From Opium Wars to 1962 Tezpur invasion, Shehnab Sahin opens a fictional window to Assam’s forgotten history

Across the 10 stories in the collection, Sahin, a former Assam government civil servant and humanitarian aid worker, offers a series of fictional windows into the past of the northeastern state.

Colour My Grave Purple and Other Stories, published by Niyogi Books, seeks to broaden the historical narrative of Assam beyond its more familiar associations with insurgency and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. The collection ranges across lesser-told episodes, from the impact of the British ban on private opium cultivation in the valley, to the threat of Japanese invasion during the Second World War, and the Chinese advance into the region during the 1962 India–China war. Each story draws on fragments of forgotten history, woven into narrative fiction.

In an interview with indianexpress.com, Sahin discusses these historical moments that link Assam not only to mainland India but also to wider global currents. She also dwells upon the literary and research methods she employed in weaving archival fact with imaginative storytelling.

Edited excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Each of your stories is marked by a specific year, such as 1858, 1921 and the like. Why did you select these specific milestones?

Shehnab Sahin: I started writing the book during COVID when I was a civil servant, an assistant commissioner with the government of Assam. My father was also an IPS officer, and I wrote the civil services examination so that I could follow in his footsteps and come back to trace the home that was arrested in my mind. But when I got back here, I couldn’t quite locate the Assam of my father’s time. So much had changed. So I started writing as an exercise of retention, of what Assam had always meant for me. This helped me justify my return to myself. And that is when I started thinking about and drawing from memory. This method pried open Assam’s historical canvas for me.

I first thought about tea. It is such an intrinsic part of Assamese life and is special to nearly every Assamese. However, the way we encountered tea is located in our modern history. Although it was in use in its wild form for a very long time, the way we encountered it, as an enterprise, was an outcome of colonial design.  This way, I wanted to keep going back in time to arrive at products, themes, and movements that have had a remarkable imprint on the collective consciousness of the Assamese people.

That led me to themes such as opium, human-animal conflict, or the first anti-colonial peasant rebellion in Assam. Then there is the whole complex issue of the illegal immigrants and their opposition, which is an ongoing issue in contemporary Assam. I traced the genesis back to the 1980s, the decade after the creation of Bangladesh. So, as the themes fell in place for me, so did the dates.

Also, in a few stories, I have mashed together different aspects of Assam’s history and socio-cultural ethos as well. For example, in the story, ‘Freedom in my blood (1921)’, I mixed social taboos around menstruation with the arrival of (Mahatma) Gandhiji in Assam. For all these themes and dates to align, I have utilised a degree of creative freedom that comes with writing fiction.

Q: Your first story is set in the aftermath of the Opium Wars in China. Could you explain the impact of the wars on the social landscape of Assam?

Sahin: My book was a conscious attempt to connect the frontier to the larger world. I am also trying to contest the fact that most English language fiction that travels from my part of the world to the mainland and beyond has an overemphasis on the violence that resulted from years of insurgency, state repression, and our response to it. I did not give it fulcrum positioning because I did not want to erase the rest of the historical happenings in Assam.

In my book, Assam encounters Britain, Japan, and even China. For instance, the reverberations of the Opium Wars of the 19th century were felt in my side of the world. We know that these wars were outcomes of the diabolical British design to stop British bullion from going into Chinese purses. The British would grow opium in our country, which they would barter for tea in China, and the tea would then be sold in England. Eventually, when the Chinese revolted, the two Opium Wars took place.

At that time, the British, with an unquenchable thirst for colonial expansion and its safeguarding, knew that they needed to find alternative ways of carrying out their lucrative tea trade without having to deal with future wars. The universe, too, was on the side of the British, because it was during this time that the Scotsman Robert Bruce chanced upon the tea crop in Assam. It was growing wildly in Assam since before it was catapulted into the world via the British from China. The tribal communities, especially the Singphos, have been drinking it since ancient times. Bruce was led to the Singpho tribe to try this wild tea by Maniram Dewan, an Ahom nobleman and a British loyalist-turned-rebel during the revolt of 1857.

