Podcast: What does history say about how Mumbai changed and stayed the same over the past 200 years?

In 2012, while searching for books on Gujarati theatre within the collection of Mumbai’s KR Cama Oriental Institute, Murali Ranganathan stumbled upon a 400-page Gujarati-language volume with the title Rangbhoomi par Rakhad. This seemed to fit the bill: Rangbhoomi par Rakhad translates as “Rambles on the Stage”.

But the book held within its weathered pages a multiplicity of surprises. First, it was not a book on drama but rather the memoirs of Nariman Karkaria (1894-1949), a Parsi soldier who fought in the First World War. This, by itself, was a landmark find: although over a million Indians fought in the war, Rangbhoomi par Rakhad remains, as far as we know, the only published autobiographical account of an Indian soldier’s experiences during that conflict.

Second, Karkaria narrated a story which was almost impossible to believe: he served on three different fronts, probably one of the few soldiers to do so, and participated in one of the war’s most blood-soaked episodes, the Battle of the Somme. He did this as a soldier in the British Army – not the Indian – which he joined after making a mad wintertime dash in 1914 from Beijing to London via the recently-completed Trans-Siberian Railway.

The last surprise was...

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