Love amid the turmoil

Often what doesn’t work for some, works best for others. In the case of 29-year-old author Aruni Kashyap, who is hailed as one the brightest literary sparks from the Northeast this year, it is intuition.

Aruni’s first book, The House with a Thousand Stories, released this year and has received great critical acclaim. But, for the Guwahati-born author, the best thing he has heard about his book so far may seem rather unusual. “Someone was very upset because I ‘killed’ one of the characters. I thought that was very charming,” he says.

His book, as he says, is a “love story set against political strife”, and borrows heavily from the ruthless killings in Assam during 1998-2001, which still remains a shameful period in India’s post-colonial history.

And so he writes, “A radical love story is the only device that makes the time-chariot of a village, a city, a country, gallop faster… And for that chariot to move forward, to bring change in the village, you don’t have to be a radical. You just have to fall in love.”

As one of the region’s few English authors, the pressure has seemingly increased on him to write of Assam and the Northeast adequately. However, Aruni seems unfazed with that responsibility.

“Assamese readers have told me that I should have provided more information about the human rights violations, about the aspirations of Assamese people and historical details about the secret killings or the insurgency in my novel. But I can’t write with such anxieties,” he says adding, “My loyalty is to my story and characters. Yes, as a writer I am interested in politics and I consider myself a political writer. Yes, I like to explore the different ways in which human rights intersect with literature and storytelling. And I am sure my fiction is shaped by Assamese politics, aesthetics and literary traditions — both oral and textual. But ‘What people want’ is the mainstay of fiction and that is what I try to focus on.”