About the Book
This collection of twenty Assamese stories was translated into English in a four-day translation workshop in Guwahati under the aegis of the Sahitya Akademi and the direction of acclaimed writer and scholar Dr Hiren Gohain (former Dean, Arts Faculty, Guwahati University and recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award for literary criticism in Assamese in 1989) in December,2006.
These stories, by authors ranging from pioneer Lakshminath Bezbarua to elder contemporary Harekrishna Deka, have been translated by a team of enterprising young translators. A thoughtful and analytical introduction on the background, themes and trends, has been contributed by Dr Hiren Gohin as the editor of this volume.
Preface
An Anthology of Modern Assamese short Stories
The conventional and now-discarded definition of the short story as ‘a slice of life’ had taken for granted too easily the elusive contours of the meaning of the word ‘life’. In the last decades of the twentieth century there has also been a radical interrogation of the traditions of the dominant mode of the short story, realism, and it has put under the scanner such key ideas in that mode as ‘representation’, authorship’, ‘narrative’ and even ‘reading’. Stories by such diverse writers as Kafta, Jorge Luis Borges and Marquez do not merely appear as interesting deviations from the relist mode, but as embodiments of quite different norms. Under these circumstances to a shift in sensibility (or if you like, paradigm), mandating novel rules of construction.
I am relieved that the selection, though probably not the best possible or even representive, still marches under the ‘slice of life’ banner, as with all due allowance I find it more comfortable to work with. A workship had worked sincerely on the translation, a difficult task in any field of literature, and I had to devote more than a couple of months to introducing nuances and correcting excesses or sometimes even downright errors of understanding in the light of the originals. I am still not very confident that this selection will acquaint the reader with the richness and creative exuberance of the Assamese short story. If it gives him just a glimpse I shall consider our joint effort worth all the trouble.
Authors of short stories in Assamese from different epochs have articulated different visions of life as Assam has undergone a series of changes in the economy and material environment, political climate, culture and the world of ideas. Elements of the past inevitably, were retained and assimilated in different ways through such changes. These visions have incorporated not only attitudes and human relations developing under such varying circumstances, but also changing rules of the craft of story-telling and the authors’ changing approaches to the content of their stories. But determinists will be fluxmmoxed to find in Bezbarua’s Paatmugi (Golden Girl), written in the thirties, an uncanny anticipation of Postmodern features (Madan Sarma of Tezpur University has found other traits such as Lawrence Sternian infinite digression, artfully exposing the constructed nature of the narrative). But in all their variety, I believe the stories embody man’s ceaseless and unavailing attempts to grasp the essence of life.
The readers will forgive me for entering here my regressive reservations about postmodern content, though I have no problem with postmodern techniques to discover new aspects of a developing reality, the postmodern tendency is to construct a world in rather arbitrary fashion and impose one’s private fantasies and choices on it and then offer it to the reader’s collaboration or participation, the reader is denied the surprise and pleasure of discovering a world previously unknown or unsuspected by him but far from a personal whimsy.
Assamese short stories, like modern Assamese (i.e. romantic and later) Poetry were first written by students who studied in universities outside Assam, esp. Calcutta University and were exposed to examples of European and Bengali short stories. The genre did not have a name in the beginning, and the pioneer, Lakshminath Bezbarua, called them ‘Sadhu Kotha’, Assamese word for folk-tale or fable. Later on, as in Bengali, a direct translation of The English term ‘Short Story’ (Stuti Galpa) was adopted for it.
The Assamese were made acquainted with ideas of European Enlightenment, like ‘rational formulation of the goals of life’, ‘dignity and independence of the individual as against the tyranny of custom,; ‘need for social reform and progress’, ‘crusade against prejudice and superstition’ in the nineteenth century by the journal ‘Arunoday’, and they were partially re-inforced by English education. The new outlook often in conflict with deep-seated inherited views demanded an unvarnished perception of human affairs under local decaying feudal institutions, ruthless patriarchy and a repressive irrational social code. Tomantic and sentimentalized loved sought to overcome jaundiced Social outlook and the repressive code in favour of the liberation of the individual. Rebellion against that code also proceeded from the experience of the somewhat relaxed milieu of urban environments. Gradually the struggle of the enlightened and crusading individual against tyrannical and outworn social institutions and prejudice, became a dominant theme of modern Assamese literature, in modes as varied as triumphant, Satrical and tragic.
A secular realistic narrative purged of distracing associations and proceeding logically, was taking shape elsewhere, in non-literary contexts. Law courts, with their emphasis on legal rigour and tangible proof accustomed people to speaking and writing about events in a coherent, chronological and non-mythical narrative, where supernatural factors were discounted. Likewise official reports on local events and social and cultural institutions which occupied such a major place in colonical administration had to be prepared with the help of native Assamese subordinates, who thus acquired a detached view of things otherwise accepted as a matter of course. Rajani Kanta Bardoloi’s Miri Jiyori, the first published Assamese novel, was a by-product of such ethnographic observation as part of the author’s official duties.
However the place of religion in life never came under a cloud. Like the Christian missionaries the pioneers of vernacular modernity also assumed that the original religious inheritance had some fundamental validity, and it was only the patina of ignorance, prejudice and superstition that had given it such a lethal form. Thanks to the persistence of Shankaracharya’s under a Vedantic umbrella, and the mighty influence of the medieval Vaishnava saint-poet conversion of the Assamese. Indeed the pioneers of modernity in Assam discovered anticipations of the basic values of humanism in the literary works and teachings of Sankardev in spiritual form, as witnessed in his conception God through bhakti and in his casual dismissal of caste-prejudice.
Thus realism, permeated by a literal humane outlook affitming concern against injustice and oppression, and fired with the passions of pity and indignation, not only confronted the self- image of traditional society, but also became the overwhelmingly dominant ethos of modern Assamese literature. But Assam had no Prem chand as the humanism of these early masters were severely circumscribed by the parameters of colonized imagination. The Titan among them, Bezbarua, condemned in a public address to students in Assam in 1916 the revolutionary unrest and rebellion against British rule in Bengal, and even the tremendous upsurge of the non-co-operation movement initially left him unconvinced. Only in the Second half of nineteenth thirties, with social unrest and nationalist struggle coming together in mass-,movements and peasant movements unleashed in the heartland of North India, the awareness of and anger against colonical exploitation seeped among the middle class. Rajyat Sabhas were organized in different parts of Assam. the ideology of socialism and communism radicalized Assamese students who had gone to Calcutta and Banaras Hindu university for their higher education, in the late thirties Assam unit of the CPI was formed at Golaghat, with the first members coming from radicalized students. Meanwhile Fascism also attracted radical students who had only glimpses of the ‘national unity’ and ‘patriotic dedication’ of Mussilini’s Italy from favourable Western Propaganda. (Even Tagore for a time had been beguiled by the Fascist camouflage). On the other hand the British government skitfully fomented Muslim distrust of Hindus and communal tension, and only the left had an unambiguous answer to that imperialistic strategy. Meanwhile the Second World War broke out and towards the end came to Assam’s doorsteps triggering panic, enthusiasm for the INA, and Price-rise and plunner and corruption by traders and contractors on a massive scale overturning values that were once considered unshakable. The reports of the terrible Bengal famine exposed the callousness of the richer sections of society and stirred the conscience of idealistic youth. The ideas of Freud and Marx trickling in small doses also unsettled old uncertainties. In brief society and culture were at the cross- roads.
Contents
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