Writer extraordinaire : Mamoni Raisom Goswami

She celebrated her 70th birthday only a couple of weeks ago surrounded by friends and family members in a room in the Gauhati Medical College Hospital where she has been lying in a coma for the last few months after a massive stroke.

Dr Indira Goswami or Mamoni Raisom Goswami - Mamoni "baidew' (elder sister) to thousands of Asomiya language readers, and even those who have read her scintillating works in translation, has left a void in the literary arena that would be hard to fill. Coming just after the death of another icon of Assam, Dr Bhupen Hazarika for whom Assam is still mourning, this is another loss hard to contend with though the prolonged illness of the Jnanpith Award winner may have prepared the admirers for the eventuality.

Though born into a privileged family and educated in a premier English medium school in Shillong, Goswami's writings focused on the suffering of the disadvantaged section of society. She understood the joy and pathos of the common people. Her novels and short stories reflected her empathy for them whether the setting of the plot was Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh or the green landscape of the Brahmaputra Valley. Not for her the chronicling of the lifestyle of the rich and powerful. If at all they appear in her fiction, it is as if to contrast the misery of the other half.

She championed the cause of women throughout her career. Brought up in a conservative Brahmin family, Goswami never stuck to the diktat of social norms, - be it while marrying someone out of the community, or in the way she wrote.

In The Saga of South Kamrup, originally called Une Khowa Howda in Assamese, she chronicles the saga of a young Brahmin widow Giribala who, since the death of her husband, had eaten only rice and boiled pulses and now shocks the society by eating meat surreptitiously.

The defiance of the protagonist Giribala, as she challenges the norms set by society for Brahmin widows in 19th century Assam, is echoed again in Nilkonthi Braja depicting a much later period (the 1960s) in holy Vrindavan. In one of the earliest contemporary novels on the plight of widows in the religious circuit, it reflects on the suffering of thousands of Bengali widows living on the edge.

But Goswami's stories are not just etchings of depression; they also sustain belief in the basic goodness of human beings, though it is constantly challenged by opposite forces. Goswami's style, as she was budding into a promising writer in the 1960s, was branded as 'daring' perhaps because even though a 'woman writer' she was not coy about talking about sex. Her writing has a basic honesty, even when talking about herself. In the autobiographical Adha Lekha Dastavej (Life is no Bargain), she talks openly about her obsession, since she was young, with "the thought of taking (my own) life".

Even though her health was failing towards the end, she was researching relentlessly to write her magnum opus Chinnmaster Manuhto (The man from Chinnamasta), in which she opposed animal sacrifice at the Kamakhya temple. It created quite a controversy. But she always went by her own beliefs when she wrote; that's why they sound so honest.

Goswami's reputation as a Ramayana scholar is well-known. Though she was in Delhi for a long stint as professor of Assamese literature in the Delhi University she never lost touch with her native land. A few years ago, going out of her literary world she took the initiative to try build a bridge between the outlawed ULFA faction and Assam's administration to bring peace to the insurgent ridden land. Because her heart was always in the well-being of the state.

With the demise of Mamoni 'baidew' Assam and Asomiya literature have lost a writer and humanist extraordinaire.

(Ranjita Biswas is editor of Trans World Features and a writer and translator who hails from Assam. She has translated the works of Indira Goswami)