Book Review: For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died by Priya Hajela

Team Kitaab reviews Priya Hajela’s For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died (Speaking Tiger, 2026), observing closely the stories that outlive us.

“Countries are made up of stories. So are families.”

In Priya Hajela’s For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died, this is more than a reflection on memory. It is a question of inheritance, who gets to tell the past, which versions survive, and what happens when the dead become part of the stories through which the living understand themselves.

Spanning nearly a century of Sikh and Indian history, the novel follows a family through the Anglo-Sikh Wars, the uprising of 1857, the Komagata Maru incident, the freedom movement and Partition. Its point of entry is intimate. On winter nights, Beant Kaur gathers her family around her and tells them about those who came before. In the warmth of this domestic ritual, the distant past acquires a human scale. Battles become choices made by men who could not have known what history would make of them. Political upheavals leave their mark on households, relationships and the ways people speak of their ancestors. What survives is rarely a complete account. It is a collection of memories, handed down with their griefs, silences and stubborn attachments intact.

Priya Hajela’s turn to historical fiction has developed into a sustained literary interest in the relationship between public history and private memory. Her debut, Ladies’ Tailor (2022), explored the legacy of Partition and in For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died, she turns to Sikh history, tracing the ways war, colonialism and resistance enter the lives of successive generations. Across both novels, history is approached through the intimate world of families rather than solely through political events. This recurring focus suggests that Hajela is less interested in history as a finished account than in its afterlife, in the memories, loyalties and inherited silences through which the past continues to shape the present. A graduate of Goddard College’s MFA programme in Creative Writing, Hajela came to writing after twenty-two years in senior marketing and business development roles in the telecom and IT sectors.

The act of telling is central to Hajela’s novel because the family is both the keeper of history and an interpreter of it. Its members inherit stories of courage and sacrifice, but also the contradictions that complicate these virtues. Men who fought against one power might later serve it; acts of loyalty might sit uneasily beside acts of resistance. Such contradictions are difficult to accommodate in the histories communities tell about themselves. The desire to honour the dead can turn their lives into exemplary tales, smoothing away the uncertainty and compromise that made their choices human. Hajela’s material invites a more searching account of ancestry, one in which love for the past does not require its idealisation.