India, the world’s largest democracy, is in the process of electing a new central government. Elections in India are a national circus, with a field of characters partaking of events that would be absurd to those outside the country.
This year, the contest is between incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the champion of Hindu nationalism as well as the dream of India as an economic powerhouse, and the party that has dominated Indian politics since the independence movement, the Congress, led by India’s first political family, the Gandhis.
The Congress has in recent years failed to sufficiently capture the national imagination, allowing the BJP, with its appeal to the country’s Hindu majority, to take centre stage. In the last contest in 2014, the Congress projected Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Gandhi family but relative political novice, as its prime ministerial candidate and lost. Five years later, the Congress could still not identify an alternative leader – possibly anyone except a Gandhi would lead to fractious rivalry among the dominant political families – but at least Gandhi seems to have got more familiar with the on the ground reality of Indian politics and Modi, his opponent, has been weakened by policies such as the disastrous demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs1000 currency notes and rising unemployment.
Then, last month, the Congress announced the entry of Rahul’s sister Priyanka into national politics. Priyanka has thus far resisted taking on a formal position in the party; her decision to campaign actively this time generated a fair deal of excitement.
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Anuja Chauhan superbly captures the zeitgeist of India in the throes of a general election in her novel Battle of Bittora. Priyanka Gandhi stepping into the political fray and her activities on the campaign trail reminded me a lot of Sarojini (Jinni) Pandey, the protagonist of Chauhan’s election novel.
Like Priyanka, Jinni is born into a political family but has stayed away from politics. Her grandmother, Pushpa, a wily parliamentarian who has been shut out by the party, convinces her to take a leave of absence from her job as a graphics designer in Mumbai and travel to the fictitious state of Pavit Pradesh (presumably Uttar Pradesh) to campaign in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. In fact, Pushpa had hoped that Jinni would replace her as the constituency’s candidate and manages to get her way, throwing Jinni into the rough and tumble of rural electoral politics.
Chauhan’s mother-in-law Margaret Alva was a senior Congress leader so she presumably had access to a wealth of insider information on how the business of politics works. To that, she brought her sharp eye for quintessentially Indian characters and their argot.
Chick lit has been criticised for relegating the protagonist’s career to a mere backdrop for romance. I do not find this to be the case in many (of the better) Indian chick lit novels.
In Battle for Bittora, the election campaign is an integral and entertaining part of the story. The details that Chauhan provides are both familiar and not – from the government quarters in Delhi that Pushpa refuses to vacate and which are crowded with petitioners who are tolerated, ignored and occasionally plied with tea, to Jinni’s “crack team” – the muscular, obsequious Pappu (“I will do anything for you didi, anything!”), the plucky Dalit Munni and the strange, not-so-secretly alcoholic Gudiya Aunty who simmers with resntment – to her journey from Bittora into the inner reaches of her constituency. Along the way, we have many absurd moments that show the rural voter as anything but the noble savage – from the women who get Jinni to perform for them before saying they are only visiting and are therefore not her voters, to the sex workers who shower her with ribald questions to Muslim gathering at which Jinni and Zain outdo each other in making big promises to their voters.
The novel is replete with incidents that have echoes in today’s election drama.For example, as the Election Commission seems to have just woken up and been making waves, I realise that the import of the commission first came to me through this novel. I had generally considered the Election Commission a fairly stodgy (and dare I say it, not very relevant) part of the process, but there is an important plot point in the novel concerning a car chase with Election Commission officials, who apparently do spot checks of candidates’ vehicles to ensure that they are not transporting illegal cash (which of course they are, and which according to the novel, is euphemistically referred to as “oxygen”).
And as Maneka Gandhi created a stir for threatening Muslim voters that if they didn’t vote for her, she would know, and would not help them, Battle for Bittora details the fears of the tribal population over a rumour that the election booths are rigged so that their votes will be seen. Instead of countering the rumour with logic, Jinni appeals to people’s desire to have one over the system, by telling them to simply put their fingers over the alleged camera and then voting for whom they pleased (hopefully her).
As always, Chauhan provides moments of great comedy – there’s an incident with a dog, a goat and a maulana, for example – but there is also seriousness, when Jinni considers the terrible state of the tribal population which has loyally voted for her grandmother and who have got nothing in return. While all this is just a lark, there is also a genuine, though possibly naive, desire to serve that motivates both Jinni and Zain.
Even as Chauhan is to be commended for never being patronising in her portrayal of the so-called downtrodden, she does not threaten the status quo of caste and class privilege. There is a rather outlandish plot in which Jinni and Zain save a Dalit man from an honour killing, an incident that is basically deployed in the service of furthering their romance. After this incident, Zain realises what Jinni is made of.
The deep resentment felt by Munni, who has worked tirelessly in the district but not been considered for the ticket, is acknowledged and we are told that she is granted a legislative council seat, but Jinni, who has done nothing but be her grandmother’s daughter, carries on as the the more powerful parliamentary candydate. We are presumably expected to note Munni’s objections and then forget them as good middle-class Indians are want to do. Perhaps, we should be grateful to Chauhan for letting Munni raise them in the first place.
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A key generic trope in chick lit is the makeover. Rosalind Gill notes:
“A makeover paradigm constitutes postfeminist media culture. This requires people (predominantly women) to believe first that they or their life is lacking or flawed in some way, and second that it is amenable to reinvention or transformation by following the advice of relationship, design or lifestyle experts, and practising appropriately modified consumption habits”
In Battle for Bittora, Jinni’s transformation is in the opposite direction to the typical Indian chick lit novel. Rather than learning how to blend into the sartorial and moral norms of the city, Jinni’s journey is from (somewhat) city slicker into a woman comfortable in the rough and tumble of Indian politics.
