(Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series) Amit R. Baishya - Contemporary Literature From Northeast India - Deathworlds, Terror and Survival-Routledge (2019) (Z-Lib - Io)

i
Contemporary Literature from

Northeast India
The Northeast Indian borderlands, a cultural crossroads between South, Southeast

and East Asia, constitute an important post-colonial exception to the narratives of
nation, troubling the common perception of India as an ostensibly liberal regime.
This book is the first to consider the representations of the effects of political
terror and survival in contemporary literature from Northeast India. Fictions
from this polyglot region offer alternative representations that show the post-
colonial nation-state to engage in acts of aggression that parallel colonial
regimes. The militarization of everyday life and the subsequent growth of
cultures of impunity have left a lasting impact on ordinary existence in this
border zone. As in the much more widely discussed case of Kashmir, the
governance of the northeast region is not characterized so much by the
management of life, the domain of what Michel Foucault calls biopolitics, but
rather around the preponderance and distribution of death, what the post-colonial
critic Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics. Not surprisingly, along with
Mbembe’s theorizations, the influential works of the Italian philosopher, Giorgio
Agamben, on “bare life” have provided fruitful pathways to a study of the
sovereign politics of death and political terror in this region. The author draws
upon the conceptual literature on political terror and sovereign power through a
reading of Anglophone fictions alongside Assamese fictional narratives (all
published after 1990), but shifts the onus from the “why” of violence to the
“how” of lived experience.
An original study of contemporary survivalist fictions that explores survival
under conditions of civil and military threat, this book is a valuable contribution
to the field of contemporary global literature focusing on cartographies of death
and sovereign terror, and post-colonial literature.
Amit R. Baishya is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the

University of Oklahoma, USA. He specializes in post-colonial literature and
cultural studies.
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Contemporary Literature from Northeast India
Deathworlds, Terror and Survival
Amit R. Baishya
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classicalstudies/series/RMCS
iii
Contemporary Literature
from Northeast India
Deathworlds, Terror and Survival
Amit R. Baishya
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Amit R. Baishya
The right of Amit R. Baishya to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or
in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Baishya, Amit R., author.
Title: Contemporary literature from Northeast India : deathworlds, terror and
survival / Amit R. Baishya.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series:
Routledge contemporary South Asia series ; 127 | Includes bibliographical
references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021966 | ISBN 9781138597341 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780429486937 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Assamese fiction—20th century—History and criticism. |
Assamese fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Indic literature
(English)—India, Northeastern—20th century—History and criticism. |
Indic literature (English)—India, Northeastern—21st century—History and
criticism. | Politics and literature—India, Northeastern—History—20th
century. | Politics and literature—India, Northeastern—History—21st
century.
Classification: LCC PK1564 .B25 2019 | DDC 891.4/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021966
ISBN: 978-1-138-59734-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-48693-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
v
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
List of abbreviations ix
1 Necropolitical literature from Northeast India, the everyday

and survival 1
2 The mayabi state: narratives of torture, sexual violence and

disability haunting 50
3 Of hill spaces: survival in duress in no-man’s zones in

Assamese militant fictions 92
4 Survivance and supplements: revenants and animality in

“The Last Song” and “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali” 138
5 Being-as-following: modalities of survival and relationality

in An Outline of a Republic and Felanee 169
Index 204
Acknowledgements
I began thinking about this project in the summer of 2007 when I picked up
Raktim Sharma’s novel Boranga Yan purely by chance at a bookstore in Guwa-
hati. Over the years, the project has benefited and grown from discussions with
and counsel from various people. At the University of Iowa, I’d like to thank
Priya Kumar, Claire Fox, Barbara Eckstein, Paul Greenough, Virginia Domin-
guez and Garrett Stewart. I would also like to thank Young Cheon Cho, Alessan-
dra Madella, Sangeet Kumar, Li Guo, Anirban Mukhopadhyay, Sucheta Mallick
Choudhuri, Harish Naraindas, Minkyu Sung, Choonghee Han, Jin Kim, Francis
Dube, Jose Molina, Ned Bertz, Swarnavel Pillai, Vinu Warrier, Balmurli Natra-
jan, Vidya Kalaramadam, Christiane Orfaliais, Hsinyen Yang, Jongin Chang,
Arpita Kumar, Sushmita Banerji, Dennis Hanlon, the Goswami family and the
Basan family for the friendship, booze and food, and the intellectually stimulating
conversations. A wonderful summer at the School of Criticism and Theory (SCT)
in 2008 put me down the Agamben–Mbembe path. I feel privileged to have been
part of Elizabeth Povinelli’s wonderful seminar, and for the wonderful intellectual
comrades I met there: Ricky Varghese, Puspa Damai, Amrita Ghosh, Bimbisar
Irom, Desmond Jagmohan, Karine Cote-Boucher, Sally Booth, Gladys Illaregui,
Ana Hontanilla, Vinod Balakrishnan, Omri Grinberg, Vasudha Bharadwaj, Brad
Flis and Andreea Marculescu. Listening to Jay Bernstein talk about torture was a
powerful experience that has lingered over the years.
Over the years, colleagues and compatriots have helped me push my interroga-
tions further. At Ball State University, I thank Adam Beach, Pat Collier, Joyce
Huff, Rai Peterson, Debbie Mix, Nihal Perera, Jeff Brackett, Joe Marchal,
Carolyn McKay, Melissa Adams-Campbell, JoAnne Ruvoli, Pam Hartman,
Harald Leusmann, Shashi Naidu, Matt Hartman, Mark Neely, Jen Erickson, Jon-
athan Pierrel, Anca Topliceanu and Nick Kawa for the friendship and camaraderie.
Michael Smith and Karla Kirby were wonderful friends. At the University of
Oklahoma, I thank Kenneth Hodges, Aparna Nair, Deonnie Moodie, Waleed
Mahdi, Joanna Rapf, Jim Zeigler, Rita Keresztesi, Joshua Nelson, Daniela Garo-
falo, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Kim Wieser, Honoree Jeffers, Gabi Rios, Will Kurlin-
kus, Ralph Beliveau, Vincent Leitch and Dan Cottom for being such warm and
supportive colleagues. A special shout-out to Su Fang Ng and Catherine John
for their support. Graduate and undergraduate students at both institutions have
vii Acknowledgements vii
been the unfortunate recipients of my muddled forays into these questions –
thanks for always keeping me on my feet. The project also benefited from conver-
sations with Raktim Sharma, Arupa Patangia Kalita, Dhrubajyoti Bora, Jiban
Krishna Goswami, Imran Hussain, Rita Chowdhury and Siddhartha Deb.
Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers – their comments and suggestions
made this a much better work. Dorothea Schaefter showed tremendous confidence
in this project from the beginning – my sincere thanks to her. The project has also
benefited from comments, questions and support from senior scholars, colleagues
and friends like Suvir Kaul, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Yasmin Saikia, Sanjib Baruah,
Suvadip Sinha, Auritro Majumdar, Ania Loomba, Amritjit Singh, Vinay Dharwad-
ker, Nalini Iyer, Yengkhom Jilangamba, Parismita Singh, Ankur Tamuli Phukan,
Duncan McDuie-Ra, Dolly Kikon, Aruni Kashyap, Babyrani Yumnam, Sreyoshi
Banerjee Sarkar, Sanjib Pol Deka, Ranjan Sharma, Imran Ahmed (of Cambridge
Publishers), Uddipana Goswami, Xonzoi Barbora, Arupjyoti Saikia, Rajeev Bhat-
tacharyya, Beppe Karlsson, Sean Dowdy, Arko Longkumer, Nandini Dhar,
Gautam Basu Thakur, Swargajyoti Gohain, Atreyee Gohain, Madhusmita Bora,
Iku Pathak, Mitul Baruah, Tara Amrapali Basumatary, Bonojit Hussain, Arupjyoti
Saikia, Avishek Parui, Chad Haines, Nilanjana Mukherjee, Sandhya Devesan,
Saikat Ghosh, Nabina Das, Nirmala Erevelles, Bhakti Shringarpure, Rakhee
Kalita, Sumana Roy, Tanmoy Sharma, Haripriya Soibam, Dhrijyoti Kalita, Purba-
sha Mazumdar, Shalim Hussain, Rini Barman, Anwesha Dutta, Aditya Mani Jha,
Uddipan Dutta, RK Debbarma, Arnab Dey, Papori Bora and Manjeet Baruah.
Dr. Hiren Gohain gave some very valuable suggestions during the closure of the
project. Special thanks to GJV Prasad and Neeladri Bhattacharyya for re-orienting
me towards the world of scholarship as a student in Jawaharlal Nehru University.
JNU is under attack now daily by right-wing forces. This book is my homage to
that great institution for providing me a home to stoke my intellectual curiosity
and a safe space that helped overall growth. I could not have been what I am
now if it were not for JNU. May the idea and spirit of JNU live long and prosper!!!
I want to especially thank two mentors separately. First, Priya Kumar was the
best adviser one could ask for. She helped me through some tough times as I was
adjusting as a lonely graduate student in Iowa. Priya may not remember this, but
it was a conversation at an Iowa City Thai restaurant on a cold, depressing winter
day in 2005 that convinced me to stick with a Ph.D in Literature – if it were not
for that conversation, I would probably have packed my bags and left academia.
Yasmin baideu has been a wonderful mentor in the post-Ph.D years helping me
navigate the thickets of a tenure-track job and publishing an academic book. This
book could not have developed without her support and encouragement over the
past few years.
My brother, Anirban Baishya, and sister-in-law, Darshana Sreedhar Mini, have
been pillars of support and wonderful interlocutors over the years. Radu and
Mariana Marculescu, thank you for welcoming me into your lives. Bijan Ray-
chawdhuri (Bulu mama) passed before this book was published – I wish I could
have downed whisky at the Crow Pub in Glasgow in celebration with you.
Danny and Bedanta, you are always missed. Harsha Phukan has been a wonderful
viii Acknowledgements viii
friend over the years. Saswata Bhattacharyya remains the best ex-roommate
(Mr. Cho apart). Thanks to my legions of uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and
friends from Guwahati and elsewhere – I haven’t mentioned your names, but
you know who you are. Sushi, our little furry companion, has enriched our
lives. We thank her for her presence daily.
I want to dedicate this book to Andreea Marculescu and my parents, Anima
and Dwipen Baishya. My parents have looked forward to the publication of
this book for a long time. I hope the final product makes them happy. My dad
was a wonderful “research assistant” as well. Andreea and I met ten years ago
at SCT. We have come a long way since. But what hasn’t changed is that she
has always been my first and last line of support. This book is as much hers as
it is mine.
An earlier version of the chapter segment on An Outline of a Republic was pub-
lished as: Baishya, A (2015). “The Act of Watching with One’s Own Eyes:
‘Strange Recognitions’ in An Outline of the Republic” (pp. 603–20). Interven-
tions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Vol. 17, Issue 4) © Routle-
dge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2015. Reproduced with permission.
An earlier version of the chapter segment on Aulingar Jui was published as:
Baishya, A. (2017). “Dismembered Lives: Narrating History’s Footnotes in Aulin-
gar Jui” (pp. 161–80). In Y. Saikia & A. Baishya (Eds.), Northeast India: A Place
of Relations © Cambridge University Press 2017. Reproduced with permission.
ix
Abbreviations
CL Contemporary Literature from Northeast India

KG Kalantoror Gadya
BY Boranga Yan
AJ Aulingar Jui
SDBD “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali”
1
1 Necropolitical literature from

Northeast India, the everyday
and survival
States of terror: necropolitical zones in Northeast India

On July 23, 2009, Chongkham Sanjit, a 27-year old youth, was shot dead in
daytime by an armed contingent of the Manipur Police Commandos (MPC) in
Imphal, the capital of the northeast Indian border state of Manipur. Sanjit was
taken into a room by the commandos in broad daylight; about an hour later
his bullet-ridden corpse was ushered out. Sanjit’s ostensible crime: he was
accused of being a member of a banned Manipuri independentist outfit, the
People’s Liberation Army (PLA).1 Manipur, like many other states in India’s
northeast, is under the aegis of a state-security act – The Armed Forces Special
Powers Act (AFSPA). Passed on September 11, 1958, by the Parliament of
India, the AFSPA empowers the Indian security forces to arrest anyone without
a warrant, to search any place that supposedly harbors suspicious elements, and
to fire upon or to use force even to the point of causing death against any
person or assembly of persons who are deemed to have broken the law in these
so-called disturbed regions. The military is also provided legal immunity for
any act of extra-juridical killing in these “disturbed” areas. The AFSPA is techni-
cally against Article 21 (the right to life) and Article 22 (protection against arbi-
trary arrest and detention) of the Indian Constitution. But this act has been in
effect in seven states of the Indian northeast (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Naga-
land, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya) in varying degrees since 1958.2
On August 8, 2009, one of India’s leading investigative magazines, Tehelka,
carried a story by its correspondent, Teresa Rahman, on Sanjit’s “encounter
killing,” accompanied by photographs. Two statements in Rahman’s article illus-
trate the paradoxes of the exercise of sovereign power. Sovereign power, per
Michel Foucault, is the right of a sovereign entity to make live and let die. At
the beginning, Rahman asks: “How can a State justify such a war against its
own people?” At the article’s end, an Imphal resident observes: “Life in
Manipur is like a lottery. You are alive because you are lucky.” Rahman’s statement
emanates from the classic liberal belief in the rule of law. William Schuerman says
that the rule of law “renders state action predictable and makes an indispensable
contribution toward individual freedom . . . (it) protects against arbitrariness by
helping to guarantee that like cases be treated alike” (4–5). By providing a standard
2 Necropolitical literature 2
of generality, clarity, public accountability and stability, the rule of law guarantees
the life and welfare of its citizenry.
In contrast, the Imphal resident’s comment betrays the consciousness that the
performance and reproduction of sovereign power rests precisely in such excep-
tional decisions over life and death in such zones of death. As Vishnupad
argues, such spectacular performances of sovereign power betray a “psychotic”
logic where the subject is submitted to the “impossible, whimsical jouissance of
the other.” Categories like “life” and “living” seem to be continuously shadowed
by unpredictability, arbitrariness and risk. In Achille Mbembe’s words, these
zones begin to resemble deathworlds: “new and unique forms of social existence
in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them
the status of living dead” (“Necropolitics” 40). These zones are not characterized
so much by the management and governance of life – the domain of biopower
(Foucault History of Sexuality; Society) – but rather around the preponderance
and distribution of death, what Mbembe calls “necropolitics.” Death, as Jasbir
Puar writes, is “decoupled from the project of living” (Terrorist Assemblages,
33). Mbembe’s theorization of the necropolitical – one of the fundamental concepts
that underpins this book – is concerned with figures of sovereignty whose “central
project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of
human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations”
(“Necropolitics” 14). These figures of sovereignty, Mbembe cautions, should not
be confused with expressions of madness or unreason; instead, they offer us alter-
native genealogies of sovereignty and subjectivity that depart from the dominant
philosophical discourse of modernity that bases its “romance of sovereignty” on
“the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling author of his or her
own meaning” and on the twin poles of self-institution and self-limitation (13).
If Rahman’s statement reveals an investment in the romance of sovereignty inher-
ent in the philosophical discourse of modernity, the Imphal resident’s comment
gestures towards this generalized instrumentalization of human existence.
The northeast Indian borderlands – a conglomeration of eight different states
and a cultural crossroads lying in between South, Southeast and East Asia –
have been governed as an exception to the rule of law in India.3 Although talk
of “conflict resolution” is very much in the air, emergency laws that deal with
this so-called disturbed area are still in place. The AFSPA, for instance, was
extended in Assam for six months on February 28, 2018.4 (I must clarify that
the AFSPA isn’t the focus of this book, but functions as an example of militarized
law and a starting point for this inquiry as it has received a significant degree
of critical attention in the field of Northeast Indian studies). The AFSPA is a
reworking of the Armed Forces Special Powers Ordinance promulgated by the
British in 1942 to suppress the nationalist Quit India Movement – a colonial
law that has had an afterlife in post-colonial times (Akoijam 484). Northeastern
states like Nagaland and Manipur have been administered under the ambit
of such military laws almost continuously since India’s independence, with
states like Assam, Tripura and Mizoram also facing the brunt of such operations.
A. Bimol Akoijam writes
AFSPA, rather than being a response to the ‘armed revolt’ in the North East,
is . . . a reified expression of the militarism that characterises the policy of the
Indian government towards the region from the foundational years of the
Republic of India.
(48)
Such militarized forms of rule in the post-colony are legacies of colonial pol-
icies of governing this region as a frontier zone inhabited by so-called wild
people that needed to be pacified.5 Sanjib Baruah writes in “AFSPA: Legacy
of Colonial Constitutionalism” that the decision to introduce the law “can . . .
be understood in the context of the resilience in postcolonial India of . . . the
legal framework of colonial constitutionalism where emergency and emergency-
like powers had a predominant role.” Imperial policing practices, he continues,
“especially the use of the military to assist civil power,” and administrative
habits persisting from the mentality of the pacifying a hostile “frontier,” have per-
colated down to the post-colony. The “authoritarian accent” (Sanjib Baruah,
Durable, 61) of the Indian state draws from the resilience of such emergency
regimes that traverses colonial/post-colonial potentates. One of the toxic results
of this resilience has been the production of a ubiquitous culture of militarism.
The prevalence of a culture of militarism also spawns its spectral counter-image.
Begona Aretxaga calls this a “phantomatic mode of production” – a structure
in which state terror and anti-state violence “produce both the state and terrorism
as fetishes of each other, constructing reality as an endless play of mirror images”
(229). Here the nervous and paranoid state obsessively engages in criminal and
paralegal operations, and in the process, appropriates attributes it usually associ-
ates with terrorists and criminals. Simultaneously, this fetishistic feature of polit-
ical terror also describes many of the militant organizations fighting against the
Indian state that are also disciplinary and necropolitical entities in their own
right, often conducting various forms of punitive, coercive and disciplinary
actions against the populations inhabiting the region, while at the same time
maintaining complex relationships of conviviality and paternalistic control with
the local people.
The focus on exceptional forms of necropolitical violence and resistance in the
region has been a fruitful pathway for research in the last two decades in Northeast
Indian studies. However, this tendency to conceptualize the northeast as a perma-
nent localization of the state of exception, especially when filtered through the
Agambenian lens of the camp as the nomos of the modern, can be a reductive
approach.6 An example of such reductionism is found in Ananya Vajpeyi:
My reading of the predicament of the citizens in the northeast is that they feel
reduced to what . . . Agamben . . . called ‘bare life.’ . . . If the AFSPA is the
ban under which the sovereign power of the Indian state has placed all of the
northeast, then the exception to the rule of law that is spatialized in the north-
east should be thought of as a camp.
(39–40)
While the exposure to death exists as an everyday reality in many parts of the
region, the camp metaphor oversimplifies and homogenizes a complex range of
modalities and spatio-temporalities of necropower operative here.
Furthermore, by privileging the post-colonial state as the singular topos of sov-
ereignty, and correspondingly, the overarching entity that spatializes the state of
exception through the nomos of the camp, commentators like Vajpeyi seem to
subscribe to the modern mythos of what Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak critique
as the conjoined “romance” of sovereignty and the decisionist, autonomous
subject (Who Sings 54–55). Such works often downplay the fractured nature
in which governmentality is wielded and its effects experienced or endured in
the region. Jeffrey Nealon is correct about the ideological appeal of Giorgio
Agamben: “[H]e everywhere reinforces the sense that sociopolitical power actu-
ally is what its boosters claim it is: top-down, to be feared, eradicating virtually
all resistance and controlling nearly all life” (26). Indeed, the incessant shuttle
between bare life and the centralized node of the sovereign, between citizenship
and abandonment, with the camp functioning as the spatial nomos of the modern,
leads to an impoverished vocabulary for understanding necropower, states of dis-
possession and its aftermaths.
In comparison, Mbembe’s works haven’t found sustained uptake in Northeast
Indian studies when compared to Agamben. Mbembe’s work offers a complex
and wide-ranging discussion of figures of sovereignty and of the cartography of
necropolitical deathworlds, ranging from plantations and colonies to settler colo-
nialism in Palestine and economies of war in Africa. Such considerations of other
necropolitical topographies is necessary if we want to move away from the figure
of the camp as the nomos of the modern. In any case, the “hygienic, defensive”
topos of the camp is an elemental space of a provincialized narrative of logistical
modernity (Bratton 19) that did not develop in a unilinear fashion everywhere.
Vajpeyi’s statement that all deathly topographies in the region are analogous to
the camp does not consider the variable processes and temporalities of abandon-
ment and the divergent necropolitical techniques deployed against populations in
topographies such as the no-man’s zones between India and Myanmar explored in
Chapter 3 of this book.
Mbembe’s work, both in “Necropolitics” and beyond, also facilitates an
engagement with other forms and figures of sovereignty beyond the apparatus
of the territorialized state-form.7 The latter formulation aligns with critiques of
normative models of sovereign power that focus on the grounded form of the
state, which implies an isomorphism between territory and sovereignty. For the-
orists like Foucault and Agamben, sovereignty can still be located back to a
unitary center that distributes power in a “top-down” manner – the topos of the
modern state-form. These models of sovereignty need to be reworked for the
study of zones of fragmented sovereignty like borderlands in Northeast India. In
such zones, the state apparatuses compete with other sovereign entities, such as
the independentist group, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN),
and functions as an ambiguous presence.
Zones like the Indo-Myanmar borderlands fall within what Willem Van Schendel
in “Geographies of Knowing” calls “Zomia,” and which James Scott radicalized
as one of the last shatter zones where populations who traditionally fled and
resisted being governed by states found refuge.8 Mbembe’s work on borders
and boundaries share affinities with Scott’s argument about shatter zones.9
Scott’s work is a fundamental challenge to Eurocentric ideas of sovereignty
and state formation as it shifts the perspective to those populations often casti-
gated as “uncivilized” because they did not manage to establish a rooted, territo-
rialized idea of the state. Mbembe’s critique of the relationship between
sovereignty and territory in the case of Africa echoes some of Van Schendel
and Scott’s critiques:
[T]he history of boundaries in Africa is too often reduced . . . to the frontier

as a device in international law . . . [or] to the specific spatial marker consti-
tuted by the boundary of a state. . . . [When] the connection between state
and territory is seen as purely instrumental, the territory . . . [makes] sense
on the political level only as the privileged space of the exercise of sover-
eignty and self-determination, and as the ideal framework of the imposition
of authority.
(“At the Edge” 263)
The isomorphic view between state and territory that Mbembe critiques does
not fit the framework of split sovereignty in many locales of Northeast India.
Many scholars have advanced such critiques of borders and border-making in
the region (Van Schendel Bengal, Baruah “Between South and Southeast”, Phan-
joubam The Northeast Question). In such borderland spaces, the organization,
navigation and distribution of space and resources cannot simply be viewed
“as the preserve of . . . executive power alone, but rather one diffused among a
multiplicity of – often non-state – actors” (Weizman 7). I am not trying to roman-
ticize flexible sovereignty in the way Scott sometimes seems to do. However,
it’s important to think about how the state becomes a competitor for sovereign
power and an ambiguous presence in such regions, although its long shadow
still looms large.
Although Mbembe talks about kinds of life and forms of death in the shadow
of the necropolitical beast’s regime (“What is Postcolonial Thinking?”), a perusal
of his work shows that the accent tends to fall more on the thanatographic dimen-
sion and the work of the negative than on the question of the persistence and con-
tinuation of forms of life. His focus, as Puar writes, is on the “anatomic, sensorial
and tactile subjugation of bodies” (Terrorist Assemblages, 35). Mbembe’s work
ultimately gives us a view of how necropower subjugates, but rarely considers
the quotidian means through which subjects survive in the shadow of the necro-
political.10 The result of this tendency is the lack of attention to the quotidian, the
mundane and the ordinary in the almost exclusive focus on myth, the domains of
the symbolic and the spectacular choreographies of violence and death.
Scholars engaging with necropolitics have recently begun making calls for a
turn to the everyday and the quotidian. Puar says that Mbembe’s theorizations
“may cohere through a totalizing narrative about the suffocation of life” that is
offset by the fact that “the biopolitical will to live plows on, distributed and
redistributed in the minutiae of quotidian affairs” (Terrorist Assemblages, 33). In
this vein, Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kunstman and Silvia Possoco write:
Thinking through necropolitics on the terrain of queer critique brings into

view everyday death worlds, from the perhaps more expected sites of
death making (such as war, torture or imperial invasion) to the ordinary
and completely normalized violence of the market . . . the distinction
between war and peace dissolves in the face of the banality of death in the
“zones of abandonment” . . . that regularly accompany contemporary demo-
cratic regimes.
(3)
I align with this focus on the “unremarkable, the ordinary, and the mundane” in
necropolitical worlds. Such moves entail a slowing of temporal scales and closer
attention to the multiple spatialities of abandonment, with the necessary proviso
that “temporalities of speed and slowness are . . . convivial, not antagonistic”
(Puar, The Right to Maim, 11).11 To achieve this, we need to put more pressure
on the multiple ways and temporal scales in which populations and subjects are
killed, let die, subjugated or abandoned. Moreover, we also need to pay closer
attention to the distinctly ordinary ways through which populations survive and
endure states of dispossession and abandonment.
This turn towards quotidian temporal scales and spatialities through which
death and abandonment are diffused and distributed has a bearing for Northeast
Indian studies, a fact that has haltingly been taken up in the critical scholarship.
The prevailing situation of continued militarism and the cultures of impunity it
has spawned in the region has left a deep impact at the level of everyday life.
For instance, speaking about the effects of acts like the AFSPA, Yengkhom Jilan-
gamba writes:
One among the . . . casualties of militarism is that it incapacitates. The AFSPA

has produced precisely such a culture of violence and impunity, the hallmark
of which is the inability to trust. One cannot trust family members, relatives,
neighbours, colleagues, and . . . strangers. This is the surest way to break a
society, a collective.
While I align to a large extent with Jilangamba, especially his exploration of the
breakdown of trust in the social realm and intersubjective reciprocity, I pause
and make my own turn at the word “incapacitates.” While I agree that being-in-
terror often incapacitates, what I am interested in exploring are both the impacts
of terror that keeps bodies locked in place or place them (sometimes imperceptibly)
in motion, and, more importantly, how subjects endure and survive in such milita-
rized states. For scholars in the Schmittian–Agambenian trajectory in Northeast
Indian studies, the question of survival beyond emergency and the move beyond
incapacitation is often equated with the principle of (spectacular) bodily resistance.
The analysis also tends to focus on some major and iconic points of reference – for
example, the killing of Thangjam Manorama and the subsequent “naked protest”
by the Manipuri Imas and the (now suspended) hunger strike by Sharmila
Irom.12 This move of equating survival with embodied resistance follows a narra-
tive trajectory where the latter category emerges as a counter-move to a form of
originary form of injustice perpetrated by sovereign power. Thus, it seems as if
resistance against necropower necessarily takes the form of what Banu Bargu
calls a “weaponization of life,” for instance through a hunger strike.
Spectacular bodily resistance through which one transcends the everyday,
however, is not the only form through which survival can be encountered or imag-
ined. In Contemporary Literature from Northeast India (henceforth CL), I move
away from analyses of the semiotics of spectacular accountings of resistance and
focus on quotidian, diffused, and uneventful narrative manifestations of modes
of survival. Hence, Jilangamba’s fleeting reference to “trust” and its dilution are
examples of everyday categories that interest me here. CL, thus, focuses on ordi-
nary manifestations of life, living and survival as figured in contemporary (post-
1990) Anglophone and Assamese necropolitical literary fictions by Dhrubajyoti
Bora, Raktim Sarma, Anurag Mahanta, Temsula Ao, Jehirul Hussain, Siddhartha
Deb and Arupa Patangia Kalita. Such necropolitical literary narratives have been
underrepresented in the exploration of this issue in this knowledge-field. By
descending into and probing the minutiae of everyday life, and helping us slow
down the vertiginous and oftentimes incapacitating scale of the speedy encounter
with sovereign terror, such necropolitical literary narratives facilitate a critical con-
tention with contingencies engendered by deathly conditions and with modalities
through which ordinary populations survive. Such literary narratives do not repre-
sent the eventless, “as though it seeks as it were, what is not happening”; rather, as
Stanley Cavell says, it “is interested rather in the uneventful, seeking, so to speak,
what is not out of the ordinary” (“The Ordinary” 193). The focus on the unevent-
ful as the locus of survival in necropolitical deathworlds, I wager, is a primary
characteristic of the literary works I study here.
Moreover, CL also marks a new turn in studies of literature from Northeast India
through its focus on necropolitics, the everyday and survival. Of late, a few con-
siderations of political terror from a trauma studies perspective have appeared
(see Zama; Nongkynrih and Ngangom). The output here is very slender, and I
will mark my differences from the trauma studies approach in Northeast Indian lit-
erary studies in a later section of this chapter. The other prevalent trend is a literary
sociology (Misra, Literature and Society; Manjeet Baruah, Frontier) that considers
the development of cultural production within the matrix of the historical develop-
ment of questions of cultural identity, subnationalism and ethnicity. While I draw
on such works wherever necessary, this historico-sociological method is not the
approach I adopt here.
While focused on a particular geographical locale in South Asia, CL joins a
growing list of works in post-colonial studies that explore cultural production
on life and living in the shadow of the necropolitical.13 However, most of
these works on the necropolitical circumscribe their critical gaze within what is
unproblematically considered within the domain of the “human,” aligning with
the near exclusive focus on human suffering in post-colonial theory. Closer atten-
tion to colonial/post-colonial bio/necropolitics show that the distinctions between
“life” and “nonlife,” animatedness and non-animatedness, lives worth living and
lives rendered valueless have always been shifting, mutable categories. There-
fore, taking cues from the recent turn towards the nonhuman in post-colonial
studies, CL extends the inquiry beyond the domain of what is oftentimes circum-
scribed within the “human” to also consider the impact of necropolitical terror on
animals, objects and things (with the proviso that “humans” are also treated
sometimes like animals, objects and things). While the mutable, porous catego-
ries of the human and the nonhuman co-constitute each other, necropolitical
terror impoverishes both domains simultaneously.
Furthermore, a common feature that binds the literary works I study is the pre-
ponderance of figures or materializations of nonhuman entities and of disabled
characters. I study the almost ubiquitous resort to the symbolic and lived dimen-
sions of nonhumanness and disability both as reductionist narrative moves and as
concrete embodiments of modes of life, living and survival in necro-zones. On
the one hand, I query what happens when life captured by forms of necropower
is reductively compared to that of animals, things and of forms of disability; on
the other hand, contending with the lived, embodied and affective experiences of
what is initially presented as disabled, animal or thing-like, I also unearth ordi-
nary modes of survival, endurance and agency through which figurations of
life escape, endure and survive beyond the constrictions imposed by necropower.
CL, thus, develops its claims by locating itself at the critical intersections between
post-colonial studies (especially the necropolitical and nonhuman turns), disabil-
ity studies, anthropological considerations of the everyday and the ordinary, phe-
nomenological studies of orientation and corporeality, contemporary feminist
relational philosophy, and Northeast Indian studies.
At the very outset, I would like to highlight the five central questions animating
CL. These questions echo and resonate with varying intensities through the texture
of the book; I will keep returning to them as touchstones for my inquiry: How can
we contend with modalities of survival, living and dying in necropolitical locales
that cannot be subsumed under well-known critical narratives about embodied
resistance? How is the everyday unmade in states of terror and how is it remade
as violence descends into the ordinary? How is the question of survival in necro-
political locales simultaneously connected with the human subject’s relations with
the nonhuman domain? Do representations of disability and animality – common
as both metaphor and materiality – offer us alternative ways of thinking about the
question of embodiment and survival, especially given that disability studies and
animal studies emphasize the strategic and tactical will to survive? Finally, how
does literary fiction enable contentions with different imaginaries of the political
and the ethical in necropolitical locales where life is under threat of being captured
by law? The rest of this chapter will probe these questions and elaborate terms
and concepts like the everyday, the ordinary, phenomenology, endurance, gift, sur-
vival and figuration that provide the essential tool kit for the literary analyses con-
ducted later.
The everyday and the ordinary
The everyday is used in two senses in CL: as a rupture caused by the extreme pres-
sures of the terrorizing event(s), and as a more dispersed, diffused and mundane
form where the event and the quotidian cannot be separated clearly. As far as
this second usage is concerned, there are multiple connections between the two
categories of the event and the everyday that result in both an unmaking and
remaking of worlds. The accent will be heavier on the first sense of the everyday-
as-event in Chapter 2, where I read Dhrubajyoti Bora’s novel Kalantoror Gadya
(The Prose of Tempest, 1996), and the first part of Chapter 3 where I consider
Raktim Sarma’s militant novel Boranga Yan (The Song of the Forest, 2007). Begin-
ning with my discussion of Anurag Mahanta’s novel Aulingar Jui (Harvest of Fire,
2007) in the second half of Chapter 3, and continuing with the discussion of short
stories and novels by Temsula Ao, Jehirul Hussain, Siddhartha Deb and Arupa
Patangia Kalita in the subsequent chapters, the onus will shift more towards the
remaking of worlds and survival after violence “descends into the ordinary” (Das,
Life and Words).
Significantly, the field of Northeast Indian studies has recently seen a turn
towards the analysis of the everyday. In their co-authored book, Joy Pachuau
and Van Schendel focus on ordinary dimensions of photography to show
“local agency in the creation of vibrant contemporary societies that have little
to do with obsolete ethnographies as they have to do with the security gaze”
(4). Makiko Kimura’s work on the Nellie massacre of 1983 focuses on the
local memories of the incident of violence and focuses on “ordinary people”
and the “agency of the rioters” (3). Dolly Kikon’s works on “foothill” cultures
(“Difficult Loves”; “Tasty Transgressions”) explore the embedded vocabularies,
practices and grammars of the everyday. Duncan McDuie-Ra writes in Northeast
Migrants in Delhi that “Academic and policy literature on the Northeast is still
dominated by attempts to explain the causes of violence rather than analysing
the ways this violence is experienced, normalised, and contested” (17).
McDuie-Ra’s laudable critical move – I focus on him here because he is also
one of the major contributors to studies of the exception in the region – is pred-
icated on a shift from the why of studies that look at the causes of violence to a
focus on the how of lived experience. However, a careful perusal of McDuie-Ra’s
work shows that the category of the everyday remains unarticulated theoretically.
For McDuie-Ra, the category of the everyday seems to be defined as a move
away from the exceptional. Moreover, his work focuses more on migration
from the region into mainland India, as opposed to a focus on the minutiae of
everyday life experienced by populations who have lived or are still living in
states of terror in the region. I align with the temporal aspects of his critique:
“Scholars and policymakers continually discuss the ways India has changed,
but analysis of these dynamics is rarely extended to the Northeast region . . .
obscuring an analysis of everyday life” (Northeast Migrants, 17). However,
everyday life seems to be understood here only through the lenses of flux,
rapid change and the contemporary. What about modalities and inconspicuous
temporalities of everyday existence in the recent past that extend and continue
in the present? While what McDuie-Ra says about the experience, normaliza-
tion and contestation of violence should be studied further through the very
innovative lenses of migration and movement that his work has initiated,
what of everyday contestations of and negotiations within contingencies of
sovereign terror and, most crucially, modes of endurance and survival in necro-
political zones and situations of abandonment? Do we have to abjure the excep-
tion to reach the everyday or can we rethink the quotidian within states of
emergency?
To initiate an inquiry into the everyday in states of terror and its two-pronged
manifestation in CL, an attunement to the double sense of the term by way of ety-
mology is necessary. As Stuart Elden writes, the everyday (French: le quotiden)
means both “the mundane . . . but also the repetitive, what happens every day”
(3). The element of the mundane, that which is too close to hand and uneventful
to be available easily as an object of thought, and the repetitive, which underpins
notions such as habit and the familiar, combine to create a sense of a habitable
everyday world for the subject. Contiguously, where should we look for the ordi-
nary? Das writes:
[T]he notion of the ordinary takes us to an important characteristic of everyday

