Book Review | Ten Pieces of Assamese History

This is important not just because of the sequence but also because it outlines the changing awareness of the people of this region. During the period covered by the stories, political borders, external threats, and administrations changed many times over. So have populations. And, from the content of the stories, the author is very well positioned to describe them, having grown up in Assam, and, as mentioned before, studied history as well.

More stories than ever have begun to emerge from the northeast, many carrying some of the unique and diverse flavours of the region. What sets this collection apart is the author’s insight into the region and its people. The very first story, ‘Two Leaves and a Bud’, for example, tells of a British tea estate manager with a Cantonese wife who arrives in Assam to manage a large estate that’s just been taken over by a British company after the passing of its previous owner. There’s a sense of the lives of indentured workers, the terrible working conditions and deferred wages, and the influence of mystical folklore.

Other stories are more modern and more political. There’s ‘Freedom in My Blood’, in which young Mamoni begins to menstruate the year before Mahatma Gandhi comes visiting in 1921. Mamoni matures with her father, a forward-looking schoolteacher differing with her mother, a conventional housewife, over how she is to be treated during this phase of her growth.

‘Ursula’, set in World War II, sets up the transformation of an outsider into an object of reverence by a common enemy, the Japanese, and depicts the savage effects of the war on the region. In ‘Sunsets in the East’, set in 1962, an ordinary family not far from the border faces the possibility of the Chinese crossing their threshold. Set in the days before and during the Sino-Indian war, it shows a family retreating into their faith in their gods to keep the Chinese at bay.

The title story, ‘Colour My Grave Purple’, covers the period from the 1980s to the noughties, and all the political turmoil of the period, the terror unleashed by the ULFA and by the army to counter it. What’s different is that it focuses on the sense of personal loss arising from the violence…

An increasingly familiar topic, covered here in ‘Animal Instinct’, is the complex nature of the difficulties people at the edges of human-animal conflicts suffer in the face of rampaging boars or drunken elephants, and the superficiality of the establishment’s understanding of these.

What’s easy to like about this collection of stories is the sense of history they give you from the point of view of an ordinary citizen or family pushed willy-nilly into trouble by stirring events in the neighbourhood. What’s not to like? Well, the language is sometimes bloated, sometimes convoluted, sometimes forced. Large doses of simplicity and some good editing would have made all the difference.

Colour My Grave Purple

By Shehnab Sahin

Niyogi Books

pp. 257; Rs 695/-