Bruce’s accidental brush with the Singphos helped birth the Camellia sinensis var. Assamica as the new, prized commodity for the empire. Now, even if they were to lose control of China, they would have access to the vast territory of Assam to grow this. So you see, the opium wars had quite a direct bearing on Assam, shaping its history and its socio-political and cultural environment.

In fact, the first wave of workers in the plantation economy of Assam was brought from China. For a very long time, a significant Chinese diaspora had therefore existed in parts of upper Assam, especially in an area called Makum. Such details of our being are threaded to the larger happenings around the world, even if we are a frontier, existing in the ‘margins’.

Q: You have also mentioned the Christian missionaries. Were their interactions with the Assamese people different from the rest of the subcontinent?

Sahin: Perhaps in some ways, because in Assam, we had a larger influence of American missionaries. The mission of proselytization that took root in Assam was started by American Baptist Missionary figures like Nathan Brown and Oliver Cutter. They had a rather ‘intellectual’ approach to spreading the word of God as they are credited with setting up the first printing press in Assam. Rather than brute conversion, the approach was ‘softer’ in the sense that they initiated modern journalism and literature in the Assamese language.

Although the primary concern was to publish Christian literature and associated educational materials for the local population, the parallel impact was the creation of an alternative platform for Assamese literary development. For example, the first Assamese language magazine and the Assamese-English dictionary were outcomes of American Baptist Mission activities. Yet, there was resistance in varied ways and means, which prevented an overarching influence of missionary activities in Assam, particularly in the Brahmaputra valley.

Q: In your second story, you mention the British ban on growing opium in Assam. Can you elaborate on why it was banned and its impact on the local population?

Sahin: British colonial policies were brazenly hypocritical. They banned people from privately growing opium in their homesteads, but immediately afterwards introduced the ‘abkari opium’, meaning excise opium. So, in essence, the empire had no problem with opium so long as it profited from it. The narrative they developed around the adverse impact of opium, a major social malaise, stands for nothing when seen through the lens of the profit-making they designed out of its licensed sale.

Opium and its use in Assam remain a contested topic. When we look at collective memory and social usage, we know that opium was liberally used among the people, especially among the nobility. It also had its ritualistic and medicinal use and was not simply used as a ‘recreational drug’. This topic has also piqued the interest of a lot of revisionist historians who challenge the colonial narrative of the ‘Kaniya’ ( those who use Kani or opium), ‘indolent’ and ‘perennially addicted Assamese’ on account of opium smoking.

On the other hand, no matter the veracity of the matter, the widespread use of opium, thereby rendering the labour force weak, also paved the way (to a certain extent) for the institutionalising of the plantation labour economy, the exploitation and extractive system of acquiring labourers from places like Chota Nagpur, Orissa, etc. to work the tea plantations.

Thus, if  ‘altruism’ was the true motive, the British should have just left it at that, in its complete ban. Instead, what a person could cultivate on their own before had to now be purchased! As long as the empire profited, the definition of altruism could be tweaked to serve colonial interests.

Q: Could you explain how you wove fictional characters or events with historical ones?

Sahin: The narrative is fictional, but the historical events did take place. For example, the British did ban the cultivation of opium in 1860. The British did set up a tea enterprise during that timeline. The Assam Company is still a thriving tea company in India. And some of the characters are also very real. For example, Maniram Dewan is one of the most venerated freedom fighters in Assam.  I also mentioned in a line that he was hanged alongside his compatriot Piyali Barua, very much a real character.

Ursula Graham Bower, who is mentioned in chapter four, is also a real character. In fact, this is a very special story. Here is a woman, an anthropologist who came all the way from England in the 1930s, to a remote place called Laisong village in modern-day Dima Hasao in Assam to live among the Zemi Naga population. She was tasked with the setup of a guerrilla watch unit against the Japanese during the Second World War.

One of the other chapters, ‘Sunsets in the east’, is about the Chinese invasion of India, set in Tezpur town of Assam. Tezpur has one of the most famous hospitals for the mentally infirm. The story goes that when the Chinese arrived there, all administrators, the police, and the planters fled. The hospital inmates were out on the streets amidst all the chaos that ensued once the Chinese army descended upon the Brahmaputra Valley. They started chanting ‘China zindabad’ because they held China responsible for their newfound freedom.

These things did take place. All of these are real events. I have simply, finely interlaced fact and fiction.