#BookReview : How To Tell The Story of an Insurgency edited by Aruni Kashyap

A former militant is unable to reconcile his tranquil domesticity with his brutal past. A mother walks an emotional tightrope, for her two sons - a police officer and an underground rebel - fight on opposite sides of the Assam insurgency. A deaf and mute child who sells locally brewed alcohol ventures into dangerous territory through his interaction with members of the local militant outfit. How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency is an unflinching account of a war India has been fighting in the margins. Written originally in Assamese, Bodo and English, the fifteen stories in this book attempt to humanize the longstanding, bloody conflict that the rest of India knows of only through facts and figures or reports in newspapers and on television channels.

How To Tell The Story of an Insurgency is a collection of 15 stories from natives of Assam and how they have experienced insurgency in their daily lives, it has been edited by Aruni Kashyap & published by Harper Collins India. The author is a writer of short stories, novels and poetry in Assamese and English, and translates from Assamese. His work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian UK and the Hindu. He won the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Georgia, Athens.

A man gave up guns & decided to be part of the mainstream and yet he cannot live in peace. He is continuously haunted by his past, and the people around him as well as the administration makes it sure that he doesn’t forget it. In another case a mother waits till late night for her militant son to come home & have dinner with her while her other son who happens to be a police officer fights against the same militants. With many other complex stories like these, get this book to understand what it is like to live in insurgency,

The North Eastern states have been neglected since a long time, our main stream media only focuses only around Delhi or at most Northern India but there are people who are determined to bring these neglected stories out in the open. This book aims to do the same, we come to know of different stories exploring several angles about how insurgency have affected the lives of locals. Stories from different strata have been included in this collection to give the reader an experience of the daily lives of people living constantly under that environment. An important which deserves to be read.