Bringing India’s north-east into the mainstream

Indian writer Anjum Hasan, whose books are set in hilly Shillong, was a guest at this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival

BY CHITRA SUDARSHAN

Authors from the subcontinent are not always well represented at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival – so it was with the usual sense of resignation that I scoured the Writers’ list for some familiar names in the field of Indo-Anglia. Lo and behold – there were two writers from India: one an established literary essayist and novelist, Pankaj Mishra, and the other a less wellknown, but on the way to becoming a celebrated - poet, critic and writer in India and abroad, Anjum Hasan. The third name was that of a Sydney Professor of Neuropsychiatry, Perminder Sachdev who grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas and later studied in Delhi. We have reviewed Mishra’s books in this column a couple of times in the past, so our attention must turn to Anjum Hasan, who is on two panels at the MWF, and has published two novels, a book of verse and short stories. (Professor Sachdev, who was educated at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, has published many papers over the years, but his new book, The Yipping Tiger and Other Tales from the Psychiatric Clinic is his first foray into general writing, and consists of experiences from his neuropsychiatric practice. He discussed – with other panel members at the festival–whether neuroscience negates the concept of free will. Yipping Tiger will certainly appeal to a niche readership.)

Back to Anjum Hasan. A few English language writers from India’s north-east such as Mitra Phuken, Temsula Ao (both of whose writings we have reviewed here before) and Siddharth Deb, have cut a swathe in the world of Indo Anglia. Hasan’s is a new voice that has joined this small but growing group. She was born in Shillong of parents who were academics from UP who settled down in Shillong in the early 1970s to pursue their careers. Hasan showed promise at a young age, winning the Outlook-Picador non-fiction contest and the Indian Review of Books award, followed by a book of verse published by the Sahitya Akademi in 2006. Her first novel Lunatic in My Head was brought out by Penguin India in 2007, and came to be shortlisted soon for the Crossword Book Award. Hasan has been living in Bangalore for the past several years, and she is the Books Editor for The Caravan

Hasan’s first novel Lunatic is located in Shillong, Hasan’s birthplace, and in it we feel the racial tensions running just below the surface and breaking out, not infrequently, into violence against the dhakar or ‘outsiders’– or ‘permanent guests’ of the majority Khasi hills-people who are the

‘insiders’ in the town. The effects of migration on a tightly knit society in India’s north-east is brought out, and what emerges are Hasan’s love for the place as well as a lingering desire to be ‘accepted’ by the locals. Hasan does it by telling the story of the interwoven lives of three protagonists who live in this town in the 1990s: Firdaus is the ‘outsider’ who teaches at the Loreto Convent and is four years into her PhD; Aman Moondy is a local who is preparing to take the IAS exams - again - although his first love is music and he is involved in a band whose members imagine themselves to be Pink Floyd; and Sophie Das is a child who is quite confused about her identity from the Ladybird books she reads!

Hasan’s second novel - a kind of sequel - Neti, Neti, came out in 2009 (Roli Books) and was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. This is the story of Sophie Das of the earlier novel, a girl who has grown up in small town Shillong, but now goes to work in an outsourcing industry in cosmopolitan Bangalore. It traces Sophie’s sense of disillusionment with life in the big city, and her attempts at navigating the maze of city life. Hasan herself has been living in Bangalore for a few years, and she is able draw on her own knowledge of the city’s offices, pubs, call centres, night life and the noveau riche suburbs. A murder too close for comfort sends Sophie back to her parents and her hometown, but all is not well there with her father and her mother each chasing their separate dreams. She must pull herself from the brink and find a way to move forward.

Both Anjum Hasan’s novels are a kind of insight into the minds and the worlds of both the ‘insider’ and the ‘outsider’, of the soul wrenching effects of both the small town and the big city. That they are written in a style of quiet elegance simply adds to their attraction.