Hometown: Shillong in the World

A lively and literary account of one of India’s most historically fascinating and culturally layered smaller cities

Drawing on detailed personal testimonies, scholarship and autobiography, Hometown brings alive Shillong's unique character: resulting from its past as a British-created hill station and its later twentieth-century life as the capital of the large province of Assam and then Meghalaya.

Through themes like nostalgia for imagined utopias, aspirations and confusions of the city's young, the rich music scene, politics and violence, the growth of both evangelical religion and consumerist desire, the book documents one of the country's least written about urban cultures. It presents, largely through the voices of its inhabitants, Shillong's astonishing and shapeshifting amalgam of native Khasi, Christianised Western and mainstream Indian culture.

Combining deep research with rigorous reporting, Anjum Hasan skilfully maps the lives and histories that have shaped Shillong. Her magnificent and meticulous lifestory of the city illuminates larger questions of identity, modernity and belonging in contemporary India.