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Recollections of a home
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Moving to Bangalore made all the difference to writer Anjum Hasan, who has just published her first novel “Lunatic in my Head”. It enabled her to look at her home town Shillong with a different perspective, she tells AYESHA MATTHAN
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Anjum Hasan is an ‘insider-outsider’ in her birthplace, Shillong. The poet and writer who has just written her first novel “Lunatic in my Head” states: “The book is not a missionary attempt to shed light on the forgotten
North-East. It is borne out of a love for the place.” She believes that good literature goes beyond the place – though it may happen to become representative of it – but largely the idea is to tell a story. “The idea was to graze space with possibilities in writing about people and their relationships. To explore possibilities of friendships and falling in love in the region – they have been reciprocated and are not one-sided.”
Though originally from Uttar Pradesh, Hasan was born and brought up in the ‘Scotland of the East’. “There was always the feeling of belonging and not belonging.”
And it was her move to Bangalore in 2001 that enabled her to look at Shillong from a different perspective to be able to write a novel. “In Shillong, India was faraway. Moving to Bangalore was moving to India.”
She feels: “In a place like Shillong, the landscape and weather inevitably enter my writings. They may not be idyllic, but rhythms connect the three.” She also believes that English, as a widely spoken language in the hill-station, is the peoples’ passport. “English was the way to express oneself, having an English professor for a father and Irish nuns in school, it instilled a love of writing and the language.”
But the distinction of being tribal and non-tribal or dhkar (foreigner) in Shillong is debatable as the British took it over in the 1860s. “Though it is a multi-cultural city, the sense of a shared culture in the once-capital of Assam, is not overt. They remained in relationships and conversations, and were not give and take like in theatre or art. But over long periods, there were flare-ups like through the 70s, 80s and 90s.”
PHOTO: V.V. KRISHNAN
NEW VIEW ANJUM HASAN: ‘In Shillong, India was faraway. Moving to Bangalore was moving to India’
She feels, “People tend to romanticise Shillong. They have some image of it being a pretty place. But they ignore the city’s modernity for it has all the institutions of a modern city.” She believes that tourism, if handled well, can people give a better insight – for even a tourist’s eye is tangible. For Hasan who has been writing since she was 17, “writing has given me a form of escape from my self. Poetry is synonymous with the poet and I needed to be anonymous. And fiction has given me the opportunity to be impersonal and explore other themes.”
Hasan, who is working on the sequel to “Lunatic in my Head”, is about her character Sophie Das’ move from Shillong to Bangalore to work in the outsourcing industry. “The novel will delve into old and contemporary Bangalore’s reaction to Sophie. “It is natural for young people after school or university to move out of Shillong, because opportunities are limited to government or teaching jobs. Though the media and outsourcing industries have opened up in a small way, it is not a place of opportunity.”
“Lunatic in my Head”, a vivid prose novel jointly published by Zubaan Books and Penguin India, is a 344-page paperback priced at Rs. 295.
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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