For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died

by Priya Hajela

English 336 pages 1 edition

‘Countries are made up of stories. So are families.’ At the heart of this story is Beant Kaur—sitting on a comfortable chair, shawl wrapped tight on winter nights, gathering her family around her, and telling them who they are. What begins as a granddaughter listening to her grandfather’s half-mumbled memories soon unfolds into something far larger: a deeply personal history that moves from the battlefields of the Anglo-Sikh wars to the uneasy years of British rule, and into the wider currents of a changing world, from the upheaval of 1857 to the Komagata Maru voyage that carried Indians across oceans and into confrontation with empire. These stories are not found in official records, but are passed down in fragments—through memory, grief and pride. These are stories of men who chose to fight when ordered to retreat; of soldiers who found themselves serving the very power they had once resisted, and of families who carried both honour and contradiction in equal measure. As Beant pieces together the lives of those who came before her—her grandfather Balwant, and the generations that shaped him—she begins to understand that history is never as simple as it is told. It lives in the choices people make when survival, loyalty and belief pull in different directions. Intimate and rooted in oral memory, For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died is a story about inheritance—not just of land or name, but of the tales we must choose to tell before they are lost to time.