowing that someone was cheering for them at home.

Nariman does not write about the 1 million plus Indians who had been recruited by the British, and who were fighting in the trenches in Europe or among the sands in the Middle East and East Africa. He was perhaps unaware that India had contributed 170,000 animals, 3.7 tons of supplies and even a loan to the British government. He also does not comment on whether his attitude towards his colonial master changed after the war.

In Indian history, World War I is a turning point. Indians were deeply resentful of how the British had recruited troops in areas like Punjab and Rajasthan. It became evident to the common man, who might earlier have pledged loyalty to the King of England, that the British viewed them purely as a resource to be exploited.

Village officials were forced to make lists of people – those who signed up for the war, their families were listed in the white book. These people and their families were rewarded with special favours, which in a hierarchical social structure was a great incentive. Those who did not, or could not, sign up were listed in the black book. The fear was that once your family’s name was in the black book, generations would suffer at the hands of a vindictive official of the British government.

From the top left (clockwise): 1. A local woman placing a flower in the soldier’s pocket as they march through her village; 2. (top) an expeditionary force being led through a war torn landscape, 3. Many soldiers were illiterate, and had others write home for them; 4. Gas mask drill (Nariman describes in great detail just how uncomfortable these masks are); 5. A break from fighting, with a dip in a pond. Source: Imperial War Museum

Gandhi and many others had encouraged enlistment, hoping that the British would be grateful for Indian support and would grant India more autonomy. But that didn’t happen. Instead, we got the Rowlatt’s Act (crushing freedom of speech, press and the right to gather and express dissent) and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

In Europe, Nariman and many other Indian soldiers were greeted with affection by locals as their troops marched through their villages. To Indians, who had been treated so poorly by the colonizers in their home country – the kindness and lack of prejudice were an eye-opener.

Having said that, there were also Indians who, at the end of the war, did not want to return to India. They were in different parts of the Western World and would later form groups like the Ghaddar Movement, supporting Indian independence from a great distance.

But again, Nariman does not go into any of this. He is a traveller and he writes about what he loves – which is meeting new cultures and travelling through these various regions with his eyes wide open, absorbing all the sites. History and politics are not topics Nariman wants to explore or reflect on.

So, what is the final verdict? Is it worth reading?

Read it if you:

1. Like travel writing or are interested in trains and train travel
2. Enjoy reading military history – Nariman does mention names of battles, and details about weapons, and equipment (like an enlightening comparison between English and German gas mask and rucksack design).
3. Are exploring translations. I think more now than ever before, we have access to works of literature in other languages. I am often confused about how to assign credit when I am reading an immensely readable translated work. Is it the original writer who made it such a pleasurable read, or is it the translator’s command over two languages? In this case, I do not know how to divide the credit of this text between Murali Ranganathan, the Mumbai-based historian and translator of this work and Nariman. If the original book is as well written in Gujarati, I thank Ranganathan for his faithful translation and for bringing his discovery to light. And if Ranganathan had spruced up the language to make it something a contemporary reader can digest, then it is a job well done. I hope to read more translated works by him and am going to keep a special eye out. 

However, this book isn’t perfect – so do not read it, if you:

1. are looking for a reflective memoir
2. expect insights into the political and strategic decisions taken during the years of his travel.
3. are reading for literary value. This is simply written, immensely readable – not high brow literature.

I myself, am glad I read it. It didn’t take long to go through and although it was less than perfect, it was just good enough to escape being sent back to the second hand bookstore to be exchanged for the next haul.