Philip L. Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post, is widely credited with the truism: “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.” But this claim can be equally staked by writers of fiction and poetry. For it is through the alchemy of their experience and imagination that the history of our distant past, or vanishing present, begins to assume a human face.
Philip L. Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post, is widely credited with the truism: “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.” But this claim can be equally staked by writers of fiction and poetry. For it is through the alchemy of their experience and imagination that the history of our distant past, or vanishing present, begins to assume a human face.
Scholar, journalist and writer Uddipana Goswami’s latest collection of stories, The Women Who Would Not Die: Stories, drives home the truth behind this sentiment with a raw force. Except for the last, all the stories are set in the author’s homeland, Assam. In letter and spirit, these vignettes are rooted to specific cultural and social contexts. You could wager that although written in English, these stories pulsate with the cadence of colloquial Axomiya, its idioms, expressions and emotional registers.
Scholar, journalist and writer Uddipana Goswami’s latest collection of stories, The Women Who Would Not Die: Stories, drives home the truth behind this sentiment with a raw force. Except for the last, all the stories are set in the author’s homeland, Assam. In letter and spirit, these vignettes are rooted to specific cultural and social contexts. You could wager that although written in English, these stories pulsate with the cadence of colloquial Axomiya, its idioms, expressions and emotional registers.
While the people and places that appear in the stories are recognisably from Assam, there is a tragic universality to the scars they carry on their minds and bodies, like festering physiological wounds. Goswami sets up her canvas right off the bat. Andolan, the opening story, offers the reader a potted history of sectarian violence in the village of Barbari. From the origins of this division during the British Raj to its persistence in contemporary India, it tells a familiar morality tale: “All oppressors loathe and fear those whom they oppress.” Whether it is Gaza or Ukraine, the North-East or Kashmir, places described as conflict zones, are, in essence, riddled by the same underlying tension, irrespective of historical triggers to violence. Life runs on the age-old natural law of the big fish eating the small and small fish eating those smaller than them.
Goswami builds on this idea, unpeeling layers of social and economic inequalities that have turned ordinary, decent, once-neighbourly humans into monsters. “In themselves, they are good people,” the narrator says, “but between them, they are deeply divided.” The bleak irony is that those in power today can, in a blink of an eye, be turned into victims tomorrow, simply because the political or economic reality has shifted. The Hindu Axamiya’s atavistic pride in being the true natives of Assam, for example, is quickly overturned by the arrival of migrants from across the border. Bengali Muslim settlers, employed as cheap labour to till the land, soon begin to expand their community as well as their influence. In the pecking order of caste Hindus, Muslims, Bodos and other tribes, the wheel of advantage keeps turning, depending on who gets to call the shots.
This theme of radical instability is at the core of life in conflict zones. Goswami carries it into other stories, where the focus is on a different site of conflict: the home. Men and women thrown together through marriage or circumstance are locked in a battle for self-determination. Just as breach of territorial borders leads to violence among communities, the violation of personal boundaries erupts into marital rape, domestic violence and lifelong suffering.
Goswami’s women are survivors, even when they are dead like Romola in Write Romola.The shadow of her absence in her afterlife runs so long that her story cannot be told by another woman from a different social station, even though she, too, is a victim of her volatile husband’s moods.
Questions ripple through the collection: Who has the right to speak for others? Can a writer convey the experience of oppression when they are sheltered from the worst of it? And finally, are there stories that cannot, should not, be told?
In one of the longest stories, Beloved of Flowers, the protagonist Dino, the scion of a family of religious leaders but in reality an aspiring writer, suffers a nervous breakdown as he encounters a horrific truth in his patron’s family. In Body, Bones and All, the protagonist is fortified by the knowledge that “If a body was crushed, it would become a creeper, a plant or a flower, and finally recover.” This Ovidian transformation of the body into nature is an allusion to the Assamese folklore of Tejimola. It’s a paradigm that rears its head at several moments, including in the title story.
Published by Lakshminath Bezbarua in 1911, the story of Tejimola is a familiar one, about a girl falling victim to her stepmother’s wrath. When Tejimola’s corpse is buried in the yard by the evil stepmother, it flowers into a gourd tree. When the stepmother cuts it down, Tejimola returns as a plum tree. Finally, when the plum tree is hacked and thrown into the river, the young girl reincarnates as a lotus, which tells her father, returning from a trip by water, the truth of the tragedy that befell her. In a final deliverance of justice, Tejimola returns to her original, human form. The stepmother is punished and the father-daughter duo live happily ever after.
Reality, unfortunately, is deprived of the comfort of the magical revivifying power of mythical tales. Goswami’s girls and women either recover enough to ignore their scars and carry on, or disappear, leaving behind the legacy of intergenerational trauma.
Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in Delhi.
