Beggar my Neighbour.

London, Secker & Warburg, 1943. Small-ish 8vo. Orginal boards with illustrated dust-wrappers; pp. 128, sketch maps; a typical war time book production and rare, even more so in the illustrated dust-wrappers. First edition of a work on the political and spiritual situation of India at the brink of independence, with an essay about Gandhi, and future problems of independence. The book is dedicated to 'Zulfaqar', who is actually Zulfiqar Ali Bukhari, the legendary Radio broadcaster of British India and later Pakistan. He had been born into a family of Sufi mystics and was as well a writer, poet and musician. Fielden had 'served as subaltern at Gallipoli and decided that war was insanity. He was doing brilliantly in the League of Nations and got bored with it. Relief work in Eastern Europe - with Nansen - seemed to him worth while, and so did working for the BBC in its pioneering days; but when the BBC became "a pudding" of bureaucracy he shied off to India where he created All India Radio out of almost nothing' (blurb inside front flap of Fielden's 1960 autobiography).