On the Stories History Left Out- Notes on reading For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died by Priya Hajela

I kept thinking about Beant Kaur after I finished For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died by Priya Hajela (Speaking Tiger, 2026). She is sitting in her comfortable chair, her shawl wrapped tightly around her on winter nights, telling the family stories of those who came before her. There is something so familiar about the image that I could almost see her. 

Every family seems to have someone who remembers. Someone who knows which grandfather did what, who married whom, who left home, who came back, who did not. Someone who can take a name and turn it into a story, and a story into a piece of the family itself. But what stayed with me was not about how Beant remembers. It was what she was trying to understand through those memories. 

Hajela’s first novel, Ladies’ Tailor (Harper Collins, 2022), has Beant’s grandson, Gurdev at its center. He is brave, and we see his courage. We understand him through the choices he makes, but somewhere behind that courage is a question that I found myself returning to- Where does it come from? What makes a person brave? Is courage something that suddenly appears in an individual when circumstances demand it, or has it been quietly forming through generations, through the lives of people who may never themselves have been called brave? That question opened the book for me. 

I realised while reading Hajela that I have been doing something similar in my own family, although I had never thought of it as history. I have been tracing the story of my great-great-grandfather and, the more I look into his life, the more I find myself looking for the woman who stood beside that story: my great-great-grandmother. His name has survived. His story has travelled down the generations in fragments. But hers exists differently, in the spaces around his life, in what she must have carried, managed, endured and made possible. The more I try to understand him, the more I find myself wondering about her.

And this is what Hajela made me see more clearly. We inherit the stories of the men in our families much more easily. Their journeys acquire dates, places, and events. The women remain in the background, remembered through relationships: someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's grandmother. But a family does not survive through one person alone. There are always lives holding up the visible life, and very often those lives belong to women.

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As Beant traces her family backwards, I felt she was tracing more than a genealogy. She was trying to understand the making of a human being. The grandson does not exist by himself. His courage has a history. Behind him are generations of people who have lived through wars, displacement, uncertainty, loss, and choices for which there were rarely any easy answers. And among those generations were women whose names history would probably never have bothered to record. This is what I loved about Priya Hajela’s novel. 

I have read a fair amount of historical fiction, and I have often found myself fascinated by the people who stand at the centre of history: kings, soldiers, revolutionaries, political leaders, men whose decisions change the course of events and whose names survive because of it. Even when historical fiction moves away from the official record and tries to imagine the private lives behind those names, the men who made history tend to remain visible. Hajela made me look elsewhere. 

Her story moves through the Anglo-Sikh Wars, the uprising of 1857, British India, the freedom movement, the Komagata Maru, and the years that eventually led towards Partition. It is a large historical canvas, and I learnt a great deal while reading it, particularly about the Komagata Maru and the world of British India. There are real historical figures woven into the story, and that gave some of the events an additional weight for me. The sense that these people were living alongside figures and events we recognise from history made the fictional family feel even more rooted in its time. But I found myself looking at the women. They are the ones who live with history in a different way. 

A man goes to war, and history records the battle. A woman waits for him to return. A man dies, and his death may become part of the story of a war. A woman is left with children, a household, and a life that has suddenly acquired a different shape. A family has to move, and someone has to figure out how to feed everyone. There is wood to gather. There is food to cook. There are children who do not understand why their lives have changed. There is marriage, and sometimes the death of a husband, and sometimes remarriage, because life cannot remain suspended forever. There is grief, but there is also the next morning. These lives are so ordinary that they disappear very easily from history, but they mattered so much to me. 

The women in Hajela’s novel did not feel like women placed in history to make the story more dramatic. They felt like women who had always been there, women whose lives were happening whether or not anybody thought they were important enough to write down. They were part of families, and their work was often the work of keeping those families alive. I have loved historical novels about fierce women. 

Writers such as Koral Dasgupta and Chitra Divakaruni have brought extraordinary women from Indian history into the light, women who have lived lives that demand to be remembered. Those books have their own power. But something about the women in For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died felt closer to me. They were not queens. They were not necessarily people history would recognise. They belonged to ordinary families. 

Seeing an ordinary woman placed inside a historical narrative and realising that she, too, was living through history was cathartic in many ways. 

We sometimes speak about history as though it happens somewhere else, in battlefields and palaces and political meetings. But for most people, history probably arrived at home. It arrived as an empty place at the table. It arrived as a husband who did not come back. It arrived as a decision about where the family would live. It arrived as hunger, uncertainty, or even a child who needed to be cared for. It entered the household unexpectedly one day and changed everything forever. The women carried those changes, and they were also the ones who remembered. That felt important to me because memory is one of the ways families survive themselves. 