life . . . its very ordinariness makes it difficult for us to see what is before our
eyes . . . we need to imagine the shape that the ordinary takes. . . . Depending
on how we conjure the everyday, the threats to the everyday will also be seen
in relation to this picture of the ordinary . . . if we see the ordinary as habitation
within a world in which we dwell in a taken-for-granted way as an animal
lives in its habitat, then the threat might be seen as our existence becoming
ghostly (Hamlet), losing that natural sense of belonging. . . . Framing all
these pictures of the everyday is the idea that everyday is a site on which
the life of the other is engaged.
(“Ordinary Ethics” 71–72)
While I discuss literary narratives in the next section, I find it significant that Das
uses terms like “shape” and “pictures” and literary works like Hamlet as illustra-
tions of how to imagine the contours of the ordinary. Das asks us to pay close
attention to localized narrative formations of existence and belief that are close
to hand, and that persist and provide resources for the remaking of worlds
despite the hit of necropolitical terror. These located narrative grammars of quo-
tidian existence enable us to reconsider the everyday as “the site on which the life
of the other is engaged.” Through representations of the everyday and the ordi-
nary, the literary fictions I study enable contentions with forms of being-with
others, both human and nonhuman (although, in this essay, Das is talking
about humans only). This is the crucial ethical dimension of this project.
To make a turn towards a relevant local history for CL, I suggest that Das’s
comments can be fruitfully conjoined with Yasmin Saikia’s discussion of the
concept of “manabata” (humanism) in places like Assam. Saikia locates the
genealogy of “manabata” in the pan-South Asian confluence between local forms
of Sufi Islam and Bhakti mysticism that facilitated “linkages between multiple
religious communities” (9). Interpreting this term through the lens of neighborli-
ness, Saikia writes that local ethical concepts like manabata have helped
“develop a vigilant outlook not to lose awareness of the Other, because it is in
the other’s well-being that the survival of the self is possible” (13). Indeed,
this conjoint mode of caring for the other’s well-being is at the root of the
ethical attitudes manifested in a text like Kalita’s Felanee. If Felanee functions
as an allegory of a fractured, yet still possible, ideal of multiethnic amity in
Assam, it is represented by the titular character’s manabata, her capacity and
desire to care for the other’s well-being.
If being-with others is a crucial dimension for survival and continuity, the
everyday is also subject to unmaking and ruination in states of terror. This refer-
ence to ruination lead me to the work of the philosopher, Jean Amery, and the
reworking of his critical framework in the reflections of the moral philosopher
JM Bernstein. These formulations by Amery and Bernstein are my primary
resources for a consideration of the everyday-as-event. In his reflections on
torture, the philosopher, torture victim and concentration camp survivor Amery
writes that the moment the first blow lands on the victim in a scenario of
torture, s/he loses something called “trust in this world.” This notion of “trust
in the world,” Amery continues,
is the certainty that by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the

other person will spare me . . . that he respect my physical, and with it
also my metaphysical being. The boundaries of my body are also the bound-
aries of my self.
(28)
Drawing on Amery, Bernstein argues that trust is the ethical substance of every-
day life. Beneath the “ever-shifting surface of routine and variation,” everyday
life, Bernstein argues, is full of terrible risks (226). What makes trust a fundamen-
tal relation of everyday life is our original vulnerability to others, which is usually
masked by a dense network of intersubjective and social relations and dependen-
cies. Bernstein develops this idea further by borrowing the term “second person”
from Susan Brison, a philosopher and survivor of rape, who says that images
of personhood are “essentially successors, heirs to the other persons who made
them.” Bernstein expands this to argue that a subject can:
find a world at all only by establishing reassuring relations with others that
enable her to have reflective confidence that . . . others are vulnerable beings
like her, not would-be sovereigns who would count her as nothing . . . it is
through reconstituting conditions of connection and sharable habitation
that a . . . version of trust is possible, which in turn makes ordinary life
more or less possible.
(122)
The first issue worth highlighting is that of sovereignty and the perverse dimen-
sion of the scenario of recognition in a situation of bodily harm like torture.
Drawing on Amery’s Bataillean reading of sovereignty, Bernstein says that
extreme events like torture makes the torturer experience himself as an absolute
sovereign. His absolute autonomy, his sense of overarching power, arises from
the experience of turning the other before him into nothing. On the flip side, the
tortured witnesses the absolute sovereignty of the torturer with a sense of amaze-
ment. As Amery writes:
If from the experience of torture any knowledge at all remains that goes
beyond the plain nightmarish, it is that of a great amazement and a foreign-
ness in the world that cannot be compensated by any sort of subsequent
human communication. Amazed, the tortured person experienced that in
this world there can be the other as absolute sovereign, and sovereignty
revealed itself as the power to inflict suffering and to destroy.
(39)
This sense of amazement engendered by sheer powerlessness and the breaching

of bodily boundaries, encapsulates how a picture of a familiar world assumes
menacing dimensions after the world-shattering hit of terror.
Amery’s theses also have immanent within them a theorization of the tempo-
ralities that structure everyday life that Bernstein expands further. While part of
our confidence in our everyday world emerges reflectively from the awareness
that others are as vulnerable as us, Bernstein argues that trust also has a “predic-
tive” dimension – the “blind confidence that, for example, the standard causal
laws will continue into the future as they have in the past, and further that
events have causes, that things can be explained” (112). The key Ameryian
passage that highlights this is:
What one tends to call “normal life” may coincide with anticipatory imagi-
nation and trivial statement. I buy a newspaper and am “a man that buys a
newspaper.” The act does not differ from the image through which I imag-
ined it, and I hardly differentiate myself personally from the millions who
performed it before me. Because my imagination did not suffice to entirely
capture such an event? No, rather because even in direct experience everyday
reality is nothing but codified abstraction. Only in rare moments of life do we
truly stand face to face with the event and, with it, reality.
(26)
This “anticipatory imagination” is nothing else but the predictive sense of trust
that enables us to navigate our social worlds with confidence. To return to the
question of the “second person,” we navigate our social worlds forgetting the
fact of this basic dependency on others. The expectation of help from others is
taken as a given. Amery suggests that this expectation of help emerges from
our relationships to pain and its connections to primary dependencies. Children
often appeal to parental figures for the mitigation of pain. Bernstein calls this “a
material a priori of everyday life.” Bernstein continues:
As children we expect each discomfort, sickness, injury, hurt, each pain to be

tended to and removed by our parents. Because infants and small children are
helpless . . . then for them the reason-for-action aspect of pain immediately
and necessarily passes to the adult caregiver. Hence, the original intelligibil-
ity of pain for the child is relational, a turning toward the parent in the expec-
tation of relief.
(101)
Acts of dehumanization like torture and the habitation of quotidian necropolitical

worlds force us to experience the existentially devastating situation that we may
be helpless at any time, and potentially be reduced to situations of primary depen-
dency. With that sense of helplessness sinking in, our trust in the world begins to
break down.
This intersubjective dimension of the unmaking of the everyday by terror is
conjoined here with an analysis of the banal and ritualized practices of the
state and sovereign apparatuses, and the ways in which they exude affective
states like terror and indifference. My inquiry is influenced especially by anthro-
pological studies of rituals of terror, bureaucracy and everyday statist practices.14
Let me elaborate this point not through a detailed review of the anthropological
literature on state terror, but via a discussion of two examples of state practices in
Northeast India. The first example relies on terrifying spectacle for its effects, and
the second represents something more inconspicuous and mundane, yet devastat-
ing. If torture is one of the extreme events that unmakes the everyday, the terror it
evokes combines with other statist rituals like whisking the suspect away at night
in the presence of others. I provide two documented instances of the ritualized
dimension of the act of picking up a person anonymously at night – a frequent
occurrence during a notorious period of “secret killings” (gupto hatya) in
Assam’s recent history.
A recurring issue in the public sphere in Assam, but rarely discussed in the
pan-Indian context, the term “secret killings” refers to a spate of extra-judicial
killings between 1998 and 2002 that targeted mainly militants, kinsfolk and sus-
pected sympathizers of the militant organization United Liberation Front of
Assam (ULFA). Ostensibly a retaliatory measure deployed by the SULFA (sur-
rendered ULFA militants) as a counter to the acts of violence committed
against them by their former comrades, and aided and abetted by the state
machinery, the secret killings were a brutal counter-insurgency tactic that fol-
lowed a recurring pattern. As the authors of the fact-based account Secret Killings
of Assam write:
In the name of search operation [sic], SULFA members, aided by security

forces, would enter the house of the victim at midnight, pick up their
target and then the bodies would be found the next morning. In some
cases, they would forcibly enter and gun down everyone who came on [sic]
the firing line.
(Mrinal Talukdar, Utpal Barpujari and Kaushik Deka 8)
Dismembered body parts of people who were made to “disappear” turned up in

the rivers, beels (swamp) and embankments across Assam. These killings also led
to a cycle of revenge killings by the ULFA.
Notice the repetition of a similar scenario in two accounts of such sudden
arrests at night recounted in The Secret Killings of Assam:
1 Ananta Kalita’s disappearance: “In one of such deadly nights, unknown

assailants knocked at the door of Kalita. They came in two vehicles. Cov-
ering their face with black hoods, the assailants, numbering more than 10,
dragged Kalita out of the [sic] bed and drove away.”
(33)
2 Jyotish Sarma’s disappearance: “Around 11 in the night, they [Sarma’s

family] woke up hearing somebody knocking on the door and calling out,
‘Sarma-da, Sarma-da.’ As they opened the front door, they saw around six
to seven people standing outside, their faces covered in black. As soon as
Sarma came out, one of them started questioning him. . . . Without waiting
for answers, they caught hold of him and told him that he would have to
show someone’s house at Chandmari . . . they dragged Sarma away to a
Gypsy standing about 30 yards from the gate of the compound. The Gypsy
did not have any number plate.”
(59–60)
About the ritual dimensions of arrest, Allen Feldman writes:
Arrest and interrogation are both symbolic and instrumental modes of hier-
archization. The analysis of arrest and interrogation forces one to read the
state not only as an instrumental and rationalized edifice but as a ritual
form for the constitution of power.
(86)
This ritualistic dimension of power is evident in the scenes described. There is a

strong emphasis in both accounts on the physical appearance of the abductors.
The faces covered with “black hoods” not only ensure anonymity, but also
convert a banal everyday scenario – such as answering the door at night – into
a phantasmagoric theater of terror. Discussing the use and functions of such
forms of apparel in Northern Irish prisons, Aretxaga elaborates the spectacle-
like dimensions of such actions. She writes:
All prisoners were struck by the riot apparel, which seemed to serve more the
purpose of striking terror than that of protecting the officers. Since prisoners
were assaulted one by one in the small space of a cell, the paraphernalia of
military dress, batons, shields, dark visors and dogs were clearly unnecessary.
(111)
In the case of Assam’s “secret killings,” the “black hoods” served the function of
hiding the identity of the abductors; however, the apparel and the time of the
abductions also reveal the excessive dimensions of these displays of power.
The abductors appear literally as emissaries of death.
Furthermore, the time of the night (“around 11.00”), the phantasmatic appear-
ance of the abductors who emerge from and meld into the inky darkness, the ter-
rifying nature of their anonymous collectivity buttressed by the brute power they
wield, the mixture of the absolutely banal (the abductors address Sarma with the
honorific da, meaning elder brother) with the threat of violence, and the lack
of clear markers of identification in the object-world (no “number plate” on
the Gypsy) combine to convert this scenario into a terrifying universe where
a volley of questions rebound without definitive answers for the victims or the
witnesses. Who are the anonymous masked men who knock familiarly on
doors late at night? Where are they taking the abducted to? Would the abducted
person ever be seen alive again? Whom should the witnesses inform or ask
for help or information? What crime are the victims accused of? Would they
become bullet-ridden cadavers or dismembered body parts? Moreover – a
crucial question for the people who hear about such events – whose turn would
it be next?
These scenarios almost seem “magical” and extraordinary. The co-authors of
Secret Killings in Assam, in rather unfortunate terminology, describe the ordeal
of the only survivor of these abductions, Ananta Kalita, as something that
would “put to shade any Hollywood thriller” (32). While this equation with the
“thriller” banalizes Kalita’s terrifying ordeal (he survived after being tortured
and shot in the head), it gestures towards the excessive dimensions of this ritual-
istic event that spills beyond normalizing categories in everyday life. Moreover,
such events and their accounts, as Michael Taussig reminds us in The Nervous
System, “drive the memory deep within the fastness of the individual so as to
create more fear and uncertainty in which dream and reality commingle” (27).
Is it a coincidence, then, that one of the most powerful representations of the
secret killings in Assamese – Arupa Patangia Kalita’s searing novella Arunimar
Swades (Arunima’s Country) – describes these masked gunmen as “mayabi
hatyakari” (magical killers)?15
My second example of statist practices that perpetuate terror and a sense of
indifference to the well-being of the other in a necropolitical locale concerns
the seemingly mundane act of waiting. One of the most banal experiences of
encounters with the bureaucracy – an action that strikingly illustrates the
usually unequal contest over time between the state and its citizenry – is the expe-
rience of waiting. In recent years, there has been a sharp uptick in studies on the
spatio-temporal and social dimensions of waiting (see Corbridge, Jeffrey, Hage).
As a key dimension of modernity, anthropologists have focused on “the increasing
regimentation and bureaucratization of time” and the “multiple settings – such as
traffic jams, offices and clinics in which people waited” (Jeffrey 3). Hage argues
that the “multiple and ambivalent forms in which agency takes shape in relation to
waiting render it a unique object of politics” (2). Who is to wait, what waiting
entails, and how to wait organizes waiting within a sociopolitical system. While
specific modes of waiting are culturally contingent, Hage also suggests that
there is a “political economy” of waiting. There is both a “demand” side (the
person who waits) and a “supply” side (the person who provides what one is
waiting for). Waiting is also a “function of technology” that a society deploys
as a mode of regulation.
The representation of the devastating effects of bureaucratic indifference that
makes subjects wait for justice will be evident in my analysis of a rape narrative
in Bora’s Kalantoror Gadya in Chapter 2. The victim of sexual assault, Sombori,
and the other supplicants from her village shuttle between bureaucratic and
doctors’ offices with the intention of reporting the sexual assault – but they are
repeatedly thwarted and made to wait. An analysis of the spatio-temporal dimen-
sions through which bureaucratic indifference is produced through this narrative
is crucial. Michael Herzfeld says that time is a “social weapon” in bureaucratic
encounters. Daily bureaucratic rituals hinge on a suppression of time. Herzfeld
points out the doubled characteristic of such daily rituals:
First, the sheer tedium of constantly having to “come back next week”
deadens one’s sense of the passage of time, especially in it repetitiousness.
Second, the ability to demand this level of obedience expresses the bureau-
crat’s control over the client’s time, making the latter unimportant by com-
parison: “Can’t you see I’m very busy?”
(167)
This struggle over time is key to the acknowledgement or denial of the client’s
humanity. Conterminously, clients also occupy a symbolic space in bureaucratic
encounters. Fusing Michel de Certeau’s idea of place as a locus of intersection
between person and value, and Mary Douglas’s notion of pollution as matter
out of place, Herzfeld argues that when clients are treated like dirt, they are
denied access to a certain moral topography. It would be a mistake though to
see clients simply as helpless pawns in a machine or to view their modes of
waiting simply as a marker for a lack of agency. They continue seeking entry,
often making claims or critiques of the inherent idea of the “national family” as
a “spatial entity” (Herzfeld 167). However, bureaucratic officials also have the
power to exclude individuals or groups as “outsiders,” as matter “out of place.”
This is what happens to subjects like Sombori eventually, thereby exacerbating
her breakdown of trust in the world.
If the everyday can be unmade by terror practices and rituals, it can also be the
site for remaking. To differentiate the dispersed processes of the remaking of the
everyday from the event of unmaking, let me return to a portion from Amery I
quoted earlier: “Only in rare moments of life do we truly stand face to face
with the event and, with it, reality” (26). Amery’s use of the word “event” is sig-
nificant here because it uses this concept in terms of something unforeseen and
unprecedented. This rare encounter with the event strips away the illusory protec-
tion of a subject’s trust in the world and forces her to encounter the trauma of the
breakdown of the symbolic order.16
The anthropologist Veena Das’s works provides us a very different handle on
the concept of the event and its relation to the everyday. In a study of Das’s “con-
ceptual vita,” her student Bhrigupati Singh outlines a fundamental change in her
use of the concept from her book Critical Events to Life and Words. In the former
book, the concept of the event is used in the sense of a radical break. This sense is
outlined in Das’s use of François Furet, “who defined the French Revolution as
an event par excellence because it instituted a new modality of historical action
which was not inscribed in the inventory of that situation” (quoted in Singh 89).
By the time of the publication of Life and Words, the use of the concept of the
event had changed fundamentally. Already, as Singh writes, the analysis in Crit-
ical Events moved away from the initial conceptualization of the concept to “the
less dramatic, less newsworthy aftermath of the event” (93). Life and Words,
Singh continues, “intensifies this dispersal, shifting the event, to understand
how the event grows out of and returns to everyday life” (93).
This intensification and dispersal of the event is evident in the first chapter of
Life and Words titled “The Event and the Everyday.” Crucial here is Das’s use of
the ocular metaphor of the picture of a descent into the everyday. Das talks here
about how our theoretical impulse “is often to think of agency in terms of escap-
ing the ordinary rather than as a descent into it” (7). Considerations of the wea-
ponization of life in necropolitical universes seem to visualize agency as an
“ascent into the transcendent” (15). This picture of descending into the minutiae
of the everyday and finding resources for survival there enables us, as Cavell says
in his Foreword to Life and Words, to observe how “life . . . knit[s]itself back into
some viable rhythm pair by pair” (xiv). Das’s indebtedness to the ordinary lan-
guage philosophy of Wittgenstein rerouted via Cavell is evident when she com-
pares Agamben to Cavell later in the chapter:
Seen from the perspective of Agamben it is the fact that a biopolitical state
can strip someone to what is bare . . . life that produces bodies that are kill-
able with impunity. In Cavell, one glimpses the dangers as if stitched into
everyday life when one withholds recognition from the other, not simply
on the grounds that she is not part of one’s own community but that she is
not part of life itself. This is not a question of a reasoned denial but a
denial of accepting the separateness of the other as a flesh and blood creature.
(16)
The key here is to grasp what “life” connotes. For Foucault, Agamben and
Mbembe, life is the primary biopolitical substance that is managed, abandoned
or killed by the state or the agencies of bio/necropower. But, for Das, the idea
of form of life “suggests the limit of what or who is recognized as human
within a social form and provides the conditions of the use of criteria as applied to
others” (15–16). As her gloss on Cavell emphasizes, the problem lies more on
the side of what is not “considered part of life” and the correlated denial of
accepting the separateness of the other. The problem of what constitutes life is
not just a dispute over form, but over the ideas constituting pictures of life
itself. Thus, when witnesses turn their eyes away from the sight of insects stream-
ing out of a living human body in Boranga Yan, it is an assault on what funda-
mentally constitutes pictures of life. The “blurring between what is human and
not human shades into a blurring of what is life and what is not life” through
these pictures of the ordinary that emerge through a descent into the everyday
(Life and Words, 16).
Correspondingly, as my turn towards disability studies and the nonhuman later
will show, through such descents what is categorized as “nonlife” from one per-
spective often demonstrates possibilities of continued life and vitality. Thus, the
snail’s way of being in Hussain’s “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali” gestures towards
a different form of life – one not captured within humanist and anthropocentric
frames of reference. Unearthing potentialities of such alter-formations of life
and living is one of the central aims of this book; however, my approach
departs from Das’s attention to ordinary language in two ways: a) a phenomeno-
logical analysis of the unmaking and the remaking of the everyday, and b) a turn
towards disability theory and theories of the nonhuman.17
I use phenomenology in three distinct, albeit interrelated, senses. First, phe-
nomenology is a close analysis of “lived experience, the intentionality of con-
sciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role
of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds” (Ahmed, Queer
Phenomenology 2). The key concept, as Sara Ahmed says, is that of orientation,
or how emotions and bodies are “directed” towards or turned away from objects.
To return to Amery, his treatment of the everyday already has this sense of dis/
orientation embedded within it. Let us reconsider Amery’s depiction of everyday
reality as “codified abstraction.” Everyday reality as a dense network of “codified
abstraction” orients my body towards objects in a certain way. Thus, the image of
me buying a newspaper orients my daily action of going to buy a newspaper. This
act seems habitual and familiar because this orientation “towards” the object closes
the gap between the imagination and the event. I perform this action almost as a
form of automatic action, without putting a lot of thought behind it. A familiar
world comes into being through a repetition of this act. As Ahmed writes:
Familiarity is what is, as it were given, and which in being given “gives” the
body the capacity to be oriented in this way or that. The question of orien-
tation becomes, then, a question not only about how we “find our way” but
how we come to “feel at home.”
(Queer Phenomenology, 7)
Necropolitical terror destroys this sense of givenness: the body loses its sense
of feeling at home. Just prior to the passage on the newspaper, Amery writes:
When an event places the most extreme demands on us . . . there is no longer
any abstraction and never an imaginative power that can approach its reality.
That someone is carried away shackled in an auto is “self-evident” only after
you read about it in the newspaper and you rationally tell yourself, just at the
moment you are packing fliers: yes, of course, and what more? It can and
will happen to me someday. . . . But the auto is different and the pressure
of the shackles was not felt in advance. . . . Everything is self-evident and
nothing is self-evident as soon as we are thrust into a reality whose light
blinds us and burns us to the bone.
(25–6)
The encounter with a world-shattering event strips away the protective casing that
comes with our body being at ease with the world. The orientation of my eyes
towards an object fixes it in space; torture is like a “blinding light” that paradoxically
renders me visionless even when I possess ocular capacity. Similarly, the skin is a
protective casing against the world; pain flays this protective surface, and “burns us
to the bone.” Furthermore, what Amery emphasizes here is the excessive nature of
acts of terror. We may have read about it in newspaper reports, we may have con-
templated its “self-evident” nature, but the lived reality exceeds the spacing between
the imagination and the event. The “pressure of the shackles was not felt in
advance” – the actual experience of it sequesters my body in a way I could never
have imagined. It is this experience that makes me aware of the boundaries and
boundedness of my body. That’s how the terrorizing act assumes a disorienting
effect – what is “given” or seems self-evident turns menacingly inside out. The illu-
sory safety of corporeal distance offered by codified abstraction is unmade.
The second way in which I deploy phenomenology entails a close analysis of the
visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, haptic, aural and kinesthetic modes through
which bodies navigate the world. Notions like familiarity, intimacy and the habitual
are crucially dependent on these sensuous modes through which bodies navigate
the world. I take recourse not only to phenomenological treatments of embodiment
and the senses (Jonas, Bachelard, Kolnai) and notions of alter-embodiment
emerging from disability studies (Garland-Thompson, Taylor, Kolb, Paterson and
Hughes), but also anthropological treatments of sense-apparatuses (Daughtry,
Taussig, Ochoa Gautier). Taussig in The Nervous System encapsulates this
concern with sensous apprehensions of the world for the subject:
But what sort of sense is constitutive of this everydayness? Surely this sense
includes much that is not sense so much as sensuousness, an embodied and
somewhat automatic “knowledge” that functions like peripheral vision, not
studied contemplation, a knowledge that is imageric and sensate rather
than ideational.
(141–42)
Consider, for instance, how we orient ourselves when we are left alone in a pitch-
dark room that we have lived in. The central organ of the body that guides us is
usually the hand. The expressive organ of the hand makes objects and things
“palpable, legible, audible” (Bachelard, “The Hand Dreams” 104). This haptic
navigation of the world, with the hand in this case, is predicated on an “embodied
and somewhat automatic ‘knowledge’” of where things and objects are – a form
of “peripheral vision.” Furthermore, to connect this to orientation, our navigation
of the room is “not so much about the relationship between objects that extend
into space (say, the relation between the chair and the table); rather orientation
depends on the bodily inhabitance of that space” (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
6). In this case, the hand’s memory of habitation of space, where it assumes
objects or things to be, orients our navigation of that space.
A powerful theoretical framework that conceptualizes the phenomenology of
embodied experience in the realm of everyday life emerges from disability
studies.18 Disability studies emphasize that disability is not a form of lack but
should be thought of as a way and mode of being in the world. In Carrie Sandahl’s
words, “rarely is disability described in generative terms” (18). However, if we
emphasize the generative dimensions of disability, it enables encounters with
modes of alter-embodiment. Disability theorists also emphasize the social dimen-
sions for the emergence of disability. There is nothing a priori or “natural” about
disability. Social conditions engender variable degrees of ability and debilitation.
Kevin Paterson and Bill Hughes write:
When one is confronted by social and physical inaccessibility one is simul-

taneously confronted by oneself; the external and the internal collide in a
moment of simultaneous recognition. When one encounters prejudice in
behaviour or attitude, one’s impaired body “dys-appears.” The body of a
person with a speech impairment “dysappears” when faced with (socially
produced) embodied norms of communication.
(603)
Paterson and Hughes’ example of speech impairment can also be thought of as a

mode of disorientation extending Ahmed’s sense. The speech-impaired person
faces an exclusion from the community of able-bodied individuals when s/he is
faced with “(socially produced) embodied norms of communication.” In such
moments of dis/orientation, bodies begin to appear different and are produced
as disabled.
Let me elaborate these points about social “dysappearance” and alter-embodiment
by focusing on an article by Rachel Kolb titled “The Deaf Body in Public Space.”
Kolb’s article begins with an anecdote from her elementary school years in which
a classmate brusquely tells her that it is rude to point.19 This experience jolted the
younger version of Kolb as she “realized that other people would see me as obtru-
sive, as taking up too much space, when I was simply communicating just
as I was.” This is moment of the “dysappearance” of the disabled body. Hindsight
enables her to recognize that what she perceived as accusatory earlier may
have been an instance of her childhood friend gaping at her “with a sort of
wonder.” To employ Rosemary Garland-Thompson’s terminology, Kolb was
stared at, although this act was not solely pejorative or reductive, as the “gaping . . .
with wonder” emphasizes.
Kolb then narrates another vignette concerning her as an adult. When she was
in graduate school, she was having lunch with a close friend, one of the very few
people who made the effort to learn sign language to communicate with her. They
began conversing through sign language. At one point, her usually unselfcon-
scious friend stopped and said that she felt that everyone was looking at them.
Kolb glanced around and signed back to her friend that this was a common expe-
rience for her. The friend smiled, began conversing again, probably with the real-
ization that this was what it was to “occupy a signing body.” If the first vignette
focuses on an initially traumatizing experience of how a disabled body is stared at
by others and “dysappears,” a fact that “haunted (Kolb’s) relationship to her body
for years,” the second broadens the ambit to show how others can recognize dis-
ability as a mode of alter-embodiment. In both cases, the individual’s lived expe-
rience and the social production of disability merge at multiple axes. Kolb writes
evocatively about the act of pointing in terms of relationality:
But pointing was a truly fundamental act for me; it was how I expressed what
my grown up scholarly self would call relationality – the idea of being in the
world in relation to others. Through sign language, a properly poised finger
allowed me to say you and me and he and she and they. If I did not point,
how could I make a human connection?
What a phenomenology of alter-embodiment, like Kolb’s account, enables us

to do is to think about quotidian modes of being and existing in the world
and of establishing relationality with others through the medium of the signing
body.20
This meshing of the subjective and social dimensions need not be limited
only to the domain of “human” interlocutors. Nonhuman entities also form
part of this dense intersubjective, biosocial network.21 A prevalent tendency –
whether in anthropocentric or anthropomorphic presentations – is to separate
ourselves from the realm of the biosocial (Ahuja, Bioinsecurities, 8).22 In such
fantasies of separation, animals, plants and things exist simply as discrete
objects to be acted upon by the “human.” However, recent considerations in
post-colonial animal theory (Huggan and Tiffin; Ahuja, Bioinsecurities; Chen;
Parrenas), plant theory (Marder, Nealon), new materialisms (Bennett, Coole
and Frost), and thing theory (Brown, Shaviro) impel us to reconsider the
agency of the nonhuman and its co-constitutiveness with the contingent category
of the “human.”
The reconsideration of the agential aspect of the nonhuman constitutes the third
sense in which I use phenomenology in CL. “We” simply do not orient ourselves
towards things; things demand our attention also. Things can signify objectifica-
tion – for instance, Aime Cesaire’s famous description of colonialism as a process
of “thingification” in Discourse on Colonialism. But, things, as Mel Chen writes,
also “generates multiplicities of meaning while retaining their ‘gritty materiality’”
(5). William J.T. Mitchell has a useful distinction between objects and things that
is relevant here. He writes:
objects are the way things appear to a subject – that is, with a name, an iden-
tity, a gestalt or stereotypical template. . . . Things, on the other hand . . .
[signal] the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine
can looks back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences
the object as uncanny.
(156–57)
Drawing on the metaphysical subject–object distinction, Mitchell defines the

object as that which is separated and spatially distanced from the subject. This
double aspect of separation and spatial distance enables the subject to name,
know and orient him/herself towards the object. The thing shifts the onus to
the vitality of the object, its capacity to act, interrupt and demand our attention.
For instance, a reflection of a shiny object on a wall allures us. Steven Shaviro
says that allure
has to do with the showing-forth of that which is strictly speaking inacces-

sible . . . (in) the event of allure, I encounter the very being of a thing . . .
am forced to acknowledge its integrity, entirely apart from me.
(53)
Instead of a sovereign, self-contained subject that apprehends the object as a rel-

atively passive entity to be known and classified, the concept of the vitalized,
alluring thing detaches the object from the realms of a purely human-centered
epistemology to a consideration of the active role of nonhuman materials in
the making of worlds. A phenomenological approach towards the immanent vital-
ity inherent in things impels us to reconsider the directionalities inherent in the
concept of orientation. “We” do not simply make a world, but the world is co-
constitutively made for “us” by nonhuman others.
Similarly, a phenomenological consideration of animal corporeality reveals that
they too are, like disabled corporealities, signing bodies. Thus, a tiny snail may
leave material traces of its existence and survival as slime on the surface of the
earth. These material traces are signs, and this insight will be crucial for my
reading of the snail in Hussain’s short story “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali”
(“Minor Preludes, Major Preludes” 2000). Furthermore, animals do not simply
react, but also “respond” (Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I am). Consider
here, for instance, the expressive part of the body that is the dog’s tail. We can
read the dog wagging its tail as a communicative mode of establishing relatedness
with others, especially given that tail-wagging is not purely instinctual but is
socialized behavior through which a dog interacts with its environment.23
Reading the animal’s body otherwise, then, necessitates a more capacious under-
standing of the question of language and signs. The wagging tail of the dog, for
example, is a “living sign” (Kohn 39).24 It’s an intensified bodily capacity that
exudes affect and shows how animals navigate and negotiate with their world
as active agents. A good example of this is found in an Assamese short story I do
not read here: Arupa Patangia Kalita’s “Bonjui” (Wildfire). The decision not to
include “Bonjui” was a conscious move to get away from treatments of compan-
ion animals, and to focus on less charismatic species forms like the snail. A closer
look at “Bonjui,” however, demonstrates that it isn’t another tale that humanizes or
anthropomorphizes the animal. This occurs quite often in Assamese short stories
such as those in an anthology of short stories on dogs titled Swargarohonor
Sangee (Companions in the Ascent to Heaven). Instead, Arupa Patangia Kalita
explores the alterity of the dog by representing its strategies of interacting with
its environment, by showing how its body circulates as a “living sign” that estab-
lishes relationships with human and nonhuman others (its wagging tail and bark
are manifestations of these signs), and by exploring its fantasy universe through
the surrealistic depiction of the dog’s dreams. Furthermore, the dog’s death,
rather than the militants it lives with, is foregrounded at the story’s closure. In
this respect, “Bonjui” endows grievability for the dog – an aspect missing in
novels like Mahanta’s Aulingar Jui, where animal bodies function almost exclu-
sively as overdetermined symbolic ciphers. If we aim to reenvisage questions of
habitation and survival in necropolitical universes, then such considerations of
the co-constitutiveness of human and nonhuman biosociality, through an expan-
sion of the notions of language and the phenomenology of embodiment, need
to be critically foregrounded. This is one of CL’s fundamental aims.
Literary narratives, endurance, survival, figuration

and the political
So far, I have talked about the everyday, the ordinary and phenomenology
without bringing into discussion the specificity of the literary. Literary narratives
can play a bigger role in such inquiries on the everyday in states of terror, espe-
cially in a knowledge-field like Northeast Indian studies that is dominated by the
social sciences. Literary works impel us to readjust the scales of observation and
analysis and to descend into and probe the minutiae of everyday life. They are
also sites where the life of the other is engaged. Literary reading, Spivak
writes, “teaches us to learn from the singular and the unverifiable,” a form of
“setting-to-work” that enables us to “imagine the other who does not resemble
the self” (“Ethics and Politics” 23). This should not be confused with the act
of letting the other speak in his/her own voice; instead, literary reading is a
setting-to-work for an interrogation and deconstruction of images of self in the
encounter with radical alterity, and a mode to imaginatively train oneself to
detect the trace of the other.
Besides this ethical dimension, literary narratives also enable us to reconsider
the question of the political. I am using the term “political” here following Jenny
Edkins’s distinction between “politics” and the “political”:
Increasingly a distinction is drawn between what we call “politics” – the

routine, regular processes that take place in parliaments, elections, political
parties and the institutions of government – and something more lively,
less dogmatic, less predictable, which some writers have begun to call “the
political.” This latter is the arena of innovation and revolution, a field of
sudden, unexpected and abrupt change, a point at which the status quo is chal-
lenged.
(xiii)
Edkins’s definition of the “political” gestures towards an emergent, unpredictable

