Love in the time of jingoism

Baaz is set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971

At the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s autobiographical novel describing the firebombing of Dresden during World War II that he survived as a prisoner of war, the narrator is accused by a friend’s wife: “You were just babies in the war… [but] You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne... And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies.” In her latest bestseller, Baaz, Anuja Chauhan manages to strike an amazing balance between making exploits of air force officers glamorous and the ugly nature of war. She also strikes a blow against jingoism, which seems to have gained an alarming currency in recent times.
 
The narrative — a romance like all of Chauhan’s novels — is set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. The lead pair comprises a dashing young officer of the Indian Air Force, Ishaan Faujdaar alias Shaanu alias Baaz and Tehmina Dadyseth, alias Tinka, a graduate of Miranda House, New Delhi, and an aspiring photographer. As with her other books, Chauhan consciously sets about eschewing the standard tropes of romance made popular by Mills and Boons. The hero is neither dark nor tall — instead, he is short and fair. The heroine is dark, lanky and not well-endowed. Chauhan, who was a very successful advertising professional before becoming a novelist, seems to be constantly taking a dig at the “fair and lovely” aesthetics of our times through these characters.
 

Baaz Author: Anuja Chauhan Publisher: Harper Collins Publisher India Pages: 430 Price: Rs 399

The two are as different from each other as chalk from cheese. He is a cocky Jat from Chakkahera, Haryana, whose English leaves a lot to be desired. She is a Parsi, a US citizen, and a graduate from one of Delhi's most fashionable colleges (as is Chauhan). Tinka is a vehement pacifist who wants to be a photographer, and her conflict with a rightwing nationalist on campus is reminiscent of similar clashes across campuses today. We meet them — and they meet each other — in 1968, the year of the students’ movement in Paris, Prague Spring, and a year after Naxalbari. In those heady days of rock music and anti-Vietnam protests, who can help but fall in love?
 
The choice of an army officer as the protagonist is not really a surprise. As she writes in the “Acknowledgements”, Chauhan “was born a year before the events described in the book.” Seven of her family members served in the 1971 war and its talk “dominated our dining table”. She gladly acknowledges that she is a product of the protected lives of army communities — a world very different from pre-liberalisation India — “with flowering trees, well-brushed dogs, swimming pools and May Queen balls”. She adds, “so this book… [is] born out of my love for all things fauji.” Along with this love is extensive research, acknowledged by the writer, which makes this novel racy in the best tradition of war narratives and love stories. But the timing of this book is also uncanny in a country where self-proclaimed nationalists seem to have monopolised all public discourse.
 
Chauhan addresses this in a recent interview with the Indian Express: “There’s a strange, jingoistic, hypernationalistic space that we are in currently, and it’s frightening. It’s not empowering to our defence services at all. You put soldiers on an altar and make them into little gods and holy cows and then you muzzle them.” In the second half of the book, in a rather poignant scene, we observe the relatives of a soldier — who is likely to have his legs amputated — in an animated discussion about his uncertain future and how he would now be at the mercy of civilian authorities, who would even try to short change him, despite his service to the nation. The picture of war we get in this novel is not glamorous  but realistic, with all the horrors of death, refugee camps, and raped and maimed children.
 
The language Chauhan uses is so lucid, in the best tradition of popular literature, that this reviewer managed to finish the novel in a single sitting of a few hours. It is, however, not English with a capital “E” — it’s rather  a pidgin with smattering of Haryanvi, Bengali and Hindi, without being the least obtrusive. In fact, as some post-colonialists would argue, this is exactly the kind of language that contemporary literature should be using, because most of us are naturally multilingual and this is a realistic expression of how we use language.
 
My only problem with the novel is that the climax is a little stretched. Anuja, we would have loved Ishaan, even without this (no spoilers). Having said that, I would like to add that this novel is almost crying out for a silver screen adaptation, and many like me, are longing to see that happen.