Significant voice
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Assamese writer Indira Goswami on her writing and latest work in the light of the latest honour to come her way: the Prince Clause Principal award. SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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Photo: Sandeep Saxena
Plans galore: Indira Goswami.
Age and infirmity have shrivelled her physical self, her singular smile, to a considerable extent. But her mind is still as sharp as a sword’s rim. Indira Goswami, a significant literary voice from the North East, has given immense pleasure to her readers; be it her Nilakantha Bajra (“The Blue-Necked Braja” on the plight of the Vrindavan widows in 1976), Adhalekha Dastabej (Unfinished Autobiography in 1988), Pages Stained with Blood (in 1994 on the anti-Sikh riots) and other works.
The pen, which she picked as a seven-year-old school girl and much later as a pill against “the tragedies of personal life”, has bequeathed her many honours over the years. Now, Goswami has recently added another — this year’s €100,000 Prince Claus Principal Award. She says, “This is one of Europe’s biggest literary awards and I am the first Indian author to have got it.” In New Delhi for a medical check up, the Jnanpith awardee, who writes in her mother tongue Assamese, says she got the news just before she started from Guwahati. Since 1997, the Prince Claus Fund has been giving awards to authors, artistes, thinkers and cultural organisations across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and the clinching factor is the positive effect of the awardee’s work on a wider cultural or social field. The award was formally presented to Goswami on December 3 in Amsterdam.
Plans
In a striking red mekhela chador with traditional Bodo motifs, and flaunting her trademark bindi, the author shares her plan to start a small hospital with the award money. “When I was a child, I used to see a man sitting under a banyan tree just outside our village in South Kamrup. Intrigued, I once asked my father who he was. He told me that the man was a leprosy patient who had been thrown out of the village. Even today, my memory takes me back to that hapless man. Now with the award money, I want to start a hospital in memory of those who had to suffer because of people’s ignorance.”
Talking of childhood memories, Goswami, fondly called Mamoni in Assam, also recollects events that made her a vegetarian. “I am a great animal lover; my playmate was a baby elephant.” When her father hosted feasts, people from three-four villages would be invited. “Many goats would be brought to our house to feed the guests. The way they were killed made me decide not to touch meat again.” Those memories aside, life in the village, “was like living in a fairy land.” Sitting by the Jagulia, which flowed by her village, she adds, “gave me such pleasure.”
Forthcoming novel
Ask her about her forthcoming novel, Goswami excitedly says, “It is about a Bodo woman, Thenka Tanor, supposedly the first lady revenue collector in British India.” Researching for the subject was not easy though. She rues, “Very little was available in terms of recorded history. It is so sad that the Bodos are the sons of the soil and yet their history is not available in any written form.” Luckily, she met “a 100-year-old person who met Thenka Tanor, from whom I got information.”
She rues the historians’ lack of interest in the region’s past. “I have always told people proudly that there has never been sati pratha in the North East. Till of course, I came to know that, after the death of a Koch king in Lower Assam, five of his queens and a concubine were burnt as sati in 1877. It was recorded in the writings of one Mukund Narayan.” She also points out, “The Ahoms, who ruled Assam for 600 years, were very good at keeping records. Many don’t know that theirs is the earliest recorded history in India.”
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