“arena” of action and change in the realm of the everyday. I wager that a bulk of
the literary texts analyzed here enable us to move from a depiction of “politics”
to the aleatory, emergent arena of the “political.” Through their descent into the
minutiae of everyday life, literary narratives enable us to glimpse an agonistic
field that is “more lively, less dogmatic, less predictable.” This is where orientations
towards potential and possible futures of survival and continuity can be envisaged.25
A few disclaimers here: please note that I am talking about literatures from
Northeast India and not Northeast Indian literature. There is no category called
“Northeast Indian literature” – to claim there is one is to accept the terms of the
homogenizing, colonialist and monochromatic gaze of the “center,” whether the
colonial dispensation or the post-colonial potentate. This region, more of a “direc-
tional” category (Baruah, “All That Is”), is polyglot and heterogenous.26 Literary
traditions in languages like Assamese, Meiteilon, English and Bengali (among
others) have their autonomous histories over the longue durée and independent
trajectories of development. To cover all these traditions is a formidable task that
exceeds my rather circumscribed linguistic capacities. My task here is much
more modest: I focus on a comparative reading of two autonomous fictional tradi-
tions that I am familiar with: Assamese and English. I do not aim to substitute
“Assam” for “Northeast India”; instead, my hope is that my analysis of necropoli-
tics and survival in the Assamese fictions (which form the major chunk of CL) will
have purchase for the study of literary texts and genres dealing with contiguous
issues in other literary traditions from the region.
In the last twenty years, several anthologies on “writing from Northeast India”
have been published by major Indian publishing houses. While the politics behind
this spurt in publication can be critiqued, it is more productive, I think, to focus on
the organizational rubrics used by the editors of the volumes, as they have led to
the production of a form of critical discourse that encompasses various literatures
from the region.27 Tilottama Misra, for instance, posits the conflict between orality
and written traditions, an intense awareness of cultural loss and recovery in nego-
tiation with “other” cultures, the experience of violence and a concern for the envi-
ronment as common threads that bind the divergent literatures of the region (The
Oxford Anthology xi–xxvii). A similar organizational logic is also evident in Geeti
Sen’s anthology: the works represented here are grouped around headers like “Cre-
ation Myths and Oral Narratives,” “Cultures in Transition,” “The Conflict of Iden-
tities” and “The Politics of Dissent.” In their anthology of poetry, editors Kynpham
Sing Nongkynrih and Robin Ngangom list the “art of witness” and the “overarch-
ing presence of nature” as unique signatures of contemporary poetry from North-
east India.
More recently, Mara Matta writes in an essay that:
Novels by north-eastern authors, far from dealing only with the idea of the
north-east as a conflict zone, appear more concerned with discourses that
range from the question of identity formation in the borderlands to the
performance of indigeneity as “frontier people” . . . from the question of the lan-
guage to the reconceptualization of the mantra “the personal is the political.”
(201)
A common element that emerges from such attempts at defining the literary “field”
as far as this borderland region is that while “conflict” and terror seems to be a
common denominator, these terms are evoked only to be disavowed. I align with
Mara’s’ concern that conflict and violence should not be the sole vectors for ana-
lyzing the complex diversity of literatures in the region – this is a limiting heuristic
if it’s the only one adopted. However, as the “far from dealing only with the idea of
the north-east as a conflict zone” in Mara’s comments reveal, critics often treat the
question of political terror with a degree of nervousness. There is a common con-
clusion, contiguous to my critique of McDuie-Ra, that the focus on political terror
and violence that has in a way defined the theoretical and literary field should be
left behind to study other complex facets and alternative narratives from the region.
Part of this nervousness emerges from the perception that the region has been ster-
otyped as a violent Hobbesian zone of a war of all against all by the colonial and
mainland Indian imagination. Literary narratives about violence then become
another way of reinscribing the image of the exotic or savage other. Violence
itself, in this critical narrative, becomes a marketable commodity dictated by the
mainland gaze. An unfortunate side effect of this nervous attitude is that a conten-
tion with the representation of actual contingencies of everyday life and ordinary
existence in representations of necropolitical states never happens. Instead, the crit-
ical discourse on literature often gets rerouted into conclusions that literary works
discredit “manufactured truths” (Kashyap) from the mainland. Such conclusions
lead to a conceptual dead-end, as if the primary function of literature from the
region is to correct flawed representations for the big Other from the mainland.
Violence and terror are viewed as antithetical to the creation of meaning, under-
standing and cognition; hardly any attention is paid to the economies of significa-
tion and symbolization that exist in literary representations of necropolitical states.
A small number of literary critics from the region have used the frameworks of
trauma, witnessing and “extreme realism” to analyze literary production in indi-
vidual essays or prefaces to works. Since these frameworks hold greater purchase
for critical analysis, I would like to mark both my affinities and departures from
them. Interestingly, these critics seem to privilege realist narrative techniques as
the best generic mode to represent contingencies in states of terror. For instance,
Nongkynrih and Ngangom write:
The writer from the Northeast differs from his counterpart in the mainland in
a significant way . . . living with the menace of the gun he cannot merely
indulge in verbal wizardry and woolly aesthetics but must perforce master
the art of witness.
(ix)
The breathtaking way the critics dismiss other literary modalities as mere “verbal
wizardry” and “woolly” aesthetics boxes literature on terror into a particular
version of the aesthetic – an ascetic version of the “art of the witness.” Such pre-
scriptions, however, preclude attention to the multiple ways in which literature
makes meaning. Closer attention to literary works dealing with political terror
from the region reveal a variety of representational modalities through which
the capture of life by sovereign entities, and the possibilities of survival and
escape from necropower are portrayed. Nongkynrih and Ngangom, of course,
revise their claims later to say:
A few fine poets have moved beyond merely recording events and have
internalized the complex conflict between themselves and the milieu. . . . It
is a rejection by these poets of the harrowing realism of these times, also
revealing an inclination towards the surreal.
(xiii)
However, the critics puzzlingly view the shift from realist witnessing to “surreal-
ism” as a “rejection” of reality. My argument is that such modes are also ways of
engaging terrorizing realities, albeit in alternative ways.
Another depiction of the relationship between trauma and literature is Margaret
Ch Zama’s essay on “conflict” literature. For Zama, the art of bearing witness to
trauma is to draw a “credible balance” between the thin line separating “fiction
from non-fiction” (73) – something she believes writers like Temsula Ao and
James Dokhuma manage admirably. However, a perusal of the works of an indi-
vidual author like Ao shows that a wide variety of representational modalities are
used to depict traumatic situations in her fictional oeuvre. To conflate the “act of
witnessing,” as Zama does, with the thin line separating fiction from non-fiction
once again gets back to the question of realist representation as the pinnacle of
modes that emerge in the shadow of necropolitics. To be clear, I find the
trauma studies approach very productive for literature from Northeast India;
what I do not find productive is the assumption among critics that realist frame-
works are more effective than antirealist or non-realist ones for depicting trau-
matic situations.28
CL shifts the study of literature on political terror from the region from the
exclusive focus on realist frameworks, the “art of witness” and representations
of traumatic effects to a study of figurations of life, death and survival in the
realm of everyday life. My focus is not as much on the traumatizing capture of
life by necropower, but on the generative potentials of survival in zones of occu-
pation and abandonment. Through a focus on continuities and (re)orientations in
the representations of everyday life in literary fictions, I explore figurations of
ordinary modes of endurance and survival in the domain of the quotidian. If the
“everyday” and the “ordinary” were the two key terms earlier, the four terms
central here are “endurance,” “survival,” “figure/figuration” and gift”.
There is a temporal distinction between the concepts of endurance and survival.
Elizabeth Povinelli defines endurance as a mode of being that “encloses itself
around the durative – the temporality of continuance, a denotation of continuous
action without any reference to its beginning or end” Internal to this concept, she
adds, is its sense of “strength, hardiness, callousness; its continuity through space;
its ability to suffer and yet persist” (32). The durational aspect of endurance is that
of continuity in a state of “stuckedness,” of “waiting out the crisis” (Hage, “Stuck-
edness”), even though the crisis may seem to be never-ending. The temporal
horizon here is that of the continuing present. The temporal horizon of survival,
however, is that of the deferred-yet-possible future. While being stuck in the
present, modes of excessive life escape and flit intermittently and can expose
lines of flight from necropolitical situations. In contrast to the capture of life by
sovereign regimes in contemporary theorizations of the exception, survival ges-
tures to an excess, to that which escapes sequestration and lives on.
To explicate the specific significations of survival in CL, it is necessary to con-
trast my usage with a notion this book does not pursue. Mbembe’s Cannetti-
influenced notion of the logic of survival reads it through the framework of
power. As Mbembe writes:
the survivor is the one who, having stood in the path of death, knowing of
many deaths and standing in the midst of the fallen, is still alive. Or . . .
the survivor is the one who has taken on a whole pack of enemies and
managed not only to escape alive, but to kill his or her attackers.
(“Necropolitics” 36)
As Marc Abeles points out in his gloss on Cannetti, such framings of survival are
predicated on ideas of invulnerability and sovereignty (104). Death has been
defeated and kept at bay; the survivor outlasts the threat of obliteration. Survival
is viewed through the lens of heroic transcendence of death.
Interestingly, the only Northeast Indian literary critic who uses the term “sur-
vival” with respect to contemporary cultural production comes close to the
Cannetti–Mbembe definition of the term. Speaking of Manipuri poetry, Robin
Ngangom writes:
A poet from Imphal told me of how they’ve been honing “the poetry of sur-
vival” with guns pressed to both temples: the gun of revolution and the gun
of the state . . . There also seems to be a dearth of the confessional or the
autobiographical, and an impersonal, detached mannerism seems to be the
norm. Is it because contemporary Manipuri poets are absorbed in writing
“the poetry of survival”? All this has resulted in criticism that contemporary
Manipuri poetry is hemmed in by extreme realism . . . But poets also have to
write about the here and now. And writing about it lends a sense of imme-
diacy and vividness to their poetry. This is perhaps what constitutes “the
poetry of witness.”
Crucial here is the association of survival with “extreme realism.” Such associa-
tions presuppose that the major way of bearing witness to survival in necroworlds
is through the vantage point of distanced observation transcribed in realist terms.
The witness brackets him/herself out and transcribes/documents the scene unfold-
ing in front of him/her. Furthermore, the act of writing itself is figured as a heroic
persistence in the face of the ubiquitous threat of death – notice for instance,
the reference to the poetry of survival forged in a smithy with “guns pressed on
both temples.”
However, the idea of survival I am pursuing is connected to notions of precar-
ity, vulnerability, relationality and nonsovereignty. A notion such as precarity, as
McKenzie Wark writes, is a performance of “power . . . as weakness . . . the right
to be recognized as something other than the self-sufficient body” (192).29 Instead
of heroic/stoic or transcendent images of self-sovereignty and autonomy, we are
in the domain of an ordinary, mutually sustaining dependency and interdepen-
dency. The important point here is that the image of the body is projected as
simultaneously vulnerable and capable of intercorporeal and intersubjective rela-
tionships with a host of (human and nonhuman) others. Feminist articulations of
precarity, relationality and vulnerability, especially the works of Adriana Cavar-
ero and Judith Butler, provide suggestive frameworks for a consideration of the
performance of power as the right to be recognized as something other than
the self-sufficient body. Feminist articulations of relationality have been funda-
mental in conceptualizing the co-constitutiveness of the subject in her relations
with unknown and unknowable others. Brison succinctly characterizes the
major premises of feminist accounts of the relational self: “On this view the
self is both autonomous and socially dependent, vulnerable enough to be
undone by violence and yet resilient enough to be reconstructed with the help
of empathic others” (38). Vulnerability is not defined by Butler and Cavarero
as a temporary situation specific to certain subjects; rather, as Butler points out
in Frames of War, it is a condition of social life, one where the subject is
exposed to forms of violence that she cannot anticipate or preempt. In Horrorism,
following the etymological root of the word “vulnerability” (the Latin vulnus),
Cavarero underlines that this category designates a susceptibility to both wound-
ing and caring. As a wounded body, the subject is unilaterally exposed to pain
and suffering; yet, this suffering body can also be cared for by others. Vulnera-
bility, thus, is intrinsic to imaginaries of the human and captures the subject in
intersubjective relations with a host of (unknown and unknowable) others.
Even more crucial in Cavarero’s works about vulnerability is the correlation
between relationality and narrative. Unlike Agamben’s idea of “bare life,” Cavar-
ero emphasizes the singularity of a life in its relations with others, no matter
how brutalized that life may be. Like one of her major philosophical interlocutors,
Hannah Arendt, she emphasizes the event of natality as the central node of
subject formation. This focus on natality shifts the terrain of thinking about life
and survival in at least two directions. First, it conceptualizes the birth of an
infant in terms of the “fragile totality of her exposure” (Relating, 38), thus orient-
ing the natal event in the dual sense of vulnerability described earlier.30 Second,
this conceptualization of the relational self shows that the story of one’s emergence
as a subject can emerge only through the telling of another. Butler, who nudges
Cavarero’s formulations in a psychoanalytic direction in Giving an Account,
argues that any account of a self is dependent on what is relayed to a subject
by others. For instance, the narrative of who “I” am between, say, the period of
infancy and about two years of age, depends on the narrative of others and mne-
motechnical implements like photographs. “I” don’t have a memory of witnessing
what “I” was as a subject at that time; instead, my sense of self emerges only from
the account of others. Thus, “giving an account of oneself” necessarily means that
“I” am fundamentally indebted to or follow the narrative of others. Cavarero calls
this the ethic of the gift in the act of relating narratives. In other words, the very
constitution of the “I”-as-self is a gift that I inherit from others in a relational field.
This ethic of the gift will be fundamental for my reading of Arupa Patangia
Kalita’s Felanee (2003) in the last chapter of CL.
I emphasize gift earlier because is a polyvalent conceptual motif that circum-
navigates CL, as it underpins the temporal framework of the deferred-yet-possible
future. The importance of this term should not surprise us, because, as Alan
Schrift writes:
[T]he question of the gift is a political question . . . which addresses funda-

mental issues of intersubjective interaction . . . the discussions of the gift
never stray too far from basic ethical and political questions concerning
how human beings do and should treat one another. This should not be sur-
prising inasmuch as giving gifts is a social act that unavoidably takes one
outside oneself and puts one in contact with an other or others.
(18–9)31
Cavarero’s notion of the gift that is inherited from others in a relational field
emphasizes the importance of transmission that takes “one outside oneself and
puts one in contact with an other or others.” Besides feminist relational philosophy
and its deployment of the concept, there is another important signification in CL,
influenced by Jacques Derrida’s formulations of survivance and the “pure” gift. If
feminist relational philosophy emphasizes the performance of power as weakness,
deconstructionist notions like the trace are indicators of “weak presence, an
imprint fatefully entwined with the absence of what left it,” and simultaneously
“a synonym for survival, the continuation of a life shaken up by a rupture . . . por-
tending death” (Marder, 36). This sense of weak presence is also immanent to Der-
rida’s term “survivance.” He suggests that survivance is a “sense of survival that is
neither life nor death pure and simple . . . a survival that is not more alive, nor
indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death” (Beast and the Sov-
ereign II, 131). Survivance is not survival in the sense of “posterity,” but plays on
the distinction between the French terms “plus da vie” (both “more life” and “no
more life”) and “plus que vie” (“more than life”) (“Deconstruction in America,”
25). This sense of survivance is a surplus, a remainder that operates as a “gift”
beyond what Derrida calls “lifedeath.” Thus, the ghostly return of a dead
woman’s voice in Ao’s short story “The Last Song” (2003) or the vitalized
image of an abject woman in Deb’s novel An Outline of the Republic (2005) is
a surplus that comes from a space beyond lifedeath. Furthermore, the spatial ori-
entation of this form of the “gift” inherent in the concept of survivance is “the
there beyond my life.” This beyond is not my survivor, but the survivor of me
(Beast and the Sovereign II, 131). This shift from the possessive “my” in the
first copula gestures towards the subject’s imbrication in a dense network of bio-
social relationships with multiple others.
The “gift” was described earlier in terms of a remainder that persists. However,
in Given Time, his longest meditation on the concept, Derrida expands this notion
to argue that for a gift to be a “pure” gift, it must exist outside the economy of
exchange. The gift defies the metaphysics of presence and cannot be placed
within frameworks of anticipation. But in and through this act of defying and
exceeding presence, it opens the space-time of the absolutely other. As Derrida
writes:
The gift, like the event, as event must remain unforeseeable, but remain so
without keeping itself. It must let itself be structured by the aleatory; it
must appear chancy or in any case lived as such, apprehended as the inten-
tional correlate of a perception that is absolutely surprised by the encounter
with what it perceives, beyond its horizon of anticipation.
(122)
The pure gift, by throwing a wrench in the framework of anticipation and predict-
ability, puts time out of joint. The pure gift has the structure of an event – “an
event of forgetting and deferral, of différance” (Schrift, 10). Thus, the snail in Hus-
sain’s story, which is a “gift” (dan) from the river, but is thrown away and forgot-
ten, functions as a pure gift that ruptures the economies of “human” exchange.
Influenced by Derrida, the political theorist Bonnie Honig has further devel-
oped this idea of survivance:
survivance as sur-vivance – more life, surplus life. . . . Survivance, survival . . .

means something like . . . overliving: it is a dividend – that surprised extra,
the gift that exceeds rightful expectations, the surplus that exceeds causality.
Often survival’s needs reduce us, they make us focus on specifics, immedi-
acies, the needs of mere life . . . This “survival” seeks to orient us towards
overlife.
(10)
Recall Ngangom’s image of the Manipuri poet here: “A poet from Imphal told me
of how they’ve been honing ‘the poetry of survival’ with guns pressed to both
temples.” This is survival in the sense of the “focus on specifics, immediacies, the
needs of mere life” Hence, Ngangom’s aesthetic investments in “extreme
realism” and the “art of witness” as a mode of documenting conditions of dimin-
ished life. In contrast, Honig’s explication of survival emphasizes the contingent,
the aleatory and the excessive – elements that also propel us towards deferred-
yet-possible futures. An appraisal of an unexpected “gift,” for instance, orients
us towards the unexpected dividends that life offers. While necropower captures
and sequesters life, survival as an unprecedented gift in situations of disposses-
sion can often emerge in chance conjugations and correlations between categories
like the “human” and the “animal,” the able body and the “disqualified” status
symbolically endowed to disabled bodies, and the vitalizing potentialities of sup-
posedly passive “things.”32
If survival implies the performance of power as weakness allied with notions
of continuity, surplus and an openness to the aleatory, another key term in this
section is “figure/figuration.” Figurations are not simply semiotic or symbolic
entities, but they gesture towards actual material presences in the lifeworlds
depicted in the texts. Donna Haraway’s usage and deployment of figure in
When Species Meet is critical:
Figures help me grapple inside the flesh of mortal world-making

entanglements. . . . The Oxford English Dictionary records the meaning of
“chimerical vision” for “figuration” in an eighteenth century source, and
that meaning is still implicit in my sense of figure. . . . Figures are not repre-
sentations or didactic illustrations, but rather material-semiotic nodes or
knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another.
(5)
The reference to “flesh of mortal world-making entanglements” keeps the

dynamic nature of co-constitution in the foreground. The idea of an anthropocen-
tric notion of the “human” emerges from an exclusion of various categories of
others – whether these “others” are other humans, animals, plants, machines
and even germs, viruses or forms of microscopic life. Haraway asks us to recon-
sider the question of co-constitutive world-making through the concept of entan-
glement within the material-corporeal substance that is the “flesh.” The flesh is
the vital, carnal, material substrate of worldly entanglements. Furthermore, the
reference to “chimerical vision” introduces questions of imagination and conjura-
tion. Yet these conjurations are not purely representations, but “material-semiotic
nodes or knots” that keep the heterogenous and material processes of co-shaping
in a world at the forefront. The implications of this for the study of figurations of
disability and animality are inescapable. In “The Promise of Monsters,” Haraway
expands what she implies by the notion of a material-semiotic actor:
“Objects” like bodies do not pre-exist as such. Similarly, “nature” cannot

pre-exist as such, but neither is its existence ideological. Nature is a com-
monplace and a powerful discursive construction, effected in the interactions
among material-semiotic actors, human and not. The siting/sighting of such
entities is not about disengaged discovery, but about mutual and usually
unequal structuring, about taking risks, about delegating competences.
(78)
No longer are we in the realm of egocentric anthropocentrism that designates

“nature” or the object-world to an outside to be controlled. Objects are not pre-
given; they are constructed as such through processes of discursive materialization.
This kaleidoscopic conceptualization of discursive materialization has a direct
bearing on Haraway’s definition of the ordinary in When Species Meet. Although
Das considers animal alterity in “Being Together with Animals,” in “Ordinary
Ethics” we are still in a human realm – one where human actors take center
stage while objects and other entities recede into the background. However, we
can expand her conceptualization of the ordinary through Haraway’s “material-
semiotic” lens: “Ordinary identities . . . remain always a relational web opening
to non-Euclidean pasts, presents, and futures. The ordinary is a multipartner
mud dance issuing from and in entangled species” (32). Like the theorists of
relationality discussed previously, Haraway conceptualizes the ordinary as an
“animate circuit” (Stewart 3), that like a web has no fixed or unidirectional center,
temporality or orientation. Instead, to confront the complex, intimate and carnal
entanglements in her resonant picture of the “multipartner mud dance,” necessitates
that we keep our inquiries open to contingent and unexpected conjugations between
entangled species, human selves and nonhuman others.
In the previous section, I considered disabled and animal corporeality through a
phenomenological register. Following Haraway’s definition of figuration and the
ordinary, I will reconsider figurations of disability and animality through the inter-
play between materiality and metaphoricity, especially focusing on recent inter-
faces between post-colonial literary theory, disability theory and animal theory.
When we consider the question of disability in post-colonial fiction, two dominant
issues become crucial for CL: the use of disability as metaphor and the deploy-
ment of bodily difference as a form of “narrative prosthesis” (Mitchell and
Snyder Narrative Prosthesis). As Clare Barker writes, scholars in disability
studies have worked against the tendency of treating disabled characters as meta-
phors in literary texts. Turning towards post-colonial literature, Barker, one of the
few scholars to consider representations of disability in this knowledge-field writes
that “without attention to material narratives of physical and cognitive difference,
post-colonial criticism effectively erases disability from view, precluding its anal-
ysis as a socially significant phenomenon or a politicized aspect of identity” (Post-
colonial Fiction, 14).33 Post-colonial criticism has been guilty of treating disability
largely as metaphor, at the expense of considering the material and lived experi-
ences of disabled subjects. Indeed, classic anticolonial nationalist allegories
such as the Filipino patriot Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, are full of images of
disease and debility (One translation of the title is “The Social Cancer”). One
of the central characters of the novel, the archetypal Filipino national “mother,”
Sisa, loses her reason. Her madness becomes a metaphor for the exploitation of
the feminized Philippines by Spanish colonizers. Besides this exceptionalization
of disability and its simultaneous transformation into metaphor and symbol,
there is a teleology associated with this deployment of bodily difference as “nar-
rative prosthesis.” Social conflict is organized around the metaphorization of dis-
ability, but the lived realities of disability disappear through a movement towards
a type of cure effected by narrative that then serves as a societal therapeutic.
These insights from disability theory have led to two types of readings within
post-colonial literary studies that I find productive for CL: first, the study of
post-colonial literary texts, especially national or national/local allegories, as exem-
plifications of narrative prosthesis; and second, a contention with the lived and
embodied realities and potentials of disability.34
Taking a lead from these two approaches to disability – narrative prosthesis and
a consideration of the lived, generative realities of alter-embodiment – CL studies
the reductionism of metaphorical deployments of disability in necropolitical fic-
tions from Northeast India and contends with the lived experiences of disabled
characters in fiction in alliance with the phenomenological approach outlined in
the previous section. There are three major disabled characters in the texts, all of
them cognitively disabled: Sumala in Kalita’s Felanee, Tempu in Mahanta’s Aulin-
gar Jui and Babula in Bora’s Kalantoror Gadya. Imagining two intersecting axes
of materiality and metaphoricity, we can position these three characters at different
points in the graph. At the furthest remove away from the material axis is Sumala.
She fuctions predominantly as a narrative prosthesis for situations of abjection in
states of terror. In Felanee, the proper name “Felanee” means thrown away.
Felanee, the protagonist, has a hybrid ethnic identity, and emerges as a sign for
a nostalgic picture of inter-ethnic harmony that various forms of necropolitical
terror in Assam have sundered. One crucial resource that enables Felanee to
emerge a survivor is her connection to the generative dimensions of existing
forms of multicultural existence in Assam mediated to her through the agency of
things that have been left behind as gifts by her deceased grandmother and mother.
When viewed from the standpoint of narrative prosthesis, Felanee emerges as a
survivor through a sharp contrast with the cognitively disabled Sumala. Sumala
loses her reason after she witnesses her brother being brutally decapitated by
ethno-nationalist forces. She exists within the diegetic space as an infant-like
dependent on her husband, Bulen, and then under Felanee’s care after Bulen
abandons her. While there are brief glimpses of her bodily agency, the dominant
feature of her characterization is her abjection. There is no dignity in life or death
as her raped, mutilated corpse is thrown away without any consideration as a
piece of trash. In this respect, Sumala is literally the felanee of the novel;
however, it is through a symbolic contrast with her character that the protagonist
Felanee emerges as an allegorical sign for survival.
If Sumala’s character is the most reductive metaphorization of a disabled char-
acter in the texts here, Tempu in Mahanta’s Aulingar Jui can be plotted some-
where in the intersection of the axes of metaphorization and materiality. Tempu
is used as an allegorical sign and a central node of the narrative prosthesis in
Mahanta’s novel. Aulingar Jui is set in the no-man’s zones between India and
Myanmar. These zones do not have legal recognition in the global national order
of things. So, forms of paradoxical adnomination (neither here nor there) or
figures of entrapment (like durgo – fortress) proliferate throughout the novel.
Towards the middle of the novel, we come across an overdetermined image of
the cognitively disabled Tempu standing in the center of his village, one arm
pointed towards India, the other towards Myanmar. This image is an allegorical
sign for the existential condition of the inhabitants of the no-man’s zone – they
belong neither to India nor to Myanmar. Disability emerges as a metaphor
for the marginalized populations dwelling in a liminal space. Concurrently,
Mahanta represents the communicative potentials of Tempu’s signing body fit-
fully. Tempu uses his pointing hands as a mode of communication. This is
where a phenomenological analysis of disabled bodies becomes relevant, from
where we can conduct an alternative reading of the representation of disability
in Mahanta’s novel.
At the furthest remove from Sumala, and by far the most nuanced representation
of the lived experience of disability in CL is Babula in Kalantoror Gadya.
Babula’s narrative is significant for the frequent reversals of perspective. Babula
is stared at by others, and in these actions of staring at the disabled body, his sub-
jectivity is made to “dysappear.” Deploying Susan Snyder and David Mitchell’s
concept of “disability haunting,” I study the hauntological implications of the nar-
rative (this section is a tale of haunting as Babula’s ghost returns at the closure)
and evaluate how Babula’s presence in life can also be read as a form of haunting.
Simultaneously, Babula’s narrative also shows him staring back at others. Rose-
mary Garland-Thompson argues that while the act of staring usually has pejorative
connotations as far as experiences of gazing at disabled bodies as spectacle are
concerned, it also has a generative potential for disabled subjectivities. Like point-
ing, staring too can be re-read as a different way of being in the world. Babula is
stared at and made to dysappear, but he also stares back and frequently displays
his bodily agency. Babula’s representation remains one of the most powerful mate-
rializations of a disabled body in necropolitical literature from the region.
Contention with disability reveals that “animality is integral to humanity”
(Taylor 115). Representations of actual animals in the texts analyzed here can
also be plotted on my imaginary axis of the intersection of the metaphoric and
the material.35 In Aulingar Jui the dismembered body of a puppy – one side of
its corpse pointing towards India and the other towards Myanmar – functions as
an allegorical sign for the entrapped condition of the denizens of the no-man’s
zone. However, in the “animacy hierarchy” of the novel, the puppy’s death is ren-
dered even more ungrievable than the death of the disabled Tempu.36 At the very
least, Tempu is buried with dignity, although people forget him almost immedi-
ately as the village is attacked by the Burmese army (Tatmadaw). But the inert,
dismembered pieces of the puppy’s body hardly register as a grievable life. At
the other end of the scale is the humble snail in “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali.”
The story invites us to read the animal figure through an anthropomorphic register
that draws on the folkloric tradition. However, attention is also paid to the slimy
materiality of the snail’s body and the virtually indiscernible traces it leaves on the
earth. Unlike the idea of the sovereign – the “being of height, of grandeur, of erec-
tion” – the snail is “the low, an animal of the earth, of humus (humility, humus)”
(Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1, 245). By impelling us to recalibrate our
vision, Hussain’s story enables encounters with unsovereign modes of being.
Besides this play between the metaphoric and the material in the representation
of actual animals, there is another polyvalent register through which animal figu-
rations circumnavigate CL. Necropolitical terror is often figured as mode of
descent for the “human” into states of abjected animality, thus corroborating
Nicole Shukin’s observation that biopolitics has always been a “zoopolitics”
(9). Thus, Prabhat Hazarika, a character in Kalantoror Gadya urinates in a stand-
ing position like a poxu (animal) after his torture by the Indian army. The exposure
to pain and terror is analogous to a process that strips away the human mask and
exposes the animal skin underneath. Chen talks about the dual signification of the
term dehumanization: a) the “removal of qualities especially cherished as human”
and b) the more “active making of an object” (45). When Prabhat urinates standing
like a poxu (animal), he is forced to abjure his human feeling of shame (laaz).
Moreover, when he is tortured by the soldiers, his corporeality is actively made
into an object, a blank slate on which a narrative of necropower can be inscribed.
However, animal figurations in post-colonial texts also possess what I, in a forth-
coming essay on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, call “polyvalent-
reversibility” (“Ethics and Politics”).37 While in the previous section, I discussed
the materiality of animal bodies as living signs, here I focus on the reversal of
perspective that occurs when we consider animal metaphors otherwise. In
Fanon, for instance, animal figurations are often used as objectifying descriptors.
For instance, the colonized are often described in “zoological” terms: “the slithery
movements of the yellow race . . . the stink, the swarming, the seething” (7). The
use of “swarm” refers to the insect domain and depicts the horror that “nonindi-
vidual groups” evoke (Parikka, 48). But this term flips around when Fanon
writes: “this same violence will be vindicated and appropriated when, taking
history in their own hands, the colonized swarm into the forbidden cities” (6).
Anticipating the affirmative reading of “swarm intelligence” in contemporary
posthumanist and biopolitical theory (Hardt and Negri, Parikka), the previously
objectified, dehumanized colonized are reconfigured by Fanon as “privileged
actor[s] captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History”
(2). Human skins can have animal masks; the contrary could also hold true –
animal skins can often reveal human masks.
Contiguously, in some of the texts analyzed in CL, the descent into multipart-
ner mud dances of the ordinary enables a glimpse of such alternative modalities
of survival rerouted through polyvalent-reversible figurations of states of animal-
ity. This descent into the ordinary helps us contend with the alterity of “animal-
ized” ways of being and existing in a world. An example of the deployment of the
grammar of animality is the repetition of poruwa (ants) in the description of aban-
doned populations in Felanee. The reference to people-as-ants seems almost
pejorative initially: they “huddle together like ants, trembling with fear” (29),
resemble “one massive ball of ants, ready to be washed away by floods” (29),
the devastation of their homes makes it seem as though “a cyclone had hit a
colony of ants as they were trying to build new anthills” (55), and the women
weep “huddled together like a group of ants, floating on a sea of water” (234).
These references to the form of life of an alter-species accentuates the helpless-
ness of abandoned populations, even though there is a recognition of a form of
biopolitical collectivity, epitomized by terms like “colony” and “group.” Necro-
political terror is figured as unstoppable natural forces (“floods,” “cyclones”) that
devastate “ant” lifeworlds.
However, the ant figurations polyvalently flip around later to provide glimpses
of modes of collective survival in conditions of duress. Consider the following
passage:
The market days became somewhat regular. Even if someone called a bandh,
the army made sure the shops remained open. There were rumors that yet
another bandh was scheduled, this time for a thousand hours. Even though
the market was smaller now, people were busy trying to save money for
the impending rainy days. They were like ants before the floods – hurrying
and scurrying with eggs in their mouths.
(251)
A bandh – a common feature of everyday life in Assam in the 1980s and 1990s –
is a call for the cessation of economic activity usually issued by independentist or
ethno-nationalist organizations. The bandh is an example of a necropolitical
modality that is both terrifyingly spectacular in its effects (the risk of death or
abduction if the order is defied is never far away), and simultaneously a manifes-
tation of a slower form of violence. The latter aspect is captured by another
animal metaphor later:
The bandh was like a huge python that had swallowed up the entire settle-
ment and now lay around waiting for its next prey. . . . From a distance it
looked as though the serpent was dead; that it would soon rot. But . . . the
serpent was very much alive, it was just waiting to create havoc.
(258)
The temporal experience depicted here teeters between the “violence of enerva-
tion, the weakening of the will rather than the killing of life” (Povinelli 132),
and a form of waiting where the still symbol of death (the python) suddenly
awakens into monstrous, carnivorous life. Yet, the “ants” survive. In the previous
references, ants are depicted as passive figures that are acted upon by necropoli-
tical cataclysms. However, in the sentence – “They were like ants before the
floods – hurrying and scurrying with eggs in their mouths” – we are provided
a brief glimpse of the survival strategies that ants deploy in the face of
deluges. They anticipate danger and “scurry” about to prepare for the approach-
ing catastrophe. Indeed, following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s affirmative
reading of the swarm, can we not ask whether this polyvalent-reversal of the ant
figure represents a vital “buzzing and swarming of the flesh” (93)? Can this rever-
sal not be the ground for imagining a different picture of life – not a biopolitical
substance captured by necropower, but the potentiality of an alternative being-in-
common forged through biopolitical collectivity?
Indeed, that seems to be Felanee’s drift. Although there are no direct references
to poruwa in Felanee’s last chapter, the accent on survival and overliving is ines-
capable in the following conversation among a group of working-class women
that is rich with vitalist figurations:
“The entire paddy field was submerged in water.”

