Land of our Birth, our faith, our pride,For whose dear sake our fathers died;Oh, Motherland, we pledge to theeHead, heart and hand through the years to be!In the late 1970s and early 80s, in a school hall at The Lawrence School, Sanawar, students would rise together and recite Rudyard Kipling’s “The Children’s Song” — a pledge of loyalty to a motherland, sung in memory of fathers who had died defending it. Scattered through the rows were children who had recently lost fathers of their own, in wars with Pakistan. When the verse about fallen fathers landed, they would cry, and they would leave the hall. Priya Hajela, then a student at the school, never forgot it. “It made a huge impact on me,” she says.Decades later, that hymn gave her the title of her new novel. For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died, published by Speaking Tiger, follows four generations of the Uppal family across nearly a century of upheaval: from the Anglo-Sikh Wars and the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, through the 1857 uprising, the Komagata Maru incident, and on into the freedom movement and Partition.Speaking to The Indian Express, Hajela says the book looks into the events preceding the Partition, encompassing Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s death and the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh. Her working title was Battle Lines, but once she finished the manuscript, she realised the book’s emotional charge was the relationship between fathers and sons. “The title has to touch the heart,” she says.Hajela came to fiction rather late in life after a corporate career spanning 22 years. At 48, she pursued an MFA in creative writing at Goddard College in Vermont, which she completed in 2017, leading her to excavate the histories of her family and her people.Born in Punjab, she was sent to boarding school at a young age and then moved to the United States at 17. Growing up, she could read Gurmukhi, but could not speak Punjabi fluently.Her intention, she says, was never to study history for its own sake. “What drives me is actually to get an understanding of who I am and where I come from.”Story continues below this adFor Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died is a prequel to her earlier novel Ladies’ Tailor, which dealt with the aftermath of 1947. This time, the story is told through Beant Kaur as she pieces together the half-remembered life of her grandfather, Balwant Singh Uppal. “History talks about the leaders,” she said. “It doesn’t talk about what happened to the common man.”A father’s death, a son’s dilemmaBalwant is where the novel’s central contradiction lives. He despises the East India Company as an “evil force,” but is willing to die for a British officer he personally serves.The Calcutta army killed Balwant’s own father, a force made up overwhelmingly of Indian troops fighting under British command, says Hajela. “He wonders, are they my enemy, or are the British my enemy?” she says. “Yes, the British were leading, but there were so few of them.”With the Sikh army his father died fighting for now dismantled, and farming crushed under rising taxes, joining the British Indian Army was the only option for Balwant.Story continues below this adHajela recounts the anguish of the Ferozepur Regiment, where Sikh soldiers were ordered to fight rebels who looked and spoke like them. They were so similar that they tore their turbans off, only to be torn apart on the battlefield. She says soldiers would turn their faces away as rebels were tied to cannons and blown apart. “There was definitely this massive guilt,” she said. “Is it really necessary? Yes, they rebelled. But to go to this length?”Reading against the recordGetting the texture of this period right meant refusing to trust any single account, Hajela said. History written by the winners reads differently from history written by the losers, and until Independence, she points out, Indians lost at nearly every turn: the 1857 uprising, both Anglo-Sikh wars.She found Indian-authored histories often eager to recover heroes and martyrs, while British accounts carried the victors’ biases, and she read the two against each other. Amandeep Singh’s histories of the first and second Anglo-Sikh wars became a key source; Singh, a computer engineer by training who became absorbed in this history, has also traced Sikh war memorials standing today in French fields from the First World War.For the on-the-ground reality of 1857—what it actually felt like inside the Lucknow residency during the siege—Hajela turned to diaries written by British women, texts she found freely available.Story continues below this adWhen the narrator doesn’t know everythingWith all that research, Hajela’s first draft read like “a history textbook.” Her fix was to strip the story down to Balwant’s own limited vantage point.“He does not know the rationale, and he does not know what’s happening elsewhere,” she says. “He is observing what is happening before him. And that is what he’s going to tell his granddaughter.”She draws a direct line to her next project, a work of non-fiction on the Sikh Gurus. Guru Gobind Singh died in 1707, she said, but the Suraj Prakash, the chronicle by Kavi Santokh Singh that documents his life, was not written until the early 1800s.For a century in between, the stories survived only by being retold and performed, gaining and shedding details with each telling. Hajela insists that the absence of a contemporaneous written record doesn’t make those stories less true.Story continues below this adWhat’s left to fight forAsked what she hopes readers take from the book, Hajela hopes it is the idea to “open your eyes, be aware, and find something to stand behind.”She says the recent Gen Z student protests in Delhi against paper leaks were an example of the kind of stories worth telling.“The world is becoming really strange,” she said. “You can’t just coast. Believe in something and believe strongly, and then do something for that cause.”It’s advice Balwant himself gives his grandson in the novel: there may be no grand battles left to fight, but that doesn’t mean inaction is an option.Story continues below this adWhether that instinct to act and pass the story on will survive in a generation fixated on their phones rather than a grandfather’s chair, Hajela isn’t sure. But she hopes the book does what that hymn in the Sanawar Hall once did to her: land somewhere and start a conversation.