Insurgency, Violence, and the Transformation of Assam's Social and Political Landscape: A Literary Study

Abstract

The body of literature emerging from the decades of militancy in Assam has become crucial to understanding and interpreting the region’s shifting social and political discourses since the inception of the Assam Movement. The political turmoil caused by such a violent uprising became the source of utter misery and destitution for the people. Through this paper, an attempt has been made to study the works of select authors, including Arupa Patangia Kalita, Jahnavi Barua, Mitra Phukan, and Aruni Kashyap, to understand the consequences of these incidents in the social and political context as reflected in the literature of the period. We propose to study the theme of transformations and alterations in familial life in fiction set during the period of insurgency and its aftermath in Assam. The fervour of Assamese Nationalism was deeply seated in the hearts of the Assamese intelligentsia and the students of the state, and hence the violent uprisings of the period became an agitation of the masses affecting every household. The systemic violence of the period gave a new direction to the functioning of society, and we are interested in tracing these changes through a literary study of the fictions written about the period.