“The water remained for eight whole days.”
“And after the water subsided, there was nothing but sand.”
“How come it is filled with reeds now?” . . .
“The seeds came floating in the water.”
“They were carried by the winds as well.”
“These seeds have wings, you know.”
“The flowers turn into wings, and they carry the seeds to far off places.”
“They don’t sink in the water, they float.”
“The moment they hit soil, they germinate.”
(311)
Riparian areas like Assam are annually affected by floods. Floods, usually framed
as natural disasters by the colonial/post-colonial dispensations, play complex roles
in such riparian societies. Populations here often have symbiotic relationships with
floods, even though they annually cause lots of devastation and displacement.
Floods also play a major figurative role as both destroyers and life-enablers in
Assamese cultural productions. In Felanee, floods are depicted as figures of devas-
tation (“one massive ball of ants, ready to be washed away by floods”). However,
in the conversation above, floods are figured simultaneously as devastating and
generative events. Floods destroy, but also carry seeds and allow new life to ger-
minate. Like the seeds that “don’t sink in water,” the poruwa-like group of women
also float, hit the soil and assist in the germination of new possibilities of life and
living. The circulating figure of ants combined with the figure of the germinating
seeds become manifestations of biopolitical collectivity and overlife. The concep-
tualization of politics that emerges from such alter-readings, as Eduardo Kohn
says, “grows not from opposition to or critique of our current systems but one
that grows from attention to another way of being, one here that involves other
kinds of living beings” (14). A recalibrated sense of the political can potentially
emerge both from attention to the aleatory and the unpredictable in the realm of
everyday life and to other forms of being.
Plan of the work

CL consists of four chapters in addition to this introduction. Chapter 2 – “The
Mayabi State” – focuses on a reading of three narrative strands in Bora’s
panoramic, multi-perspectival novel Kalantoror Gadya. Bora’s novel, and the
Kalantor trilogy of which this is part, is the most wide-ranging treatment of
approximately seventeen years of political terror in Assam (1985–2002). Adopt-
ing an Ameryian perspective on the unmaking of the everyday buttressed with
anthropological considerations of statist rituals and banal everyday forms of gov-
ernance, this chapter focuses on the narrative of a young torture victim, Prabhat
Hazarika, and a rape victim, Sombori, in the first two sections. The last section is
devoted to the kaleidoscopic narrative of the disability haunting of the rural
denizen, Babula. I will focus on the agential aspects of Babula’s representation
while keeping the focus intact on how political terror, perpetuated both by the
state and independentist organizations, ruins the habitation of his everyday.
Chapter 3 – “Of Hill Spaces” – pairs two novels by former militants of the
independentist group ULFA: Sharma’s Boranga Yan and Mahanta’s Aulingar
Jui. I consider both these novels to be part of the longer historical trajectory of
the Assamese ethnographic novel where the narrating “self” from the plains/
valley comes near the “other” from the hills. I am utilizing the hill–valley distinc-
tion that underpins Scott’s argument in The Art of Not Being Governed – the
valley as the topos of state making, settled agriculture and “civilization”; the
hills as a topos that people escaping the constrictions of the state-form inhabit.
Furthermore, these two novels are also explorations of the contingencies of sur-
vival in necro-zones. Contrasting Boranga Yan with the “epic” modality of the
traditional guerrillero testimonio, I argue that the latter genre is characterized
by an attempt to transcend the everyday, while Sharma’s novel evokes a horrifying
descent into the everyday. The initial depiction of the foothills as a pastoral space
morphs into a portrayal of the forest (aranya) as an ecogothic topos. Sarma shows
the unmaking of the everyday through a phenomenological exploration of sensory
disorientation and asks how the body witnesses assaults on pictures of life. In con-
trast, Aulingar Jui does not deal with the quotidian realities of militant life; instead,
it focuses on the ordinary existence of a group of Naga villagers residing in the no-
man’s zones between India and Myanmar. While the text presents this mode of
existence as a disabled or animalized condition of being, it also depicts modes
of endurance through which populations live with the uncertain and arbitrary
nature of everyday existence in these liminal zones.
Chapter 4 – “Survivance and Supplements” – shifts from the novel to the short
story. I pair two short stories here – Ao’s English short story, “The Last Song” and
Hussain’s “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali.” Many short stories on necropolitics from
the region usually end with a moment of incapacitation during the closure. These
two stories are comparable at a structural level because they both close with sup-
plementary sections – a small section labeled “P.S.” in “The Last Song” where the
ghostly voice of a raped woman comes back to address denizens of her village
thirty years after her death, and a solitary sentence separated by a clear spatial
marker from the main diegetic space in “Soru Dhemali” where a hitherto still
snail slowly begins to move outside the range of vision of the story’s protagonists.
As opposed to shocking closures that show incapacitation and immobility in the
face of terror, these two supplementary segments are fictional concretizations of
Honig’s notion of “overliving” – the dividend or extra that unexpectedly remains
after life has seemingly been captured by law.
The last chapter – “Being-as-Following” – pairs two allegorical fictions: Deb’s
English novel An Outline of the Republic with Kalita’s Felanee. Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness and Lord Jim are Outline’s intertexts. We are invited to read Amrit’s
(Outline’s protagonist) journey through the Northeast Indian borderlands as a
repetition of Marlow’s journey through the Congo, thus emphasizing how the
necropolitical governance of the colonial frontier shares uncanny affinities with
the management of the post-colonial borderland. Reading Felanee requires a
working knowledge of the necropolitical history of Assam from about 1980–
2000. The survival strategies of the protagonist, Felanee, function as allegorical
signs for the generative dimensions of Assam’s multiethnic hybridity, making
Kalita’s text a powerful humanist appeal for breaking the vicious circle of necro-
political violence. However, what interests me about these texts are not the allegor-
ical frames, but the moments where the allegorical frames are ruptured to reveal the
contingencies of everyday existence and ordinary modes of survival. These rup-
tures occur because of the vitalizing power and allure of things. Amrit follows
the lead of a photograph that changes character and reframes his relations with
others in his journey through the borderlands. The presentation of Felanee’s sub-
jectivity emerges via a relational field that is mediated by the agency of vitalized
things and the generative potentialities of female collectivity formed through bio-
political labor. This presentation enables us to read materialist depictions of survi-
val that move away from the novel’s dominant allegorical frame.
Notes
1 In September 2010, nine commandos were booked for murder. Soon they were out on
bail. Earlier in 2016, one of the cops involved, Thounaojam Herojit, came public with
the circumstances surrounding Sanjit’s execution.
2 For the AFSPA, see Sanjib Baruah, Durable; and Oinam, State of the States.
3 See Akoijam; McDuie-Ra, “Fifty Year”; Karlsson, Unruly Hills; Vajpeyi; and Gaikwad
for considerations of exceptionality.
4 What Mbembe says about war and peace in the colony is applicable here:
A fact remains . . .: in modern philosophical thought . . . the colony represents the
site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside
the law (ab legibus solutus) and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face
of a “war without end.”
(“Necropolitics” 23)
Indeed, the repeated extension of the AFSPA can be thought of as a artificial state of
peace imposed in a locale where war is without end.
5 Colonial anthropological studies perpetuated these imaginaries. For discussions, see
Pels; Kar, “Headhunting”; and Zou.
6 A state of exception, as Schmitt defines it, is an emergency where the law functions only
by suspending its own application. In the influential reformulation by Agamben in
Homo Sacer, the legal instrument of the state of exception is conceptualized as the local-
ization that lies simultaneously inside and outside the normalizing rule of law.
7 For a critique of the state as the arbiter of sovereign power, also see “Necropolitics”
11, 24.
8 Van Schendel derives the word Zomia from zomi, a term for “highlander” in several
Chin-Mizo-Kuki languages spoken in Burma, India and Bangladesh. Scott borrows
this term to propose a theory about the hill regions in “shatter zones” of Southeast
Asia as locales where subjects escaped the state. At one level, the book is about the
Zomia; at another, it is an anarchist theorization of state formation. For a critique of
Scott’s use of Van Schendel’s concept, see Sadan.
9 Scott’s thesis, while very provocative, does generalize, as critiques from scholars of
Northeast India have noted (Karlsson “Ethnicity in Northeast India”).
10 For a critique of Mbembe, see Weate.
11 While Nixon’s influential concept of the slow violence of environmental degradation is
used sporadically through this work, I find his binary of “slow” and “spectacular” vio-
lence less useful.
12 The naked protest was conducted by a group of elderly women collectively named Imas
(mothers) in front of the Indian army cantonment to protest the rape and murder of
Thangjam Manorama. Sharmila Irom ended her 16-year-long hunger strike against the
AFSPA in August 2016. For discussions of Irom’s hunger strike, see Mehrotra;
Bhonsle. For readings of the naked protest see Gaikwad; Papori Bora; and Vajpeyi.
13 See Khanna; Driscoll; Kabir; and Morton.
14 My use of ritual draws on “psychocultural” approaches to state terror. Sluka writes that
“other approaches to state terror have emphasized its instrumental and rational . . .
aspects, and often fail to “pay sufficient attention to the irrational and expressive
aspects of terror” (21). For rituals of bureaucracy, see Gupta; Gupta and Sharma; Herz-
feld, Hansen and Stepputat; Das and Poole; and Navaro-Yashin.
15 See Baishya, “The Secret Killings.”
16 See Baishya, “Close Encounters.”
17 Das has made contributions to both disability and animal studies (Das and Addlakha;
Das, “Being Together with Animals”).
18 For phenomenological studies of disability see Sandahl; Paterson and Hughes; and
Toombs.
19 To be sure, this attribution of rudeness to acts of pointing is culturally contingent.
As post-colonial disability studies scholars like Erevelles emphasize, “crip politics”
exists in multiple localized sites, spaces and dimensions and cannot have universal
applicability.
20 In an ongoing work, I read an Assamese disability life-narrative – Sharmistha Pritam’s
Atmakatha (Autobiography) – through this lens of alter-embodiment and the signing
body. Pritam has spinal muscular atrophy. For another reconsideration of alter-embodiment,
see Taylor’s discussion of the hand and the “animal” aperture of the mouth in Beasts of
Burden (115–16).
21 One of the best explorations of the connection between disability and animal studies is
by Taylor. She provocatively poses the question: “If . . . animals can be crips, can crips
be animals?” (115). Her work represents one of the most powerful instances of claim-
ing animal by a thinker of disabled experience.
22 My work here critiques anthropocentrism – the human considered as the pinnacle of
the “natural” order – while retaining a strategic value for anthropomorphism. While
anthropomorphic figurations can negate animal alterity, they also possess the potential
of blurring lines between human, animal and thing. The important aspect, as Daston
and Mitman write, is not to focus on the anthropos, but on the processes of the
morphos in anthropomorphism (6).
23 See my reading of Manto’s “The Dog of Tetwal” (“Ethics and Politics”).
24 Kohn’s theorization of an anthropology of the human derives from a reading and appli-
cation of Peircian biosemiotics. Life, as he says, “is inherently semiotic” (74). To
reduce complex processes of semiosis to the symbolic – the distinctive feature of
human language systems – is to have a very provincialized view of what language
and signage is or becomes (38–42).
25 See my reading of survival and the impact on the infrastructural domain in Manorama
Das Medhi’s short story “Sambhabya Kaal” (A Time to Come) (Baishya, “The Days
After”). I draw on the “infrastructural turn” in contemporary theories of feminist rela-
tionality (Diprose, Butler “Vulnerability and Resistance”).
26 See Baruah, “All That Is” for a discussion of how this term – “Northeast India” – is a
legacy of post–World War II and area studies politics.
27 See Guha.
28 For a discussion of realist versus antirealist positions in the depiction of trauma, see
Rothberg (1–10).
29 Wark says that the word precarious has a double signification: a) something obtained
by asking or praying, dependent on the favor of another, and b) dependency of circum-
stances, “being at risk” (191).
30 The elision of natality in contrast to the overweening importance of death has been dis-
cussed in feminist critiques of Agamben and Mbembe. See Mills and Weate.
31 Schrift’s “Introduction” provides a useful survey of the approaches to the gift.
32 Siebers writes: “Disqualification as a symbolic process removes individuals from the
ranks of quality human beings, putting them at risk of unequal treatment, bodily
harm, and death” (47).
33 While post-colonial treatments of disability have been increasing in frequency, studies
of disability in post-colonial literary and cinematic production are still lagging. Besides
Barker’s book, for studies of disability in post-colonial cultural production, see
Quayson and Flaugh. An example of the erasure of the lived aspects of disability in
literary criticism is Nixon’s reading of Animal’s People in Slow Violence. Animal’s dis-
abled corporeality is read almost exclusively in a symbolic register.
34 For an example of the first type of reading within post-colonial studies, see Barker’s
analysis of Rushdie’s Shame; for the second, see Van Dam’s reading of Ousmane’s
Xala.
35 Despite frequent invocations of the “grammar of animality” (Gossett) as it relates to the
question of the production of the human, there has been a persistent reluctance to con-
sider the question of actual animals within this theoretical corpus. See the four reasons
outlined by Huggan and Tiffin for the reluctance to consider the question of animals in
post-colonial theory (135–38).
36 By animacy hierarchy, Chen refers to the conceptual arrangement of “human . . . dis-
abled . . . animal . . . plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value
and priority” (13). The term “animacy” is drawn from cognitive linguistics and
refers to “the set of notions characterized by family resemblances.” It is “described var-
iously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility and liveness” (1–4).
37 Derrida’s term l’animot is relevant here as a critique of the generalizing concept of the
“animal.” The l’animot lets “the plural animals . . . (be) heard in the singular.” Thus,
“l’animot” does not represent a reductive “single figure of an animality that is
simply opposed to humanity,” but rather references “within itself the heterogeneity
and difference that exists among animals” (The Animal, 47).
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2 The mayabi state
Narratives of torture, sexual violence
and disability haunting
Introduction
While studies of terror, terrorism and literature have proliferated after 9/11, there
are very few analyses that explore state terror in literary criticism and theory.1
This spurt in critical interest in terrorism may have something to do with
the view that “terror has become the contemporary state of being to which,
for the West, there is no exception” (Boehmer, Terror and the Postcolonial
145). The figure of “otherness” that consolidates this state of being is the spectral,
feral form of the terrorist as civilizational other.2 Although many works are also
critical of state violence, the question of the representation of techniques of state
terrorism and its impact on the everyday is largely undertheorized in literary
studies – possibly because this apparatus is still implicitly seen as the rationalized
political force guaranteeing order, law, security and civilization. Besides this
undertheorization may also arise from the fact that state terror is perceived as
occurring “elsewhere” (the Global South) and not “here.”
Mention “the state” and “terror” in the same breath, and the descriptors that
usually come to mind are “Kafkaesque” or Max Weber’s pronouncement on
the iron cage. Readings of Kafkaesque depictions of the relationships between
bureaucracy and terror and the Weberian idea of the iron cage are predicated
on a split and increasing distance between the mind and the body. The bureau-
cracy becomes a symbol of machinic, impersonal hyperrationality that transcends
and stands apart from the realm of the body, the flesh or the creaturely. This split
and the concomitant distance between a bureaucracy and its clients paradoxically
produces its own “magical” effects.
However, the framework of the mind–body split and a concomitant elision of
the “magical” in bureaucratic ensembles is attractive for literary scholars who
study the depictions of the state, bureaucracy and terror. Consider the following
sentence from Kirsten Mahlke’s reading of Julio Cortazar’s neo-Kafkaesque story
on the “disappeared” in Argentina, “Second Time Around.” Mahlke writes:
My analysis will show that the Argentine self-description of state terror does
not lead in the direction of excesses committed by hot-blooded and exotic
banana republic despots, but rather stands in more immediate proximity to
51 The mayabi state 51
dry bureaucratic annihilation known in Germany and best described (or
better, prescribed) in Kafka’s The Trial.
(202)
Mahlke establishes an opposition between passion (“hot-blooded . . . banana repub-

lic despots”) and reason (“dry bureaucratic annihilation known in Germany”),
which rehearses the mind–body/Global North–Global South split. In doing so,
she fetishizes the hyperrational powers of the modern, bureaucratic, “drily” rational,
and may I add, Eurocentric idea of the state-form by opposing it to the passionate,
irrational cast the state-apparatus takes “elsewhere.”
I italicize fetishize because this concept enables Michael Taussig to study the
“peculiar sacred and erotic attraction, even thralldom, combined with disgust,
which the State holds towards its subjects” (111). What is politically urgent,
Taussig argues, in the explication of his notion of state fetishism is:
this necessary institutional interpenetration of reason by violence not only

diminishes the claims of reason, casting it into ideology, mask and effect of
power, but also that it precisely the coming together of reason-and-violence
in the State that creates in a secular and modern world, the bigness of the
big S – not merely its apparent unity and fictions of will and mind thus
inspired, but the auratic and quasisacred quality of that very inspiration, a
quality we quite willingly impute to the ancient States of China, Egypt, and
Peru . . . or to European Absolutism, but not to the rational-legal state that
now stands as ground to our being as citizens of the world.
(116)
Instead of reiterating the terms of the opposition between “dry,” affectless, rational-
ized bureaucracy “here,” and the noxious vitality of “hot-blooded” despots “there,”
this chapter asks whether it might be useful to study forms of the state, the bureau-
cracy and the administration “not singularly as exemplars for governmentality (or
cool and distant, rationalized disciplinary practice) but as working through exuding
affect and potency” (Navaro-Yashin 33)? Furthermore, if we study the State and
bureaucracy as producers of affect and potency, can this reveal “not merely . . .
(their) . . . apparent unity and fictions of will,” but their “auratic and quasisacred”
ritualistic qualities experienced at the level of everyday life? These questions have
an important bearing for the functioning of the state apparatuses and bureaucracies
in necropolitical locales in predominantly liberal-democratic polities like India,
where populations experience terrifying conjugations of the “coming together of
reason-and-violence.” As we saw with the discussion of the abduction episodes
during the period of the secret killings in Assam, it is the “coming together” of
these modalities that makes the State and sovereign power appear fantasmatic,
ghostly or, in a word that recurs in Arupa Patangia Kalita’s fictions on terror,
mayabi (magical).
Given that an interrogation of the mechanisms that produce otherness has been
one of postcolonial studies’ central theoretical concerns, scholars working in this
field have been more attentive to questions of state terrorism. My approach to the
fetishistic qualities of the mayabi state and its impact on everyday life, however,
differs from the comparative (Boehmer and Morton; Basuli Deb), legal-historical
(Tickell) or “poetics”-based (Primorac) approaches to the question of state terror.
I focus instead on a) the representation of the combination of bureaucratic and
exceptional technologies through which state terror is perpetuated and everyday
reality rendered phantasmagoric, and b) the phenomenological and psychocul-
tural impact of the unmaking the everyday that such terror-techniques unleash
on subject populations.
To explore these questions, I turn to an analysis of Dhrubajyoti Bora’s monu-
mental Assamese novel, Kalantoror Gadya. Kalantoror Gadya is the first part of
the Kalantor trilogy – the other two novels are Tezor Andhar (Darkness of Blood,
1996) and Artha (Meaning, 2003) – which is the most wide-ranging and compre-
hensive fictional chronicle of necropolitical terror in the state of Assam from the
late 1980s to the middle half of the new century. This period is characterized by
the rise to prominence of the militant group United Liberation Front of Assam
(ULFA), the consolidation of its status as a virtual parallel administration in
the state, the period of counter-insurgency carried out by the Indian state –
most notably through two major counter-insurgency operations in the early
1990s, Operation Bajrang and Operation Rhino – terror in ordinary life unleashed
by both of these sovereign entities, the general prevalence of cultures of impunity
because of the lingering impact of political violence, and the period of the
extra-judicial killings of suspected family members and sympathizers of the
ULFA infamously known as the “secret killings of Assam” between 1998 and
2002.3
Kalantoror Gadya (henceforth KG) deals with the period of the late 1980s to
roughly about the mid-1990s and encompasses the public debate about the
ULFA’s role in the Assamese sociocultural ecumene, its rise as a virtual parallel
administration, and the effects of the two counter-insurgency operations. The
novel represents necropolitical terror by paying close attention to the structures
of the everyday and the banal ways in which bureaucracy and administration
exude terror, affect and mayabi potency. Through such portrayals, KG illustrates
how terrifying potentialities lurk beneath the seemingly placid façades of the
everyday and the ordinary, and how sovereign power assumes a mayabi hue
for its citizen-subjects. The codified abstraction that is the everyday is unmade
in such states of terror. KG evaluates the effects of such phantasmagoric eventu-
alities and focuses on how populations and subjects endure the hit of terror.
KG is a panoramic, polyphonic novel in eleven parts. Narrated via an omni-
scient, third-person viewpoint, scattered episodes of terror are bound together
through a point of focalization: the journalist-as-witness epitomized by a young,
idealistic reporter named Partha who works for an English-language daily in
Assam. The choice of the journalist as the focalizing point is crucial in a couple
of respects. This narrative figure is mobile in the sense that he moves across
various social segments in Assam and can witness the impact of terror across
the spectrum. Through this figure, the narrator transports us to different locales
in Assam to illustrate the effects of state terror on various sectors of the population:
the urban middle class, the rural poor and the militants.
Simultaneously, Partha is constantly shown in conflict with his professional
role. His cynical boss, Neelratan Choudhury, repeatedly exhorts him not to get
involved with what he is reporting and to be “professional.” This tension is
reflected early in the narrative:
As a journalist, it would not be correct to get involved in such affairs at a

personal level. It would be unprofessional. No, he [Partha] would just
observe it and go on. . . . However, a feeling of sympathy was growing for
this family.4
(17)
This conflict between Partha’s professional role and his impulse to sympathize
and bear witness to what he encounters during his journalistic assignments
produce the grounds for storytelling in the text.
Two lines of commentary have developed around KG. The first reads it as a
fiction of the Assamese middle class, the disintegration of their certainties during
states of terror, and a staging ground for a discussion of the morality of violence
in revolutionary contexts (Gohain “Axomiya Jatiya Bidhrohor Kahini”; Barkataki
“Kalantor Trilogy”). Indeed, viewed from this angle, KG can also be considered a
story of “Terror as usual, the middle-class way” (Taussig, Nervous System, 14),
transmogrifying into a terrifying state of emergency during the period of militari-
zation. What such readings ignore, however, is that the middle class is not the
exclusive focus of the novel: a significant chunk considers the impact of terror
on the rural poor. The second line of criticism explores representations of gender
in the novel. Tilottama Misra’s reading focuses both on the transformation of
young, idealistic militants into brutal killers and the relegation of women to the
margins of the text. As she writes: “Women exist only at the peripheries of this
world, more as victims than as active agents” (“Women’s Writing” 252).5 I
agree with this reading and will criticize the narrative of Sombori’s rape following
this lead. KG, and in fact the entire trilogy, represent a primarily male-centric
universe.
However, commentators on Bora’s trilogy have not paid attention to his metic-
ulous exploration of the mechanisms and rituals through which terror is perpetu-
ated on a population, how the body is captured in the meshes of necropower
through such techniques, and the phenomenological impact of terror on the sub-
ject’s sensory universe. Accordingly, this chapter is divided into three parts. In the
first part, I adopt an Ameryian perspective and focus on the representation of
torture in the narrative of Prabhat Hazarika. I will analyze how torture and asso-
ciated rituals of state terror ruins a subject’s trust in his/her “routine” of the every-
day. I will place my exploration of torture within a larger social field where
seemingly banal statist practices, like bureaucratic writing and the storage of
information in a file, begin to assume a fetishistic, phantasmagoric hue. I argue
that Bora shows a slow process of the unmaking of a subject’s everyday world
through a meticulous recounting of the combined effects of banal bureaucratic
practices (where terror lies latent in routine) and the shattering effects of the
event of torture.
The focus on bureaucratic practices will continue in the second section, where I
study the narrative of the rural denizen Sombori’s rape by Indian army personnel.
The powerful aspect of this segment is the representation of bureaucratic and
social indifference towards Sombori’s predicament after the sexual assault, partic-
ularly concretized through a meticulous description of acts of futile waiting.
However, I find the “rape script” (Marcus) deployed by Bora problematic in
that it erases female voice and agency. I suggest that in this novel, and elsewhere
in his trilogy, Bora is rarely able to make the move from a representation of the
capture of life by necropower to a depiction of survival, especially where female
characters are concerned. Therein lies the essential artistic and ethical limitations
of the masculinist frame underpinning the Kalantor trilogy.
If KG falters in its portrayal of gendered agency, it contains a complex por-
trayal of disabled subjectivity. The last section focuses on the kaleidoscopic nar-
rative of the torture and execution of a rural disabled subject named Babula by the
Indian army. Unlike the disruption of Prabhat’s insulated middle-class “routine,”
terror infiltrates every pore of the rural lifeworlds depicted in KG before the
Indian army makes its entrance. Para-sovereign agencies, like the militant
group depicted in the story, mirror the brutalities of the state as they try to disci-
pline the rural population. The rural population is entrapped in the crosshairs of
these agencies of necropolitical terror. The ethical dimension of Babula’s narra-
tive, however, emerges from the depiction and deployment of haunting. At the
closure, his ghost wanders around the neighboring forest after he is tortured
and killed during an army raid. Placing this narrative within the intersections
of studies of haunting and disability studies, I discuss how Bora demonstrates
both the agency and dysappearance of the disabled subject in the realm of every-
day life lived under the shadow of terror, and the ghostly effects and experiences
of necropolitical terror that arbitrarily uproots a rural lifeworld from its moorings.
The mutilation of “routine”: torture, the maleficent state

and the unmaking of the ordinary
Unlike Sombori and Babula’s narratives, each contained within a single section,
Prabhat’s narrative is dispersed across three parts of KG: Part I (“Prabhatar
Katha” [“Prabhat’s Story”]), Part V (“Nyaynitir Khatiyan” [“The Eclipse of
Law and Order”]) and a brief segment in Part VIII (“Ekhon Nodi” [“A River”]),
where Prabhat appears as a mere shell of his former self after a prolonged
period of torture and incarceration. The actual episode of torture in the first two
chapters of Part V is the culminating point for the absolute breakdown of trust
in the world for young Prabhat and his father, Narayan Hazarika. Bora dexterously
places this episode of torture within a narrative of how the Hazarika family cumu-
latively experiences the fetishistic quality of rituals of the state and its bureaucratic
apparatuses. The combination of these fetishistic qualities inherent in the rituals of
the state (surveillance and policing, summoning the suspect to the police station
repeatedly, inscribing the suspect into the life of the state through the technologies
of writing and inscription, the rituals of arrest and interrogation) and the actual
infliction of torture on Prabhat’s body ruins the Hazarika family’s trust in the
world. This relationship between ordinary bureaucratic forms of terror and the
event of torture in Prabhat’s narrative are closely connected: on the one hand,
the text illustrates the phantasmatic, “irrational” and maleficent cast that forms
of bureaucratic rationalities assume through the sheer fact of seemingly banal rep-
etition; on the other, it also explores the political rationalities inherent in the
discourse and application of excessive forms of bodily harm like torture in
liberal-democratic societies like India.6 The key to unlocking this braided relation-
ship is the multiple, and increasingly, ominous significance that the English loan-
word “routine” occupies in this segment of KG.
Although the word “routine” is not directly mentioned in the beginning,
Narayan Hazarika’s ruminations on the non-dramatic element of routinized
expectation and quotidian repetition characterizing certain segments of Assamese
urban middle-class existence in the early 1990s sets the stage for the steady dis-
integration of trust in the world:
It was as if the world was much simpler then. The world was enmeshed in
a predictable rhythm and simple pattern. One’s success was thought to be
dependent on good results in the examinations and taking a practically ori-
ented stream that eventually culminated in a degree in medicine, engineering
or the like.
“Line luwa” [taking a fixed orientation in life] – then it was called “line
luwa.” Once that direction was taken, the future seemed assured. A govern-
ment job, marriage, a relatively uncomplicated sexual life sanctioned by
society, children, the construction of one or two houses, buying a second-
hand, if not a brand new, car, and growing old slowly among such comforts.
And, finally, an unremarkable death. A beloved nephew, friend or son would
write a one-column obituary in the daily newspaper. Only then did the world
come to realize that a person bearing that name existed. . . .
Every ten years or so there used to be one or two political agitations
concerning language, dialect. . . . After a few days, these agitations used to
fizzle out.
(11–12)
The middle-class subject feels that he is anchored in space and in control of time
through a predictable, repetitive series of actions and established social scripts:
working hard to reproduce one’s conditions of production (epitomized by “line
luwa”), getting a government job, marrying, garnering a few material possessions,
having children, and slowly and relatively uneventfully getting old. Hazarika’s
invocation of “line luwa” can be located within this historical milieu, where a “gov-
ernment job” or a degree in engineering or medicine offered security and the
promise of a good life to bourgeois Assamese subjects, and oftentimes determined
the horizons of their material worlds and social imaginaries. This is also a very
male imaginary with the patriarch at the center of the heterosexual family unit.
“Stability” here represents a perpetuation of the patriarchal order, with the “line
luwa” man expected to reproduce conditions of the good life. Such an “ordinary”
life could be neatly slotted into a small column in the newspaper as the sum of
one’s existence – a familiar, reassuring form of narrative closure that simulta-
neously evokes and continues the subject’s sense of security about one’s surround-
ings. The ordinary takes shape through such repeated, predictable rhythms.
Political and occasional “dramatic” events like the elopement of a boy and a
girl fitfully interrupt what is otherwise perceived subjectively as routinized repe-
tition. What this representation gestures towards is the self-perception of the urban
middle class that considered “history” and “politics” as separate from the stream
of ordinary existence. They were also relatively insulated from the “terror-as-
usual” perpetuated on the rural populations and the underclasses.7 The stability
accruing from this insulation from terror is what drives the evocation of nostalgia –
the division between the idyllic imagination of a receding “past” and the uncertain
“now.” What Hazarika feels chimes with what Svetlana Boym says about the
structure of nostalgia:
a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an

enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expres-
sion of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both
physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into
history.
(8)
Something terrible was born in the period of the 1990s that evokes anxiety in
“unremarkable” people like Hazarika. Per Ernst Bloch, anxiety, like fear and
hope, is an “expectant emotion.” While all emotions refer to the horizon of
time, expectant emotions are distinguished by their “incomparably greater antic-
ipatory character” (Bloch 74–75). Hazarika’s nostalgic evocation of an ordinary
past is bracketed as a vanished epoch. Young men like Prabhat inhabited an “alto-
gether new age” that caused great trepidation to people like Hazarika. The antic-
ipatory character of anxiety that Bloch alludes to culminates in the following
image: Hazarika and people like him, the narrator of KG says, had “two feet in
two worlds; the old world was changing rapidly while one could not get a
stable footing in the new” (12). Besides the temporal play between the “old”
and the “new,” the spatial dimension is crucial here. Sianne Ngai says that the
anticipatory structure of anxiety is “dependent on a spatial grammar and vocab-
ulary” (210). Anxiety is characterized by spatial motifs of “dispositioning.”
Notice how Hazarika’s feeling of being anchored in space is shown to be dis-
placed by a variety of motifs of dispositioning in the earlier image: “two feet
in two worlds,” the inability to get a “stable footing in the new.”
This steadily growing sense of “dispositioning” is accentuated when the state
directly intervenes in the sphere of civil and private life. An unknown person,
who later identifies himself as a police intelligence officer, knocks at Hazarika’s
door. Hazarika’s nervous response to this unprecedented visit and the officer’s
subsequent revelation of his identity exposes the terrifying potentialities that
lurk beneath the surface of this seemingly secure world: “What sort of informa-
tion do you hope to get in this neighborhood? This is a very peaceful neighbor-
hood . . . It is an old, established middle-class area. An area inhabited by
bhadralok [well-mannered people]” (14). Hazarika’s invocation of “peaceful”
and “old, established middle-class area” shows how the unannounced visit by a
police officer seems alien and terrifying to the bourgeois subject insulated from
the flow of politicized history. He tries to allay anxiety by the repeated invocation
of “stable” images of selfhood that define the horizons of his familiar world.
The unanticipated knock on the door opens a pathway for the intrusion of brack-
eted events from the outside to the supposedly secure inside of the middle-class
home. The terror induced by summons from the administration is also evident
later: Hazarika is chilled at the merest mention of Prabhat’s case being referred
to the high court. Moreover, Hazarika establishes boundaries between the self
and the other with his pronouncement that everyone knows each other in this
old neighborhood which is inhabited only by established, middle-class people.
Violence thus is bracketed to an outside. The officer debunks Hazarika’s naïve
claims by saying that a floating population of several tenants – mostly young
men – also live in the neighborhood. The latter’s horror and the attendant dispo-
sitioning caused by the breach of supposedly “stable” boundaries between self and
other is accentuated further when the officer reveals that he has come to ask
Prabhat some questions. The threat unexpectedly emerges from the supposedly
secure and known inside. The officer also asks Prabhat to present himself at the
police station the next day. Alternating between states of incredulousness and
fear, Hazarika demands a reason for Prabhat’s summons, but does not receive a
reply. This unexpected visit throws the Hazarika household’s routinized existence
topsy-turvy.
Partha makes his appearance in the second chapter as he interviews Hazarika
after the latter contacts him about the vexing situation. A significant amount of
time has passed between the intelligence officer’s visit and Prabhat’s first few
visits to the police station. My initial invocation of the non-dramatized, uneventful
sense of the everyday is accentuated during Hazarika’s recollection of the first visit
to the police station. A constable asks him if he has come to file a petition for a
relatively “common” dramatic situation in this picture of the ordinary: a servant
girl’s elopement. It is only when Hazarika tells them that they came to the
station to report as instructed by the nameless intelligence officer that the seem-
ingly lethargic institution springs into mysterious life. The constable goes in to
report to the OC, the father–son duo is made to wait for an interminably long
period in this unfamiliar location, finally the OC calls the pair for a brief interro-
gation. The OC assures the worried Hazarika that no harm will come to Prabhat,
further mentioning that they will write down a record of that conversation in a file.
Mention of file leaves Hazarika stunned. The OC reassures him that nothing sin-
ister is afoot and Hazarika leaves. Prabhat comes back safely later that day but is
summoned repeatedly. Partha asks Hazarika if he did not try to find out why
Prabhat was being summoned repeatedly. Hazarika replies in the affirmative and
repeats the ominous sounding response of the constable – “Don’t worry, this is
a matter of routine, absolutely a matter of routine” (26).
The subsequent chapters show how these unexplained calls to the police station
now become a matter of routine, albeit without a predictable regularity: “Once the
process of reporting to the police station began, it seemed to continue almost
endlessly. . . . Sometimes seven days, sometimes ten, there seemed to be no
logic to the summons” (26). The aspect of routinized repetition that characterizes
everyday life merges with the seemingly inscrutable nature of bureaucratic logic,
showing how the unpredictable itself has transformed into a sort of rule for the
Hazarika household. Prabhat is summoned repeatedly so that he can provide
information about one of his former schoolmates, Subrata (alias Arindam
Phukan) who is one of the top leaders of a rebel organization. Towards the end
of the first section, Hazarika stops these visits when he goes and personally
requests the OC to halt the harassment. However, he lets it slip that he knows
that Prabhat is being called repeatedly to provide information about Subrata
and that his son has not been in touch with the rebel leader for more than
three years. While Prabhat’s harassment stops, Hazarika’s name is listed in Prab-
hat’s file as an informant.
The file, Matthew Hull writes, is a “technology for materially enacting an
authoritative decision, for making a decision out of various utterances and
actions” (127). Anthropologists (Navaro-Yashin, Gupta, Hull, Mathur), historians
(Ben Kafka) and legal scholars (Vismann) pay a lot of attention to the file and the
associated practices of bureaucratic writing both as technologies and as symbolic
artifacts that circulate in heterogeneous ways within sociocultural fields. While
their respective emphases vary, these studies are united in two aspects. First,
they criticize the view that objects and artifacts are merely reified or inert entities
that passively reflect social relations. Second, they suggest that something like the
state is conjured in the everyday through such practices of writing, storage and
their concomitant impact on sociocultural life (Gupta and Sharma 11).
Writing here is not a by-product of state activity that merely serves archival
functions but is constitutive of the “imaginary of the state” (Hansen and Steppu-
tat). Veena Das and Deborah Poole write that writing “bear(s) the double sign of
the state’s distance and its penetration into the life of the everyday” (15). As an
inscription of the state, the official file is simultaneously distant and has a tremen-
dous impact on the everyday life of the citizenry. Speaking of the specific case of
Indian bureaucracies, the file, Akhil Gupta says, is both “the key device for the
storing and retrieval of information” and a “material object” that “attains a life
of its own that often looms larger than that of the people who are supposedly
acting on it” (153). Gupta reports an officer’s statement from the days of his field-
work in Uttar Pradesh: “If it is not in the file, it does not exist.” Conversely, we
can say that if something is in a file, it does not die. Gupta argues that writing is
not secondary to action in the bureaucratic world but is one of the primary activ-
ities of bureaucrats. A lot of what is written in a bureaucratic file falls within the
framework of “useless writing” (Gupta 153), as it exceeds the actual needs of the
state. However, this form of useless, excess writing may gather dust for a while,
but like a zombie, may be reanimated and brought back to life.8
In KG, we don’t see what writing means from the perspective of the bureaucrat
or the low-ranking police official. However, the constable’s reassurance to Hazar-
ika that what he is writing is merely “routine” is not an index of anything terri-
fying taken at face value – it merely states a banal truth that such “useless”
practices of writing are actually “routine” for such officials. However, we
become attuned to the terror latent in routine when the seemingly dead letter is
reanimated and brought back to life in the fifth part of the novel, titled “The
Eclipse of the Rule of Law” (Nyanitir Khatiyan). A common, banal bureaucratic
practice of recording details about a person and asking someone to sign his name
as a witness takes a different cast during a militarized emergency that incrimi-
nates and produces Prabhat as a form of bare life.
But what is it in the file that provokes terror? The terror is initiated when
Hazarika realizes that his son is being inserted into the life of the state through
the material record of the official file. Furthermore, because of the closed
nature of the recording process, Hazarika does not know what is written in that
file. Writing assumes the status of the “demonic” (Ben Kafka) for this middle-
class subject – he knows that he and his son are being represented in certain
ways. However, this representation is beyond his control – a stark contrast to
the sense of control and trust that Hazarika felt over the space-time of his ordinary
at the beginning. Moreover, as Das suggests the “idea of signature, tied as it is to
the writing technologies of the state” captures the doubled image, among ordinary
citizens, of the state as both a rational and a magical entity (Life and Words 162).
What allows this double image of the state to circulate and endure among the cit-
izenry is the illegibility of many of these writing technologies. The police officials
keep repeating that the exercise of entering information in the file is merely
“routine.” But the illegibility of this so-called routine is precisely what creates
and sustains terror for the citizen-subject. The file here represents a crypt
without a key. Moreover, Hazarika also signs his name in the file. His own sig-
nature, thus, gets trapped within the crypt. Das’s comments are applicable here:
my utterances become vulnerable because my words may be transfigured

