Bhupen Hazarika tiol Award for Yeshe Dorje Thongchi

OUR BUREAU

GUWAHAT/ Itagar, June 15: Eminent writer from Aruchal Pradesh Yeshe Dorje Thongchi has been awarded the fifth Bhupen Hazarika tiol Award 2017 by Sarhad, a Maharashtra-based NGO.

Sarhad has been honoring a person from the Northeast for rendering outstanding work at tiol and intertiol level with its most prestigious ‘Bhupen Hajarika Award’ every year since 2012.

The award is aimed at creating a strong bond between Maharashtra and the Northeast. The award consists of Rs 51,000, a memento and a certificate.

In the first year, it was awarded to director Jahnu Barua (Assam), the second year to actor Professor Ratan Thiyam (Manipur), the third year to jourlist Samudra Gupta Kashyap (Assam), and the fourth year in 2016 to musician and singer Lou Majaw (Meghalaya).

Born on June 13, 1952, at village Jigaon in West Kameng district of Aruchal Pradesh, Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi first went to the Government Primary School at Jigaon and then passed his Class X fil from Government Higher Secondary School, Bomdila. He later did his BA from Cotton College, Guwahati and MA from Gauhati University.

Thongchi began his literary pursuit from his childhood days. Although his mother tongue is Sherdukpen, a language spoken by barely 6,000 people, he started writing in Assamese because it was then the medium of instruction in schools in North-East Frontier Agency or NEFA, as Aruchal was earlier known.

While his first poem called Jonbaai (The Moon) appeared in an Assamese children’s magazine by the same me in 1967, he tried his hand at various genres including plays, short stories and novels, excelling in all of them.

Thongchi has so far written about a dozen novels, numerous short stories and plays, all in Assamese, a language over which he has wonderful command. His most important novel is Mau Onth Mukhar Hriday (Silent Lips, Murmuring Hearts) which won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2005, and tells the story of how simple tribal people discover the outside world as they engage in construction of a road into the mountains.

Another novel Sav Kata Manuh (Man who cuts corpses) vividly describes the tradition of how human bodies are ritualistically cut into over 100 pieces before being disposed off in the river.

Thongchi, who writes mostly about little-known communities of Aruchal Pradesh, is said to be the first author to have actually taken their stories to the outside world.

Many of his works have been translated into Hindi, English and other languages. Awards other than Sahitya Akademi that have come his way so far include the Harihar Choudhury Award (Asam Sahitya Sabha, 1970), the Phulchand Khandelwal Samhati Award (Golaghat Sahitya Sabha, 2001), the Bishnu Rabha Award (Asam Sahitya Sabha, 2002), and the Bhasha Bharti Award (Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, 2005).

A civil servant who joined Aruchal Pradesh Civil Service in 1977, he was elevated to the IAS in 1992, and after having put in more than three decades of dedicated service, served first as State Information Commissioner and then as State Chief Information Commissioner till 2015.

Founder and president of Aruchal Pradesh Literary Society, Thongchi not only leads the literary movement in Aruchal, but is also a source of inspiration for hundreds of young writers who want to tell the story of the little-known frontier state to the outside world, Sarhad founder president Sanjay har informed in a press release today.