Time out of joint
Set in north Assam, Ankush Saikia’s The Forest Beneath the Mountain is a novel about brutally sudden change and its disorienting effects
Ankush Saikia uses the classic trope of the stranger who comes to town, to write a marvellously unsettling novel about life in north Assam and the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. The image is turned on its head for the stranger, Abhijit Saikia, is a native, a child who left his hometown of Tezpur after his father was apparently killed by insurgents in the early 1990s, and who grew up missing a part of himself. That the man who returns often feels himself out of place is not because the place in question is unknown to him but because it has changed so much. And the novel is most taken with this – brutally sudden change and its painfully disorienting effects.
Abhijit’s father, Khagen, was a forest beat officer and his son is nostalgic for the vast forests around Tezpur and bordering Arunachal Pradesh that Khagen was a keeper of. (Though he was also party to illegal, nighttime, alcohol-soaked hunting trips that Abhijit remembers as one of the high points of a lost time.) Over the decades, these government-owned reserves have shrunk to a fraction of their size, taken over by settlers, the trees mostly felled by loggers. As he tries to make sense of the displacement and get to the bottom of his father’s death, the novel plays out through encounters with a network of people in, often at one and the same time, violently antagonistic and mutually beneficial relationships with each other – desperadoes with frayed nationalist ideals, peasants living off the grid, greasypalmed administrators, heroic elephant catchers, cold-blooded police commandos, stone-hearted army men, and dubious supply contractors.
The characters are disgruntled, wistful or conniving and most are corrupt. But this corruption is not mere cynicism, though that abounds; it is also a moral flailing in the face of time feeling out of joint. “The effects of change upon tribal societies in the hill states of north-east India is a topic of interest among academicians. But it is unlikely anyone will study the inner contradictions of people such as Khagen Saikia and Pradip Deka (and their friends), caught as they were between the British-ruled society of their parents and the mutations of democracy in a distant corner of a newly-independent country,” reflects the narrator.
Ankush Saikia is a friend and fellow Shillong writer whose early novel, The Girl from Nongrim Hills, I admired for how it handled the town we both grew up in – affectionately and unaffectedly. And he’s taken an impressive leap with this new book. I can think of nothing similar – not only for the usual reasons of representation (this specific neck of the woods has found generous space in fiction for the first time), but also because few English novels go beyond the requirements of plot to write sympathetically of how the scramble for survival in this country is so closely tied to political expediency, greed and crime. (Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games remains a rare benchmark.)
As Abhijit puts together a picture of this world, he quickly comes up against the limits of language. “He understood how clichés were the only thing to fall back on, the complex situation of the different insurgent groups among the Bodos (and the linked deforestation and plight of elephants) would, for example, in a Delhi newspaper, be reduced to mere words.” But “mere words” can sometimes create a place of the imagination and not just fodder for newspaper reports. The novel is rich with the smallest details of local life – how a hunter packs used shotgun cartridges in a bicycle frame to escape the notice of army jawans; how tea leaves are cured and elephants tamed and charcoal made; how a cop who has just mowed down an insurgent politely stops his Bolero to let a villager with her goats pass. This is a contemporary history of life on the Brahmaputra’s north bank of the kind only possible to write through fiction.
But Abhijit is also compelled by loss: the feeling that he was born too late, that the landscape he loved is now a “bygone wilderness”. Heart of Darkness is referenced – that transformative glimpse of something primordial. And there is a sense, even though the British in Assam inaugurated the exploitation of its natural resources, that in some ways things were better then. So along with Conrad’s, perhaps the novel to read in this connection is George Orwell’s Burmese Days, not least because it is set, a century ago, in those very regions of northern Myanmar where the soi-disant revolutionaries described in The Forest Beneath the Mountain travel to receive an education. Orwell picks apart, with savage humour, a society not unlike the one in this novel. The exercise of power has debased everyone – the British conceal their commercial interests behind the lie of the white man’s burden; the colonised contort themselves to avail of the given opportunities. Orwell makes it impossible to harbour even a shred of Raj nostalgia.
Abhijit quotes a historian to say that the absence of a uniform administrative system before the coming of the British meant that after Independence, Assam’s many communities were left with “unbridgeable differences”. Bodo, Karbi, Mising, Assamese, Bengali, Adivasi, Nepali, Bihari, Marwari – these are some of the peoples trying to live together in Assam, holding fast to what are, in some ways, state-given identities, even as they resist the state or recreate it in their own way. But it is the handful of characters at one remove, quietly accepting of their internal exile, like Abhijit himself, who compel most. And that is why fiction is the ideal vehicle to capture this, in some ways, failed society – because it can explore the effect of this failure on something most other genres would disavow: inner life.