Astorag: Sunset

Astorag (sunset) was first published in Assamese in 1986. It has already been translated into Hindi and published by Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1991. Astorag is about the problems the old face in a society in translation from a traditional to a modern way of living. Embedded in the centre of  Astorag is a drama of guilt and expiation, a drama that admits the emotive-evocative, but with an overtopping of the clinical-diagnostic on the emotive; and this gives the novel a tone and temper unlikely, at first encounter, to be agreeable to conventional expectations. Astorag is a pioneering work of its kind in Assamese because of the genuine attempt to blend the strain of creative-exploratory to that of the clinical-diagnostic. The novel reminds us of the great literatures of the world on the theme of ageing. It reminds us also of the unforgettable lines of T.S. Eliot from The West Land.