Ben Doherty

Foreign correspondent Ben Doherty's first novel is set in Nagaland, a region in the remote north-east of India, close to the border with Burma. The Naga are a tribal people, former head-hunters, who are ethnically closer to Mongols than the rest of India. Doherty's protagonist, Augustine, is a young boy growing up in a Nagaland village. The son of a drug addict and a smuggler, Augustine's life is chaotic and he harbours ambitions to leave for the big city once he's old enough. Once he eventually does so, Augustine encounters the bigotry extended to his people from the Hindu majority, and also feels the incessant tug of home.

Doherty works many themes into this novel: terrorism, racism, the clash of civilisations, the twin scourges of drugs and AIDS, the heavy burden of tribal custom and the interplay of myth and reality. It's beautifully written, with Augustine's progress through childhood and young manhood recounted alongside the story of a romantic engagement that he gets entwined in as a an adult. This is a unique and impressive debut.… (més)

Nagaland is a mountainous state in northeast India, one of three states predominantly Christian, and experiencing delayed economic development due to a long history of insurgency against domination by India. Doherty’s novel explores the conflicts of modernity through the story of Augustine Shimray, a young man torn between tradition and the possibilities of change. Through two parallel narratives, Doherty tells the story of Augustine’s childhood and adolescence in Ukhrul, and of a doomed love with a girl from the village long hostile to his own.

Ukhrul boasts two churches against only one in Tiya across the river, but it is an emaciated village divided by religion into Upper Ukhrul and Lower, depending on which church villagers attended. The ground is hard and unyielding and what little arable land there is, was over-worked and barely subsistent, let alone profitable. Its most imposing structure among the faded grandeur of the churches is the garrison of the Assam Rifles, there to suppress any secessionist insurgency from the NSCN (National Socialist Council of Nagaland). As Augustine finds out later to his cost, any association with anyone suspected of mutiny is perilous.

But Augustine’s most urgent problems are closer to home. He loves his father dearly as a man who tells wonderful stories from Naga’s mystical past, but Luke has brought back an addiction to morphine from his travels across a line on a map to Burma.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/06/01/nagaland-by-ben-doherty-bookreview/… (més)