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.

The Sikh experience of colonial rule offers fertile ground for this inquiry. The Anglo-Sikh Wars altered the political world in which the family’s history begins, while the uprising of 1857 exposed the instability of British power across the subcontinent. Later, the Komagata Maru incident carried the question of belonging across the ocean. The exclusion of Indian passengers seeking entry into Canada revealed the limits of imperial citizenship: Indians could be subjects of the British Crown and yet be denied the rights and dignity that such a status seemed to promise. The empire demanded allegiance without offering equality. For those whose lives were shaped by military service, migration and shifting political loyalties, this contradiction was not an abstraction. It shaped the possibilities available to them.

Hajela’s historical range allows the family’s story to unfold against these changing conditions. The history matters most when it presses upon the intimate lives of the characters, altering what they can hope for and what they must endure. The passage of time is measured through the inheritance of their consequences. A decision made by one generation becomes a burden, a source of pride or an unanswered question for another.

History enters the family long after the original actors have disappeare and it persists in the meanings assigned to their lives.

This is also where the novel’s ambition becomes difficult to sustain. A narrative spanning generations and major historical events must do more than carry its characters from one turning point to the next. The events need to change the texture of their lives, exposing their private fears, loyalties and desires. Otherwise, the sweep of history can become a substitute for the slower work of characterisation. The family provides a compelling frame, but its members must be allowed to exceed the roles history assigns them. Their inner lives, not merely their proximity to momentous events, are what give a multigenerational novel its depth.

The same care is needed in the treatment of memory. Family stories are shaped by affection, shame, pride and the limits of what can be said. A tale of bravery may be repeated until it becomes inseparable from a family’s identity or a compromised choice may survive only as a silence. Even an honest storyteller can preserve a partial truth. Memory gives the past a presence, but it also changes the past each time it is recalled. The distinction is crucial to Hajela’s subject. Beant’s stories connect the generations, still the act of telling also raises questions about the authority of the teller and the obligations of the listener. What does it mean to inherit a story? Must it be accepted, or does inheritance carry the right and perhaps the duty to question it?

These questions lend the title its force. For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died turns the language of sacrifice towards those who invoke it. Death in the service of a cause is often given meaning by the generations that follow, but that meaning may not have been available to the person who died. The dead cannot explain their motives anew, correct a family legend or object to the use made of their memory. The living speak in their name, and in doing so may preserve their lives or enlist them in a story they would not have recognised.

The title asks readers to look beyond the solemnity of sacrifice and consider its destination. Who was served? What was gained? What, if anything, was left for those who survived?

There is a political dimension to this question. Nations, like families, draw coherence from shared memories of injury, resistance and loss. Such memories can sustain a community through upheaval, but they can also narrow its understanding of the past. The history of a people becomes less complicated when its ancestors are arranged into heroes and traitors, martyrs and collaborators. A family, with its closer and more enduring knowledge of individual lives, might resist these divisions. It might also reproduce them. Hajela’s subject lies in the tension between the two possibilities. One is the need for stories that bind people together and the other is the danger of allowing those stories to become unquestionable.

Wars and political movements may be recorded by their dates and outcomes, but for families they are lived as absence, separation, uncertainty and the slow work of continuing. A historical event does not end when it passes from the headlines of its time into the record books. It continues in the lives it has altered, in the questions that remain unanswered and in the memories that are passed to children who never witnessed it. The past is not simply behind the present; it has helped make the present possible.

Still, the novel’s breadth occasionally threatens to outstrip its exploration of these intimate consequences. The historical episodes offer a rich framework, but their significance cannot be assumed to translate automatically into literary force. The more expansive the canvas, the more necessary the particularity of the lives painted upon it. When characters are fully realised, history becomes something more than context: it becomes the pressure under which a person makes a choice, betrays a conviction, protects a loved one or discovers that the world has changed beyond recognition. Where that particularity recedes, the historical sweep risks doing the work that the narrative itself must accomplish.

The novel’s emotional weight rests on this long intimacy between public history and private grief.

This unevenness makes For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died a more interesting undertaking than an entirely realised achievement. Its subject is rich, and its attention to the complications of inherited memory gives it a purpose beyond the reconstruction of a historical period. But the novel’s ideas sometimes carry more weight than the individual lives through which they are expressed. The distance between historical ambition and literary realisation matters: a family’s proximity to history does not, on its own, make that history intimate. The intimacy must be earned through the irreducible details of character, through the private costs of public events and through the recognition that no person can be reduced to the lesson their life offers posterity.

What remains compelling is the novel’s insistence that the past is never received innocently. Each generation inherits not only the actions of those who came before but also the stories that have made those actions meaningful. These stories can offer a sense of origin in a world repeatedly unsettled by war, migration and political change. They can also become a kind of confinement, binding the living to inherited ideas of honour or belonging that no longer explain their experience. To remember is therefore to enter into a relationship with the past, not merely to preserve it.

In Beant Kaur’s winter gatherings, history survives through the fragile act of one person speaking and others listening. Outside that circle, empires rise and recede, borders harden, and the meaning of belonging changes. Within it, the past remains close enough to be loved, argued over and questioned. The scene captures the promise and the limitation of family memory: it can keep the dead among the living, but it cannot restore them or settle every question they leave behind.

Priya Hajela’s For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died is at its strongest when it recognises that remembrance is not the same as understanding. Its historical reach gives the family’s story considerable scope, even as the novel does not always bring the full complexity of its characters into equal focus. Its lasting question, however, reaches beyond any one family or period. What do we owe those whose lives made ours possible? Perhaps not the unquestioning repetition of their stories, nor the comfort of turning their sacrifices into certainties. Perhaps we owe them the harder act of remembering them as they were: caught in the circumstances of their time, capable of courage and contradiction, and unable to know how their lives would be judged by those who came after.

The dead leave us no final version of their stories. That work falls to the living and so does the responsibility of telling them truthfully.

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About the Book

A sweeping multigenerational saga that follows a Sikh family through nearly a century of war, empire and resistance—from the Anglo-Sikh Wars and the uprising of 1857 to the Komagata Maru incident, the freedom movement and Partition.

‘Countries are made up of stories. So are families.’

At the heart of this story is Beant Kaur—sitting on a comfortable chair, shawl wrapped tight on winter nights, gathering her family around her, and telling them who they are.

What begins as a granddaughter listening to her grandfather’s half-mumbled memories soon unfolds into something far larger: a deeply personal history that moves from the battlefields of the Anglo-Sikh wars to the uneasy years of British rule, and into the wider currents of a changing world, from the upheaval of 1857 to the Komagata Maru voyage that carried Indians across oceans and into confrontation with empire.

These stories are not found in official records, but are passed down in fragments—through memory, grief and pride. These are stories of men who chose to fight when ordered to retreat; of soldiers who found themselves serving the very power they had once resisted, and of families who carried both honour and contradiction in equal measure.

As Beant pieces together the lives of those who came before her—her grandfather Balwant, and the generations that shaped him—she begins to understand that history is never as simple as it is told. It lives in the choices people make when survival, loyalty and belief pull in different directions. Intimate and rooted in oral memory, For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died is a story about inheritance—not just of land or name, but of the tales we must choose to tell before they are lost to time.

About the Author

Priya Hajela lives in Pune with her husband and two dogs. Writing is a second career for her. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont in 2017. Prior to taking to writing, Priya got an MBA from Vanderbilt University in 1992 and worked in a variety of telecom and IT organizations in senior marketing and business development roles for twenty-two years. Her debut novel, Ladies’ Tailor, was published in 2022.