In 1910, a teenage Parsi boy from Navsari, Gujarat, longed to see the rest of the world. With 50 rupees in his pocket, he made his way to Hong Kong, where he worked till 1914, until news of a world war started creeping in. He travelled to London (passing through China, Manchuria, Siberia, Russia and Scandinavia) reaching in early 1915, and, somehow, managed to register in the British Armed Forces. A century later, a historian and translator in Mumbai was leafing through old books at the KR Cama Oriental Institute, when he stumbled upon a text titled Rangbhoomi par Rakkad. “I thought it would be a story on theatre, since that’s what the first word denotes,” laughs Murali Ranganathan, who eventually discovered it was a war memoir by army veteran Nariman Karkaria. “This is a very rare story, since there are barely any first-hand accounts documenting this time in 
Indian history.”

This collection of essays were first published as a weekly series in the Jam-e-Jamshed—a weekly newspaper widely circulated at the time in Gujarat and among the Parsi diaspora—after Karkaria returned from the First World War. “This was eventually made into a book, which was truly unique since it was not just a war story, but a travelogue as well… with a lot of humour!” The book is originally written in the Parsi dialect of Gujarati, which has its own nuances. For Ranganathan, who grew up reading several books in the language from the 19th century, translating it didn’t seem like a task. “The language they used in those days was far more complex and pronounced than Nariman’s writings, which are more mainstream. Luckily, he also mentioned English names and terms in several places, which helped a lot.”
The just-released book, The First World War Adventures of Nariman Karkaria (HarperCollins India), spans four-and-a-half years of war. “Karkaria picks the best parts for his stories, abridging most of the messy bits to a bare minimum—there’s a certain Wodehousian-style of wicked humour that runs through the pages. For many war veterans, reliving their time on the front isn’t easy.” While Ranganathan got to know much about this significant time in Karkaria’s life through his work and research on the book, he still feels he doesn’t know his protagonist well enough.