It
would not be an exaggeration to say that I have never read a novel like this
before, one that shows, in a dream-like language and imagery, two stunningly different
worldviews colliding with strangeness and violence for the very first time.
Set in the middle of the 19th century in the dense forests, grand river valleys, and impassable mountains of the Eastern Himalayas, Black Hill manages to combine the experiences of a rebellious young
woman belonging to a pre-literate, deeply instinctual and elemental culture, with
the true story of a French priest trying to find his way through that
forbidding landscape to carry the word of God to Tibet.
Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the action takes place in the Northeast-the region that spreads from Assam to Arunachal today. The East India Company is seeking to make inroads into the region and the local people-in particular the Abor and Mishmee tribes-fear their coming and are doing all they can to keep them out of their territories. The author takes a recorded historical event-the mysterious disappearance of a French priest, Father Nicolas Krick in the 1850s and the execution of Kajinsha from the Mishmee tribe for his murder-and woven a gripping, densely imagined work of fiction around it. And, even…
I am partial to any fiction set in my part of
the world, the cultural hodgepodge called Northeast India. And
Mitra Phukan is one of the region's best novelists.
Here, a bored and
lonely college lecturer is washed up in a small town in Assam. With her
husband often away on official duties, she quietly observes the mediocrity
of the middle-class lives around her, even as the sectarian strife of the 1980s
flickers in the background and then comes devastatingly close.
A slow-paced
novel about violent change, hidden desires, and the strangeness of
teaching canonical English literature in a setting far removed from it.
This is the story of Rukmini who is married to the District Collector of a small town in Assam, and teaches English literature in the local college. On the surface, her life is settled and safe in the big, beautiful bungalow on the hill above the cremation ground, seemingly untouched by the toil and sufferings of the common folk living 'below'. And yet, each time there is an 'incident' in the district, the fear and uncertainty that grips the town finds a reflection in her own life. Assam is in the grip of insurgency and it is this thread that…
I
am drawn to writing on Indian literature and on being an Indian writer when it
comes from novelists themselves rather than as an academic production.
UR
Ananthamurthy belonged to both fields; he was a teacher of literature and a
critic and also one of the big names of the generation of novelists born in the
1930s and 1940s.
This collection offers a fascinating range of ideas on how one
might make oneself an Indian writer, how to tap into traditional
sources, how not to make a monument of the past, and how to remain creative and rooted
at the same time.
Alif Mohammad is a middle-aged, mild-mannered
school teacher of history, living at a time when Muslims are seen either as
hapless victims or horrid threats. Alif is neither; he is a daydreamer who,
when not taking his students around to gawp at the relics of Delhi’s past, is
immersed in reveries on the country’s long centuries.
But the present is pressing down on him in
the form of colleagues suspicious of too much history, landlords keen to police
his eating habits, and the imam of the local mosque whom the God-loving but not
necessarily God-fearing Alif is anxious to avoid.
This book is a darkly funny story about Indian life today
and the challenge we all face: thwarting the bullies at the door.