elsewhere. In ordinary life, this is the region of human vulnerability – I
may be quoted out of context, my words may be reproduced in a mood of
irony, or they may be infused with another affect. In the life of the state,
that very iterability becomes not a sign of vulnerability, but a mode of circu-
lation through which power is produced.
(Life and Words 178)
Indeed, state power is imposed in a brutal way through this zombified mode of
the circulation of writing wrenched from context when military rule is declared in
the early 1990s. Part I ends with an ominous sense that matters of “routine” are
not what they appear. Part V reveals that our readerly forebodings were not far off
the mark. One night, Prabhat is forcibly taken away by the armed forces in front
of his family. By this time, the police recede into the background as the major
apparatus of surveillance; the primary source for instilling terror in the populace
is the army. His father’s signature in the file indicts Prabhat as an accomplice of
the rebels for the army – the seemingly dead letter is released from the crypt with
catastrophic consequences.
The first two chapters of “Nyaynitir Khatiyan” deploy an interesting narrative
technique. The descriptive scenes of Prabhat’s arrest and torture are intercut
with Choudhury expounding the ritualistic functions of arrest, interrogation and
torture to Partha and his colleagues. The Choudhury sequences can be considered
as a form of choric commentary on torture as political rationality of government,
and on the sovereign and zoopolitical dimensions underlying the deployment of
technologies and spectacles of terror. The aim of the deployment of these specta-
cles of arrest and incarceration, to channel Michel Foucault from Discipline and
Punish, is to make witnesses aware of “the unrestrained presence of the sovereign”
not for the re-establishment of justice, but for the reactivation of power (49).
This narrative strategy of intercutting between graphic descriptions of scenes of
terror and choric commentary is inaugurated by Prabhat’s arrest on a dusty
evening. In a parallel scene, Choudhury begins by telling his captive audience
that torture is one node of the rituals of state terror. The process of terrorizing
begins earlier, from the time the suspect is first arrested. Choudhury continues:
It is usually a norm to arrest the person in front of his family members. . . . It

has also become a norm to humiliate and terrorize the suspect and his family
members during the arrest. Can anyone tell me why? . . .
. . . Creating terror is now an indispensable element in the process of arrest-
ing the suspect. . . . The goal of arrest today is to intimidate and terrorize.
Therefore, the process of arresting the suspect is very inhuman. If even
one family in a locale gets terrorized . . . then that fear spreads like a conta-
gious disease throughout the entire region. The neighbors, friends and inti-
mates all begin to cower in fear. . . . The aim is to break morale. . . . Such
groups can hardly raise their voices against injustice . . . forget protesting
against it.
(189–90)
The rituals of terror and their necessarily excessive, spectacular nature are aimed
not only at the breaking the morale of the detainee, but also to intimidate the
“third subject” (Avelar 12), the witnesses to the act of arrest. Fear spreads infec-
tiously like a viral form of life, making subjects cower in fear and ensuring pas-
sivity. Allen Feldman writes:
[A]rrests are spectacles that elicit subject positions by commanding complic-

itous silence and passivity. The . . . raid by counterinsurgency forces is a
display of colonizing power and the command of territory . . . This claiming
of territory and time moves to the command of domestic spaces and bodies.
Each appropriative stage, from its timing to its culmination in the subtraction
of the suspect from his home and community, functions as a disciplinary
incision onto populations and topographies.
(89)
This notion of spectacle that accelerates via appropriative stages and elicits
passive subject positions is evident in the scene that occurs immediately after
Choudhury explicates the rationalities behind such terror-techniques. Around
eight soldiers arrive in two vehicles and surround Hazarika’s house. They man-
handle and intimidate a passerby, barge into the Hazarika household, abuse
Mrs. Hazarika and Prabhat’s sister and them treat roughly, drag Prabhat out of
his room, haul him into one of the waiting vehicles, make him kneel in a
corner of a vehicle, place a dirty rag over his head and then drive away speedily.
All the while the terror of the situation is accentuated because the abductors speak
gruffly in Hindi, a language Mrs. Hazarika does not understand (Hazarika is not
present at the time of the raid). As soon as the vehicles arrive and block the road,
and the soldiers create a massive din, the other people in the neighborhood shut
off their lights and televisions, close their doors and peek silently through their
curtains. A deathly silence pervades the entire neighborhood. Feldman’s com-
ments on the rituals of arrest in Northern Ireland are relevant:
Arrest establishes a cordon sanitaire around the suspect, his house, and
around entire communities in which the arrest occurs. . . . The cordon sani-
taire is the state in miniature . . . it disrupts public/private allocations of per-
sonal and social space. . . . During arrest, the counterinsurgency forces expect
the community to avoid the event, to stay off the streets, to close the lights
and curtains and withdraw into privacy.
(93–4)
The way the cars are parked create a cordon sanitaire around the Hazarika house-
hold. The noisy parking of the cars and the din created by the army personnel are
aural indicators that the cordoned space represents the “state in miniature” and that
the other people in the neighborhood are supposed to keep off. A passerby in
a bicycle inadvertently transgresses that space. He becomes the “out-of-place
element in the tableau in which all participants are supposed to occupy fixed posi-
tions” (Feldman 94). His bicycle is flung into a drain and he is ordered to kneel
behind some bushes, only daring to move after the convoy has whisked Prabhat
away. Besides, as Choudhury states, no answers are given as to where detainees
like Prabhat are being whisked away to. The whole effect of this phantomatic per-
formance by sovereign power suspends the witnesses in a state of uncertainty and
terror.
The narrative technique of intercutting continues as we are presented with
graphic descriptions of Prabhat’s torture and Choudhury’s disquisitions on the
history and aims of this terror tactic. Elaine Scarry argues that the “unmaking”
of the world in torture “inevitably requires a return to and mutilation of the
domestic, the ground of all making.” One example of such a “ground” is the
room, which magnifies the body, miniaturizes the world and provides the body
a stable inner space (38–39). In the early part of KG, Hazarika is stunned to
realize that the threat to his sense of self seems to emanate from the insulated
“inside” of his private domain: his son could be the uncanny other within. In
the torture scenes, the private domain of the room is breached, mangled and
ruined. Moreover, in torture, the “world” is reduced to a room or a set of
rooms – thus, the room itself “is converted into another weapon, an agent of
pain” (Scarry 40). A comparable mutilation of the domestic and a dramatization
of the world collapsing occurs for Prabhat during the period of his capture and
subsequent torture. The process begins when the soldiers enter and trash his
room and is then extended to the chilling banality of the space he is sequestered
in in the army camp. Two ways in which torture achieves its effects of terror is
through breaking down or putting under erasure the sensory world of the victim
and through a dreadful temporal anticipation of expected pain. Sight, sound,
smell, touch and taste – each a “means of moving out into the world or moving
the world in to oneself, becomes a means of turning the body back on itself”
(Scarry 48). This process, as we have seen, begins much before the actual inflic-
tion of extreme pain on the body.
The infliction of extreme pain on the body is preceded by a “surplus of cruelty”
(Avelar 28) where the subject is humiliated, his atmoxomman (self-respect) bru-
tally assaulted and the ordinary is turned into a locale of fear and terror. When
Prabhat is forcibly taken out of the army vehicle at the detention camp, he is
still blindfolded. This blindfold, an instrument through which visual markers
are obliterated, his prone position in the floor of the truck that he is hauled
into and his inability to discern where he is being transported creates an acute
sense of disorientation in Prabhat. Snatches of indistinct conversation, the occa-
sional bloodcurdling scream and the fetid smell of urine are the only elements his
senses register. Cold air assaults his body, while his mouth runs dry. He is pushed
into a room and handcuffed to the wall. Bora devotes sufficient space describing
the room in the camp where Prabhat is detained and made to wait.
A few wooden benches and desks were piled together in one corner of the spa-
cious room. A lone bulb was hanging from the ceiling. Sacks and plastic
covered some of the cracks in the concrete floor. A blackboard lay on the
floor. The windows with iron bars were closed. A biting wind entered
through the door and made Prabhat shiver.
(194)
Bora’s description of what is possibly a classroom in a school echoes one of

Xonzoi Barbora’s observations: “Assam’s landscape of terror . . . encourages a
semblance of the routine and adds a feral, untamed quality to spaces that are
meant to be refuge, sanctuary and shelter” (“Road to Resentment” 117). In this
ordinary room, the olfactory predominates over the ocular as Prabhat’s nose is
assaulted by the fetid stench of urine. The window with iron bars is closed,
thus accentuating isolation from the world outside. The compartmentalization of
space inside the room increases the sense of isolation. The room itself is spacious,
but largely empty. Most of the desks and benches are scattered pell-mell in one
corner. The blackboard thrown carelessly and the sacks and plastic covering
the floor (possibly to hide signs of violence and torture), accelerates the mutila-
tion of images of the domestic for Prabhat.
Prabhat is ordered to strip naked in this isolated room and is left handcuffed
there for a few hours. The temporal experience of waiting is characterized by
the subject teetering between a fearful anticipation of future terrors, indicated
especially by horrible, jagged sounds of pain emanating from nearby rooms, to
a debilitating sensation that this action itself can end shockingly, unexpectedly
at any minute. Prabhat, thus, inhabits a period of dread time in this former
shelter that has now turned “feral, untamed.” Shivering incessantly, Prabhat
finally relieves his bladder in a standing position like “an animal” (poxu). It is
only after Prabhat has been reduced to this humiliating and undignified situation
that the physical torture begins.
In a neighboring intercut scene, Choudhury continues:
By destroying self-respect [atmoxomman] . . . the very personhood of a

subject is sought to be destroyed. If personhood is destroyed, mental forti-
tude goes the same direction. To achieve this, a person’s clothes are stripped
off and he is left naked, he is humiliated, he is abused using foul language, he
is tied up like an animal, fed like an animal. Only after this is the subject pre-
sented in front of his interrogator. By that time the person has to let go of his
sense of shame, of any attachment to custom and habit. He is reduced to the
level of an animal [jontu].
(195)
What is important about this passage and the one in which Prabhat is urinating
like a poxu is the association of qualities like “self-respect” and “dignity” with
a mode of transcendence over “animal” being. Biopolitics, in Nicole Shukin’s
words, bleeds into a zoopolitics (9), as the human being is exiled from the
orbit of humanness and actively made into an object. The subject is denied his/
her humanity by being deprived of all identifiable insignia of bios (qualified
life). In this extreme zoopolitical universe, all that s/he falls back on then is
the bare privation of zoē (pure, natural life). The capture and repression of
animal life in the semblance of the human is brutally overturned, and bare life
is the production of this biopolitical machine.9
Furthermore, both the idea of self-control and self-respect are assaulted in
torture. In that respect, torture is also a fundamental assault on the image of the
“second person” that anchors our relationships to the world. This is evident in
the case of Prabhat’s torture. His clothes are taken away as he is stripped naked.
Shame (laaz) and fear (bhoy) constantly assail him. Eventually, feeling helpless,
he abjures his shame and relieves himself like a poxu thus bringing his involuntary
body into play – an act that leads to a volley of verbal abuses from his torturers. It
can be argued that self-control, shame, self-respect and dignity are like a protective
casing of the “second person” over the brute facticity of the biological body. When
these are stripped away in the humiliating world of torture, it is akin to clothes
being stripped off a body.10
It is only after Prabhat’s self-respect have been extinguished, after he has been
softened up by blows and electric shocks and descends into the realm of the animal-
ized human that the culminating ritual of the torture session – the interrogation –
begins. Commenting on this Choudhury says:
The aim of interrogation is not solely to extract truth. . . . Besides extracting

information, the prisoner’s resistance is sought to be broken down completely.
A mentally broken person, that’s the aim of interrogation; so that he cannot go
about ordinary life with his head held high.
(194)
While interrogation is supposed to be predicated on the dualistic structure of ques-

tion and response, interrogation during torture has an excessive, useless dimen-
sion.11 Furthermore, what Choudhury says here chimes with what commentators
on torture like Foucault in Discipline and Punish and Avelar identify as the key
node of modern technologies of torture. Avelar argues that while premodern
forms of torture were predicated on revenge of a crime against the sovereign
(hence its public and spectacular nature), modern torture has a pedagogical dimen-
sion. In a passage that echoes Choudhury’s disquisitions, Idelber Avelar writes:
Modern punishment found its raison d’etre in breaking down all future resis-
tance. Much like classical torture . . . modern penal practice inscribed punish-
ment on the body of the condemned. The difference was that it continued to
be a state prerogative but was invariably carried out within four walls. Even
though it was hidden from view, it was meant to address a third, absent
subject upon whom its effects were supposed to make themselves felt as a
warning and a moral lesson.
(27–88)
The effects of this brutal practice are evident on Prabhat’s body – when we see
him last in the novel, he has become like the living dead, seemingly desensitized
to the world around him. In his brief final, appearance, he shuns public contact,
starts with fear whenever he hears a car, suffers from insomnia and gets jumpy
whenever a light is switched on. He takes medication to curb hypertension.
Hazarika attempts to find a cure for his state and consults doctors, psychiatrists
and faith healers, but all to no avail. Prabhat exists, but as a shadow of his
former self, no longer feeling at home in the world.
Additionally, the “address to a third, absent subject” is evident when we con-
sider what happens to Hazarika. After Prabhat is disappeared and tortured, Hazar-
ika files a habeas corpus petition, with the help of Partha and his father. This
petition forces the army to transfer Prabhat to a prison in Guwahati. Later, he is
transferred to a special jail under the auspices of the draconian detention law Ter-
rorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA), which was deployed in Assam exten-
sively during the period of military rule.12 Prabhat is released only after his father
bribes a police officer during a period when general amnesty is extended to people
detained under TADA. Two segments, one a narratorial comment and another in
Partha’s conversation with Choudhury, shows the impact of such terror-techniques
on this “third” subject. The harried, disheveled Hazarika goes on a harrowing
round of police stations, lawyer’s offices and courts trying to find news of his dis-
appeared son. Finally, he appeals to Partha and his father (who is a well-known
lawyer) for help. The narrator writes: “He followed Partha around faithfully
much like a frightened child would seeking reassurance and refuge from an
adult” (Bora 207). Fear, worry and terror almost bring back the specter of
primary forms of dependency that social “adults” are supposedly leave behind
as they emerge as autonomous beings. This is Amery’s point about pain and inter-
subjectivity; the reflective claim that Jay Bernstein extends to argue that the expec-
tation of help from figures we primarily depend on (such as parents when we
are children) functions as the “material a priori of everyday life.” Terror – both
the terror of torture and the terror of banal practices inherent to the maleficent
state – breaks down our implicit faith in the availability and predictive dimensions
of such everyday structures. The combined effects of terror have a debilitating
impact on both the tortured and this third subject. While his son bears marks of
torture on his body, the father does not know how to navigate the contours
of the world he thought he knew intimately. The maleficent state and its rituals
of terror shatters his trust in the world and reduces him almost to the level of a
dependent child.
The second segment that illustrates Hazarika’s breakdown of trust emerges in a
brief exchange between Partha and Choudhury. The word “routine” features prom-
inently here; but notice how this term has assumed different, sinister connotations:
“What news of the boy?” Choudhury queried.

“He is now in a special jail,” Partha said.
“Did his family members meet him?”
“They are allowed to meet him once a week.”
“The poor man! I feel very bad for the family”
“Is that the only family . . .,” Arup said. “There are so many families like
theirs. Special families – special court – special jail . . .”
“This is nowadays routine, Partha, a fixed routine,” Choudhury opined.
“A visit to the jail . . . a consultation with the lawyer . . . on this day a
hearing in the court, a fixed routine. And yet, life goes on, with food,
sleep, sex. . . . Ha! Ha! Ha!”
(215)
The chilling aspect of this passage, accentuated by Choudhury’s cynical laughter,

are the new connotations that words like “routine” and “special” assume in a
climate of state terror. The supposedly stable ecology that characterizes Hazarika’s
social world is unmade, and a new “routine” comes into being. This “routine” con-
sists of extended brushes with the same bureaucracy and institutions of penal law
that were viewed to be outside the orbit of the shelter of everyday existence. Fur-
thermore, Choudhury’s mention of the “poor man” before the “family” also
reveals the breakdown, during a period of terror, of the cultural symbolism inher-
ent in the imaginary of the “stable” patriarchal family within the Assamese
middle-class milieu. While the family unit, with the patriarch at the head, provides
a picture of “security” and “stability,” and is the locus for the evocation of certain
forms of nostalgia, state terror strikes at the very heart of this symbolic economy.
All that is solid melts into air; what was believed to be “stable” reveals its ephem-
eral, unstable foundations. A dispositioned “new” world based on a seemingly
ceaseless set of repetitions comes into being. Due to terror, an “ordinary” family
becomes a “special family” – more importantly, one among many.
Rape scripts: bureaucratic indifference and

the silencing of voice
While the previous section explored the unmaking of the everyday and its lurch
into the realm of phantasmatic in a torture universe, this section shifts the accent
to how rape is represented in narrative. While the analysis of state and bureaucratic
practices continues, my focus will be on the story of the sexual violation of a rural
denizen, Sombori, by Indian armed forces in Part VI of KG titled “Amritxya Putra”
(“Children of Immortality”). “Amritxya Putra” combines two narrative strands: one
about bureaucratic indifference and the second about rape and its aftermath. Bora
effectively evokes the devastating effects of bureaucratic indifference on popula-
tions and shows how experiences of fruitless and interminable waiting turn a bru-
talized subject like Sombori into a femina sacra. I borrow this term from Ronit
Lentin, who revises Giorgio Agamben to suggest that:
At the mercy of sovereign power, woman, due to . . . her sexual vulnerability,

arguably becomes femina sacra at the mercy of sovereign power: she who
can be killed . . . yet who cannot be sacrificed due to her impurity.
(25)
In this segment, Sombori is produced as a femina sacra due to her sexual vulner-
ability and the subsequent effects of societal ostracization and bureaucratic indiffer-
ence. However, there are severe ethical limitations in the narrative of Sombori’s
rape and its aftermath. The most problematic aspect of “Amritxya Putra” is the
gradual elision of Sombori’s voice. This elision is violently exacerbated when
Sombori is virtually ejected from the narrative after her second rape, which
occurs just at the point when we begin to see her gradual discovery of her voice
and her associated emergence as a “subject through rape” (Sunder Rajan 77).
The framework here is inspired by feminist work on the representations of rape
in narrative.13 Readings of the representation of rape in narrative “refuse voyeur-
ism and exploitation” and “confront the uncomfortable and shocking nature of
sexual violence in ways that are themselves shocking and uncomfortable and
break the mould of the victim/perpetrator binary that dominates patriarchal dis-
course and much of subsequent feminist debates” (Gunne and Brigley 3). This
move necessitates paying closer attention to subversive deployment of “rape
scripts.” Sharon Marcus says that the word “script” should be considered as a
polyvalent metaphor and can be “understood as a framework, a grid of compre-
hensibility which we might feel impelled to use as a way of organizing and inter-
preting events and actions.” The advantage, Marcus argues, is that we can see
rape “as a process of sexist gendering which we can attempt to disrupt.” Essen-
tialist notions of male violence and female vulnerability are not then viewed as
the final explanations of rape; instead, by focusing on the momentary production
of victimhood in situations of rape, we can understand that “rape is not only
scripted – it also scripts” (391).
Feminist critics have noted the close conjunction between literary representa-
tion of rape, cultural mythologies/fantasies and legal narratives (Horeck;
Higgins and Silver). Two general scripts through which rape is represented are
either through an absence or gap in narrative or by making it hypervisible as
the focal center of the narrative. In the first case, “the simultaneous presence
and disappearance of rape as constantly deferred origin of both plot and social
relations is repeated so often as to suggest a basic conceptual principle in the
articulation of both social and artistic representations” (Higgins and Silver 3).
A male “mystique around rape” develops because of this absence, oftentimes
described by a resort to metaphoric language. As far as the second mode is con-
cerned, the placement of the rape in the narrative is the key moment to consider.
Sunder Rajan says that many masculinist narratives about rape make the assault
the exact center of narratives “so that the plots describe a graph of climax and
anticlimax around that point” (74). In contrast, in many feminist narratives of
rape, the assault is structurally located at the beginning of the woman’s narrative.
Thus, instead of building expectation and titillating male desire, the “scene of
rape [is] diminished by this positioning . . . [and] is also granted a more functional
purpose in the narrative economy . . . narrative interest becomes displaced on
what follows” (73). Furthermore, by focusing on survival in the post-rape sce-
nario, such stories show how a woman becomes a subject through rape rather
than someone who is merely subjected to it (Sunder Rajan 77). While “Amritxya
Putra” displaces the presentation of the rape, it eventually fails to show Sombori
becoming a subject through rape.
I will begin my investigation, however, by attending to Bora’s portrayal of
bureaucratic indifference and acts of waiting. “Amritxya Putra” begins on a
dark night in Nopam village where the widowed Sombori and her father-in-law,
Arjun Volunteer, are about to sit down for dinner. The “volunteer” moniker is
attached to Arjun because he was a participant in the anticolonial Quit India move-
ment. We learn that quite a few militants often come to their house and stay over-
night. While Sombori is guarded about these visits, Volunteer is very attached to
the militants. On that night, a military vehicle stops in front of their doorstep. In
the chaotic scenes that follow, Volunteer is beaten and taken outside. Finding
Sombori alone, a military officer rapes her. The next day, news of Sombori’s rape
spreads throughout the village. The opinion of the village is divided: on one hand,
the conservative sections, epitomized by characters like Budu Mahajan, prescribe
religious rituals to “purify” Sombori; on the other hand, a large section, led by
Menoka Mastoroni (the female form of “teacher”), decide to lodge a complaint.
However, after repeated trips to the offices, the villagers fail to get the complaint
filed because of sheer indifference and the climate of fear under which government
officials operate under military rule.
Subsequently, Sombori faces subtle and overt forms of social ostracization in
the village. Volunteer gradually loses a grip on his sanity. A villager contacts
Partha and another journalist to write about the issue. Partha writes an article
that is sensationalized and given a lot of space by his editor. However, nothing
happens to the case months after the publication of the article. Instead, the pub-
lication of the article increases Sombori’s ostracization in the village as powerful
villagers like Budu spread terrifying stories of the army’s power. Volunteer,
meanwhile, disappears for days on end. During one such disappearance, the mil-
itants appear at Sombori’s doorstep. The angry Sombori asks them whether they
could deliver justice for her. After her angry outburst, they leave shamefacedly.
Later that day, one of the villagers informs her that Volunteer has been hospital-
ized with pneumonia. That night, the army official comes to Sombori’s house and
finding her alone, rapes her again. In the meantime, Volunteer passes away . Our
last view of Sombori is when she agrees to Budu’s proposal to publicly retract her
story, comes back home, and is about to take poison. The scene abruptly cuts to
Partha who ruminates on the futility of his article on Sombori that was sensation-
alized despite his opposition. Partha, however, does not want to pursue the story
further; instead, the last sentences say that he is satisfied that Sombori is alive
and that he is content with the image of her as a nonviolent agitator against
state terror.
A portrayal of bureaucratic indifference and the associated acts of waiting that
populations endure play a big role in “Amritxya Putra.” Michael Herzfeld defines
indifference as the “rejection of common humanity . . . [the] denial of identity, of
selfhood” (1). Populations and subjects are produced as disposable or damaged life
through the operations of bureaucratic indifference. Bare life in modern, biopoliti-
cal polities cannot be produced without bureaucratic practices (Gupta 6). The
sphere of everyday bureaucratic practices emerges as the central field through
which ordinary people learn about the state and how this imaginary institution
“comes to assume its vertical position as the supreme authority” (Gupta and
Sharma 11). Routine and repetitive everyday practices like standing in line to cash
a check, and paying taxes substantiates the state as an institution in people’s
lives “through the apparently banal practices of bureaucracies” (11).
The representation of the devastating effects of bureaucratic indifference that
makes subjects wait for justice is evident in the two chapters where Sombori
and the other supplicants shuttle between different bureaucratic offices and
the doctor’s office with the intention of reporting the sexual assault. The spatio-
temporal dimensions through which indifference is produced and perpetuated are
important. Herzfeld says that time is a “social weapon” in bureaucratic encoun-
ters. Furthermore, when clients are treated like dirt, they are denied access to a
moral topography. Bureaucratic officials have the power to exclude individuals
or groups as outsiders, as matter out of place. This process is illustrated in the
repetition of Sombori’s acts of waiting. After a heated discussion in the village
after Sombori’s rape, Menoka – supported by some of the village youth –
decide to file a written complaint the next morning at the district office. They dis-
courage Sombori from bathing as that would destroy the evidence of assault. The
emphasis on a written complaint is key here as it is a “token of coming into state
centered communicative practice” and allows the subjects filing the complaint to
be “fully present as citizen, rather than simple body, in their very absence” (Cody
359). The written complaint, along with the tangible corporeal “proof” of Som-
bori’s bodily violation – an act that produces the female body as having eviden-
tiary value – are perceived as means of self-representation and constitute a form
of political agency that inscribes rural subjects as citizens of the state. This
attempt at an act of inscription is accompanied by the belief that the wrong
will be redressed once the evidence is presented and attested by the signature
of the citizen-subjects.
The supplicants arrive at the district headquarters after a long journey the next
morning. To their horror, they see two army vehicles parked outside. Because of
the presence of the vehicles, there is a distinctly apprehensible air of nervousness
and fear in the government employees. In trepidation, the group from the village
wait outside in the sun until they see the vehicles leaving. Led by Menoka, who is
probably best equipped to handle the written technologies of the state, they go
inside the SDO’s office. From this point, the manipulation of time as a social
weapon between bureaucrats and the clientele becomes evident. Menoka and
another young man from the village state their complaint and demand that the
SDO relay their message directly to the state. Flummoxed, the SDO stalls for
time and is rescued by one of his subordinates who states that nothing can be
done without a police complaint. Regaining his composure, the SDO invites
them to sit, asks his subordinate to close the door (to contain poisonous informa-
tion inside the room), and then begins to explain the process to the supplicants.
He says that what has happened to Sombori is very unjust, but that they should
follow due process. First, they must file a police report and then go for a medical
report. Assuring them that he would take a personal role in the case once the
report is filed, he sends them away. The bureaucrats’ strategy of stalling clients
is also a subterfuge: the purpose behind it is to stop petitioners from filing a com-
plaint in writing. A complaint in writing, an authorization of signature, could pos-
sibly have involved the official in the investigation; conversely, absence of
inscription meant the stalling of any possibility of involvement.
Similar scenarios that repeat this social and moral contest over time keep
occurring. The officer at the police station neighboring the SDO’s office
refuses to register their complaint, saying that Nopam village falls under the juris-
diction of another station. Ironically, the officer’s last advice to the group is not to
“waste” their time waiting. Ghassan Hage’s point about the “political economy”
of waiting is relevant. The supplicants demand that the agent of the state listen
to their complaints; the officer deflects that demand by invoking an economic
principle – they should not waste their time by waiting. Time is represented as
a commodity with value that is both traded and contested. The process is repeated
in a police station where the presiding police officer flatly refuses to register their
complaint. When they ask what they should do, the officer brusquely replies that
they can do whatever they desire, but he would not register the case. While the
officer’s rude response denies them access to a moral topography, Volunteer’s
subsequent response that “dex roxatoloi gol” (the country has gone to hell) can
be viewed as a rhetorical strategy that advances a moral claim for inclusion in
the national family.
Rebuffed at the station, the group decide to go to the local hospital two miles
away. Once again, they are made to wait for a long time. Finally, in the late after-
noon, the doctor comes in. However, the well-meaning government doctor pro-
fesses his helplessness because Sombori’s case hasn’t been registered at the
station. Sombori’s case, thus, never gets registered. Sombori is thus triply victim-
ized. First, as a body that is raped and potentially rapable again, Sombori exists in
a state of emergency (Azoulay 217–18). Militarist culture reduces her body to a
subjective position that is deprived of any autonomous significance. Second,
through the creeping social ostracization she suffers – she is continually denied
work, while conservative figures like Budu Mahajan exhort her relentlessly to
go through a process of ritual purification (uddhar) – reinforces the fact that
she can be killed (or raped) but lacks social value due to her “impurity.”
Without enduring the act of ritual purification, a bulk of the villagers consider
her matter out of place. Third, through sheer bureaucratic indifference, she is pro-
duced as femina sacra. The demand she makes is denied formal recognition by
the state; instead, she is abjected, devalued and denied access to the moral topog-
raphy of citizenship and of community.
While the representation of bureaucratic indifference is the strongest aspect of
“Amritxya Putra,” the same praise cannot be extended to its deployment of the
rape script. Bora’s narrative places Sombori’s rape at the beginning of the narra-
tive, thus seemingly placing the accent on the post-rape scenario and on survival.
However, Bora does not altogether eliminate the mystique around rape. Although
the incident is not directly described, the melodramatic mise-en-scene (both
nights when Sombori is raped are described as “very dark” and resonate with
the ominous howling of foxes) and the description of the first rape using meta-
phors of animality and light/dark mystify rape through figurative language: “It
seemed to Sombori that a brood of snakes had wrapped themselves around her
body and was throttling her. Now, the darkness that lay behind the torchlight pen-
etrated her body with great force” (227). The melodramatic elements are height-
ened if we consider the characterizations of the male figures. Volunteer’s status as
a former Gandhian nationalist, for instance, institutes him as a figure inducing
pathos. If Sombori represents a femina sacra who cannot be sacrificed because
of her impurity, Volunteer stands for a stereotypical character whose sacrifice
for the nation remains unrecognized and is brutally trampled upon. He continues
to make moral claims on the nation-idea that he sacrificed a lot for, but his sup-
plications go unheeded. His descent into madness reemphasizes his melodramatic
function as a pathos-inducing sacrificial figure. Conversely, the unnamed soldier
who rapes Sombori, is represented as a leery, shadowy villain who leaves behind
a paltry sum of money for her after he assaults her the second time. In both depic-
tions of the assault, the predator–prey dichotomy is deployed, stripping any
agency from the figure of the woman. If in the first instance, Sombori is feels
that she is “throttled by snakes,” in the second instance, she endures the
assault like a piece of “inanimate wood” (257).
The post-rape scenario initially shows Sombori gradually becoming a subject
through rape and gaining a degree of agency. In effect, Sombori begins to exercise
her voice in the space between two deaths: her social death and then her textual
one.14 During the complaint process, she is described as a marionette whose
will is being directed by Menoka and the other villagers. After the complaint is
not registered, she attempts to find some mode of employment in the village.
However, people she knows turn her away, exacerbating her condition of social
death. She is coaxed into giving an interview to Partha by Menoka and a few
other villagers. Towards the closure of the story, Sombori gradually begins to
gain her voice through two encounters: first, with the members of the militant
organization who come to visit her; and second, with the conservative Budu
who asks her to deny the report of her rape in the newspaper. Following Das,
we can say that “voice emerges at the moment of transgression . . . the zone
between two deaths is identified as the zone from which the unspeakable truth
about the criminal nature of the law can be spoken” (Life and Words, 61). The
exposure of the criminal nature of formations of sovereign and patriarchal law
occurs through the two encounters with the militants and Budu. Sombori’s
series of questions to the militants directly critiques the phallic and death-
dealing dimensions of a masculine sovereign economy that both the militants
and the counter-insurgency forces participate in. Sombori asks them whether the
“revolution” fomented by mainly male militants is merely “child’s play” – a
process that simultaneously makes playthings of others. Similarly, she finally
counters Budu Mahajan, one of the primary agents in the village who treat her
like matter out of place. In their previous encounters, Sombori silently listened
to what Budu says. It was Menoka who talked back. However, on this night,
Sombori directly refuses to entertain his proposal to deny the newspaper report
and asks him if he has any “shame” (laaz) left (252–57).
It is tragic that just at the point when Sombori slowly metamorphoses from her
presentation as a seemingly lifeless marionette to articulating harsh truths about the
criminal nature of the law, KG throttles her voice in two ways. First, there is the
narrative placement of the second rape immediately after she begins to find her
voice. Her will broken by this second assault, she goes to Budu’s house and
agrees to sign the statement of retraction. In a melodramatic coup de grace, the
news of Volunteer’s death arrives just after Sombori returns home after her visit
to Budu. Our last view of Sombori comes when she is about to take poison. In
a narrative that seemed to initially be oriented towards a description of survival
and the recovery of voice in a post-rape scenario, it is as if actual or figurative
death are the only options available for the raped woman. Bora is unable eventually
to show how a subject emerges through rape – instead, after a potential alternative
to the masculinist rape script seems to emerge in the Sombori episode, we are again
left with a scenario where a woman is silenced by once again being subjected
to rape. Frances Ferguson’s points about power/lessness and its relation to a
woman’s testimony resonate: “Were a woman to become powerful, she would
lose the weakness that is the very condition of the strength of her testimony.
That is, her very lack of power guarantees her truthfulness; her not counting
makes her words count” (98). “Amritxya Putra” falls into the trap of this debilitat-
ing patriarchal logic.
An even more insidious form of discounting Sombori occurs after her implied
suicide attempt. The focus shifts altogether to Partha in the last page of this
section – he speaks for her. Partha had been a minor player thus far, appearing
briefly in the chapter where he interviews Sombori. In this closure, Partha rumi-
nates on the failure of his effort to highlight Sombori’s story. He is uncomfortable
with his editor’s attempt to sensationalize Sombori’s story as a symbolization of
suffering femininity. But Partha himself is guilty of turning Sombori into a
symbol, from a “real” woman to an “imagined” woman. The villager who con-
tacts Partha to interview Sombori later tells him that army atrocities increased
after Volunteer’s death. The villagers devised their own system of warning
each other of the approach of army vehicles. However, the crucial detail is the
brief mention of a form of collective action framed by women. To protest the
detention of the villagers, hundreds of women would go and encircle the army
camps till their demands were acceded by the security forces.
This reference to women’s protests refers to actual events. Paula Banerjee
describes the organizational skills of women’s groups in Assam like the Anchalik
Mahila Sajagata Samiti and the Chapar Anchalik Mahila Samiti:15
[they] are able to marshal about 40 to 50 women, and sometimes more in a

couple of hours. These women can be housewives, agricultural laborers or
students . . . whenever there are atrocities against women in their area, they
congregate and organize protest marches. . . . It is through these initiatives
that women are trying to appropriate public spaces.
(“Between Two Armed Patriarchies” 155)
In the last paragraphs, Partha thinks that Sombori possibly was also a crucial part
of such forms of nonviolent agitation aimed at appropriating public spaces. But
how does Partha represent Sombori and these protests? There is no mention of
how these protests were organized. There is no description of whether Sombori
joined these protests. Instead, the concluding lines of this section transform
Sombori from a “real” woman to Partha’s “imaginary” idea:
Whenever a vehicle entered the alleys of the village, a tremendous din would
be made by the residents. . . . The women would drop everything they were
doing and would come out into the streets ululating. . . . Imagining Sombori
as a central heroine of this nonviolent protest made Partha happy. . . .
No, let it be. “Sombori is alive, alive.” That is the most important thing.
“Sombori is alive.”
(260)
Sombori is alive, but Partha “let[s] it be.” While he feels guilty for putting her at
risk by publishing her story, the moot question remains whether for Partha, and
by extension for KG, she is a living person with agential capacity, or just another
voiceless, imaginary object in a trail of “information” about terror. Therein lies
the rub, and the limitation, of the ultimately conventional rape script in KG.
Staring back: terror, mirroring and disability haunting

