Red River by Somnath Batabyal: The past is alive, and not a foreign country
Red River, tells an expansive story set in an Assam shattered by insurgency and anti-Bengali protests, where ordinary lives are upturned by cruel sleights of hand. It is a familiar theme explored by many writers, from Indira Goswami to Aruni Kashyap, in Assamese as well as English, but Batabyal brings freshness to the well-worn subject through his gift of characterisation and storytelling. Red River takes the reader back in time when separatist movements held a death grip over Assam, opposing the demographic composition of the state.
As India votes, it is clear that those ancient enmities, ethnic or communal, are far from over. The North-East continues to implode and ever new spectres, like that of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019, cast a shadow over the region. While hard facts must stay off the nebulous terrain between “what is" and “what if", fiction has no such compulsions.
It is in this in-between domain that Batabyal builds a home for his novel. Red River is an ambitious, inter-generational saga of interconnected lives that has a long provenance. Batabyal’s patient and painstakingly mimetic style carries with it the evidence of the 13-long years of research, writing, and careful editing that have gone into the making of the ambitious book.
Also read: Murakami in Bengali and Kenji in Malayalam At the heart of the novel is the story of friendship among three boys growing up in Assam in the 1980s. Rizu Kalita, daredevil cricketer and a hero to his peers, has lost his older brother Romen, who was briefly with the ULFA, in an encounter with the Indian Army. There is the bookish and chubby Samar Dutta, a Bengali growing up in a state where he’s unwanted by the locals.
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