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…
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