What images do the mention of war bring to your mind? Valiant soldiers charging through muddy, smoke-filled battlefields impervious to bullets flying all around them? Maybe a battery of Bofors guns raining down fiery death on enemy soldiers cowering in their trenches? Or possibly tricolour draped wooden coffins being unloaded from an aircraft? A funeral pyre lit by a misty-eyed daughter heroically holding herself together?

These are the images we get to see of wars in movies, or on television news. Then the next news cycle begins and these move into our subconscious. While we often hear of heroism and bravery, we rarely get to hear candid confessions of the trepidation that haunts the soldier before he goes into battle. The doubts, the human emotion of fear before undertaking something that has a high likelihood of resulting in you being maimed or even dying. Nor do we often hear about what happened to those heroes many years after the war, or how the families of those who never came back lived the rest of their lives in their absence. Long after the treaties are signed and posthumous medals awarded, many continue to live the war for the rest of their lives.

Rachna Bisht Rawat’s ‘1971 – Charge of the Gorkhas’ is a collection of short stories about the participants of war. It takes you beyond the surface of war, giving a rare insight into the lives of the human beings who took part in it. Or were irrevocably affected by it. We meet the dramatis personae 50 years after the 1971 Indo Pak war and see a completely different side of them, and hear about the war through their eyes. A septuagenarian lady still waiting for news about her husband, clinging firmly to the belief that he is still alive after all these years. Just about a year of marriage, a war, and fifty years of waiting. The veteran fighter pilot reciting the Kalima, knowing which back then could have saved him from captivity many years ago.

The author has painstakingly pieced together these stories through interviews with veterans and their families. Some forlorn, some nostalgic, and some amusing long after the danger has passed –each story is nevertheless worthy of being told and interesting to read. Her expressive narrative style brings them to life, and the reader can almost feel the pulse of the young officer racing as he prepares to go into battle. Or the rekindling and dashing of the hopes of the relatives of the missing personnel every time there is fresh mention of Indian prisoners in Pakistani jails. You can feel the bond between old comrades, forged in the bloody battlefields and nurtured into the sunset of their lives. You can sense the pride they feel as they recount their experiences, shorn of hyperbole or jingoism. The treasured photographs from personal collections of the subjects included in the book help in bringing the characters to life.

The human aspects of a war and its everlasting aftermath are rarely covered in popular literature in such a readable and evocative manner. Being an army wife herself, the author has been able to recreate the trials and tribulations of the soldiers and their families emotively. What emerges is a collage of human courage. Not just the physical courage involved in fighting the war, but the emotional and moral courage it takes to live life after it. As the author herself puts it, “I marvel at these heroes who not only put their lives at stake for their country but did it with so much spirit and panache.”

(Lt Col Rohit Agarwal (Retd) is a former Armoured Corps Officer and the author of Brave Men of War – Tales of Valour 1965)

About the Book

1971: Charge of the Gorkhas and Other Stories

Rachna Bisht Rawat

Penguin Random House

Rs 269/ 200 pages

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