Echoes Of Authority, Resistance, And Belonging

Shehnab Sahin’s Colour My Grave Purple is an evocative collection of ten stories that revisit the history of Assam and the wider Northeast over more than a century, from the 1850s to the early 2000s. Drawing on folklore, ecology, political history, and personal memory, the book offers a layered portrait of a region often marginalised in mainstream Indian writing.

Quietly political and deeply personal, the collection is shaped in part by Sahin’s relationship with her late father, a police officer and Assamese writer. His influence surfaces in the stories’ recurring concerns with authority and resistance, belonging and displacement, memory and erasure. The title, which may initially seem macabre, gradually reveals itself as a reflective metaphor for remembrance and the intersections of private grief and collective history.

The stories move through key moments in Assam’s past: the arrival of the colonial plantation economy, the lives of tea garden labourers, wartime encounters and foreign incursions, and periods of cultural and social transition. History is never distant or abstract; instead, large political forces are filtered through everyday lives — British planters negotiating an unfamiliar land, or indigenous communities adapting to imposed systems of power. Sahin’s attentiveness to ecology is especially striking. Forests, rivers, animals, and landscapes function not merely as settings but as active presences shaping and witnessing human experience.

One of the collection’s strengths lies in its range. Some stories are grounded in documented history, including those inspired by Ursula Graham Bower, the British woman who forged close ties with the Zemi Nagas during the Second World War. Others turn inward, engaging with taboo, gender norms, queerness, and generational conflict, particularly in stories set in the 1970s, where individual identity unfolds against social unrest.

The prose is atmospheric and immersive, capable of conjuring entire worlds with economy and restraint. At times, however, the book’s ambition can feel demanding. Shifts in time, tone, and narrative density may challenge readers unfamiliar with the region, and some stories privilege mood over character development, leaving certain emotional arcs less fully realised. The collection resists a single narrative, functioning instead as a mosaic of voices and moments.

It is this mosaic quality that gives Colour My Grave Purple its quiet strength. Bound together by geography and emotional continuity, the stories move across decades with a steady, flowing rhythm, echoing the course of the Brahmaputra. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a plural society shaped by adaptation, loss, and resilience. Sahin avoids nostalgia and exoticisation, offering instead a thoughtful meditation on cultural change and the persistence of the past in the present.

This is a quiet book, and its impact lies precisely there. There are no dramatic monologues or sweeping declarations — only women living, enduring, suffocating, and hoping. The writing is gentle but incisive, revealing its force gradually rather than through spectacle.

From a feminist perspective, the anger it evokes is familiar and restrained rather than loud. It is the slow burn of recognition: women being controlled, silenced, watched and judged by society, by family, and sometimes by love itself. There are no caricatured villains, only the steady workings of everyday patriarchy.

The title story, in particular, stands out for its insistence on agency, even in death, where life has offered little room for choice. This is not a book meant to comfort. It is a book that unsettles, that makes the reader feel seen — and perhaps quietly furious.

With its restrained power and lingering ache, Colour My Grave Purple is a compelling and honest collection, Throughout the book, Sahin blurs the boundary between the natural and the supernatural, drawing on folklore and spiritual belief systems as meaningful ways of understanding memory, loss, and continuity.