As evinced by the stories in Aruni Kashyap’s collection The Way You Want to Be Loved (Gaudy Boy, 2024), Assam has a complicated political and linguistic history with Bengal and the rest of India. The people of Assam were exploited during British Colonization and by the Government of India following independence. Unrest began when the British took control of Assam and employed Bengalis in the administration, leading to ethnic tensions between its indigenous inhabitants and migrant Bengalis. Assam has its own language and script; however, for a long time, Assamese language was not recognized as an official language in India, and Bengali was the language of courts, government, and the medium of education, which led to the neglect of Assamese language and literature. This linguistic hegemony subsumed the voices of the Assamese people and erased their narratives, particularly the history of state violence in the region. Given this context of erasure and violence, Kashyap’s stories about Assamese people— written in English—are a powerful and important contribution to world literature.
The Way You Want to Be Loved was originally published in India under the title His Father’s Disease, and the US edition contains three additional stories. In the stories set in Assam, the army is a solid presence, in the form of army camps, border soldiers, checkpoints, and raids. Family relationships, interpersonal conflicts, and individual desires are dwarfed by the state violence that looms over them. To the people of Northeastern India, the state represents violence, that is both an ongoing daily experience and a collective memory of past atrocities. In spite of the violence, the characters of Kashyap’s stories forge love through community ties, laughter and shared jokes among family members, and passionate, erotic lovemaking in the fertile village landscape. The land and the river awaken and arouse the spirit of the villagers. In “Before the Bullet,” returning home after a year spent at an American university, a young man bicycles slowly because he wants “to smell the forests that the dusty gravel road cut through, and gaze at the light-brown empty paddy fields interrupted only by patches of first-rain grass raising their adamant heads.”
The stories in this collection strain against being co-opted by official state narratives. In “Skylark Girl,” a young Assamese writer named Sanjib is invited to read his story—written in Assamese—in English at a conference at the university in Delhi and must have it translated so that it might be understood by the conference attendees. At the conference, he discovers that stories from Northeastern India are becoming popular in the Indian capital, but Assamese writers are only permitted to narrate two kinds of tales: those of colonial exploitation of Assam by the British or violent insurgencies by the Assamese people. When Sanjib reads his story, a simple folktale about a girl who does not die, the moderator of the panel asks him coldly why they should care about such a story. Sanjib retorts, “I wrote it in Assamese—the reader in Delhi never figured during the composition process.” The people of Assam enjoy the joyful story because it reflects how his people have endured despite the violence committed by the Government of India.
Often, the Assamese characters want to go as far as possible from their homeland out of the simple desire to escape violence. Several stories follow Assamese students who travel to America to study. Like any other foreign students, they experience homesickness and discomfort in a new culture but also find comfort in America as a place of exile. In “Nafisa Ali’s Life, Love and Friendships Before and After the Muslim Ban,” Nafisa is a married Assamese woman working in America as a researcher. Her mother and husband call her every day from Assam, transferring their constant trauma and fear. Seeking escape from the collective trauma that is the fate of her people and searching for joy, Nafisa embraces America as her new community.
The characters of other stories navigate the tension between holding on to their awkward, foreign identities and transforming themselves to assimilate in America. In “Minnesota Nice” and “The Umrikans,” foreign student Himjyoti struggles to understand the American students he encounters, who give him little love and intimacy compared to his community at home. He survives by adjusting his expectations and becoming as guarded as the Americans. When Himjyoti’s mother dies far away in India, he breaks his final connection with home and becomes an American, responding to her death as he imagines an American would. “But you say, like they do here in America, I am fine, can I please have a moment?”
In spite of the constant presence of the army and the shadow of violence, Assam pulsates with love in these stories. The young Assamese characters receive immense love from their mothers, relatives, and neighbors. In response to big tragedies, they laugh together to the point of tears. In “Bizli Colony,” a narrator grieves when his beloved younger brother becomes a drug addict. While visiting his brother in the psychiatric ward, the narrator encounters a lunatic woman who sings badly, while all the inhabitants of the ward make music to accompany her singing. The narrator bursts out laughing as the woman’s ridiculous effort to produce something beautiful and joyful for the others provides the perfect antidote to his own suffering. In “For the Greater Common Good,” when the army ransacks the houses in the village and shoots and kills twenty cows belonging to the village milkman, Prodhan Mahatu, all the villagers gather and clean up the mess of the corpses of Prodhan’s cows. Their collective care soars above anything the army can do.
The stories in The Way You Want to Be Loved document the suffering of the people of Northeastern India, but they also capture their desires, ambitions, and joys. The Assamese characters wrestle valiantly with state violence and destruction, through their resilience, their humanity, and their fierce love for one another. As a Bangladeshi, I had only read about Assam in Bengali novels through the eyes of Bengali writers. Local people in Assam often view Bengalis as infiltrators and illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Once, visiting Assam and Meghalaya, I met a Bengali soldier who was stationed in the region. The poor fellow was depressed and homesick, and he came forward to introduce himself to me. He obviously felt alienated from the region where he had come to serve; while I could only see Assam as a tourist, he could only see it as an outsider. Kashyap’s stories, told through the accounts of the Assamese student, writer, researcher, and villager, made me see Assam on its own terms, and the rest of the world through the eyes of Assam.
