NEW DELHI — The first time I ever saw my grandfather’s name written out was in a leather-bound register of a thousand pages. Each page was busy with names, and it took me a while to find his: misspelled, in diminutive type, buried deep in the thick, creamy leaves. It was late spring, and I was seated inside a shed at the Delhi War Cemetery, reading with my chin tilted up so the sweat dropped away from the paper: I couldn’t risk blotting out the memory of a war hero.

Outside, the sun blazed off the marble gravestones of about a thousand men who died for the British Empire in World War II. I had come to find my maternal grandfather, who joined the army’s medical service in the summer of 1942: the high noon of India’s freedom struggle, as well as of the war. I searched along the headstones until an attendant pointed out that the Hindu dead were cremated, not buried. The small scratching, with a typo, was my grandfather’s only commemoration.

In July last year, the newly elected government of Narendra Modi announced that it would build a monument to India’s fallen soldiers, honoring a long-standing promise to the armed forces. Arun Jaitley, then minister for both defense and finance, set aside $15 million in his first budget for a National War Memorial. It would bear the names, he said, of “all those who made the ultimate sacrifice for the country after 1947,” the year of India’s independence.

India rarely cares to remember the soldiers of the Raj, especially those who fought in World War II, which ended in Asia exactly 70 years ago. Japan announced its surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, and two years later, to the day, India was free. Since then, the authorized history of the period has dwelt only on those who fought to be free of the Empire, forgetting the many who had fought to defend it.