Hometown

A lively and literary account of one of India's most historically fascinating and culturally layered smaller citiesDrawing 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 nerve centre of the large province of Assam and then the capital of 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.