Guwahati, Feb 10: A new short story collection by Shehnab Sahin has placed Assam at the centre of Indian historical fiction, moving away from dominant narratives of insurgency and spectacle to focus on everyday lives shaped by colonialism, conflict and social change.
Colour My Grave Purple, published by Niyogi Books, brought together 10 stories set between 1855 and 2019. Rather than offering a linear historical account, the collection explored local voices, intimate struggles and the quieter consequences of power often absent from mainstream histories.
In her author’s note, Sahin, a former civil services officer now working in the international humanitarian sector, rejected the framing of the Northeast as a “problem region” and called for broader representation of Assamese experiences. The stories treated the region as a lived and complex space rather than an abstraction.
The opening story, Two Leaves and a Bud (1855), revisited the early tea plantation era through a British manager, foregrounding land appropriation and labour exploitation beneath colonial authority. Other stories examined the clash between indigenous knowledge and imperial systems, gendered limits of nationalist politics, ethical questions of anthropological observation, and queer self-realisation in post-Independence Assam.
The title story, Colour My Grave Purple, closed the collection by linking personal grief with historical memory, framing remembrance as an act of resistance. Taken together, the book foregrounded Assamese lives across more than a century and a half, challenging narrow narratives and arguing for a more inclusive literary mapping of India.
