After Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as the Education Minister amid nationwide protests over NEET-UG examination leaks, I witnessed a gathering in my city that left me uneasy. An elderly activist spoke to a largely young crowd about the freedom movement and why defending the Indian republic required remembering those who had fought for it. But the crowd grew restless and asked him to finish; they wanted to celebrate and dance. Dejected, he ended by invoking Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, “If you don’t want to know about them, you don’t know what you are doing.” The celebration resumed and youngsters danced the evening away. I was left wondering about the unimaginable feat these youngsters have achieved by holding the government accountable, but also about whether it is possible to defend the freedoms of a place whose history they barely understand. Perhaps that 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) addresses this dilemma in a pertinent manner. She makes the reader re-view the grand language in which sacrifice is portrayed as a national event. In place of a grand national narrative, Hajela’s book approaches past through the intimate scale of family history that unfolds into the larger and relatable questions of memory, inheritance and identity. Fathers died for empires, national causes, flags but families remember these stories differently. 

The narrative is told through the perspective of Beant Kaur who wants her children and grandchildren to know about their family history. In the very beginning, the readers are told about the importance of oral traditions. Beant observes, “Only British wrote things down, Indians told stories.” These oral traditions become significant because these stories through their distortions, embellishments, contradictions, forgetting invent their own kind of archive. Beant emphasises that the grandchildren will decide what they want to do with these stories and they might interpret them in ways that their ancestors might not even meant to. These tellings and retellings are not just about people in the past but their contextualisation in the present. Eventually, it is in these refractions that Hajela’s book reclaims the power of small histories and how they shape us.

Over 300 pages, Beant narrates the story of her grandfather, Balwant Singh who served in Ferozepur Sikh Regiments; her father, Harjit Singh who served in Piffers-Punjab Irregular Frontier Force; her brother, Amrik Singh who was a barrister, a freedom fighter and was on Komagata Maru Voyage from Hong Kong to Vancouver. Through Beant’s narration of family history, the personal becomes a way of approaching the political without reducing either one. The historical events that take place do not just appear as big events but mediate the reader’s understanding of how common people navigated relationships, loyalties and imaginations through these events. 

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The events of Anglo-Sikh war, Indian rebellion of 1857, Anglo-Afghan border invasions, Komagata Maru incident, Ghadar movement are not just portrayed as big events that shaped the fate of the nations but episodes that shaped families and individuals. These stories are also not just about men who went to war but women like Harsharan Kaur and Sindhu Uppal who waited, who built and supported their families when their husbands went to war; Khushi Uppal who joined independence movement to fight for a free India. This is about Beant Kaur who refuses to let these stories die. First, she pays attention to the mumblings of her grandfather and as she grows up, she coaxes details from him so she could one day narrate these stories to her progenies. These stories become a seam binding one generation to the next.

The intimate scale of the narrative also allows the reader, just like grandchildren, to interrogate the past, to interrogate what our ancestors believed, why they believed it, what circumstances made those beliefs possible, and whether those circumstances still exist. Negotiation with these stories become a way to contextualise them in the present, to remember them, to carry them forward. 

We can honour the past without being encaged 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 not treating inheritance in the same way as obedience. Everyone has to reclaim their individual path, just as Harjit does or as Balwant tells Amrik to do. Courage lies in not just inheriting these family stories but in questioning, arguing and negotiating with them. It is in deciding what is worth carrying forward. What worked for a parent may not work for a child, and the narrative establishes that there is no inherent shame in breaking with tradition when the circumstances that created the tradition have disappeared. 

Hajela also rejects the fantasy of moral purity for her narrative. In an ideal world, one may never do anything wrong. But a life governed entirely by the fear of being wrong can become a life in which one may never do anything. There is something liberating in the book’s willingness to enter that uncomfortable territory, between what is right and what circumstances demand. This highlights a complicated reading of the British colonial times, of Balwant who fought for the British and yet encouraged his grandson to participate in the freedom movement against the British, of Harjit who sees the absurdity of British campaign against the Afghans and still fights for the cause, of Harsharan who treats Sindhu unfairly despite (or on account of) her love for her son, each revealing moral ambiguities in a world where prejudices and loyalties continuously unsettle each other.

Priya Hajela’s For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died is an attempt to remind us of the struggles that shaped our freedoms not merely to honour those who fought for us, but to understand what we must do better, and to ensure that we never settle “into a life of complacency, of the mundane, of the everyday.” This is why the book’s greatest achievement is its insistence on the anecdotes, contradictions, family jokes, half-remembered conversations, domestic quarrels and stories passed down without footnotes. This kind of history, unlike ‘big’ history, allows the readers to carry on the conversations without being intimidated by it. It extends as an ongoing conversation that has not finished and will carry on with the grandchildren. 

For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died by Priya Hajela is published by Speaking Tiger Books.