Somnath Batabyal’s Red River opens in 1983, with a television set being delivered to Gopalpur Rajbari, a house in a small village in Assam, on the eve of India’s World Cup final against West Indies. This is pre-liberalisation rural India, and television is still a rare sight. Children run excitedly to announce the arrival to everyone in the village. Kalpana, the head of the household, generously invites the entire village to watch the match together, marking their collective moment of upward mobility and urbanisation in the transition from listening to the transistor to catching live action on a television screen.
The scene has all the ingredients of a great story to be told for years to come – a nail-biting match, an involved audience, a harried housewife trying to keep everyone fed, a family feud promising even more drama. But the narrative quickly shifts from this reassuring familiarity of the domestic to the spectre of violence already haunting the state, pushing the reader into disquiet with a reminder of the horrific Nellie massacre in the February of the same year, and the divisive politics of linguistic and regional identity that threatened the very idea of India implied in the Gopalpur Rajbari’s celebration of the team’s historic win. This taut opening chapter, then, exemplifies the tightrope that the narrative walks between seeming normalcy and its violent collapse.
Turbulent times
At first glance, Red River tells the stories of three families, over a period of approximately three decades. Lucky Ganguly, born in Bangladesh, is sent by her family to sanctuary in India at the time of the 1971 war. Living at her maternal home in Assam, she marries Amol Dutta, a singer in her cousin’s musical troupe, abandoning the possibilities of her Cambridge education for a life of ordinary struggles. Kabir Singh Chaudhary of the Indian army (also responsible for escorting Lucky to safety, from Dhaka to Gopalpur), soldier before all else, wins accolades for his commitment to wiping out the insurgency movement in the North East. Madhob Kalita, headmaster of a government school in the (fictional) village of Moramela, loses his older son to the complex confluence of separatism and army intervention.
Already running parallel to each other, the strands of these stories entwine with the second generation – Samar Dutta, Rana Chaudhary, and Rizu Kalita – now at the same school in Guwahati. In their brief, idyllic interlude at St Joseph’s School, the three boys are a teenage, angsty version of the almost-atavistic Swami and Friends. The dynamic of Samar and Rizu, sworn best friends for life, begins to change with the entry of Rana, the “new boy”, every bit the foil to athletic and self-assured Rizu in a way that bespectacled and nerdy Samar cannot be. Their high school hijinks soon give way to the reality of life in Guwahati in the 90s – bomb blasts, the mushrooming of army outposts, and a pervading sense of fear and distrust, cataclysmically changing the lives of all.
Tellingly, the book’s first chapter is titled “Refugee”. Questions of home, exile, belongingness, and identity run through the text, much as the Brahmaputra runs through its cities and villages. Lucky, despite being a daughter of the Gopalpur house, is deemed an outsider, a “foreigner”. Her son, Samar, growing up in Guwahati, is never allowed to forget that he does not belong: “Samar had been taught his place by this neighbourhood he had grown up in. Milonpur’s older citizens, like his parents, were mostly migrant Bangladeshis (…) Their children were taught not to speak Bengali too loudly, especially in Assamese localities, and not to protest when Assamese kids cheated in games. And never, ever fight them.”
The dangers of the politics of language when used not as a tool of self-assertion but wielded as an instrument of divisiveness are brought home to the reader in the fragmentation of the Dutta family, their lives uprooted over and over again, in an unstinting cycle of exiles. From Gopalpur to Guwahati to the porous fringes of the nation, to Dhaka and thence, to seeming safety and re-invention in London, and back, finally to Assam, Samar remains on the run, caught between the endlessness of leaving and returning, always part refugee, always partly in exile.
The cost of freedom
If Samar is the outsider struggling to fit in, Madhob and Rizu Kalita are another tangled skein of the complex story of Assam. Born to a freedom-fighter father, Madhob believed in the nation and in the contribution of education and community service to the cause of nation-building. His son’s death in an army encounter after the boy had misguidedly attempted to join the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam), coaxes him out of his role as educator and pushes him into the cause of Assamese freedom. His life is spent attempting to find alternate ways of saving the land and its people, finding a solution in the great push of capitalism, believing that while ideology wreaks havoc, money makes people forget ideology altogether.
His son Rizu, separated from home and family in early childhood, has a similar quest, only, instead of an abstract mass of imagined community, he wants to protect those closest to him, often through personal sacrifice. Rana, having followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the army, challenges the tropes of narratives by refusing to be cast as an antagonist in his friend’s struggle against the hegemony of the nation-state. Early in the narrative, Kabir Chaudhury is asked by a Naga elder if the British rule of India was unjust. His affirmative answer provokes the question, “How then can you justify ruling my land, saying that the British left it to you? One thief passed the stolen property to another.” Who does the land belong to, and who gets to live off its resources, is a question the text asks repeatedly.
Considering its wide canvas and its temporal and geographical spread, Red River is a surprisingly compact narrative. Marching to a staccato beat, efficiently cutting through swathes of time, it builds up a composite picture of a people caught in circumstances decidedly out of their control. Its research is meticulous. It carefully pulls together the tentacles of history that connect the Bangladesh Liberation War, the refugee crisis in India, the rise of insurgency and its ties outside of India, the disastrous consequences of the Armed Forces Act of 1953, and the changing economy of the North East. The Brahmaputra, the eponymous red river, similarly connects the fates of the Gopalpur family and the Kalitas, signifying simultaneously the assuredness of home, and the inexorability of bloodshed. The river, we are told, carries tales of its people.
One of the tales this reader would have liked to see a little more of is that of Lucky’s cousin, Geeta, tantalisingly termed “queen of the elephants” at Gopalpur Rajbari. Forest-dwelling and mysterious, Geeta appears at crucial points in the story but remains a shadowy presence and hers is definitely a story that needs telling. There are also other stories, embedded within the larger narrative, stories of star-crossed lovers, that sometimes stretch into the improbable, but as Rana reminds us, borrowing from Tagore, “the truth doesn’t give a damn about the impossible.” Batabyal’s novel, with its unvarnished historicity and its beguiling stories, captures multiple shades of conflict and asks of you, the reader, what is justice, what is truth, and where are they to be found? “A story has to be careful of make-believe,” it tells us, “but truth has no such care”, it confirms.
Red River: A Novel, Somnath Batabyal, Context/Westland.