Achingmori. The name is on everybody’s lips when Sahitya Akademi winning author Mamang Dai’s latest novel, Escaping the Land (Speaking Tiger) , begins. If it is an unfamiliar name for most readers, so it is for the characters of the novel, all of whom belong to Arunachal Pradesh, where the village of Achingmori is. But there was no Arunachal Pradesh in its present form when Achingmori hit the headlines back in the fifties. “In October 1953, a party of 165 men accompanied by an armed platoon of Assam Rifles had been attacked in a small village called Achingmori in the remote valley of the Subansiri river somewhere deep in the mountains beyond Assam. Forty-seven people including the commandant and twenty-seven Assam Rifles jawans had been killed.” The massacre sets off a chain of events which will eventually lead to the formation of Arunachal Pradesh in 1987.
In Escaping the Land , some characters shape the course of history of the State, others are caught unwittingly in its turbulent waves. You are taken right inside their home and hearth so that by the end of the novel, you feel your perspective has subtly shifted – like the characters, you are looking at, say, Delhi, from Pasighat or Itanagar rather than the other way around. The hills of Arunachal Pradesh are no longer just a holiday destination but a place where real people lead real lives. Yes, it has magical forests but it also has moneyed timber merchants who are cutting off those forests and controlling political power. Some of them are in cahoots with insurgent groups, who make their presence felt through random acts of violence, which mar families forever. Like everywhere in the world, while kings and kingmakers fight over their own interests, common people pay the price with their lands, food reserves and lives.
Escaping the Land joins the ranks of novels which are making the northeastern States, including their gateway – North Bengal – living, breathing places riven with conflicts. Last year, Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih’s Funeral Nights (Context) took readers to the remote West Khasi Hills, which hum not just with ritualistic chants in the novel but also with the daily chitchat of resilient women, raconteurs, pranksters, drunkards, politicians, conmen and taxi-drivers. Nongkynrih, born and brought up in Sohra (or Cherrapunjee), Meghalaya, writes about felt realities, as does Dai, who lives in Itanagar. Funeral Nights is as much about corrupt officials who go to villages “only to loot” as it is about the many names Khasis have for rain.
Veio Pou, another writer from the Northeast who has now moved to Delhi, writes about the unending skirmishes between Naga underground organisations and the armed forces that leave common people in a quagmire in his 2020 novel, Waiting for the Dust to Settle (Speaking Tiger). In the introduction, Pou quotes Temsula Ao, one of Nagaland’s most well-known writers: “Nagaland’s story of the struggle for self-determination started with high idealism and romantic notions of fervent nationalism, but it somehow got re-written into one of disappointment and disillusionment because it became the very thing it sought to overcome.”
The tendency of revolutions to lose the plot midway is brought out startlingly in Song of the Soil (Rachna Books) by Chuden Kabimo, a Yuva Puraskar winning writer from Darjeeling, West Bengal. Translated from Nepali by Ajit Baral, this novel about the Gorkhaland agitation of the 80s, which claimed hundreds of lives and displaced thousands in the Darjeeling hills, is told chiefly from the point of view of adolescents, who join the rebellion without even realising what they are fighting for. But as they get separated from their families and witness dear ones die, they feel the consequences in their bones and shiver: “The fight with an enemy will come to an end, you will either win or lose. But can a war against your own people ever end? You neither win nor lose.”
