Colour My Grave Purple and Other Stories

Colour My Grave Purple is an unusual anthology of historical fiction from Assam which spans a century of the Northeastern state’s colourful past, evoking a vivid journey from the 1850s to the 2000s. Through stories about the peoples, cultures, ecology and socio-political paradigms of the frontier region, readers will stumble upon a fascinating mix of characters and entities; from occult practitioners and drunk elephants to a British-Naga queen and the Chinese red army. In these stories, Assam will encounter Britain, Japan and China through lived experiences that seamlessly traverse the natural-supernatural dichotomy, while attempting to understand its own identity as a state. Weaving remnants of social unrest, taboos, interspecies conflict and cultural movements into an undulating canvas, Colour My Grave Purple makes an attempt to locate the making of the region, from modern-day Assam to a time that is now a mere memory.