According to Dharmendra Pradhan resigned As Education Minister amid nationwide protests over unveiling of NEET-UG exams, I witnessed a gathering in my city that disturbed me. A senior activist spoke to a predominantly young audience about the freedom movement and why defending the Indian Republic requires remembering those who fought for it. But the crowd grew restless and demanded that he finish; they wanted to party and dance. Dejectedly, he concluded by citing Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad: “If you don’t want to know about them, you don’t know what you’re doing.” The celebration continued and the young people danced the evening away. I wondered about the unimaginable feat these youth have accomplished in holding the government accountable, but also about whether it is possible to defend the freedoms of a place whose history they barely understand. Perhaps this is one of the strange dilemmas of inheriting a democracy: we inherit the rights without necessarily inheriting the memory of the struggle that produced them.
Priya Hajela’s For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died (2025) poignantly addresses this dilemma. It makes the reader look back at the great language in which sacrifice is portrayed as a national event. Rather than a grand national narrative, Hajela’s book approaches the past through the intimate dimension of family history, which unfolds into the larger and relatable questions of memory, legacy and identity. Fathers died for empires, national causes and flags, but families remember these stories differently.
The timelessness of oral stories
The story is told from the perspective of Beant Kaur, who wants her children and grandchildren to know about her family history. Right at the beginning, the importance of oral traditions is explained to readers. Beant notes: “Only the British wrote things down, Indians told stories.” These oral traditions gain importance because these stories create their own kind of archive through their distortions, embellishments, contradictions and forgetting. Beant emphasizes that the grandchildren will decide what they want to do with these stories and that they may interpret them in ways that their ancestors may not have even intended. These stories and retellings are not just about people in the past, but also about their contextualization in the present. Ultimately, it is in these refractions that Hajela’s book regains the power of small stories and how they shape us.
In over 300 pages, Beant tells the story of her grandfather Balwant Singh, who served in the Sikh regiments of Ferozepur; her father, Harjit Singh, who served in the Piffers-Punjab Irregular Border Force; her brother, Amrik Singh, who was a lawyer and freedom fighter and was on the Komagata Maru Voyage from Hong Kong to Vancouver. Through Beant’s telling of the family story, the personal becomes a way to approach the political without reducing either. The historical events that take place not only appear as major events, but give the reader an understanding of how ordinary people navigate relationships, loyalties, and ideas through these events.
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Big events and small details
The events of the Anglo-Sikh War, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Anglo-Afghan border invasions, the Komagata Maru Incident and the Ghadar Movement are portrayed not only as major events that shaped the fate of nations, but also as episodes that shaped families and individuals. These stories are also not just about men who went to war, but also about women like Harsharan Kaur and Sindhu Uppal who waited and raised and supported their families while their husbands went to war. Khushi Uppal, who joined the independence movement to fight for a free India. This is about Beant Kaur refusing to let these stories die. At first she listens to her grandfather’s mumblings, and as she grows up, she coaxes details out of him so she can one day tell these stories to her descendants. These stories become a seam that connects one generation to the next.
The intimate scope of the narrative also allows the reader, like grandchildren, to interrogate the past, to question what our ancestors believed, why they believed it, what circumstances made that belief possible, and whether those circumstances still exist. Engaging with these stories becomes a way to contextualize, remember and carry them forward in the present.
Honoring the past
We can honor the past without being trapped by it. We can tell the old stories and still refuse to end them in the same place. The book derives its moral force from the fact that it does not treat inheritance in the same way as obedience. Everyone has to reclaim their individual path, like Harjit does or like Balwant asks Amrik to do. Courage lies not only in taking on these family stories, but also in questioning, arguing and negotiating with them. It’s about deciding what’s worth pursuing. What worked for a parent may not work for a child, and the narrative shows that there is no inherent shame in breaking with tradition when the circumstances that created the tradition have disappeared.
Farewell lessons
Hajela also rejects the fantasy of moral purity for her story. In an ideal world, you can never do anything wrong. But a life defined solely by the fear of injustice can become a life in which you may never do anything. There’s something liberating about the book’s willingness to tread that uncomfortable terrain between what’s right and what the circumstances demand. This highlights a complicated reading of the British colonial period: of Balwant, who fought for the British and yet encouraged his grandson to take part in the freedom movement against the British, of Harjit, who recognizes the absurdity of the British campaign against the Afghans and still fights for the cause, of Harsharan, who treats Sindhu unfairly despite (or because of) her love for her son, both revealing moral ambiguities in a world where prejudices and loyalties are constantly reciprocal unsettle.
“For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died” by Priya Hajela is an attempt to remind ourselves of the struggles that have shaped our freedoms, not only to honor those who have fought for us, but to understand what we need to do better and to ensure that we never settle “in a life of complacency, of the mundane, of the mundane.” Therefore, the book’s greatest achievement is its insistence on the anecdotes, contradictions, family jokes, half-forgotten conversations, domestic squabbles and stories, passed down without footnotes. This type of story, unlike the “big” story, allows readers to continue the conversation without being intimidated by it. It extends to an ongoing conversation that is not yet finished and continues with the grandchildren.
For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died by Priya Hajela is published by Speaking Tiger Books.
Urvi Sharma is Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Amity University, Punjab. She specializes in studying how gender dynamics influence our everyday lives. When she’s not explaining why men are responsible for 99 of the world’s 100 problems, she’s reading memoirs by women to collect quotes for the remaining problem.
