Why Hannah Lalhlanpuii's first book talks about insurgency from a child’s eyes
Updated On: 19 December, 2022 03:53 PM IST | Mumbai | Nascimento Pinto
In her first book, the Mizoram author tells the story of the 1960s insurgency in the northeast state not through a political lens but a cultural one that brings the people’s story to the fore
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Hannah Lalhlanpuii says the conversation around the Mizo insurgency is very much absent in the Northeast discourse, says the author, is the reason why she believes her book has kind of achieved what she had set out to do. Photo Courtesy: Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest
“My mother was three years old when my grandfather got killed during the insurgency and due to my grandfather’s tragic death, my grandmother continued to develop mental illness,” recounts Hannah Lalhlanpuii. The first-time author’s book ‘When Blackbirds Fly’, which was released earlier this year, delves into the very subject of the insurgency but from the eyes of a child. The Mizoram native says her mother’s family suffered a lot of loss because of the insurgency and she knows of many other families that were affected too. “So, we grew up listening to all these stories of the insurgency and the lives that were affected by it. It has always been there at the back of my head to put out these stories for people,” she adds.
It was for this very reason that the PhD research scholar, who was in Mumbai in November for the Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest, felt it was imperative to write the book. The fact that not many children in Mizoram really knew what their ancestors had faced in the 1960s due to the insurgency was the other reason. “I didn’t intend for it to be a children’s novel,” says Lalhlanpuii, continuing, “When I started writing, I realised we have many political and historical accounts of the insurgency but a majority of them were biased. The reports, accounts and statistics had a political agenda and a blame game about who started it, whose fault it really is.” Using the child as a narrator, she thought the perspective would give “a very unbiased stance” towards the insurgency because “children do not care about politics, they don’t care about the power in place and their perspective is the purest and most unbiased perspective we can get”.
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