The physical manifestation of this transformation happens in the course of a train journey from Mumbai to Bittora, in which Jinni must switch her tank top and jeans for a sari with “decent bloujej”, her grandmother says, because “salwar kameez won’t do, now that you are the candidate”. She also has to wear the local Champapaul slippers.
I was reminded of Jinni when I read about the comments about Priyanka Gandhi’s clothes. Priyanka’s hairstyle even seems to be a less-fashionable version of Jinni’s unruly “rosebud” cut. Rather defiantly, amid the brouhaha over her apparent sartorial hypocrisy, Priyanka uploaded a photograph of herself on her official Twitter handle in which she wears jeans and shirt. While Pushpa Pandey’s views on this are clear, what would Priyanka’s own illustrious grandmother have thought?
Meanwhile Jinni’s rival in the political contest can get by with jeans and a kurta, just as Priyanka’s rivals stick to their political uniform (or not) without unleashing much commentary.
Like Priyanka, who seems to be wear Western clothes in her non-political avatar, Jinni continues in private with her Spiderman gangi, her tracks and ratty old t-shirt and jeans. But, by the end of the novel, Jinni has become comfortable in a sari.
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The Indian woman as a patch-work of contradictions – that one might roughly term as ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ – that she no longer feels the need to hold entirely in balance, even as she embraces both is, I argue in my thesis, the defining quality of the singleton in Indian chick lit. Chauhan’s heroines embody this by encompassing a further set of polarities – the class barrier so that her heroines must exhibit the ability to move convincingly across it (as I noted in my post about Baaz), the urban and the rural, and finally, most transgressively, the Hindu and the Muslim.
In Battle for Bittora, Jinni’s embracing and welding of these contradictions takes place through a journey. Just as Priyanka does her Ganga yatra, Jinni traverses deeper and deeper into India’s heart.
At the core of this journey and the novel is the romance between Jinni and Zain, the son of the local nawab and her childhood sweetheart, who is contesting the election against her as the IJP candidate. Their sexual tensions crackles across their political rivalry.
While India is officially a secular country, Hindi-Muslim romance remains taboo. Political discourse smooths over the tensions between the communities by sanitising it into sibling relationship. As the “love jihad” controversy rages, an IJP politician in the novel says the party believes “in Hindu-Muslim unity. We believe Hindus and Muslims should be close, very close, like brothers and sisters… And you don’t marry your brothers or sisters, do you?”
In fact, politicians are deeply calculating about religion and regional markers as every person is seen primarily in terms of the vote bank they belong to. Thus, Pushpa struggles to categorise Jinni’s oddly named friend Rumi Gaiman Tagore and her oily colleague Anthony Suleiman tries to plot her marriage to his son, so they could tick various vote bank categories at one.
Glib sloganeering and politicking apart, through Pushpa, Chauhan shows up the contradictions in Indian attitude to difference:
“Bengali, Bihari and Gujarati women are man-eaters and husband-stealers. Their menfolk are impotent. Kashmiris are crooks and drug addicts and they don’t bathe. Good Nepalis are nightwatchmen, bad ones slit the throats of their employers. Punjabis (of either gender) are permanently randy. Christians are scheduled caste and out to convert anybody they meet. And Mussulmaans? They are all dirty, stupid, constantly breeding, Pakistani-cricket-team-cheering-rapist-murderers”
Despite this, Pushpa’s day-to-day interactions with these communities are, if not entirely politically correct, cordial and even friendly and largely helpful if always pragmatic. The point seems to be that we all have our prejudices, but that most of us don’t really act on them.
Jinni and Zain must overcome the general distaste for Hindu-Muslim unions, complicated by the fact that they are supposed to be competing with each other. Jinni sneers at Zain for joining the IJP and being the duplicitous face of their attempt to convince the electorate of their secular credentials. He earnestly believes that the IJP has changed, and sneers at the Pragati Party for its legacy of corruption.
[Spoiler alert]
Amid the sizzling chemistry between the two and the conviction that this being chick lit, we must have our happy ever after, the question of how this will come to pass are not entirely apparent. After all, the obstacles to Zain and Jinni’s union are not just their religions, but their ambition. There can only be one winner here, and who that winner is represents a certain idea of India – the well intentioned, idealistic but ultimately resting on the dubious foundations of communalism that Zain represents or the scrappy, pragmatic, venal and yet true-at-heart Indian politician that Jinni discovers herself to be.
The ultimate romance in this novel, as with Baaz, is thus with the nation. Chauhan lets Jinni have both her victory and a man who supports her in this victory even though it means his own loss (can there be anything more romantic than this?). The reader is left with both the satisfaction of the national fantasy of not just Hindu-Muslim unity but of Hindu-Muslim union and the rather emotional ideal of parliamentary democracy as the true representation of India’s multitudes. Despite the very cynical portrayal of the election process in all its filth and foibles, the solemnity of the swearing in ceremony that the novel closes on is a modern-day reiteration of the founding moment of the Indian nation and a renewal of the promise of those idealistic early days.
If you need to get into the right mood to vote, this is the book to read. If that isn’t enough motivation, in Zain, Chauhan gives us possibly our first and only truly hot Indian male politician.
Chick Lit Hall of Fame 