Focusing on wartime journalism and nonfiction, this article analyses how nationalist Indians made sense of the war’s political and moral causes and goals, and how such understandings shaped the war’s longer historical resonance in India. The article centres on the wartime publications of the writer and journalist Dosabhai Framji Karaka, juxtaposing them with those of his colleagues in the nationalist newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle. Tracing the unfolding of the war through Karaka’s eyes, the article delineates the acute dilemma that the Second World War posed for nationalist Indians, between the struggle for liberation from colonial rule and the global struggle against fascism. It suggests that contemporaries perceived this dilemma as a choice between nationalism and internationalism. The war dealt a severe blow to the more fluid and capacious political imagination of interwar leftist internationalism, espoused by Jawaharlal Nehru and his followers. While substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the interwar period, this article puts a spotlight on the war, especially the pivotal year of 1942, as a distinct period that should be understood on its own historical terms—terms specific to war, with the urgency that arose from horrendous violence, unpredictable outcomes of battles on multiple fronts, and existential threats to nations and the global order. Such unprecedented pressures and constraints bifurcated the range of possibilities and forced historical actors to make difficult choices. The article shows how, during 1942, Karaka’s position parted ways with that of his peers, who more steadfastly represented the Congress stance.

This article explores the various ways in which Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy privileges the affective (and aesthetic) quality of reticence. I begin by addressing the broader political significance of such moderation—relating it, more specifically, to the placatory content of the speeches made by Jawaharlal Nehru during the late forties and early fifties. I then trace the process by which Nehru’s “meandering pleas for mutual tolerance” eventually find their way into the very structure of A Suitable Boy, directly influencing its formal qualities and creating a general discursive “climate” of order and stability. In other words, I would like to suggest that the narrative not only privileges this Nehruvian virtue at the level of content—by explicitly advocating the renunciation of strong feeling—but also practices it at the formal or structural level. And by doing so, I shall argue, it ultimately obliges the reader to adopt a similar affective stance.