Loss, death, grief, anger, violence, persecution, dread are the keywords of these stories from Assam

In this book, editor Aruni Kashyap compiles fifteen different stories of insurgency in Assam, originally written in Assamese, Bodo and English, with the aim to present the state as a polyphonic region. It strives to impart the narrative of Assamese insurgency in an inclusive manner, combining the experiences of minorities, tribals and settlers’ communities who have often been marginalised, both in publications and in reality.

The question of the Assamese identity is deeply woven into these stories, all of which bring out many dissonances on how it is understood – a complex enquiry of immense magnitude which continues to plague the state even today. Do language and lineage only determine the identity of indigeneity? Or were the deemed foreigners equally as Assamese as the young insurgents blanketed in the idealism of revolution?

The impossibility and indifference of national boundaries which carve out different geographies of belonging reveal the obliviousness of the nation states to the plight of those who are now literally pushed to the margins, who have shared histories and cultures beyond the border, but now face the onslaught of conflict and persecution.

The political canvas

The incomprehensibility of such violence unfolding in front of one’s eyes is captured in Arup Kumar Nath’s Koli Puron, where an aged villager’s compassion fails to save the life of a young miya girl, whose family and community had a generational symbiotic relationship with an Assamese village. The dissonances between indigenous and “settler communities”– who settled early enough to not be assimilated into the local faith or the language is dealt with in stories like Jayanta Saikia’s Maryam, Rattotama Das Bikram’s Crimson, Hafiz Ahmad’s Jiaur Master’s Memorandum and Nitoo Das’ Charred Paper, which quietly reveal the arrogance of chauvinism in failing to take note of the diversity of cultures of a region.

The tensions of tribal experiences find expression in Hongola Pandit, where Katindra Swargiary writes in a deadpan way of how a self-proclaimed Bodo pandit’s assimilation from a tribe to caste Hindu society is upturned by his son’s involvement in the revolution, and in Arupa Patangia Kalita’s Our Very Own, which brings out the apprehensions between the Assamese and Bodo Kachari communities that the insurgency and revolution washed ashore.

Nandeswar Daimari’s A Hen That Doesn’t Know How To Hatch Its Own Eggs is the only text that dissolves the contemporary violence of militancy and draws a satirical portrait of a post-insurgency society based on development. But the questions of progress lingers, for even as a small section climbs up the social ladder, the poor continue to remained poor – does the revolution then succumb to its own ideals?

Audacity of life

All the stories are interwoven with themes of loss, death, grief and anger, and tainted with violence, persecution and dread. They bring out how the revolution can never truly leave a militant, and how it affects the psyche of a surrendered rebel – Anuradha Sharma Pujari’s Surrender and Sanjib Pol Deka’s What Lies Over There wonders whether love and compassion are enough for someone who has killed, maimed and brought grief, and if being a part of normal society again is an exercise in futility behind the shadow of the gun.

The exploration of the trauma that families of militants go through is carefully crafted in Jahnavi Baruah’s poignant The Vigil, possibly the most refined story of them all, where an aged mother manoeuvres with love and patience between her two sons, one a policeman and one a militant. Manikuntala Bhattacharya’s Stone People weaves the tale of a family with a deserted militant son who now both reverses and reinforces patriarchy in tying all responsibilities to build a bridge leading to him, through their daughter.

Kaushik Barua’s Run To The Valley reveals how memory can often be an enterprise fraught with divergences, especially when it has been invested with the depth of grief and horror. The mind refuses to become a repository of continuous suffering, yet it is resilient in constructing alternate narratives that garner a veneer of truth over the years, even as such matters are attempted to be personally silenced. It is the resilience of memory which also gives the insurgency years the garment of collective pain, by stories mirroring the themes in the book that permeate from families and households to colleges and universities.

Although some of the translations sometimes seem hasty and abrupt, Kashyap’s compilation stands as an extremely relevant and essential text, incorporating a wide social milieu of Assam. If the reader moves beyond the academic and the critical, they take home the concluding morality of the text: the unfailing persistence of the human spirit. For in spite of brutal massacres, persecution, carnage, and violence, the unifying lessons that all the stories offer is how the audacity of life, absorbing the pain and the pillage, continues to move on.

How To Tell The Story Of An Insurgency: Fifteen Tales From Assam, edited by Aruni Kashyap, Harper Collins.