In Uddipana Goswami's new book, women are survivors
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.
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,
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