India, Oct. 31 -- 1You look at Assam before the Ahoms, a period many know little about. Why did you feel this story needed to be told? In December 2021, when I was working at chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma's office, I attended the Asom Divas celebrations in Dispur, honouring Chaolung Sukaphaa, often called the creator of Bor Axom. When I visited his 100-ft-tall statue in Nazira in 2023, a question occurred to me: Was Assam's history really only 800 years old? Something about this did not seem right. I have always been sceptical of official versions of history, particularly what I call "day zero histories", which begin a civilisation's story at a convenient historical milestone, overlooking everything that came before. I began reading inscriptions, chronicles and historical scholarship to investigate what Assam was like before the Ahoms. I felt that if I had so much to learn about my own land, others probably did too. That realisation inspired Land of the Eastern Light. 2How would you respond to readers who may worry that the book is trying to fit Assam's past into a present-day ideological frame? For decades, we have read our past through colonial, Nehruvian and Marxist historiographical frameworks, often treating their interpretations as established fact. Why should a different interpretation immediately be suspected of ideological manipulation? We need to understand the distinction between history and historiography. History is what happened; historiography is how we interpret what happened. We can never reconstruct the past perfectly. We have evidence, and we interpret it through a particular lens. Every historian does this, whether they acknowledge it or not. Yet this has gone unquestioned for some because they dominated the academic and popular understanding of our past. My book uses the same historical evidence but approaches it through a different civilisational lens. My suggestion to readers is simple: examine the evidence, question the interpretation and arrive at your own conclusions. 3The story of Raja Prithu resisting Bakhtiyar Khilji is dramatic. What do the sources say about that episode? The story is remarkable. Bakhtiyar Khilji marched through Kamarupa towards Tibet, only to suffer a disastrous defeat on the banks of the Brahmaputra, near present-day North Guwahati, at the hands of the ruler of Kamarupa. To establish what happened, I triangulated indigenous inscriptions, including Kanhai Boroxi Boa and Gachtal, Islamic chronicles such as Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, and British gazetteers. We remember Khilji for the destruction of Nalanda, and there is even a town named Bakhtiyarpur after him. Yet hardly anyone knows who defeated him. I find that extraordinary....