We inherit stories before we understand that they are history. As children, we listen to adults talking about people we have never met. We know the names of relatives who died long before we were born. We know that somebody once lived in a particular place, or that somebody left, or that somebody suffered something that is still spoken about years later. The details may become blurred, but the story remains. Beant understands that instinctively. She knows that telling these stories is a way of keeping the family together across time. 

The line that accompanies the novel, “Countries are made up of stories. So are families!” kept returning to me as I read. I think we often understand the first half of it more easily than the second. We know that nations create stories about themselves. We know the importance given to wars, heroes, victories, resistance, and sacrifice. But families do the same thing on a much smaller scale. They choose what to remember and what to tell the next generation. And women have often been the ones carrying that memory. 

A lingering sense of historical absence is unmistakable. A woman may be central to the survival of a family and almost completely absent from its official history. She may be remembered in a sentence, a name, a photograph, relationship to a husband or son. Her own interior life disappears. What did she fear? What did she want? What did she think about the choices being made around her? What did she dream her life might become? We rarely know, and that absence made me restless while reading this book. 

It also made me think about belonging. There is a deep longing in the women’s stories for a place where they can say, without qualification, that they belong. And the more I thought about it, the more complicated that word became. 

Women are told that belonging will come through family, through marriage, through motherhood, through the home they build with somebody else. But all of those things can be fragile. A husband dies. A family moves. A marriage changes. A country is divided. A home that once seemed permanent becomes inaccessible. Where does a woman belong then? I do not think Hajela sets out to answer that question directly. I am not even sure the novel needs to. It was simply a question that rose in me as I followed these women through their lives. 

Reading a book that travels through generations makes you aware of how little control any one generation has over what comes next. People make choices for reasons that seem necessary at the time, and their children inherit the consequences. Courage is inherited. Grief is inherited. Memory is inherited. So are silences. Beant’s work is to break some of those silences. She gathers the family around her and tells them where they came from. In doing so, she gives them something that cannot be found in an official record. She gives them a way of understanding themselves. 

I found this especially moving because of the way the novel connects the personal and the historical. The larger events never disappear. The Anglo-Sikh Wars matter. The British Empire matters. The uprising of 1857 matters. The Komagata Maru matters. The movement towards independence and Partition matters. But history becomes something else when it enters a family. A historical event can be studied, but a family has to live through it, and that distinction stayed with me. 

There are also contradictions that Hajela does not smooth away. People serve powers they may once have resisted. Soldiers receive orders that are not necessarily aligned with what they believe. Families have to negotiate between loyalty, survival, and belief. The past is full of choices made under circumstances that we, looking backwards, have the luxury of judging. The women seemed to me to understand this kind of complexity particularly well because their lives were so often shaped by decisions made by others. They did not have the privilege of stepping outside history and deciding what it meant. They had to live inside it, which requires a different kind of courage. 

I kept thinking about that when I thought of Beant’s grandson. We see the courage of Gurdev, but Beant seems to know that courage did not begin with him. There were people before him who had survived things he may never fully understand. There were women who had kept going because there was no other choice. There were families that carried loss and still found a way to laugh, eat, marry, raise children, and tell stories. 

That is how courage travels, maybe. Sometimes it becomes part of the temperament of a family. Sometimes it looks like a soldier standing in the face of danger. Sometimes it looks like a woman waking up the next morning and making sure there is food for the children. Both belong to the same history. 

That is what I will remember from For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died. I will remember the scale of the story, the historical events I learnt more about, the real figures who enter the fictional world, and the extraordinary sweep across generations. But more than that, I will remember the women who could so easily have remained at the edge of the story. They reminded me of how many lives have been lived without being documented. Women who were never asked what they thought. Women whose greatest work was considered too ordinary to name. Women who kept households going through wars, migrations, and deaths. Women who remembered the people everyone else had forgotten.

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Beant Kaur remains with me most strongly. She is sitting in her chair, wrapped in her shawl, telling the family who they are. There is something almost sacred in that act. She knows that people disappear twice. Once when they die, and again when nobody remembers how they lived. By telling the stories, she keeps them from disappearing completely. 

In a way, that is what all of us are doing, in one way or another, when we tell the stories of the people who came before us. We are trying to understand what we have inherited. We are trying to find the source of the courage we recognise in ourselves and the grief we cannot quite explain. We are trying to understand why certain stories stay with us long after the people in them are gone. 

Countries are made of stories. Families are too. 

And sometimes, when we listen closely enough, we discover that the history we thought belonged to our fathers has been carried for generations by the women who remembered them.

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