I now turn to Bora’s deployment of haunting and disability in the third section of
KG titled “Babula Puraan” (The Tale of Babula). Haunting and “hauntological
landscapes” are among the key techniques for the exploration of the effects of
political terror on subjects in Bora’s trilogy. In each novel, a particular place is
“stained by time” or becomes the topos for an encounter with “broken time”
(Fisher 21). The “reserved” forest functions as the haunted topography in KG
and Tezor Andhar. The riverbank is the specific “hauntological landscape” in
Artha – a landscape “stained by time, where time can only be experienced as
broken, as a fatal repetition” (Fisher 21). The protagonist of Artha, Sriman, acci-
dentally witnesses a secret killing on the riverbanks. He keeps repeating his
journey to the riverbank, physically and at a psychic level, throughout the novel.
These haunted topographies in Bora’s trilogy have specific historical reso-
nances. Reserved forests and the areas adjoining them witnessed some of the
worst atrocities conducted by the military forces during Operation Bajrang and
Operation Rhino. Forests like Lakhipathar were also locations where the mass
graves of the victims of the ULFA were discovered. People considered spies
and public enemies by the ULFA were tortured, disappeared and interred anony-
mously in these mass graves. Army operations also focused on these reserve
forests, causing great devastation to the human settlements nearby. Moreover,
the riverbanks, along with the beels (swamps), were among the major locations
where the corpses and body parts of people killed during the notorious period
of the “secret killings” often turned up.
The most sustained and complex use of haunting and haunted topographies in
the trilogy is the tale of the benga Babula in KG.16 There are three reasons why I
find “Babula Puraan” significant. First, this narrative of haunting is structured
around the fatalistic temporality inherent in the figure of the curse. The figure
of the curse facilitates the juxtaposition of the temporal categories of arbitrariness
and predictability that structure the everyday of a rural locale. Necropower, state
or non-state, erupts in arbitrary fashion in the rural lifeworld; however, such erup-
tions of arbitrariness that result in broken time are endowed a semblance of con-
tinuity through our temporal immersion in a cosmological, fatalistic system of
belief and causality. Broken time is rendered with a semblance of signification
even though it is experienced as fatal repetition. This fatal repetition of broken
time is manifested in this segment’s unique (judged relatively with the rest of
KG’s dominant narrative protocols) deployment of a circular and circuitous nar-
rative temporality.17
Second, I find “Babula Puraan” important because it does not relegate the dis-
abled figure to the margins of the narrative. In general, disabled figures exist at
the fringes of narrative or as symbolic characters who are bearers of “tragic or
enigmatic insight” (Quayson 52). Compared to such overdetermined symbolic
portrayals, the representation of the cognitively disabled and mute Babula in
KG is more complex. By placing him center stage instead of relegating him to
the margins, and by portraying Babula’s subjectivity and agency, “Babula
Puraan” marks a great advance in the portrayal of disability when compared to
other Assamese fictions on necropolitical terror. This is evident from the perspec-
tival shifts in the narrative between able bodies and the disabled subject – as a
consequence, the disabled subject is not only stared at, but returns the stare.
Third, in addition to the circular narrative temporal framework, “Babula
Puraan” deploys spectrality and the associated technique of mirroring within the
narrative in polyvalent ways. Consider here what Maria del Pilar Blanco and
Esther Pereen say about “spectrality”: it “specifically evoke(s) an etymological
link to visibility and vision, to that which is both looked at (as fascinating spec-
tacle) and looking (in the sense of examining)” (2). The mirror, too, enables
both a looking at and a reversal of the gaze. Through the technique of mirroring,
distinctions between subject and object, narrator and narrated, starer and staree
are undercut and reversed. Furthermore, mirroring kaleidoscopically exposes the
heterogeneous and ambivalent ways in which haunting operates in “Babula
Puraan”: as a portrayal of haunted subjectivity, as an inversion of the linear struc-
ture of the narrative, and as a representation of the ghostly dimensions of sover-
eign power.
One of the key sequences that underpins these heterogeneous mechanisms of
haunting and mirroring is the version of Babula’s voyeuristic primal scene in
Chapter III. Babula stares transfixed as he accidentally comes across a couple
making love wrapped “like snakes” (saape mer khuwadi) in the forest (133).
The episode of staring at the lovemaking couple in the habi (jungle) shows
how Babula is perceived as an absent presence by normate, able-bodied subjects.
But this perception of his absent presence is alluded to only after the economy of
staring is reversed. Thus, the scene where Babula stops in the habi and witnesses
the lovemaking of the couple is an example of the simultaneous subjectivation and
desubjectivation of the disabled figure. As Babula watches the couple, Maneswar
and Seuti, making love, he is agitated and titillated by an alien form of desire
coursing through his body. He is transfixed by this scene till the “starees”
become aware of his presence. Thus, this scene of staring and counter-staring
gives rise to a scenario in which the disabled subject can wield the power of
the stare for brief instants, even though at the end he is brutally tortured, killed
and haunts the text as a sayamurti (shade).
Discussing “haunted subjectivities” (race, gender, queerness, disability), Blanco
and Pereen write that:
The boundaries between normative and non-normative subject positions,

despite being heavily policed, are not necessarily immediately perceptible,
producing a pervasive anxiety that things may not be as they seem, that
there may be more to the subject than meets the eye.
(310)
The disability studies theorists Susan Snyder and David Mitchell gesture towards
contiguous territory through their term, “disability haunting”: the “spectral pres-
ence of disabled people’s material circumstances in history as disability haunting”
(1). Disability’s presence as symbol or metaphor for lack or defect moves parallel
with the absence of engagements with the complexities of lived experiences of
disability. Furthermore, Snyder and Mitchell’s invocation of “spectral presence”
attempts to describe the paradoxical situation of disability as a form of absent
presence – something that Babula is confronted with frequently in the narrative.
Babula lives with his grandmother, Aahini burhi (a generic name for “old
woman”), in a village at the edge of a reserved forest. He often goes fishing in
the beel near the forest. Babula may be infantilized by others, but in his charac-
terization, he is not portrayed as a “helpless” infant/child. Babula understands,
frames and controls his own mode of interaction with people. A good instance
of this is his refusal to heed his grandmother’s attempt at emotional manipulation.
His grandmother usually reinstates her power over him by pretending to bawl and
scream loudly when he leaves alone to go into the forest. In most cases this works
as Babula relents. However, in Chapter III, this strategy clearly fails as Babula
ignores her altogether. He also controls his interactions with the camouflaged mil-
itants in the forest whom he likes mingling with. While he is perceived by others
as a dependent subject, Babula shows a capacity for autonomous decision-
making, including the final, tragic one when he rushes off to the forest to warn
his militant friends when the Indian army attacks the village. If we consider
these complex facets of Babula’s characterization, then the primal scene can be
viewed in a different light.
The disabled character in “Babula Puraan” is not always gazed upon or “stared”
at, to use Rosemary Garland-Thompson’s terminology, as spectacle. Instead, the
scene is inaugurated with him staring at the normate couple. Garland-Thompson
argues that the stare is different from the gaze in that the latter is “defined as an
oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates its victim” (9). Instead
the stare has several variations, like the blank stare, the engaged stare and the
baroque stare. Staring has a “generative potential” that takes it beyond predomi-
nantly negative versions of the gaze (9). Garland-Thompson argues that aspects
of novelty often transform a look or a glance into the temporally lengthened
act of the stare. For instance, such is the case when people stare at the “spectacle”
of disabled, “monstrous” or “freakish” bodies – although, as Garland-Thompson
emphasizes, such an act of staring should not be considered a one-way street
where the disabled subject is completely robbed of agency. In the act of staring,
the starer is “not master of the encounter” (23). Further, as she discusses in
section titled “Staring Back,” starees develop “fluent staring management routines
that are more sophisticated than simple defensive reactions” (87). Julie Van Dam
parses Garland-Thompson’s points thus: “Staring subjects the starer to the will
of the stareable subject/site and the stareable subject can likewise invoke in the
starer a beholding – an ethical stare – one that is collaborative, open, and gener-
ous” (217).
Especially relevant here is the category Garland-Thompson calls “baroque
staring.” Garland-Thompson uses the word “baroque” as a metaphor for “an obsta-
cle in schematic logic” or the “irregular, bizarre, exaggerated, peculiar and illog-
ical.” The baroque both arouses fervor and “revels in contradiction.” Baroque
staring is “gaping-mouthed, unapologetic staring” as opposed to the temporally
fleety nature of the glance or the look. While baroque staring exposes both partic-
ipants, it is also an “overly intense engagement with looking” on the part of the
starer (50). This category adequately captures Babula’s open-mouthed stare,
described as being like the look of a “thunderstruck dove” directed at the lovemak-
ing couple. For him, this scene where the couple’s sweaty bodies are wrapped
around each other “like snakes” represents something novel and desirable (134).
Two interpretive possibilities emerge from this staging of baroque staring. The
first concerns the relationships of power that are exposed in this social script
where normates encounter a disabled subject. Babula initially invites the starees
into the orbit of his desire. This is clearly emphasized as the initial description
shows the gaze traveling from Babula to the amorous couple. This moment
of power is soon reversed as the couple suddenly notice him staring open-
mouthed at them. The two starees are “at once cornered and empowered”
(Garland-Thompson 9). While they are stunned and frozen with horror, they
soon begin discussing what they should do. At this point, Seuti allays Maneswar’s
apprehension by saying “Wait, it’s only Babula. He cannot speak, to whom will he
tattle his tale?” Maneswar remonstrates, saying that he knew and understood every-
thing. In response, Seuti says: “Nothing is going to happen. He cannot say anything
to anyone. Although he may understand what he has seen, this benga cannot utter a
word. When he was younger, he was afflicted with typhoid or some major illness”
(134). Indeed, the possibility of an ethical stare is short-circuited – Seuti re-
establishes the two starees as the masters of the encounter through this statement
that makes Babula dysappear. Although Babula is physically present as a witness
during the scene of lovemaking, his muteness – an “incurable” condition that
puts him outside the realm of “curative” time (Kafer), and perceived cognitive dis-
ability – automatically render his testimony non-threatening for the normate subjects.
He is read as a “mute” absent presence, a form of mobile-yet-ghostly existence in life
that prefigures his later appearance as a wandering specter after death. The thresh-
olds between “life” and “death” constantly keep getting blurred.
An alternative possibility of desubjectivation beyond the mutable byplay
between starer and staree comes from the folkloric dimension. Here the similes
likening the three participants in this social script to forms of animality are key.
In certain parts of Assam, a belief exists that if a person is witness to the mating of
snakes, some great calamity with befall him/her. The folklorist Benudhar Raj-
khowa writes:
The Assamese expression for the pairing of snakes is or jowa. Or is the

abbreviation for jor (double). There is another Assamese word or which is
derived from anta (end). So when a person sees the pairing of snakes it is
believed that there will be an end of him, i.e. some great calamity will
befall him.
(87)
If this folkloric belief is considered, then “Babula Puraan” can be read in a dif-
ferent light. Babula becomes a subject who is cursed by this act of staring.18
He is akin to the “thunderstruck dove” who is later captured, immobilized, tor-
tured and killed later by the “hunters” of the cynegetic state.19 This reading is
provided further ballast if we consider the lines that describe Babula’s appearance
as a ghost at the closure: as a sayamurti (shade), he keeps looking for something
at the foot of the trees in the reserved forest. He witnesses the couple making love
like snakes at the foot of a tree; at the end, he seems to be looking for something
at the foot of the trees. This seemingly innocuous looking scene at the beginning
begins to function almost in the deconstructive sense of the future anterior, as the
deferred effects of this past event becomes evident from a retrospective point in
the future of the narrative. Furthermore, it incorporates the seemingly meaning-
less, arbitrary death of the disabled subject within the temporal orbit of a fatalistic
cosmology for the rural community.
In addition to these mirrored, shifting representations of haunted subjectivity,
“Babula Puraan” also differs in its narrative protocols from the other sections
in KG. I identified Partha’s position of direct or indirect witnessing as the dom-
inant protocol of narration. This is evident in the narration of Prabhat’s torture
and in “Amritxya Putra.” In the former, Partha is present as a witness to many
of the scenes. Even when he is not, as in the scenes of Prabhat’s torture, it is rea-
sonable to assume that he is aware of what happened because of his close contact
with Hazarika, who relays the information to the journalist. Similarly, Partha nar-
rates the story of Sombori’s sexual violation after he is invited by a villager to
cover this event. The limits of “Amritxya Putra” are also determined by the
limits of Partha’s interested vision.
Something bizarre occurs in “Babula Puraan.” The first chapter of this section
focuses almost entirely on Partha. He is informed of the sudden military operation
and travels to the forest near Babula’s village. There he comes across a ghostly
procession of numbed village denizens, among whom is Babula’s grandmother,
Aahini burhi. As he proceeds further, Partha is presented with the covered
corpse of a lone “terrorist” by the army inside the forest. When he gets back
to the schoolyard where the terrorized villagers have congregated, he notices
Aahini burhi crying and lamenting the absence of Babula. Someone tells him
that Babula’s bullet-ridden corpse had been laid out in the nearby yard. At that
time, Partha, to his horror, makes the connection that the bullet-ridden corpse of
the dreaded “terrorist” he had been presented with may well have been Babula’s.
Partha disappears from the scene thereafter, except for a fleeting appearance in
the last chapter of the section. The second chapter takes us back a few weeks or
months prior to Partha’s appearance, almost as if the narrative rewinds to fill in
Babula’s narrative. This mode of rewinding should not be confused with a flash-
back as Partha does not receive the narration. It’s almost as if this narrative of
Babula’s life with his foul-mouthed, yet loving, grandmother, his experiences
with the villagers and the militants whose base is in the reserved forest, Aahini
burhi’s difficulties after the militant group issues a diktat that she stops selling
country liquor, the army’s attack on the village, and the events that lead to
Babula’s death exist in a supplementary, ghostly space vis-a-vis the first chapter
of the section. The dominant narrative and temporal protocols in KG are reversed:
elsewhere, while we are presented only with the events that logically fall within
Partha’s range of vision, in this section, it’s almost as if an extended supplemen-
tary space – one that exceeds Partha’s dominant position as witness – haunts the
initial presentation of the narrative space.
The relative oddity of this section vis-a-vis the other sections is further empha-
sized if we look at the closure. While the last paragraph of the section narrates
how the sayamurti of the dead Babula haunts the reserved forest, the preceding
five paragraphs make the temporal frame of the closure of the story almost simul-
taneous with the first chapter. While this temporal coincidence reveals that the
unnamed corpse of the dreaded “terrorist” in the first chapter is none other
than Babula, it’s almost as if the narrative stare is reversed. If in the first
chapter, the gathered journalists stare at the objectified corpse, in these last few
paragraphs, the ghost seemingly stares back at witnesses. This is evident in the
final sentence before the concluding paragraph of “Babula Puraan” where the
hitherto unidentified corpse is named and a form of closure seemingly provided
for the benga after his death: “Babula benga was transformed into a dreaded ter-
rorist” (155). A legitimized object of violence for the cynegetic state – the feral
figure of the terrorist – is endowed with an identity and a history, bringing the
story back full circle and setting the stage for the actual haunting by the revenant
in the concluding paragraph. While we are presented with the spectacle of the
corpse that we stare at through Partha’s eyes in the first chapter, the supplemen-
tary narrative of Babula’s life before his execution, especially the scene where he
stares back and spits a bloody gob at his killers, is an instance of the disabled
subject turning his haunting stare back on witnesses with the demand that his
proper name and personal history be rescued from the flattening effects of the
dehistoricized, empty signifier “terrorist.”20
This specular economy of staring and being stared at both the subjective and
narrative levels reemphasizes the technique of mirroring. There is yet another
component to the technique of mirroring in this narrative: the ghostly formation
of sovereignty. Achille Mbembe uses this metaphor of mirroring in his essay on
Amos Tutuola to “envisage ghostly power and sovereignty as aspects of the real
integral to a world of life and terror rather than tied to a world of appearances”
(Pereen, 333). In On the Postcolony, “Necropolitics” and his essay on Tutuola,
Mbembe focuses on “extreme forms of human life, death-worlds, forms of
social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life
that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (“Necropolitics” 40).
Mbembe further focuses on the “specular experiences” (Pereen 333) of subjects
reduced to the status of the living dead in deathworlds. This focus on those who
are forced to live like the living dead is already evident in a question posed in On
the Postcolony:
How can one live in death, be already dead, while being-there – while having
not necessarily left the world or being part of the spectre – and when the
shadow that overhangs existence has not disappeared, but on the contrary
weighs ever more heavily?
(201)
Unlike Jacques Derrida’s specters, who are usually dead subjects from the past
who re-emerge to make an ethical demand from a subject located in the present,
Mbembe’s focus is on subjects or populations that live as if they are dead. These
are dispensable populations that live “desperate existences on the verge of death”
and for whom even haunting “may lie outside of their power,” much like the com-
munity Babula and his grandmother reside in (Blanco and Pereen 95). It is sig-
nificant, therefore, that the ghostly procession of terrorized villagers led by
Aahini burhi opens “Babula Puraan” and Babula’s wandering ghost closes it.
At the same time, in Mbembe’s schema, ghostly terror and sovereignty also
refer to extreme forms of sovereign power whose “central project is not the strug-
gle for autonomy but the general instrumentalization of human existence and the
material destruction of human bodies and populations” (“Necropolitics” 14).
Such sovereign ensembles have full control over human mortality. In this use
of ghostliness, Mbembe refers to the radically contingent, unpredictable, psy-
chotic and almost unassailable form of sovereign power armed with the terrifying
capacity to wreak arbitrary violence and terror on virtually defenseless subjects.
Thus, for Mbembe, as Esther Pereen writes, the “ghost in fact indicates the entan-
glement of power and disempowerment, oppression and opposition, agency and
subjection” (333–34). In other words, in Mbembe’s work, “ghostliness” refers to
the mirrored, entangled relationship of both forms of necropolitics and its propen-
sity to transform the subject to the status of the living dead. The Mbembian
understanding of sovereignty is that of a ghostly economy.
If the state was the primary agent of ghostly sovereignty in the narrative of
Prabhat’s torture, “Babula Puraan” doubles this representation to show how
forms of state and non-state sovereign power mirror each other. While the
sudden attack by the Indian army on the village and the brutal treatment they
mete out to the rural denizens is the most obvious representation of the arbitrary
and unassailable exercise of sovereign terror, “Babula Puraan” extends this por-
trayal to show how independentist forces are complicit in the creation of necro-
political and disciplinary universes that instrumentalize human existence. Since
this section is based on the terror-regime of the ULFA – the unnamed militant
organization in the narrative is clearly modeled on this organization – historical
contextualization is necessary.
From its inception in 1979, two dominant images of the ULFA have been in
circulation in the Assamese public sphere. The first view of the ULFA in the
Assamese public sphere is the gendered one of “our boys” (Baruah India;
Durable) or as “Robin Hood” (Uddipan Dutta). This view emerges from the
long history of Assamese subnationalism dating back to the colonial era. The
ULFA was one of the foremost modern representatives of this legacy of subna-
tionalism, which it endowed with a radical, militant turn. Furthermore, the
“Robin Hood” image of the ULFA, at least in the early years of the organization
in the 1980s, was created and sustained because of numerous public welfare
schemes that the outfit initiated and executed, and for its daredevil image of strik-
ing at state institutions like banks with impunity. As Uddipan Dutta writes: “The
metaphor of ‘Robin Hood’ was invoked to catch a particular mood of the period
when the organization virtually ran a parallel administration” (17–18). The ULFA
was, thus, positioned in a complex network of conviviality and the exercise of
paternalistic control in the Assamese public sphere.
The point about paternalistic control merges with the other circulating image of
the ULFA, one associated with terror, coercion and violation of human rights.
This included the public humiliation of those it deemed offenders (such as
corrupt officials or bootleggers), issuing capital punishment to certain people,
torture, burying corpses in mass graves, kidnapping and extortion, and issuing
diktats to the local media. Parag Das’s novel Sanglot Fenla (Call for Indepen-
dence), although sympathetic to the ULFA, has long sections critiquing the mil-
itant organization’s torture camps (Baishya “Radical Humanism”).
Relevant here is ULFA’s ban against alcohol and the punishment meted out to
bootleggers and sellers of alcohol. Banning alcohol has been one of the “micro-
processes” of disciplinarization utilized by many militant groups (Viterna), both
as a way of managing inter-group relations and as a matter of solidifying and
enforcing ideas about cultural purity. Further, there is a class-caste/tribe nexus
to this interdict on alcohol in the case of Assam. While drinking “foreign”
alcohol is often seen as a marker of civility and masculinity (the impress of colo-
nialism is evident), especially among the upper castes and classes, local varieties
of alcohol that are often common among the tribal communities are derided as a
sign of “primitivism,” “indolence” and “indiscipline.”21 What Piya Chatterjee says
about the attitude of the bhadralok in neighboring North Bengal could very well
apply to the way caste Hindus look at their “tribal” neighbors in Assam:
contemporary understandings of being jungli [wild] is connected to a con-

