Assam’s Kula Saikia has won the 2015 Sahitya Akademi award for his short story collection Akahar Chhabi Aru Ananya Galpa . Kula Saikia is also the Additional Director General of Police for Assam. With this award, the curious connection between Assamese literature and its police force continues.
The writer-policement list includes former IPS officer and well-known poet-writer Keki N. Daruwalla; former Director General of Police Gyanendra Sarma Pathak, also a poet; and another former DGP, Harekrishna Deka, who won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1987 for his poetry collection Ann Ejan.
Saikia, a 1985 batch IPS officer, was in New Delhi recently and sounded proud of this particular connect. “Assam Police has indeed seen quite a few writers of repute. Their contribution to the literary world has been widely talked about in Assamese society,” he said.
Saikia has produced 19 short story collections besides three plays, a book of collected essays, and a novel that was recently translated into Hindi by Penguin, Woh 24 Ghante . His last book of short fiction was Breaking News in 2014.
Saikia’s stories stand out because of their individualistic style. He has a way of beginning his stories at the middle, of a conversation for instance, before he takes the reader to an unexpected end. With a play of words, he creates webs of mystery around his protagonists, who often straddle the worlds of fantasy and reality. The author says his enduring attraction to short fiction is because “the genre allows the author to have a greater sense of intimacy with the characters than a novel does.”
“I like its speed more than that of a novel where multiple events slow down the pace of story-telling. Short fiction has the pace of a flowing river where every moment has new ripples, new waves, but the current remains,” says the alumnus from Delhi School of Economics.
The Akademi award is an endorsement of Saikia’s mastery of short fiction. “The award reminded me, like an important milepost along a journey, that there is a long way to go,” he says.
Saikia has also been at the forefront of police reforms in the State Police force. He initiated two community policing moves. The first was as Chief of Guwahati Police in 1996, when he started ‘Nagarik Committees’ (citizen forums), which allowed citizens to actively form a coalition with the police to tackle day-to-day law enforcement issues. “Now it has been regarded as an effective model of urban policing in the city,” he says. The second initiative was ‘Project Prahari’, aimed at tackling rampant witch-hunting in the State.
Recalls Saikia, “I launched ‘Prahari’ in 2001, just after I returned from Penn State University as a Fulbright scholar, in Kokrajhar district where many cases of witch-hunting were being reported. I wanted to create a common platform for various stakeholders, with the local police as the agent of change.
Soon, 'Prahari’ was recognised as a governance model that reached out to marginalised tribal communities to counteract social ills such as witchcraft.” As a change management model, the project got picked up by prominent business schools across the country and has been made available as a case study by the Harvard Business Review.
Going back to writing, Saikia says, “I can never get away from the world of short fiction but presently, I am focussing on completing my first novel in English. It might have an occasional intrusion of the cop in me, the experiences and nuances of police life for more than three decades. In the journey of writing, if there is recognition for the writer in the public domain, one feels, ‘Oh yes, someone somewhere has talked about it; there is a discourse on the creative effort.’”
In Assam, clearly, the cops see a purpose in poetry.
Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty is a New Delhi-based freelance writer.
