13 Books From Northeast India, One State at a Time

The stories move through the Khasi and Jaintia hills, from the colonial years to Shillong as it is now. A girl dreams of being a firebird. A man walks home through rain that has opinions about him. Rumour, folklore and a matter of fact belief in things that cannot be seen sit inside otherwise ordinary lives: a school, a shop, a family argument. Pariat never stops to explain Khasi custom to an outsider, which is exactly why it works. You pick it up the way you pick up a language, by staying in the room.

Temsula Ao was an Ao Naga writer and professor, and these stories sit with the villagers caught between the underground fighters and the Indian army during the long Naga conflict. A woman feeds men from both sides on the same day. A boy learns what a checkpoint means. The telling is plain, almost patient, and that restraint is what makes the violence land when it comes. Nobody here is a hero of a movement. They are people who wanted a harvest and a school year, and got neither.

A journalist returns to the hills she comes from and gathers what people there say: a boy called Hoxo who is said to have fallen from the sky, a road the British cut through the Siang valley and the world that arrives with it, missionaries, spirits who are treated as neighbours rather than as metaphors. The book moves in circles across generations of one valley instead of running along a plot. Mamang Dai writes from inside the Adi world rather than translating it for a Delhi reader, and she trusts you to keep up. What you have by the end is less a story than a place you would recognise if you landed in it.

Rukmini teaches English at a college in a small Assam town and is married to the district collector, which makes her important to everyone and known to nobody. Years of marriage have brought no child, and the town has opinions about that. Around this very domestic story sits the Assam of agitation, strikes, curfews and the men who have gone underground. Mitra Phukan keeps the politics as weather rather than plot, so the fear arrives the way it does in real life, through a phone call, a rumour, a road you no longer take.

A young man preparing for the civil services would rather listen to rock music, a college lecturer is stuck in the swamp of her own thesis, and a small girl is quietly certain her real story lies somewhere else. Their paths cross in a Shillong where the question of who belongs and who is an outsider is in the air of every shop and classroom. Anjum Hasan grew up in that town and writes it with affection and no sugar. The comedy is in the detail, the ache is in the wanting.

Parajuly was born in Gangtok and writes about the Nepali speaking world that spreads across state and national borders. Eight stories: a thirteen year old servant girl with a cleft palate travelling with the mistress who torments her, a Kalimpong shopkeeper stuck with a problem he cannot solve politely, a Nepali Bhutanese refugee pinning everything on getting to the West, two young immigrants meeting in Manhattan. He is sharp about class and caste inside a community that outsiders treat as one cheerful block, and he is funny in places, though the funniest lines usually cost somebody something.

Kire follows a single life from a childhood in the years before the Naga national movement, through the decades of underground groups, army operations and factional killing, to an old age in a Kohima where young men still carry guns for reasons nobody can fully explain any more. It is a family story first: grandmothers, sons, a neighbourhood. The politics enter the way they enter a household, through a missing person and a curfew rather than a speech.

Makum in upper Assam had a Chinese community that had been there for generations, working in tea, carpentry and shops, marrying local families. After the war with China in 1962 they were rounded up, held in a camp in Rajasthan, and many were sent to China. Rita Chowdhury wrote it in Assamese as Makam after years of tracing survivors, then translated it into English herself. The novel is long, and it earns the length: you meet the town before you watch it disappear.

A young man comes from Guwahati to his family's village for an aunt's wedding, and the house fills with relatives, rumours and old grudges. Outside it, in the late 1990s, the secret killings are going on: people connected to militants turning up dead with nobody claiming responsibility. Kashyap keeps the camera on the household, on cousins and jokes and food, which is precisely what makes the dread work. The fear arrives at a wedding, wearing a good shirt.

Goswami sets her novel in and around the great temple on the hill at Kamakhya in Assam, where animal sacrifice is part of worship. Her central figure campaigns to end it and finds that faith, money, priests and habit are all standing in his way. Around that argument she writes women who have been abandoned to the temple economy and men who profit from it. The book caused a public row in Assam when it appeared, which tells you it was aimed at something real rather than at literature.

After the Anglo-Manipur war of 1891, the kingdom is under British control and a political agent sits at the centre of the palace world. Sanatombi, a daughter of the royal house, becomes his companion, and the court, the town and her family decide what that makes her. Binodini was Sanatombi's niece and wrote the novel in Meiteilon in 1976, so the book carries family memory as well as history. L. Somi Roy, her son, brought it into English in 2020.

Shai leaves Delhi and goes back to Meghalaya, where the villages have their own way of knowing plants and hills. Her strand is braided with an Englishwoman travelling to the Khasi hills in the early 1900s, with Goethe going to Italy, and with Linnaeus going north to Lapland. The argument underneath is about two ways of looking at nature: one that sorts and labels everything, and one that watches things change. It is long, it wanders on purpose, and it is the most ambitious book here.

Hazarika works through insurgency in Nagaland and Mizoram, the Assam movement of the 1980s and the long fight over who counts as a foreigner in Assam, the pressure of the border with Bangladesh, and the way Delhi has handled all of it. He was reporting on these stories as they happened, so the book is full of rooms he sat in and people he met rather than only documents. It stops in the early 1990s, which is both its limit and its use.