trasting image of upper-caste and upper-class civility, to be bhadra. The bha-
dralog epitomized the restrained and elegant comportment of upper-class
Bengali men. Jungli behavior . . . connoted a transgression of these caste,
class and gendered codes of civil, and indeed civilized, behaviour.
(195)
In Uddipan Dutta’s discussion of the conflict between two radical groups in
Assam – the ULFA and the United Reservation Movement Council of Assam
(URMCA), an umbrella body of more than thirty-seven Scheduled Caste, Sched-
ule Tribe and Other Backward Classes – he describes a press conference on May
28, 1990 in which a tribal leader named Sabyasashi Rabha “dwelled on the issue
of the ULFA’s war on . . . country liquor and . . . questioned the non-interference
of the ULFA in the case of foreign liquor.” In fact, for many people in the tribal
communities in Assam, the ULFA was perceived as an upper-caste organization
that waged war exclusively on the “traditional liquor made by ethnic communities
in the state” (Uddipan Dutta 72). There is a long list of critical literature on how
ethnic communities were and are designated as “primitive” by the colonial and
post-colonial dispensations; suffice it to add here that social attitudes towards
alcohol also play a big role in the construction of “tribal” or lower caste others
as “primitive.”22
This social conflict around alcohol has a direct bearing on “Babula Puraan,”
especially if we consider the other major character: Aahini burhi. Aahini burhi
ekes out a living for herself and her grandson by brewing alcohol from rice.
Babula assists her economic endeavor by catching fish that she then fries and
offers as snacks, and by arranging and cleaning the glasses and plates the custom-
ers drink or eat in. She reveals that she was impelled to do this after the death of
Babula’s parents left her with no steady source of income. While brewing alcohol
provides her with a degree of financial autonomy, the spaces in which she serves
alcohol are gendered. The clientele she serves is exclusively male. Conducting
business only for men, her quick retorts and abusive language are forms of
moral claims that she makes on her male customers, invoking both her age (she
is referred to as “aaita” or grandmother) and traditional gender roles (she says
that she brews better alcohol then their “mothers”).
Mention of a militant organization’s ban on brewing alcohol first spreads through
a contagious form of communication: rumors discussed by customers. But the con-
tagious life of rumor (Pandey) is soon arrested by an unpredictable form of sover-
eign power that arbitrarily appears on Aahini burhi’s doorstep. A young, unnamed
militant (whom Babula recognizes from his forays into the forest) arrives at
Aahini’s doorstep without warning, upbraids her for brewing and selling alcohol,
and issues an ultimatum that she stop selling alcohol. The militant gives her
some money to set up a shop as an alternative. Something in his demeanor
and speech tells her that arguing would be futile. However, she tries to exercise
her agency by using that money to spruce up her brewery with new cutlery and
glasses. In response, the militant reappears without warning and punishes her by
attaching two heavy implements to her earlobes. Cowed by this assault and the
threat to her life, Aahini burhi reluctantly agrees to close her brewery and establish
a shop instead. Sovereign terror, that in a ghostly fashion emerges intermittently
and unpredictably from the nearby habi, clearly disrupts the functioning of her
everyday and accentuates the conditions of precarity that rural subjects inhabit.
The arbitrariness of terror and its capacity to destroy a precariously settled
sense of the everyday strikes Aahini burhi’s world again when the other
ghostly sovereign – the state – suddenly and without warning launches an attack
on the village. The army operation here is modeled after Operation Bajrang,
which failed because militants had allegedly gotten wind of the army operations
from sympathizers in the state government and the bureaucracy. However, the
rural public faced the brunt of army atrocities. Aahini burhi loses Babula in
the confusion while the rest of the villagers are herded like cattle into a school-
yard. Atrocities are wreaked upon the cowering rural populace, eventually impel-
ling a group of them to flee. We realize at the end that this is the same group that
Partha comes across when he is making his way to the army base inside the
forest. They are described as a “silent” (nirov) group with “suspicious and
fearful” faces and “terror-stricken” eyes (Bora 119). When Partha attempts to
stop and ask them who they are, this group pays him no heed and in their
“stunned, stricken and silent state” (nirbak, nirovbhabe) glide away and disappear
into the nearby field. The brutal, instrumental power of the ghostly sovereign
transforms them into literal manifestations of the living dead.
Babula’s status as a disabled subject allows him to mingle freely with one pater-
nalistic sovereign ensemble. Because he is infantilized by the militants, he is con-
sidered “harmless” and given free rein in the external perimeter of their base,
although he is never taken into their base in the deep heart of the habi (jungle).
Here, a distinction between the spatial imaginaries inherent in the word habi
and a statist term often used in association with it in KG and Tezor Andhar –
the “reserve” – is germane. Characters in these texts often alternate between
these two terms to describe the nearby wilderness, although they allude to different
imaginaries. Habi usually refers to an imaginary of “uncivilized, wild” space.
Arupjyoti Saikia writes that nineteenth-century Assamese figures like Anandaram
Dhekial Phukan who were influenced by the European Enlightenment, used habi
with reference to “uncivilized” space (354, 358). In contrast, a reserved forest is a
classic instance of statist management of enclosed space. The flora and fauna there
become the “wards of the state” (Trautmann 182), and a clear distinction is made
between human-inhabited places from “protected” spaces like the forest. Such
spaces are also important for ideologies of nationalism.
If we view the habi from the standpoint of the counter-insurgency operations,
the forest also represents a politicized ecology. Nancy Lee Peluso and Peter Van-
dergeest write that statist agencies often mark distinctions between “forests” and
“jungles.”23 When forests are depicted as “jungles,” they write, “a particular set
of geographic and political imaginaries used to justify state violence comes
into play” Furthermore, conceptualizing a space as a jungle helps in “realizing
nation-building projects through violence, militarization, resettlement, and other
territorial practices of counter-insurgency” (254). The “infestation” of the habi
by militants, the attempts at flushing them out, the violent relocation of the rural
population, and the reinstatement of the woods as a protected forest space in
“Babula Puraan” represents an attempt at nation-building of this type. Somewhere
in this process, Babula is captured by the agents of the cynegetic state, brutally tor-
tured and then coerced into service as a tracking animal used to find the “enemy”
hidden in the deep recesses of the habi that he is unfamiliar with. Eventually he is
tortured as if he is a thing, and his corpse presented as a classic figuration of the
feral other: the terrorist. The progressive descent into animalization and thinghood
accentuates the bleed between biopolitics and zoopolitics.
Before we get to how Babula is animalized and thingified, let us backtrack to
how his disability, viewed as “harmless” by one sovereign ensemble creates a suf-
ficient degree of anxiety in the other – the Indian army. Snyder and Mitchell track
other associations of the word “haunting” with disability: “Haunting occurs when
a vacuum exists between viable social definitions and the objects they intend to
designate” (3). This description chimes with Blanco and Pereen’s point about the
“anxiety that things may not be as they seem, that there may be more to the
subject than meets the eye” (310). This “vacuum” produces a form of “social
anxiety” that renders Babula almost but not quite human – simultaneously dan-
gerous (because he may be mimicking “normalcy”) and hypervisible (because
of his disability).24 This is evident when Babula is captured by the Indian
army. As the village Babula stays in comes under attack, he rushes in panic,
making inarticulate “porcine sounds” (Bora 145) to see if the militants, with
whom he had formed friendships, were safe. As he runs through the forest, he
is accosted as isolated prey by Indian soldiers, who bind his hands and feet.
The soldiers try to ferret information out from him, but suspect that he may be
mute. However, Babula’s muteness also produces an “anxiety that things may
not be as they seem.”
This is evident when a soldier says that he might be a “scoundrel” who may be
“performing” muteness. The soldiers rough him up and are still not convinced that
he is mute. To force the truth out of Babula, they strip him naked, tie him to a
wooden board, attach electrodes to his chest and genitals and brutally torture
him. Page Du Bois’s point about the relationship between torture and truth is appli-
cable in a grotesque fashion here. The anxiety that the soldiers have about there
being more to this subject than what meets the eye is sought to be allayed by bru-
tally extracting the truth from Babula’s body through torture. Yet what emerges
from Babula’s mouth are inarticulate, albeit continuous, screams of pain. The
soldiers seem to be satisfied that the naming of Babula’s disability (boba or
mute) merges with the thing they torture only after the infliction of terrible pain
on his body.
While the biggest advance in “Babula Puraan” is the representation of Babula’s
interiority and lived experience, the animalized production of his torturable
body by the biopolitical machine is predicated on the supposed lack of response
by a disabled subject. This is evident in the following segment, which describes
Babula’s thoughts as he is bashed mercilessly by the soldiers who capture him:
After so many assaults on his person, Babula understood well that the sol-
diers were angry because he did not speak. But how could he speak? –
besides a few inarticulate, meaningless sounds, nothing else emerged from
his mouth. Only those who were familiar with him understood their
import. He understood everything but couldn’t respond. He felt helpless.
Tears streamed from his eyes. With the babble of noises that emerged
from his mouth, he tried to convey to the soldiers his inability to speak. But
would they understand?
(153)
If we flip the gaze here from Babula to the torturers who want him to speak, we
notice that the former character’s descent to the dehumanized status of animal and
thing is accentuated by his inability to be understood. Note that I didn’t say
inability to articulate but the inability to be understood as Babula’s babble is
understood by those familiar with him. But for these brutal representatives of sov-
ereign power, Babula’s tongue is reduced to its “animal functions” (Chen 126).
Babula understands everything and tries to communicate with his torturers. But
the perception of his “inarticulate” babble robs him of the capacity to respond
to the interrogations of these petty sovereigns. The production of Babula’s tortur-
able, animalized and eventually killable body is predicated on this presumed inca-
pacity to respond on the part of these agents of the hunter-state.
Even after Babula is tortured, the soldiers remain skeptical whether he knows
more than what he shows on the surface. They force him to take the lead, as if he
were some sort of tracking animal, and guide them to the deeper recesses of the
habi – an area he does not know well. Frustrated by not being able to find what
they were looking for, they abuse Babula, assault him brutally again, fire a hail of
bullets at him, and then finally dress up his corpse in military fatigues to display it
as a successful “kill” of a dreaded terrorist. Yet Babula doesn’t lose his bodily
agency at the moment of his death. Realizing that the soldiers are about to kill
him, he raises his blood-spattered face, stares at them (and us) defiantly one
final time, and then ejects a gob of bloody spittle in their direction. He is then
cut down by a hail of bullets. To be sure, Babula’s disabled body is treated as
blank slate that the soldiers feel free to inscribe whatever narrative they
choose. In each case (torturing him to produce truth, coercing him to guide
them in unknown territory, and finally killing him and violently inscribing their
own narrative on his supposedly unresponsive body), the vacuum between his
social definition and the absolute objectification of his supposedly insubstantial
body is used, abused and brutally broken and reshaped by others.
I read Babula’s final appearance as a ghost in terms of the deferred effects of
the curse extant in local folklore. The cruel arbitrariness of his meaningless,
“bad” death is thereby incorporated into the oral narratives and fatalistic cosmol-
ogy of the rural community. Another telling detail in the last paragraph impels us
to simultaneously read this scene in a slightly different direction. The ghost of
Babula appears dressed in army fatigues that are riddled with innumerable
bullet holes (155). This ghostly spectacle of the body marked by violence haunt-
ing a place stained by time elicits a response from the beholder. The ghost looks
for something, drawing us into the orbit of his search affectively. One can term
this a ghostly ethical stare that is turned to us, the readers. Avery Gordon’s res-
onant words helps provide an apt conclusion to this narrative of haunting: “Being
haunted draws us affectively. Sometimes against our will and always a bit mag-
ically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold
knowledge, but as a mode of transformative recognition” (8). Maybe therein lies
the value of hauntological narratives like “Babula Puraan” – drawing us into tales
of terror affectively, making us experience such events not as cold knowledge but
as modes of transformative recognition.
Notes
1 See Scanlan, and Frank and Gruber.
2 Zulaika and Douglas argue that the “terrorist” is the contemporary figuration of the
former image of the savage, the classic “other” of civilization. In the context of India
debates around defining terrorism began as early as the 1830s. It referred to both “ter-
rorizing state violence” as well as people’s “potential means of resistance” against such
oppression (Tickell 8). This double bind went against the essentialization of the terrorist
figure as inherently evil, feral, alien and given to senseless violence at least until roughly
the 90s. This has changed with the conjunction of local and global forms of Islamopho-
bia in recent times.
3 In India Against Itself, Sanjib Baruah argues that the ULFA is the militant offshoot of
Assam’s long history of linguistic subnationalism that had its roots in the colonial
period. The ULFA was formed in 1979 and had its heyday during the period from
the mid-1980s to the early 2000s. There was a significant amount of public support
for this group. Operation Bajrang and Operation Rhino were two major army opera-
tions launched by the Indian government to root out the ULFA. Both the military offi-
cials and the ULFA were accused of massive human rights abuses.
4 All translations from KG are mine.
5 Also see the essay by Dipali and Poli Bora.
6 A common shibboleth in moral modernity is that torture and democracy are incompat-
ible. A formidable line of scholarship has challenged this – see, for example, Dubois,
Foucault, Rejali, Franco, and Avelar.
7 See Barbora, “Road to Resentment” for the insulation of the middle class during the
1990s. A well-known earlier critique is Hiren Gohain’s “Origins of the Assamese
Middle-Class.”
8 For the zombified status of the technē of writing, see Boluk and Lenz.
9 The concept of bare life in Agamben is not the same as that of zoē (natural life). Rather
it is a production or a remainder that emerges after a political bios (the good life) has
been destroyed. In State of Exception, Agamben explicitly says that there “is not first
life as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature, and then their impli-
cation in the law through the state of exception” (87). Instead, the very possibility of
distinguishing between “life and law, anomie and nomos” arises from their articulation
in a biopolitical machine. Bare life is a production of the biopolitical machine.
10 Vajpeyi has a brilliant reading of the relationship between clothes and bare life in her
analysis of the naked protest in Manipur. She writes that, semiotically, the naked
protest does something very original – it uses the bare, naked body of the woman to
image the abstract body of the citizen. Clothes stand for rights, while nakedness sub-
stitutes for the lack of rights. As she says, just as a person “without clothing is naked,
so a citizen without rights is bare life” (42).
11 Hence the chillingly ironic implications of the title of Henri Alleg’s torture memoir
from the period of his incarceration in French Algeria: The Question. A process of
question and response presupposes a framework of reciprocity. This framework is pre-
cisely what is missing in the torture situation. For an exploration of the breakdown of
this framework of intersubjective reciprocity in torture, see Amery (36–40).
12 TADA was in force in Assam during Operation Bajrang and Operation Rhino. TADA
follows a line of extraordinary legislations in India, some of which draw upon colonial
modes of exceptional governmentality. The continuation of such laws in post-colonial
India, in Baxi’s words, illustrates the compatibility of a “reign of terror” with the “rule
of law” (85–94). TADA also bypassed one of the most important safeguards against
torture in the Indian context. Previously, confessions could only be voluntarily
recorded by a judicial or metropolitan magistrate in an atmosphere free of coercion.
Although this directive was not always followed, TADA changed the provision to
enable confessions to be recorded by police officials not lower in rank than the super-
intendent of police “either in writing or on any mechanical device like cassettes, tapes
or sound records” (Lokaneeta 174). TADA also enabled an extended duration of pre-
ventive detention allied with harsh bail provisions. While the normal remand period
in India’s criminal procedure code is fifteen days, extendable up to a period of sixty
to ninety days with the permission of a judicial magistrate, TADA allowed for
an extended period of remand, sometimes even for a period up to a year. Furthermore,
as Ujjwal Singh argues, there is a “life after death” quality to this law (67). Even after
its lapsed status, trials continued under this act because of a clause that allowed the
completion of proceedings that began when the act was still in operation. Singh
notes that even in 2000, five years after the law had lapsed, trials had not been com-
pleted in around 5,000 cases.
13 See Marcus, Sunder Rajan, Ferguson, Bourke, Azoulay, Higgins and Silver, Horeck,
Gunne and Brigley, and Graham.
14 I am borrowing this term from Das’s reading of Lacan (Life and Words 60–2).
15 See Banerjee “The Space Between”; Borders, Histories, Existences (143–48); and
Papori Bora for a discussion of such movements of feminist politics and organization
in Northeast India. There is a similar scene at the end of Felanee.
16 Here’s the entry on benga in the Assamese–English dictionary, Hemkosh:
Benga: [. . . croaks like a frog (beng), hence] cannot articulate words clearly, idiot;
hence, without any knowledge, foolish, lacks practical skills, tongue-tied, idiotic,
foolish . . . a man unable to articulate distinctly, an idiot . . . feminine . . . bengi.
(811)
A person who is categorized as a benga may suffer from a speech-related disability or
may be cognitively disabled like Tempu in Aulingar Jui. The attribution of innocence
and insulation from worldly affairs infantilizes the benga/bengi and places him/her in
the realm of the child. Like a child, the implication is that the benga is also insulated
from the corruption of the adult “human” world. This is illustrated via ordinary speech
acts: children are often endearingly called benga/bengi emphasizing the attribution of
innocence and insulation from worldly affairs. Benga/bengi also derives from “beng”
(frog) or more precisely a form of likeness with the frog’s act of vocalization (“croaks
like a frog”). This instance of animacy helps us “theorize . . . anxieties around the pro-
duction of humanness” (Chen 3).
17 It is significant that the title of this section has the word Puraan in it – a reference to
the cosmological structure of the Sanskrit Puranas (purana means “ancient”). Das
writes in “A Sociological Approach to the Caste Puranas”: “The Puranas are defined
by the Indologists as a class of Sanskrit literature that deals with the five themes of
creation, re-creation, genealogies, Manu-cycles of time and the histories of dynasties”
(141).
18 The figure of the curse also plays a crucial structural role in the novella Tezor Andhar.
Here the subject is seemingly doomed by the indelible stain of a hauntological land-
scape. This haunted topography, whose curse is revealed at the traumatic core of the
narrative, is a thicket near a lake at the edge of the village the story is set in.
19 Chamayou locates a missing component to Foucault’s theory of pastoral power. In his
philosophical genealogy of sovereign power, he identifies cynegetic power as the
opposed function to the pastorate. Cynegetic power “is exercised over prey, living
beings that escape or flee.” What emerges through this form of power, therefore, is the
hunter-state, one which is predatory and which functions by “scattering the group of
prey . . . to isolate the most vulnerable” (14–15).
20 See Medovoi for a discussion of the “terrorist” as empty signifier.
21 There have been recent attempts in Assam to commodify local alcohol as a “heritage
drink.”
22 See Longkumer, “Rice Beer, Purification and Debates”; and Maan Baruah. Alcohol,
however, plays an agential role as actant in Assamese “janajatiya” (ethnic) fictions
like Jatin Mipun’s “Okum.”
23 According to Zimmermann: “‘Jangala’ in Sankrit meant ‘dry lands’, what geographers
would call ‘open’ vegetation cover, but in the eighteenth-century Hindi ‘jangala’ and
Anglo-Indian jungle came to denote the exact opposite, ‘tangled thickets’, a luxuriant
growth of grasses and lianas” (14–55). In contrast, in Ancient India: “all the values of
civilization lay on the side of the jungle. The jangala incorporated land that was cul-
tivated, healthy, and open to . . . colonization, while the barbarians were pushed back
into the anupa, the insalubrious, impenetrable lands” (18).
24 In Bhabha’s terms, Babula is a “partial presence” or a “metonymy of presence” for the
Indian soldiers (130).
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3 Of hill spaces
Survival in duress in no-man’s zones
in Assamese militant fictions
Introduction
Elaborating on the hill–valley distinction in the Zomia, James Scott writes:
During the colonial era, the autonomy of the hills . . . was underwritten by the
Europeans for whom a separately administered hill zone was a makeweight
against the lowland majorities resentful of colonial rule. One effect of this
classic rule-and-divide policy is that . . . hill peoples typically played little
or no role – or an antagonistic one – in the anticolonial movements. They
remained . . . marginal in the nationalist narrative, or . . . was seen as a fifth
column threatening that independence . . . the postcolonial lowland states
have sought fully to exercise authority in the hills: by military occupation,
by campaigns against shifting cultivation, by forced settlements, by promot-
ing the migration of lowlanders to the hills, by efforts at religious conversion,
by space-conquering roads, bridges, and telephone lines, and by develop-
ment schemes that project government administration and lowland cultural
styles to the hills.
(20)
Scott’s points here are extendable to the administration of “hill” regions in North-
east India by the colonial/post-colonial potentates. Consider, for instance, the case
of the Naga territories, the major topography in Mahanta’s Aulingar Jui, which
encompass both current-day India and Myanmar, and which like other “aboriginal”
areas, was subject to brutal policies of “pacification” during the colonial era
(Pels 99). In the post-colonial era, the struggle for independent Nagalim remains
the longest-running independentist movement in the Indian context (although not
all Naga groups share the same vision).1 From the pan-Indian perspective, the
Nagas are viewed as peripheral and marginal to the nationalist narrative. This per-
ipherality is underscored by circulating images of exotic/savage primitivist other-
ness still perpetuated by museological ventures like the annual “Hornbill
Festival” (Longkumer “Who Sings for the Hornbill?”). The Nagas are also sepa-
rated from the pan-Indian imaginary because of their cultural-religious difference.
A large segment of the Naga population is Christian. Richard Eaton writes that the
93 Of hill spaces 93
Naga conversion to Christianity is “the most massive movement in Christianity in
all of Asia, second only to that of the Philippines” (245). Over time, Christianity
became a crucial part of Naga cultural identity. This also resulted in deeply held
perceptions in mainland India is that Naga “separatism” is encouraged and
abetted by the church and by church organizations.2 Contiguously, for a long
time Hindu nationalist groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
have been trying to make inroads into “tribal” societies to make them part of the
“Hindu” mainstream (Longkumer, “Inserting Hindutva”).
Complex systems of cultural exchange existed (and still exist) among the dif-
ferent communities in the northeast region in the pre-colonial and colonial eras.
Revising Scott, Sanjib Baruah writes in Durable Disorder that the categories “hill
peoples” and “valley peoples” are leaky vessels:
People had continually moved from the hills to the plains and from the plains
to the hills. Since manpower was always in short supply, wars in this region
were not about territory, but about capturing slaves. If wars produced move-
ments in either direction, the attractions of commerce and what the lowlanders
call civilization may have generated a flow of hill people downwards. On the
other hand, the extortionist labour demands of the lowland states and the vul-
nerability of wet-rice cultivation to crop failure, epidemics, and famines pro-
duced flight to the hills where there were more subsistence alternatives. While
in other parts of the world, such movements may have produced broader cul-
tural formations, here the lived essentialism between hill “tribes” and valley
civilizations . . . remained powerful organizers of people’s lives and thoughts.
(103)
While these “leaky” forms of cross-cultural contact are still evident (see Kikon
“Tasty Transgressions”), the “lived essentialism” between hill and valley popula-
tions further mutated within colonial regimes of governmentality and the persis-
tence of such imaginaries and technologies of rule in the post-colony. Colonial
processes that codified tribes and the sharp division instituted between the
“hills” and the “plains/valley” by spatial regimes like the Inner Line consolidated
social processes that “denied coevalness” (Fabian) to the hill other.3 Writing
about the separation of “tribal areas” from “Assam proper” Bodhisattva Kar says:
what lay unenclosed by the Inner Line was not only a territorial exterior of
the theater of capital – it was also the temporal outside of the historical pace
of development and progress. Though encountered on the numerous plateaus
of everyday life, the communities forced to stay beyond the Line were seen
as belonging to a different time regime – where the time of the law did not
apply; where slavery, headhunting, and nomadism could be allowed to exist.
(“When Was the Postcolonial?” 52)
We can extend these insights to say that a sharp demarcation between the “unciv-
ilized” hills (pahar) and “civilized” valley (bhaiyam), and the attribution of a
different form of life to the hill communities by spatio-temporal regimes like the
Inner Line has had a big influence in sociocultural imaginaries, and the rise of
literary genres like the modern Assamese “ethnographic” novel. To clarify, I
am not talking about the hill–valley distinction as an absolute binary that struc-
tures everyday life in the region. To claim that would be to elide multiple occur-
ences of leaky forms of transgression, or other forms of colonial classification in
the region (see Jilangamba “Beyond the Ethno-territorial Binary”). My focus here
is how this binary shapes the literary imaginary that represents the hill other. In
the Assamese ethnographic novel, the hill others are often placed in a “different
time regime” because of the imaginative hold and persistence of this hill–valley
(pahar-bhaiyam) binary.
Before we get to the genre of the “ethnographic” novel, it must be mentioned
that Assam, like other states in the region, is home to numerous ethnic groups
and a wide polyphony of languages. Assamese has had the longest written tradi-
tion, whereas traditions of oral literature are usually the norm in the other
ethnic/tribal communities.4 Written traditions have also developed among many
ethnic groups. With respect to the other languages in the region, the Assamese lin-
guistic formation has held a hegemonic position in the colonial and post-colonial
polities often representing the hill tribes as a primitivist other.5 The colonized
Assamese bourgeoisie also participated in this process of othering whereby the
“tribal” other was denied coevalness. Furthermore, large sections of the upper-
caste Hindu Assamese bourgeoisie also identified with a pan-Indian Sanskritic
imaginary that gradually consolidated in the nineteenth century (Kar “What Is in
a Name?”; “This Tongue That Has no Bone”). The result of these shifts in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries was that in Assamese cultural production, the topos
of the hills are often represented as the spaces of precapital with their attendant
associations of romanticism and barbarism. Rajanikanta Bardoloi’s Miri Jiyori
(1894) – heralded as the first Assamese ethnographic novel – is a classic
example. In “Two Arunachali Writers,” Tilottama Misra writes that Bordoloi’s
novel broke new ground as far as a sensitive portrayal of tribal communities by
an Assamese author is concerned. Bordoloi’s novel, she argues, is very critical
of the detached and exploitative attitude of the Assamese babus for whom “the
tribal people are simply ‘other’.” However, the novel’s narrator simultaneously
others the tribal communities. A passage like the following is indicative:
Readers! These people came to testify as witnesses in the case, though in an

unintelligible manner. None of them would concede his rigid stance on the
matter. We have already stated earlier that the Miris are a secretive race.
They would keep their own purpose concealed in their tummies and go
around the world with an innocent face. They would never come forward
to tell you the truth.
(Misra, “Two Arunachali” 3657)
A clear distinction is marked between the observing self and the ethnographic
other using collective pronouns like “them” or “they.” The narrator also passes
judgment on the “nature” of the other calling them inscrutable and “secretive.” As
Misra says, the collective pronouns here are used as generic categories to depict
the other as an undifferentiated mass of people. Furthermore, a close reading of
Miri Jiyori reveals that the stereotypes associated with hill/plain distinction are
reinforced towards the closure. While the star-crossed lovers, Janki and Panei,
belong to a “plains” community that resides on the banks of the Subansiri river,
they are eventually captured, enslaved and killed by a “barbaric” Miri tribe that
resides in the hills that they escape to. While this aspect refers to possible histor-
ical enmities between communities in the plains and the hills, members of the hill
tribes are described as “nrisrinxo, daya-maya nuhuwa poxutkeu adham” (cruel,
lacking any compassion, worse than beasts) (Rajanikanta Bardoloir, 122).
These two tendencies of distancing and placing the tribal other in a prior tempo-
rality and romanticizing/barbarizing the “premodern” hill denizen has a long afterlife
in Assamese ethnographic fiction. Later examples like Birendrakumar Bhattachar-
yya’s Yaruyingam (People’s Rule, 1960), while it eschews many of the primitivist
stereotypes of earlier fiction, cannot contend with the tribal other in terms of their
autonomous historical and political trajectories. While Yaruyingam is a sympa-
thetic portrayal of the Nagas, the autonomy of the Naga independence struggle
is not contended with; instead, a conflict is staged between Gandhian nationalism
and an offshoot of an alternative nationalist imaginary that is inspired by the Azad
Hind Fauj of Subhas Chandra Bose (represented by the Naga rebel Videssely). In
this context, Parag Sarma is correct when he writes: “Early post-Independence
Assamese literature [like Yaruyingam] perceived itself as an integral part of the
imperative to narrate the nation and integrate plural identities into the national con-
sciousness” (39). In narrating the nation, however, the distinctive sociocultural and
political histories of the hill denizens are erased. There are more complicated treat-
ments of the hill other in later works.6 Additionally, the works in Assamese of
authors who belong to ethnic communities like Yeshe Thongche Dorje (Sharduk-
pen) and Rong Bong Terang (Karbi), among others, have also rendered the con-
temporary Assamese novel much more dialogic, instead of using the other as a
mode of narrating the self.
A recent monograph devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of the tradition of
the Assamese ethnographic novel. Juri Dutta defines the “ethnographic novel” as
those that depict “the rites and ritual, customs and traditions of any minority ethnic
community of the northeast, written either by a writer ‘belonging’ to that commu-
nity or ‘outside’ it” (40). It is surprising that Dutta does not make any reference
to a trajectory that can also be classified under the rubric of ethnographic
fiction/literature. The recent decade has witnessed the publication of quite a few
literary works by former United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) militants.
These works, all published after 2000, include collections of poems by Megan
Kachari, Kaberi Kochari Rajkonwar and Kabirranjan Saikia, memoirs by Rajkon-
war and Samudra Gogoi, and novels by Raktim Sharma (Borangar Yan), Anurag
Mahanta (Aulingar Jui and Kangliyanar Maat [Song of the Kangliyan Bird]) and
J. Dorjee (the two volumes of Bhutanot Heral Dhutiman [Youth Lost in Bhutan]).7
Most of these works detail interactions between the pahariya populations and the
militants from the bhaiyams after camps for the ULFA were established in border-
land zones in between India, Myanmar, Bhutan, Bangladesh and China from the
1980s onwards. While public figures like Indira Goswami were instrumental in
making many of these works visible in the Assamese public sphere, Dutta’s
silence on these works is not very surprising because detailed critical consider-
ations of such cultural productions have been lacking.
One reason for this neglect could be that many of these fictions are published
by smaller presses and do not get enough circulation or visibility. Sharma informed
me that the bigger publication houses in Assam were not willing to publish
Boranga Yan; instead, it was published by a small press.8Bhutanot Heral Dhuti-
man was published by a small press in Nalbari, a smaller town. The first volume
was out of circulation for a while. Compared to Sharma’s works, Mahanta’s novel
was serialized in installments in the daily Aajir Asom before being published as a
complete text by Basu Prakashan. Thus, it attained a certain amount of visibility
and popularity, which is probably reflected in the greater amount of critical atten-
tion it has received. Mahanta’s second novel, Kangliyanar Maat, was published
by the Pangea House, a subsidiary of Adharsila, an organization formed in 2011
by the Sahitya Akademi award winner and the author of the renowned Assamese
novel Makam (The Golden Horse, 2010), Rita Chowdhury. This organization was
formed to encourage young Assamese writers. A revised version of Aulingar Jui
with three additional chapters was republished by this same publication house in
2016. Aulingar Jui has been translated into English as Remains of Spring and dis-
tributed by OUP. Compared to that, Sharma hasn’t yet entered major patronage
networks. Other than the stray newspaper piece in Assamese, Boranga Yan
hasn’t been discussed extensively.
Major critical engagement with these works in Assamese appeared in a 2012
issue of the literary magazine Satsori titled “Bidroheer Sahitya” (Literature by
Rebels). In his evaluation, the editor, Areendom Barkataki, writes that the expres-
sive style and technique of these writers are weak because their works have been
produced away from the mainstream, but that they are powerful testaments nev-
ertheless because the lived experiences of the former militants have helped them
forge distinctive voices and unique worldviews (25). The word mulsuti (main-
stream) and the difference that such literary productions have from this category
are repeated thrice in Barkataki’s discussion. He closes the essay in a slightly
apologetic tone saying that while the productions of these writers are of a “differ-
ent quality” from the mainstream, future critical considerations will help develop
new heuristics for evaluating their significance (26).
This chapter distances itself from Barkataki’s separation of the “mainstream”
from such supposedly “marginal” cultural productions. This move establishes a dis-
tinction between “major” and “minor” traditions that I find problematic and unten-
able. However, I heed his call to frame a new heuristic for the evaluation of such
works by placing them within the trajectory of the ethnographic representation in
Assamese of the hill other, and of depictions of modes of survival in necropolitical
zones. The fictional works by Sharma and Mahanta can be placed within the longer
trajectory of Assamese ethnographic novels in which the ethnographic eye – often a
fictionalized substitute for the author-as-witness – narrates the self’s encounter with
the “others” from the hills. An ethical standpoint towards the other emerges in both
texts. To be sure, the encounters with the other occurs in different ways in the two
texts: Sharma’s Boranga Yan (the title is in Dzongkha, spoken in Bhutan) and
Mahanta’s Aulingar Jui (“Auling” is the harvest festival of the Konyak Nagas).
Boranga Yan (henceforth BY) follows the exclusionary trajectory of the Assamese
novel in placing the hill other in a space-time of precapital, although it paints a nos-
talgic picture of inter-ethnic contact in the foothills of Southern Bhutan. Aulingar
Jui (henceforth AJ) marks an ethical advance over BY in its reversal of the gaze
directed by the valley self on the hill other; here, the other too looks back at the
self. Eventually, this habitation in the lifeworld of the other in AJ, I argue, inaugu-
rates an ethical maneuver where the self lets itself “be destabilized by the radical
alterity of the other, in seeing his or her difference not as a threat but as a resource
to question your own position in the world” (Saldanha 118).
However, such entangled ethical explorations of selfhood and otherness are not
the only reason why we should pay attention to these texts. Novels like BY and AJ
also explore the contingencies of life, survival and endurance in necropolitical
zones where the distinctions between war and peace collapse.9 In “Necropolitics,”
Achille Mbembe writes that in zones like the frontier or the colony, “the fiction of
a distinction between ‘the ends of war’ and the ‘means of war’ collapses; so does
the fiction that war functions as a rule-governed contest, as opposed to pure
slaughter without risk or instrumental justification” (24). The borderland and
no-man’s zones depicted in the two novels are locales where distinctions
between “the ends of war” and “the means of war” collapse in the struggle that
ensues between different agencies of sovereignty: the state (India, Myanmar,
Bhutan) and para-state (the ULFA, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland
[NSCN]). I wager, therefore, that the fictions put pressure on imaginaries of
“life,” “death” and “living” in necropolitical universes. The subjects inhabiting
such deathworlds endure or bear witness to various situations of abandonment
and living death. Their respective foci are, again, different. BY foregrounds mili-
tant experience and considers the effects of death and abandonment from that
point of view. AJ places militant activity in the background; instead, its focus is
on conditions of ordinary life and modes of endurance in no-man’s zones lying
in between India and Myanmar.
Furthermore, I focus especially on how the contingent category of the “human”
emerges in necropolitical zones either in conjunction with or in opposition to sym-
bolic forms of disqualification like disability or excessive life such as plants and
insects. Sarma’s novel depicts a gradual descent into a horroristic ordinary. The
novel harrowingly depicts phenomenological disorientation in a necro-zone. In
BY, the topos of horroristic abandonment is the forest (aranya) and the luxurious
forms of life that flourish therein, such as plants and insects. Paradoxically, the
horror that freezes the subject who bears witness to extreme forms of desubjecti-
vation is caused not so much by the prospect of death and dissolution but emerges
from an encounter with excessive forms of life such as those of insects streaming
out of a living human body. Death in BY, following Mbembe’s reading of Georges
Bataille, is not figured as an annihilation of being; rather “it is the most luxurious
form of life, that is, of effusion and exuberance: a power of proliferation” (“Necro-
politics” 15). The text is not about the horror of death, but about the horrific poten-
tialities inherent in figurations of intimate, interspecies and corporeal contact
between the human and other forms of life in a necro-zone.
AJ, in contrast, explores ordinary contingencies of survival in a Naga village
pisto (squeezed) in the no-man’s zones buffeted between India and Myanmar.
The focus is on how ordinary populations endure in a seemingly endless political
stalemate between various necropolitical entities, like the nation-states and para-
sovereign entities such as the NSCN. Conditions of diminished existence in this
novel are depicted through figurations of disability and animality. Disability
(especially the figure of the cognitively disabled Tempu) and animality function
reductively as symbols for diminished life that the denizens of the no-man’s land
must endure. Conversely, disability in this text also functions as a narrative pros-
thesis for the remaking of the self as the central character, Atanu, an Assamese
youth who moves from the bhaiyam to the no-man’s zone, learns to live-with
and endure what is initially presented as an impaired condition of being.
Before I begin discussing the texts, a few words on the spatial backgrounds of
the two novels. ULFA narratives have usually focused on two major borderland
areas: a) works like Dorjee’s two-volume Bhutanot Heral Dhutiman and BY
deal with the camps in Southern Bhutan; and b) Mahanta’s AJ and Kangliyanar
Maat and Samudra Gogoi’s Ejan Prapton, like an earlier example of guerrilla nar-
rative Parag Das’s Sanglot Fenla, are based on the ULFA camps in the zones lying
between India and Myanmar. Kaberi Kochari Rajkonwar’s memoir ranges across
the camps in Bhutan and Myanmar and the bases in Bangladesh. BY, like the
first volume of Bhutanot Heral Dhutiman, is a fictional account of the experiences
endured by ULFA militants in the Indo-Bhutan borderlands before Operation All
Clear in 2003 forced many of them to flee from Bhutanese territory into Assam.10
Both Sharma and Mahanta had to flee Bhutan after that operation. The ULFA had
set up bases in Bhutan after Operation Bajrang was declared in 1990 (see Panging).
BY is a representation of this period when the camps were flourishing and when
public support for ULFA militants was gradually waning in significant sections
of Assamese society. Moreover, Operation All Clear, conducted by the Royal Bhu-
tanese Army revealed the fault lines that had developed between the Bhutanese
government and the militant groups who had set up their camps in Bhutan. Mun-
tahali S. Prabhakara says that when the ULFA set up its camps in eastern Bhutan in
the 1990s two factors worked in its favor. First, the ULFA was a “serviceable ally”
of the kingdom, a possible buffer that could keep the indigenous Lhotshampa
(Nepalese) militancy under control.11 Second, the arrival of the anti-Indian mili-
tants and the setting up of their camps there was beneficial for the economy of
the region as the local Drukpas now had a stable base of consumers with whom
they could trade their primarily agricultural and livestock produce.
For a while, the ULFA worked these internal pressures within the Bhutanese
kingdom to its own benefit and conducted its attacks into Indian spaces from its
Bhutanese bases. However, external circumstances changed drastically between
the early and mid-1990s and 2003. There had always been immense pressure by
the Indian government on the Bhutanese to act against the militant groups based
there. However, the rise of the Maoist movement in neighboring Nepal, the
support for the Maoists among the Lhotshampas, and rumors about possible alli-
ances between the Maoists and anti-Indian militant groups based in Bhutan culmi-
nated in Operation All Clear in 2003. An important fact is that the militant camps
also housed families and children. The attacks during Operation All Clear dis-
placed these families.
If Bhutan was one of the major bases of the ULFA, another major area com-
prised the zones controlled by militant groups in the borderlands between India
and Myanmar. These zones – which also fall within the Zomia – are the major
locale for works like Parag Das’s Sanglot Fenla, AJ and Kangliyanar Maat,
Samudra Gogoi’s memoir Ejan Prapton ULFA’r Swikarokti (Confessions of an
ex-ULFA Member) and Kaberi Kochari Rajkonwar’s memoir Iccha Annicha
Swatteu Kisu Kotha (A Few Reluctant Words). Parts of Sanglot Fenla are set in
Death Valley, which is so named because more than 90,000 Asian laborers and
15,000–16,000 Allied POWs died there during the construction of the Burma–
Thailand railroad and the Stilwell Road that connected Thailand to Tibet. The
famous Stilwell Road, the major supply line for the allies in the eastern front
that connected Ledo in Assam to Kachin and the Kunming region in China,
was built in this region.12
This locale has been described extensively in recent travelogues by Bertil Lintner
and Rajeev Bhattacharyya. These zones are characterized by a split framework of
sovereignty where the post-colonial states (Myanmar and India) compete for
control with the numerous independentist groups that have their bases – the
most well-known being the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the various
factions of the NSCN.13 The ULFA also set up bases in this region during the
early 1980s. The KIA, one of the most sophisticated revolutionary organizations
in the region, has even set up a parallel government, schools and hospitals. Bhat-
tacharyya writes that locales like the Kachin that fall within this region
had a long history of association with insurgents from India’s northeast. Back
in the 1960s and 70s, the KIA had allowed the Naga National Council
(NNC) and Mizo National Front to send batches to China for training
through its territory. In the 1980s, it trained hundreds of cadres belonging
to Manipur’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and ULFA.
(82)
Between 1994 and 2011 there was a cease-fire between the Kachins and the
Myanmarese government, but hostilities have since resumed. The KIA stopped
training Northeast Indian militants as part of a mutually beneficial deal with
the Indian intelligence agency, Research and Analytical Wing (RAW). Many of
the cadres were then trained in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan,
which is depicted in the second part of Dorjee’s Bhutanot Heral Dhutiman.
However, the ULFA still has bases in this region.14
Raw life: necropolitics, foothill lifeworlds and the
body-as-witness in Boranga Yan
BY is an extended gesture of mourning for the destruction of a lifeworld that
flourished around the environs of a militant camp in Southern Bhutan, and for
the evisceration of the perceived idealism of the militant cause. This gesture is
evident from the poem that is the novel’s epigraph – “When you go home, tell
them of us and say,/For their tomorrow, we gave our today.” This poem is the
epitaph on the Memorial of the Second British Division at Kohima Cemetery.
This call for a recognition of the “sacrifice” by the militants is one of the
major thematics of BY, a point re-emphasized by Sharma’s comment in an inter-
view with Saswati Kaushik: if the sacrifice of global icons like Che Guevara are
recognized, then why not the sacrifice made by his fallen and detained comrades
in Southern Bhutan?
This call for recognizing the value of sacrifice and melancholically holding on
the loved object of the revolution is not my major concern here. As a narrative, BY
shares some affinities with and major divergences from a major biopolitical genre:
the “classical” form of the guerrillero testimonio such as Guevara’s The Bolivian
Diaries and the Sandinista Omar Cabezas’s Fire From a Mountain. Stories about
guerrilla warfare and legendary figures like Guevara circulate among the Assam-
ese militants and are referred to several times in BY. Comparing these two narrative
frameworks, especially given the fact that guerrilla narratives travel globally and
transplant themselves elsewhere, is, I think, a necessary critical move. BY’s status
as fiction differentiates it from these non-fiction works. However, the narrative
codes of guerrillero testimonios share some elective affinities with this fictional
narrative: the (male) guerrillero as a modern subject who distinguishes himself
from the “primitivism” of the people inhabiting the areas residing near their
bases, the attempt of the narrative to present itself as an epic of the everyday
and the titanic struggle that the “human” wages with the hostile environment.
The classical testimonio is about transcending the ordinary. Recognition of the
ULFA’s devastating defeat takes BY into a different dimension from the classical
testimonio – instead of transcendence, we descend into a horroristic ordinary.
Most testimonios are oriented towards the future – where, despite the possibility
of the guerrillero’s death, the sacrifices made in the present are oriented toward
the victory of the revolution. Despite physical dissolution, death or states near
death become a herald for immersing the guerrillero in the vitalizing life of
the revolution. This is what provides sacrificial death with meaning and value
that is potentially realized in its plenitude in futurity. But what happens when
sacrificial death is cut off from futural redemption? What happens when
images of sacrifice lose any sense of value? This is the fundamental representa-
tional burden of BY, which I will explore in the first part of this section.
The questions I posed about sacrifice, futural redemption and value segue with
a series of queries that Mbembe poses in “Necropolitics”: “Imagining politics as a
form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body
(in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of
power?” (12). Indeed, if politics is imaged as war – which is what both guerrilla
insurgency and counter-insurgency frameworks are based on – we need to inquire
about the status of the wounded and slain body, imaginations of and encounters
with finitude and death, and the categorizations of “life” and “death” in such
necro-zones. BY explores the gradual inscription of the body into an order of car-
nivorous power through a symbolically loaded division of spatialities. Both spatial
locations – the foothills and the forest – are often described as ideal locations for
bases in classic guerrilla manuals, like those by Mao Tse-Tung and Guevara. But
they operate as symbolic contrasts in BY. The Bhutanese foothills where the guer-
rilla camps are initially based are nostalgically represented as spaces of convivial-
ity with the local populations and “maternal” figurations of nurture. In contrast, the
transit-zone of the forest (which militants cross to enter India from Bhutan), where
the guerrillero’s body is grax (swallowed) by nature, emerges as the topos of exis-
tential isolation and horror. They are zones of “raw life” which, per Mbembe is a
“place and a time of half-death – or . . . half-life . . . [it] is a space where life and
death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them” (On the
Postcolony 197). The horroristic forest scenes push BY from the generic realms
of the testimonio to the domain of the “ecogothic” (Smith and Hughes).15
Furthermore, the ecogothic scenes in BY force the guerrilla to witness forms of
extreme desubjectivation. Desubjectivation occurs not only through unprece-
dented encounters with unimaginable ways of dying, but through a corporeal
intimacy with luxurious, inhuman forms of excessive life such as plants and
insects. BY explores the phenomenology of horror and disorientation arising
from acts of witnessing the inhuman through a mobilization of all the sensual reg-
isters. The critical discourse on witnessing is largely predicated on a relationship
between seeing and saying. As John Peters writes, to witness implies two related
aspects:
the passive one of seeing and the active one of saying . . . What one has seen
authorizes what one says. . . . Herein lies the fragility of witnessing: the dif-
ficult juncture between experience and discourse. The witness is authorized
to speak by having been present at an occurrence. . . . But the journey from
experience (the seen) into words (the said) is precarious.
(709–10)
BY explores the precarious nature of this journey from experience to words while
simultaneously widening the ambit of witnessing desubjectivation to incorpo-
rate other sensual registers such as the haptic, the olfactory and the gustatory.
The senses are no longer reliable indicators for traversing the world; instead,
the witness confronts desubjectivation through conditions of phenomenological
and sensual disorientation. If, in the foothills, the body is bracketed and able to
inhabit and navigate the world through the comfort and distance offered by the
primacy of the visual apparatus, in the ecogothic horrorscape of the forest, the
protective orbit between the body, the senses and the world is shattered. The wit-
ness’s body traverses the deathworld through a series of immobilizations, pauses
and gestures of turning the gaze away. The language of this form of testimony, to
echo Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on witnessing, “is a language that no longer
signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is not language” (Rem-
nants, 39).
The guerrillero testimonios too are set in the deathworld of the forest; however,
the implicit split between mind and body, between reason and its outside, renders
it an anthropocentric narrative genre about the “human” conquering the forbid-
ding otherness of the natural environment. In contrast, through a foregrounding
of the body and the sensual apparatus, BY shows how the imaginary boundaries
instituted between “human” self and inhuman other dissolve in a space of raw life
where carnivorous power demonstrates an escalating incidence of expenditures
without reserve.16 These existential predicaments are the wellspring of horror
in this evocative necropolitical text.
Boranga Yan as the anti-testimonio

