Srinath Raghavan, a young but established historian, had to his credit two remarkable books before he moved to assess India’s role in the Second World War and its implications on modern South Asia in his latest publication, India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia (1939-1945). His first book, published in 2010—War and Peace in Modern India—brought into fresh light India’s first prime minister and foreign minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who is often known more as an idealist than a worldly strategist. His second book—1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh—was a subcontinental historiography that looked at a period in history that gave South Asia yet another new nation.

India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia (1939-1945) aims to capture the elements which compelled India to change, to an extraordinary extent, during the last few years under British colonial rule. With the strategic choices offered by the crumbling British Raj, India witnessed the sudden transformation of her citizens as soldiers, fighting in the deadliest conditions of Europe and North Africa—and against a Japanese army hell bent on invading eastern India.

As per historian Ramachandra Guha, “To hamper a possible Japanese invasion of eastern India, the British destroyed some 20,000 small boats, used to catch fish and transport essential commodities to villages not connected by road. This greatly undermined the rural economy, and may have contributed to the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, in which several million perished.” It makes the point on how the wars were used by the British Empire as a supreme tool of exploitation in its colonies, including India.

For an event of such monumental consequences, the wartime mobilisation in South Asia during WWII has seldom been covered in such rich detail before. In his new book, Raghavan takes the pains to give a new account of the fighting for the lives at home and at far-off unknown places. But unlike the old narrative which endorses the Indian nationalists’ view that the war was a source of distraction from the quest for Indian independence, Raghavan puts forth a balanced set of opinion as well as facts, supporting how WWII was also a major factor in the undoing of mighty Britain and its atrocious colonial rule in South Asia.

By writing on the Second World War through a broad angle, Raghavan restructures the readers’ understanding of last century’s largest human conflict. He reinterprets some of the famous battles of 20th century, including those fought in Europe, North Africa and Iraq—and of vaguely known, volatile campaigns that resulted with the destruction of Italian northeast Africa.

The book also maintains a deep focus on the contemporary political dynamics of the time, especially on the nature of the contested support lent to the war, which kept Indian political parties fiercely divided, and intertwines it with military history, where Raghavan’s own background in army appears to be of great help. A multi-dimensional study on WWII, the book has at its core a strategic dimension, which presents India as a power in her own right—instead merely as a subjugated colony of ruined  British Empire of the troubled 1940s.

Another aspect that the book highlights is the fall out of events in America, Germany, Italy and Japan—and how they proved fateful for India’s unwilling participation in a very costly war. The book also goes into significant detail on the financial redundancy of the   British Empire and the dubious decisions taken by the then serving Viceroy to force India headlong into the World War without reaching out for consensus to prominent nationalist Indian political leaders.

The figures, painstakingly collected and used by Raghavan, reveal the sad state of affairs of 1939-1945, “Of Calcutta’s 2.1 million people, 700,000 to 800,000 fled after just five minor air raids on the city, in which Japanese bombers dropped 160 bombs. As foreboding spread across India, workers in Bombay, which was not so much as grazed by a Japanese bomb, began despatching women and children to their villages. The broadening pessimism between 1939 and 1943 was highlighted by withdrawals from Indian banks, which consistently exceeded deposits. The number of post office savings accounts fell from 4.2 million in 1938-39 to 2.8 million in 1943-44. It was almost inevitable that British resolve to hold onto India would diminish.”

A startling truth is that South Asian history of the 1940s seldom gives WWII the coverage it deserves– as most of the attention swivel towards anti-colonial movements and the subsequent phases that led to India’s extremely painful partition. Hence, Srinath Raghavan’s book comes as a breather that looks at how India played its part in the Second World War—and how the conflict changed the course of history, for India and South Asia. In a single platform, the book brings military, strategic, international, economic and social dimensions of the largely uncovered story to single-mindedly show how the war fundamentally transformed modern South Asia. And with it Raghavan joins a group of scholars, which include Tim Harper, Christopher Bayly and Indivar Kamtekar, who have tried to address this huge gap of modern subcontinental histories, as a worthy addition.

Thakur is a New Delhi-based journalist and writer. He tweets @atul_mdb.