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Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi started his literary pursuit from his childhood days. Although his mother tongue is Sherdukpen, a language spoken hardly spoken by 6,000 people, he started writing in Assamese because it was then the medium of instruction in schools in North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), as the state was earlier known. A civil servant who joined the Arunachal Pradesh Civil Service in 1977, 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. He earned bachelor in arts from Cotton College, Guwahati and MA from Gauhati University.
He tried his hand at various genres including plays, short stories and novels. His first poem called Jonbaai (The Moon) appeared in an Assamese children’s magazine in 1967. Thongchi has written about a dozen novels, and numerous short stories and plays, all in Assamese language.
His famous novel “Mauna Onth Mukhar Hriday” (Silent lips, murmuring hearts) won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2005. The novel tells the story of how simple tribal people discover the outside world as they engage in construction of a road into the mountains. His other awards includes ‘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 Language, Mysore, 2005).
Thongchi, whose theme is mostly about the little-known communities of Arunachal Pradesh, is said to be the first author to have actually taken their inside stories to the outside world. Many of his works have been translated into Hindi, English and other languages.
Founder and president of Arunachal Pradesh Literary Society, Thongchi not only leads the literary movement in Arunachal Pradesh, 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.