Ethnic violence in Assam, like elsewhere in the Northeast, is a beast that has long bred in its hills and dales. But in the last few years it has grown more bloodthirsty. And, as always, it’s the poor who are the worst-hit. Irrespective of their ethnic identities, they exist on a thin line between living and dying. Assam’s refugee camps are bursting with thousands of people robbed overnight of their few material possessions. It shows how alive and kicking that beast of ethnic violence is, and how far and wide it has spread its claws. The camps are proof that the state has failed to protect people from the perpetrators of violence. Of those affected, some continue to live in the camps, others move out in the hope of setting up home elsewhere.

It’s this trauma of the displaced that Arupa Patangia Kalita successfully explores in The Story of Felanee. She reminds readers that these disenfranchised people were once happy in their penury, once safe (or so they thought) in their little huts which they could call their own. More importantly, they once had a sense of belonging. Her 314-page book is the story of lives lived in misery and of their fight for survival. Binding these people together, however, is the hope that one day things might change for the better.

Throughout the narrative, the writer takes the reader through the hopelessness of a situation where violence is stoked in the name of identity. It is also about militants who get sucked into the romantic belief that they are fighting for the ‘freedom of motherland,’ but wind up depraved and power-greedy. They end up slaves of a system which finally swallows them. She draws attention to the rape of Assam over the years in the name of one ‘movement’ or another, and shows how the land and its most vulnerable people often pay the price. When the men in uniform are sent by the Centre, it is not just the militants who suffer.

The protagonist of Kalita’s story is Felanee, the quarter-Assamese, quarter-Bodo and half-Bengali young wife of Lambodar, an Assamese of Koch strain. Felanee is also the mother of an adorable boy — Moni, and is seven months pregnant with another.

Felanee’s mixed inheritance clearly becomes tricky when she finds herself in the middle of a war based on identities. Her Assamese grandmother had married a Bodo, her mother wedded a Bengali sweetshop owner, while she married an Assamese. She wears the Bengali red and white bangles, the legacy of her mother, who one day dropped her dokhona for a Benarasi sari and married Khitish Ghosh, and that only adds to the complexity of her identity.

Ethnic violence is not new to Felanee. She was born in the time of violence, and lost her father to it. Her mother died not long after giving birth to her. To save the baby from rioters, the mother, Jyotimala, flung her into a pond. Khitish’s relative Ratan, hiding nearby, fished out the baby soon after the rioters left. He raised her, called her Felanee — the one thrown away.

Years later, Felanee loses not only her husband and home in another bout of ethnic violence but also her unborn child. Over the years, the loss faced by the poor in Assam has certainly risen, while the weapons of the rioters have grown sharper. In this hopeless situation, Kalita, through Felanee, plants hope; she shows how the tenacity of the violence-affected people has sustained them. Kudos to Kalita for adding this tragic chapter of Assam’s contemporary history to its literature. The book’s translation could have been better in places, but it matters little, because the plot is so potent, bordering as it does on facts.

Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty is a Delhi-based freelance writer

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