Review Of Anjum Hasan’s ‘Hometown: Shillong In The World’

While Shillong is widely known as the Scotland of the East, much of India remains unfamiliar with its history, culture, politics and social dynamics. In Hometown: Shillong in the World, Anjum Hasan takes us beyond the familiar image of a picturesque hill station and explores a city that is home to the Khasi, Jaintia and other communities, yet, deeply connected to the wider world. Through its history and changing social landscape, she shows us how Shillong has witnessed and been shaped by some of the significant changes in the nation.

Hasan begins her account of Shillong through modern poetry, which offered her solace from the city's divisive socio-cultural attitudes, particularly what she calls an “obsession with the ethnic”. Yet, Shillong also offered a certain “sweetness and light”, inspiring Hasan and her peers to start a literary magazine, Lyric, and drawing her towards poetry. The book deliberately distances itself from both its poetic elements and tribal culture, which Hasan believes take away from the city's “modern, deeply assimilated character”.

Hasan also explores the city through the experience of walking, examining how purpose and pleasure shape our relationship with urban spaces. She reminds us that walking is a privilege for some but a daily necessity for others. It also turns people into witnesses to a city's changing history. Recalling the life of Bransley M. Pugh, a scientist, teacher and politician, Hasan quotes him: “I never knew that I was a tribal perhaps until the Constitution of this country was being hammered out.” His words reveal the prejudices he encountered among fellow Indians. He also observes, “A tribal can only watch and learn. But those were the days when we were all learning.”

From tracing how the Gorkhas were brought from the Nepali community to Shillong to fight against the Khasis, Garos and Jaintias, to documenting children who grow up with an inclusive attitude towards other communities, Hasan captures the city's changing social dynamics. She also records how the Nepali population faced hostility and exclusion, both within society and through the use of state power. The insider-outsider divide is far from being a thing of the past. The contemporary tensions between the Khasi and Bengali-speaking communities in Meghalaya further reveal the contradictions of what is often imagined as the heavenly Shillong.

While exploring Khasi matriarchy and matrilineality, Hasan points to the community's distinctive social practices like children inherit their rights through their mothers, women have the agency to choose their partners, and marriage outside the clan is encouraged as an “outward attitude”. However, these practices do not necessarily translate into gender equality. Hasan notes that the sex ratio continues to favour men. While women are visible as doctors, entrepreneurs and government employees, they remain largely absent from political leadership and powerful corporate positions.

It is both interesting and disappointing that Khasi resistance against the British remains largely unacknowledged in mainstream Indian history. At the same time, as Hasan notes through references to the work of several historians, there is a tendency within the region to magnify such achievements and turn historical figures into community heroes. While discussing Tirot Singh, she highlights this contradiction. Despite receiving little recognition for his resistance, his courage found an unlikely acknowledgement in the words of the colonialist Hamlet Bareh, who wrote, “The war drums howled out and the patriots declared they were afraid neither of bullets nor of starvation.”

As religious fundamentalism gained ground in Europe, the Bible and the figure of Christ became central to people's understanding of the world, with the devil seen as a presence in everyday life. Hasan shows how Shillong absorbed these influences through the arrival of denominations such as the Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Christ. These pastor-led initiatives shaped the community through faith, but also brought the complexities of religious conversion. The colonial missions introduced Christianity among the Khasis, bringing vocational skills and creating a space of dissent against those who envisioned a Hindu rashtra. The conversion movement became so important that many converts sacrificed much to sustain the missions. It also contributed to the growth of the Khasi language, which absorbed elements from Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic.

Through Ahmed Hossain's memories and her own reminiscences of her childhood, Hasan recalls a Shillong that has since changed. The religious conflicts of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, summed up in Hossain's words, “Shillong emptied out”, continue to echo in the present. Hasan also documents how the British acquired land by negotiating only with the chiefs, leaving ordinary people out of the process. While the Khasis considered Shillong Peak sacred and Shillong their kingdom, colonial land policies gradually changed the city's landscape. As Hasan writes, “The combined legacy of this sleight of hand and the survival of traditional land-ownership systems is that Shillong ended up having the most involuted municipal arrangements of perhaps any Indian city.” Its beautiful spaces became increasingly distant from ordinary people, while traditional Khasi houses with thatched roofs gradually gave way to newer cottages with corrugated iron roofs.

Hasan also examines the Bengali Kheda Andolan, or Bengali expulsion movement, through which Assamese was sought to be imposed as the universal language of Assam, leading to violence against Bengalis who opposed it. In Shillong, the fear of a similar imposition pushed schools towards English, with Khasi, Bengali, Assamese and Hindi taught as second languages. The city also witnessed anti-Bengali riots in the 1960s. Over time, while the plains followed their own path towards political autonomy, the hills remained caught in their own contradictions.

Hometown is an important book for understanding not only Shillong's beauty but also the historical complexities that have shaped it. Through extensive research and careful observation, Hasan presents Shillong in all its contradictions and reminds us that a city is configured perfectly and in detail not only by its people and places but also by the time, moments and events that leave their mark on it.

 (Kabir Deb is a writer, reviewer and translator based in Karimganj, Assam)