Colour My Grave Purple and Other Stories

Colour My Grave Purple is a powerful collection of ten short stories that reimagine the history of Assam and India’s Northeast through intimate, human narratives that span more than a century—from 1858 to 2019. Written with lyrical restraint and historical depth, the book moves away from the dominant trope of insurgency to foreground lived experiences, quiet resistance, memory, identity, and survival in a region too often relegated to the margins of national storytelling.

At its heart, this book is both deeply personal and profoundly political. Inspired by the author Shehnab Sahin’s relationship with her late father—himself a police officer and an Assamese writer—the stories examine dualities that define the region: authority and rebellion, tradition and change, belonging and displacement. The title itself, seemingly macabre, becomes a meditation on remembrance, inheritance, and the ways personal grief intertwines with collective history.

The stories traverse pivotal moments in Assam’s past: the arrival of the colonial plantation economy, the exploitation and resistance of tea garden labourers, the trauma of foreign invasions, the negotiations of identity during social and cultural movements, and the evolving relationship between humans and the region’s rich but vulnerable ecology. From British planters grappling with an unfamiliar land to indigenous communities navigating imposed systems of power, the narratives reveal how historical forces shape everyday lives.

One of the collection’s strengths lies in its range. Some stories are outward-looking, rooted in documented historical episodes—such as the life of Ursula Graham Bower, a British woman who forged deep alliances with the Zemi Nagas during World War II. Others are inward and intimate, exploring taboo, gender norms, queerness, and generational conflict, such as a young man grappling with his identity in 1970s Assam. There are also haunting stories that blur the line between the natural and the supernatural, capturing the region’s folklore, spiritual beliefs, and the ever-present tension between human ambition and nature’s will.