The figure of the leftist militant has returned with a bang in contemporary
theoretical/cultural production. Numerous film texts across the globe and theoret-
ical productions by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as Alain Badiou
have re-introduced the figure of the militant as a transformative force or as a nos-
talgic figure in the contemporary conjuncture. Joshua Gooch argues that:
The biopolitical link between militancy and the construction of the social body
is not simply a reaction to contemporary experience but an attempt to engage
with the construction of social bodies as potential utopian projects. Militancy
acts as a process of confronting and remolding the world, which binds its
political engagement with the construction of art and narrative.
(2)
Gooch’s points about constructing “social bodies as potential utopian projects” and
acts of “confronting and remolding the world” enable a return to an earlier moment
of cultural production where the militant was envisioned as a figure of futural
promise: the period between the 1960s and the 1980s characterized by guerrilla
warfare conducted by anticolonial forces. During that period, the testimonio, pri-
marily written by the male guerrillero was a major narrative form that conjoined
visions of such utopian projects with a militant figure that embodied processes of
confronting and remolding the world through biopolitical activity.
This comparison between BY and the “classical” form of the guerrillero testi-
monio is apposite because the global influence of this narrative form gives voice
to the aspirations of the “people” through the figure of the guerrillero. Individual
destiny here becomes a sign for a collective struggle against oppressive systems.
BY and other Assamese militant novels and testimonios, such as the novel Sanglot
Fenla, written by the slain radical journalist and human rights activist Parag Das,
and Samudra Gogoi’s memoir, frequently make references to the life and experi-
ences of global revolutionary figures like Mao and Guevara. Common scenarios
in such texts are extended descriptions of mukoli melas (de-briefing sessions).
These sessions are both pedagogical exercises where new militants are introduced
and interpellated into revolutionary ideology, and discussion sessions where the
concerns of ordinary guerrillas are addressed publicly by the senior leadership.
Such sessions and conversations with senior militants means that stories about
figures like Mao and Guevara and about the Chinese, Cuban or Naxalite revolu-
tions are passed down as legacies to the emerging generation of militants. The
militants begin to imagine their “local” struggles as part of a “global” narrative
chain of revolution.
Furthermore, like the guerrillero testimonio, novels like Sanglot Fenla and, to
some extent, BY, attempt to reflect the voice of the “people” even when they man-
ifest the popular voice in the destiny of a singular revolutionary. John Beverley
argues that although testimonios are non-fictional testimonials in the first
person, they display affinities with the structure of the literary bildungsroman –
the narrative of gradual individual growth and development. However, the differ-
ence between the bildungsroman and the testimonio is that in the former, a col-
lective social situation is experienced as personal destiny, while in the latter, the
narrator speaks in the “name of a community or group, approximating in this way
the symbolic function of the epic hero, without at the same time assuming the
epic hero’s hierarchical and patriarchal status” (32).
Beverley’s point about the non-hierarchical status of the guerrillero’s symbolic
status has been challenged. Critics like Ileana Rodriguez point out that the epic
hero in guerrillero testimonios, often male, usually legitimizes and authorizes
himself as a representative of the struggle through a series of identifications
with paternal figures.17 The following passage from Cabezas’s Fire From the
Mountain illustrates this:
When don Leandro speaks to me in that way . . . giving me his sons and speak-
ing to me of sons and the Sandinista struggle, I suddenly feel don Leandro as a
father. I realize that, in reality, he is the father, that don Bacho and don Leandro
are the fathers of the fatherland. Never before I have felt more a son of a
Sandinismo. . . . I found my history through him, my tradition, the essence
of Nicaragua, my genesis, my forefathers.
(252–53)
Here the theme of generation goes back through a series of displacements to the
identification with the ur-father figure: Augusto Sandino. Moreover, a constant
refrain in Fire From the Mountain is “We must be like Che.” Such identifications
with “global” (Guevara) and “local” (Sandino) father-figures, as Rene Jara says,
inaugurate an epical/epochal notion of the everyday, with the male guerrillero at
its center (cited in Beverley 33). The paradigmatic narrative structure of the guer-
rilla testimonio labors to insert the male guerrillero into a chain of patriarchal fil-
iation, simultaneously transforming quotidian reality into an epic of the everyday.
One recurring mode through which the militant transforms himself into the new
human of this everyday epic is through a transcendence of the environment. Well-
known guerrilla manuals by Mao and Guevara are both veritable herbiaries
and bestiaries, and utilize plant and animal metaphors to describe how the militant
can blend in and conquer the harsh terrain. While their theses frequently invoke
fantasies of interspecies melding, the aspect of ultimately conquering the hostility
of the environment through human rationality and labor is ubiquitous. Mbembe’s
point about the logic of survival in “Necropolitics” is relevant here. Although the
militant doesn’t “kill” the nonhuman environment, he is one who takes it on, sur-
vives and tells the tale. This is a crucial element in the writing of an epic of the
everyday. The body can imitate forms of natural life – it can even disintegrate
into raw and formless matter – but it remains a vehicle for a rite of passage that
is the structuring principle framing the epic of the everyday.
The mind, moreover, is figured as a separate force that can control the worlds
of nature and the brute facticity of matter. Following is a relevant passage from
Cabezas:
Maybe you really were going to lose everything – your present, which is the
past. And meanwhile, the revolution is not triumphing, and the Guard is on
top of you, and hunger. . . . It’s an anguish consciously accepted; you feel you
are one more element, one more being in that environment which you have
to come to grips with and dominate, because you have reason. Because you
have intelligence and dominate the environment for a purpose. . . . So when
you lose things you’ve brought with you, and when your own body, your
own substance, has decayed and fallen away . . . your identity has one last
refuge: in the ideas and the memories that are lodged in your brain, which
you have guarded and cherished and preserved in the innermost recesses
of your brain as the fuel of all your forces.
(203–5)
The guerrilla-as-epic-hero is figured as a biopolitical agent who “consciously”

accepts anguish and corporeal degradation. The crucial point here is that the ratio-
nal mind is figured as a separate entity that enables the guerrilla to “dominate” the
environment even when he feels that he is “one more element, one more being in
that environment.” This attribute of rationality is the surplus element that enables
the guerrillero to transcend the realm of mere zōe. This ability for transcendence
remains the guerrilla’s last “refuge,” one that provides the “fuel” for the machinic
body to be reanimated, to persevere and to struggle.
What is also important in Cabezas’s passage is the affective response to bodily
degradation. No doubt, the representation of the gradual process of the degrada-
tion of the body is placed in a narrative chain by the post-facto recognition that
the sacrifice “then” leads to a certain form of closure in the narrative present.
However, it is notable that the “decay” of bodily “substance” is not meant to
evoke horror or disgust but is a necessary element in the re-birth of the guerrilla
as the epitome of the “human.” The well-known example of this idea of re-birth
through bodily degradation into a new “species” of men is found in Guevara’s
well-known statement from The Bolivian Diaries:
This is one of those moments when great decisions have to be made; this
type of struggle gives us the opportunities to become revolutionaries, the
highest form of the human species, and it also allows us to emerge fully
as men.
(208)
In other words, the mind–body split and the “consciously” accepted reality of the
degradation of the body are viewed akin to a process of shedding skin or a protec-
tive encasement: the “true” human emerges from this process of corporeal disin-
tegration, which, paradoxically, is also a new, vitalizing birth into a “higher” form.
These themes play a huge role in an earlier example of fiction in Assamese
about guerrilla revolution by the slain Assamese public intellectual Parag Das
(Sanglot Fenla). Das, a journalist and the author of numerous politically interven-
tionist essays and tracts that were sympathetic to the cause of the ULFA, was
assassinated in 1996. Sanglot Fenla was written during the height of the ULFA
movement. Das’s biographer, Manorom Gogoi, says that the novel took shape
through conversations that the author had with ULFA militants – thus, although
it is fiction, it shares elective affinities with the testimonio’s claim to represent
“truth” in a documentary-like fashion. Sanglot Fenla too transforms the every-
day into an epic of the national struggle. Moreover, the national revolution
is inscribed in global and local lines of filiation – references to Mao, Guevara
and Charu Mazumdar permeate Das’s text. The central biopolitical agent,
Diganta, endures extreme bodily privation and torture, but constantly strives to
remain steadfast to the revolutionary cause. The novel also appraises the faults
of the rebel movement (for instance, the representation of torture by ULFA mil-
itants in the Lakhipathar camp) and ponders how its revolutionary aspirations
could be oriented in a more ethical and inclusive direction. It is not surprising
that metaphors of health and sickness, common tropes that underpin the vitalism
of nationalist narratives (see Cheah), permeate this text. Torture perpetuated by
ULFA cadres is represented as a canker that must be cured for the continuing
“health” of the organization.
Sanglot Fenla is also affiliated with the larger revolutionary narrative tradition
if we consider narrative closure. In the closing scene of the text, Diganta and
another guerrilla, Prabin, walk out “like courageous soldiers” rejecting the lucra-
tive terms that “traitors” to the cause, like the former militant, Ranjit, offer them
for surrender. Diganta has just been released after prolonged incarceration and
excruciating sessions of torture, described in graphic detail, conducted by the
army. The last sentences of the novel are critical – “It was a long way off for
the dawn (The first part of Sanglot Fenla concludes here)” (174). As a literary
trope, Barbara Harlow notes, such inconclusive closures play with the symbolism
of dawn and darkness and signal a “commitment to the future” for most “narra-
tives of resistance” (43). Moreover, such closures reveal the structure of what
Ernst Bloch calls an “anticipatory consciousness” that demonstrates that the epic
of the everyday will be completed when the protagonist manages to affix his/her
individual signature and personal destiny to the collective context of the
“people’s” revolutionary hopes and aspirations for the future. In other words,
these forms of closure in media res render the writing of the militant’s life coex-
tensive with the chronicle of a nation that is not-yet but has the potential to be: the
“second part” of Sanglot Fenla (a book Das never wrote) will be completed only
when the ongoing “national” struggle reaches its telos.
BY is a product of a very different historical moment. Its fictional form adopts
the narrative address and some of the conventions of the “classical” guerrillero tes-
timonio but steers it towards different ends. Consider, for instance, the figure of
patriarchal filiation. The novel begins with a dedication to “respected father” Bhim-
kanta Buragohain, one of the founding members of the ULFA and one of the
biggest names of the organization captured by the Indian army during Operation
All Clear.18 A version of Buragohain also appears in the role of “Father” within
the diegetic space. “Father” is characterized as a mournful chronicler of times
past and as a person who relays revolutionary wisdom to Pratyush’s generation
of militants. Inspired by these narratives, the narrator constantly asks questions
like: “If tales of Che Guevara can inspire millions world over, why can’t our sac-
rifices be accorded the same status?” (72). Two modifications occur in the melan-
cholic tenor of such questions. First, figures like Guevara no longer function simply
as signifiers for a global line of filiation but also represent a form of melancholic
cathexis in a traumatic loss of an ideal that slowly recedes into the horizon as the
militants increasingly face defeat, destitution and the withering away of public
support. Thus, figures like Guevara and Mao, and the ideals they stand for, repre-
sent a patrimony that is ardently desired but becomes increasingly inaccessible.
Second, the predominance of the rhetorical question – a recurring stylistic
feature of BY – initiates a transactional relationship between the reader and the
narrator that is different from the form of address in the “classical” testimonio.
In contrast with the affirmative mode of interrogation and narratorial address ini-
tiated by the “classical” testimonio, the form of the rhetorical question in BY
remains empty and short-circuited. It invites the imagined audience to respond;
however, “we,” as readers, cannot adequately respond to the melancholic tenor
of the questions affirmatively. Thus, this gap that opens between question and
expected response exposes a rupture in the narrative transaction between the aspi-
rational epic hero and his assumed audience. As a result, imaginative projections
of revolutionary “heroism” transmogrify into scenes of extreme horror as sacrifi-
cial forms of violence no longer seem to possess value.
The inaccessibility of anticipatory consciousness is highlighted if we consider
the concluding paragraphs of BY. It ends with the flight of the guerrillas to an
uncertain future, as they trek through the dense forests in the Indo-Bhutan
border after their camp is destroyed. Just as they are about to cross the border
into Assam in inky darkness, the narrator reflects:
Everything was now quiet and still. Occasionally the stillness was pierced by
the trumpeting of a wild elephant. It was as if the wind blowing through the
somber forest [aranya] merged with this distant sound. One could not hear
cries from the battlefield here. . . . Dusk was setting in. . . . Assam wasn’t
very far. . . . The darkness gradually enveloped them as they moved
forward. The strains of recognizable music from the plains wafted towards
them as they moved ahead in the darkness . . . on the other side of that all-
enveloping darkness a new day was awaiting Pratyush.
(207–8)
This passage simultaneously encompasses gestures of mourning, leave-taking and

an uncertain “homecoming.” At a temporal level, the subject is dispositioned
between nostalgic reminiscences of the past and melancholic meditations on
loss and the journey to an uncertain future. This sense of dispositioning is
enhanced by the sonic dimension – an all-pervading stillness occasionally punctu-
ated by the ambient sounds of animals and the wind is slowly left behind, while
strains of human world-making epitomized by the “recognizable music from the
plains” lay ahead. Moreover, the “new day” that awaits is not like the dawn at
Sanglot Fenla’s closure; instead, the anticipation is riddled with doubt and uncer-
tainty. At a spatial level, the subject is caught in a transit zone in the limbo-like,
near-prehistoric space of the forest/wilderness (aranya).19Aranya connotes a sense
of spatial and temporal immensity. The Sanskrit word from which the Assamese
term is derived connotes both forest and desert – both imagined often as topoi
hostile to human presence. To be lost in the aranya is akin to being isolated
and left adrift from all forms of human world-making. This portrayal of an
immense limbo-like space, a locale the narrator also repeatedly refers to as “no-
man’s zone,” is an apt figure for the representation of the forest in the text as
an inhuman, horroristic zone.20
Foothill lifeworlds and nostalgia

The horroristic character of the forest is accentuated by the contrast with the nos-
talgic portrayal of life in the Bhutanese foothills. The encounters with the denizens
of the foothills also help us place BY in the ethnographic fictional tradition in
Assamese that attempts to represent the other from the hills. The narrator describes
Pratyush and his comrades as bhaiyamor lora (boys from the valley) unacquainted
with pahariya jibon (life in the hills) (50). The narrator denies coevalness to the
sohoj sorol (simple and easygoing), sabhyotar pohor nopora manuhkhini (popu-
lations on whom the light of civilization hasn’t fallen) and adimjugiyo (prehistoric)
populations residing in these remote foothills and hilly areas. However, there is
one complicating factor in this temporal schema in BY. One of the key passages
that complicate this primitive/modern binary appears in Chapter One. Adopting
an ethnographic voice, the narrator depicts the local populations in the following
manner:
The lives of [the peasants] are limited and circumscribed . . . they are almost
a thousand years behind as far as modern education and exposure to science
and technology are concerned. . . . They lack a language to protest. . . . [W]hat
other alternative do you have other than blaming fate for your misfortunes
especially in a place where there is no democracy, where to raise one’s
head and meet the eyes of the king is considered a crime? This is the
essence of a monarchy. . . . But Assam? Isn’t it a democratic society?
People shed their blood to wrest the right to democracy from the British
Empire. Yet, why does the public remain silent?
(52)
The passage begins with the narrator donning an ethnographer’s voice that insists
that the sohoj sorol (simple and easygoing) locals exist in an anachronistic tem-
poral space that is different from that of the observer.21 However, in a move that
displaces the modern self-certitude of this valley gaze, the narrator also uses the
primitive/modern binary to institute a different specter of comparison. The “prim-
itive” people residing in “feudal” conditions in the Indo-Bhutan borderlands sup-
posedly lack a language to protest. However, are the people of Assam who live in
a “modern” democracy any different from them? There is a recognition of con-
tiguity as far as the question of historical consciousness (or the lack of it) is con-
cerned; but, while it critiques the putative modern historical subject, it also
simultaneously reinforces the temporal advancement of the modern and a
version of selfhood that is known in advance.
Such comparisons that reveal unexpected contiguities between the “primitive”
and the so-called modern appear throughout BY. Here, for instance, is a defamil-
iarizing contrast between a gonotontro (democracy) and a rajotantro (monarchy):
Even then the fact remains that the monarchical government of a poor nation
had tried [to provide succor to its sick populations]. The pathetic situation of
Assam’s remote districts would come to Pratyush’s mind when he thought
about these realities. This was a monarchy, that was a democracy.
(40)
From the way these questions or comparisons are posed and the spatial orienta-
tions of “this” and “that,” we can discern moral disgust at the perceived situa-
tions of human suffering both here and there. At the same time, though,
such comments also reinforce a monologic image of selfhood as there is no alter-
native point of view represented by the hill other in BY. There is no transforma-
tive recognition through the dialogic encounter with the other as we will see
in AJ.
Simultaneously, descriptions of interactions between the militants and the
locals also display the impress of a “foothill sensibility.” Unlike the classic
hill–valley binary, foothills represent a hybrid cultural contact-zone. I borrow
“foothill sensibility” from Dolly Kikon’s “Tasty Transgressions” in which she
defines the term as the “manner in which residents established relationships
and associated with neighbors on the basis of sharing an unstable and precarious
landscape” (15–16). Such located examples of foothill sensibilities in the “pla-
teaus of everyday life” (Kar, “When Was the Postcolonial?” 52) show how
attempts to “police” distinctions between the hills and the plains begin falling
apart in liminal zones. The narrator discusses forms of commodity exchange
that had developed in the foothills quite extensively in the first part of BY. He
mentions that a labhjonok bozaar (profitable market) had sprung up in these foot-
hills as the local populations catered to the needs of the militants and their fam-
ilies. Moreover, the locals would also visit the camps for medicines, medical
advice and clothes. This system of mutual beneficial exchange led to the devel-
opment of convivial relationships between the local populations and the militants,
with both groups often being invited to be part of the sociocultural events orga-
nized by each other (62–63).
But these occasional material depictions of foothill relationships are displaced
into a metaphoric register. The most significant element of this displacement is
the character of Amma – an old unnamed Drukpa woman who becomes the
“mother” for everyone in the militant group. The narrator writes:
No one knew Amma’s real name. There was no need to know that. . . . The
appellation of “mother” is enough for the child. The complete identity of
the “mother” is encapsulated by that name. Amma, too, is the mother for
everyone.
(50)
While passages like these reveal the existence of a convivial foothill sensibility,
they also perform a crucial symbolic function. For a text that is haunted by spec-
ters of paternal filiation, motherhood is figured through tropes of care and nurtur-
ing. Amma’s proper name and even age is considered irrelevant; her entire identity
is subsumed under the universalized, flattening sign of “mother.” Papori Bora
points out that such figurations of motherhood in Northeast India take on “the tra-
ditional role of mothers and recasts it as a larger political project of protecting sons
and daughters from the violence of the Indian state” (251). These archetypal and
reductive representations of motherhood in BY tally with the relatively subordinate
roles that women play in the text. Like other testimonios by male guerrilleros,
BY too is virtually silent about the role of female militants. Simultaneously, the
militants here are cast here in the role of “sons.” The entire band calls her
“Mother Teresa” for taking care of these anath (orphaned) sons (51). The domi-
nant narrative teleology of BY is of declension where “nurturing,” motherly
nature soon transmogrifies into something “monstrous” in the horroristic zone
of the forest.
Concurrent with this feminized representation of the nurturing foothills are
bucolic pastoral representations of the natural environment. This impulse
towards the pastoral is announced in the very first paragraph as the protagonist,
Pratyush, who is also a painter, contemplates the landscape:
The white clouds were surrounding the mountain. A flock of prancing white
birds were slowly disappearing into the heart of the ashen sky. It was as if
their joy of living, all their desires and dreams, were slowly merging with
the ethereal whiteness . . . as if abstract pictures of the hopes and desires,
trials and tribulations, and joys of humankind were constantly traced with
invisible brushstrokes by nature.
(1)
In times of relative peace, Pratyush can afford to distance himself from the stun-
ning natural vista in front of him and contemplate it with a disembodied gaze. This
privilege endowed to sight and the attempt to halt or slow the flow of time through
disembodied vision is at the core of this pastoral sensibility at the beginning of BY.
This facilitates an imaginary (inflected by Romanticism) where a holistic figure of
the human is imagined as existing in “harmony” with nature.22
In a related way, the centrality of vision in the pastoral takes us back to the
question of the primacy of the ocular in the sensual apparatus. Hans Jonas
argues that there are three reasons why sight is considered the primary sensual
apparatus for the “human”: first, there is the issue of “simultaneity of perception,”
which “furnishes the idea of enduring present, the contrast between change and
the unchanging, between time and eternity”; second, there is “dynamic neutrali-
zation,” which “furnishes form as distinct from matter, essence as distinct from
existence”; and, third, “distance,” which “furnishes the idea of infinity” (136).
In contrast with the other senses, sight is the least temporally bound because
we can open our eyes and instantaneously see a vision or a landscape in front
of us. In contrast, senses like hearing and touch require time and the assistance
of the other senses for comprehension. Therefore, sight is often associated with
the question of static being, while the other senses are categorized under the
realm of becoming. Pratyush distances himself from objects, freezes the scene
in front of him and simultaneously places it within the realm of the pure
present. He then proceeds to judgments that separate the harmonious “essence”
of nature from the facticity of existence. This is the crucial element underpinning
this pastoral view of nature – the fact that the flow of time can be halted and sup-
posedly distilled in its detemporalized essence from the safe distance that is
managed by the disembodied gaze.
Combined, these bucolic representations of nurturing nature, of disembodied
vision and the invocation of “nurturing” motherhood are the primary elements
that drive the evocation of nostalgia in the text. Svetlana Boym writes that the
root words at the base of that hybrid, “pseudo-Greek” term “nostalgia” are
“nostos – return home, and algia – longing” (3).23 The hybrid space of the foot-
hills and the interactions with the sohoj sorol people serve as painful, melancholic
images of a lost world of plenitude, a home in the world, as all is changed,
changed utterly for the militants when they endure expulsion and abandonment
in the horroristic transit-zone of the aranya. Thus, the shift into the realm of the
ecogothic is accentuated by the symbolic contrast with the pastoral mode in the
initial sections, and with the dismemberment of the system of commodity and
social exchange that emerged and flourished in contingent circumstances. Further,
the aranya offers no comfortable ocular distance for the body that securely
anchors a holistic imagination of the union of the subject and nature. Instead,
we are propelled into the domain of subjective and corporeal fragmentation and
desubjectivation.
Witnessing raw life in the aranya: the descent into

the horroristic ordinary
The representation of the aranya-as-horrorscape in BY is a contrast to the repre-
sentation of spaces of camouflage like the jungle in guerrilla literature. Both Mao
and Guevara talk about the forest as a locale for warfare on favorable ground.
At a symbolic level forests are often viewed as places of refuge and vitality in
cultural production featuring guerrillas. Saroj Giri writes that movies about guer-
rillas like
Pan’s Labyrinth has the little girl running away from the fascists only to find
support from the rebels in the forests. Here again the fascists are parasitic and
vampirish while the rebels stand for the rupture of the status quo, for life and
a brighter future.
A perusal of guerrilla manuals and testimonios show that the forest is repre-
sented as a vitalist topos where a “new human” is forged. While the aspect of
conquering nature is ubiquitous, the forest is a space where forms of interspecies
intimacy, emulation and metamorphosis are celebrated. Mao’s guerrilla manual,
for instance, is a veritable bestiary as guerrillas are advised to model themselves
on forms of animal life.
The immense, hostile and seemingly indifferent aranya, instead, becomes a hor-
rifying deathworld in BY, a theater of raw life, where forms of life and death are
entangled. The anthropocentric theme of conquering nature in the guerrillero tes-
timonio mutates into the ecogothic. Corporeal disintegration is foregrounded. Peril
lurks at every step in the forest. Hunger and thirst are normalized states for the
guerrilla’s body. The lack of water in the densely forested areas would often
force the fighters to lap the water that had collected in the footmarks left by ele-
phants (142). The dual signification of aranya as wilderness and desert merge. In
addition to the constant fear of a sudden ambush, the guerrillas also encounter the
dangers posed by “dangerous paths . . . the desert-like expanses of sand that would
resemble a furnace when the sun’s rays fell on it, leeches and mosquitoes, [and]
the perils posed by wild animals” (111, 141). Even with their weapons, the guer-
rillas would be helpless if a herd of wild elephants were to run amok. Unantici-
pated deaths are common: leopards would camouflage themselves in the dense
foliage that sometimes blocked out the sun and suddenly decamp with a straggling
member of the band (141). The fear of ambushes would force guerrillas to lie
hidden for hours, enduring an uncomfortable tactile intimacy with legions of
insectile forms. The fear that wild animals imposed was oftentimes greater than
the fear of the ambush.
Moreover, the restraints that supposedly provide limits to militarized combat
seem to disappear in the forest. Power here seems to be predicated on what
Mbembe calls the “carnivorous” aspect – an aspect predicated on an interrelation-
ship between “death, body and meat” (On the Postcolony, 200). Often, in such
carnivorous economies, “killing a human being” proceeds from the same logic
as that of “killing an animal.” The “wild” laws of the jungle seem to be in oper-
ation here, a law that seems like the erasure of all human-made laws. The tech-
niques employed to capture militants in this no-man’s zone, the narrator says,
resemble those used for trapping animals. The narrator recounts an episode in
which a guerrilla contingent is ambushed by the Indian army in the forest.
While many militants are killed, an injured guerrilla named Bonojit Deka falls
into the hands of the armed forces. Bonojit is inhumanely tortured by the
army. His eyes are gouged out and acid is poured into his face. Bonojit’s
corpse is strung on a tree in the expectation that his comrades would come to
fetch it. In a gruesome game of waiting, the army personnel lie hidden for the
guerrillas to come and claim the body, much like a “hunter who in a tiger hunt
would string the body of a dead goat on a tree” (Sharma 133). The logic of
the cynegetic state is seen here in its stark outlines as the meat of the dead militant
is instrumentally used to lure out his comrades. Bonojit’s dead body hangs there
for days transformed into carrion for vultures and crows. The stench of his rotten
corpse covers the entire area. Eventually, the army contingent moves on and the
militants recover their comrade’s decomposed body.
However, extreme horror in BY is evoked not only by degrading forms of death,
like those of Bonojit’s, but also (and even more so) by proximity to what are per-
ceived as luxurious, inhuman forms of life. The two main forms of excessive life
depicted here are plants and insects. Natania Meeker and Antonia Szabari argue:
plants appear . . . to represent life in excess, since their growth was under-
stood as unlimited by morphology. In the absence of a defined shape, onto-
logical plants grow endlessly, in a proliferation of organless bodies, with
associations of mystical excess.
(34)
This proliferation of “organless bodies” and excessive life can be radically alien-
ating and can emerge as a topos of “plant horror.” Similarly, insect life too rep-
resents something radically other to the human. Stephen Kellert lists five major
reasons for why insects as radically different:
First, many humans are alienated by the vastly different ecological survival
strategies, spatially and temporally, of most invertebrates in comparison to
humans. Second, the extraordinary “multiplicity” of the invertebrate world
seems to threaten the human concern for individual identity and selfhood.
Third, invertebrate shapes and forms appear “monstrous” to many people.
Fourth, invertebrates are often associated with notions of mindlessness and
an absence of feeling. . . . Fifth, many people appear challenged by the radical
“autonomy” of invertebrates from human will and control.
(quoted in Brown, 7)
While insects can also stand for beauty (like butterflies), their multiplicity, appar-
ent mindlessness and swarm “mentality” make them radically other to imaginaries
of the human. Added to that are the ecologies they inhabit: insects are often asso-
ciated with decaying and putrefying matter. Aurel Kolnai describes disgust as a
paradoxical state teetering in between life and death. On the one hand, physical
disgust, which is always oriented towards biological matter, is predicated on a
“surplus” or a “luxuriance of life”; on the other hand, it is also summoned forth
by a “passing into death,” a “desire to waste away . . . over-spend the energy of
life, a macabre debauchery of matter” (52). Insects seem to combine both these
elements: a sheer luxuriousness of life and a macabre debauchery of matter.
The aranya teems with excessive forms of plant and insect life and represents a
hostile, inhuman environment for the characters. Quite a few pages in BY evoke
this sense of “plant horror.” The plants and thick foliage block out sunlight, ren-
dering the forest dark and forbidding even in daylight. If the regular pathways
aren’t used for a while they are rapidly swallowed (grax) by teeming vegetal
life. The lack of light means that the slippery pathways become veritable death
traps. The virtually dry, stony beds of the streams they cross under the cover
of luxurious vegetation are full of oozing, slippery moss. These forms of slippery
moss cover even the rocks and the militants rarely get a stable foothold on them.
In addition, the thick vegetation is ideal for the Indian army to set up an ambush.
The episode that is the traumatic core of BY brings together both these forms –
plants and insects – of excessive life and stages a scene where the subject wit-
nesses the inhuman through a mobilization of all the senses. Theorists who
have considered the question of witnessing the inhuman, like Adriana Cavarero
in Horrorism, usually focus on the “physics of horror” – the freezing of the
body of the witness in the face of an inhuman entity. Considerations rarely
venture beyond the link between seeing and vocalization. But how are the other
senses mobilized in witnessing the “ontological crime” that exposes shared vulner-
ability between the witness and a figuration of the inhuman? How do these disori-
entations lead both to moments of extreme self-consciousness and a sense of
subjective fragmentation? How does witnessing the inhuman through the senses
merge with the impossibility of witnessing? I return to an analysis of a sequence
of witnessing in BY, one that mobilizes all the sensual registers. The narrator
recounts an incident that involves one of Pratyush’s dearest friends, Anurag.
Anurag’s guerrilla unit is ambushed during a mission through the no-man’s
zone. He and some of his comrades are wounded while retreating. Although Pra-
tyush and his other comrades bring back most of the wounded guerrillas to the
safety of the base camp, four people remain missing: Anurag and three other mil-
itants named Maihang, Moon and Deepkon. They are given up for dead, until
Deepkon manages to send them a message via radio transmission that he is
stranded and badly injured. However, there is no way they can go to his rescue,
as the army is keeping watch. When the army finally withdraws, the guerrilla
band sends out a search party that includes Pratyush to retrieve the dead bodies.
After two days of searching, the rescue party is about to call off its search. Sud-
denly they hear someone crying out weakly in the distance. They come across
Deepkon lying hidden within some tall elephant grass. The narrator describes the
bullet-ridden, emaciated body of Deepkon thus:
[Deepkon’s] bullet-ridden leg had swollen considerably and resembled a

bloated banana tree. . . . They had never imagined that Deepkon would be
alive in such a fashion. The ensuing sight horrified Pratyush and his troop.
The smell of rotting flesh was wafting in the air. Kamal examined Deepkon’s
bullet-ridden leg by lifting it carefully and saw, to his horror, that hundreds of
insects came frantically [bijbijkoi] crawling out of the holes that had been
bored into the flesh by the bullets. Deepkon screamed in intense agony.
The horrifying sight of insects crawling out of the body of a living person
filled Pratyush with so much disgust [ghrina] that he was forced to close
his eyes.
(146)
The rotting, insect-ridden, half-cadaverous body of Deepkon resembles a form of

raw life. The militants are first alerted to Deepkon’s presence by the olfactory
sense (the smell of rotting flesh), which, in Kolnai’s words is the “proper organ
of disgust in virtue of its primacy” (51).24 When one smells, Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer write, the subject is “taken over by otherness” (72). The
spatial distance from the other that a disembodied, distanced notion of sight pro-
vides begins to collapse.
The band of militants don’t see Deepkon initially because he is hidden by thick
clumps of elephant grass. But this initial approach towards the object through the
olfactory sense – one that evokes ghrina (repugnance) – is soon rendered into an
economy of horror through the register of the visual. The “hundreds of insects” that
come streaming out of Deepkon’s rotting leg represent a “restless, nervous, squirm-
ing, twitching vitality,” a bjibijkoi (frantic) form of undifferentiated activity that
stands in for a “phenomenon of life in decay” (Kolnai 52). This is tactile intimacy
with the insect exacerbated in a horroristic register. As in Bataille’s meditation
about flowers (Visions), death and putrefaction here become the repugnant condi-
tion for the teeming, luxurious proliferation of insect life. Furthermore, the horror
of the scene also emerges from what Neel Ahuja calls “redrawing the borders of
species” in necropolitical zones. In other words, the sense of horror evoked in Pra-
tyush emerges from the tactile aspect of the “crossing of the body with an alien
species” (Ahuja, Bioinsecurities, 55). This scene of a pestilential contact of a
“living body” inhabited by alien species disorients descriptive categories for a
moment. There is no category of signification through which Pratyush can bear
witness to this pestilential intimacy as it assaults his images and notions of the
human. He freezes in horror and is then forced to turn his eyes away.
Thus, the “ontological crime” precipitated by the encounter with a form of
living death, which at the same time teems with excessive life, make the witnesses
freeze in horror for a moment that seems like a figuration of the pure present.
Eventually, the spell is broken and Pratyush turns his eyes away in ghrina from
this abjected form that bears the proper name Deepkon. This act of looking
away, as Cavarero emphasizes, is a conserving gesture that emerges from a
desire to maintain the imaginary boundaries of self, especially when the subject
“contemplates the unprecedented act of its own dehumanization” (Horrorism, 12).
Furthermore, the horror that emanates from witnessing Deepkon emerges not
from the “dignity or indignity” (Agamben, Remnants, 10) of death or the phenom-
enon of confronting walking corpses – as in well-known literary examples like the
“grove of death” sequence in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or actual cases
like the Musselmanner in the concentration camps – rather, it emerges from the
sheer unimaginability of witnessing a still-living body colonized by excessive
life. The narrator posits this paradox in the following sentences: “They had only
come in search of his dead body. That Deepkon could survive in this manner
was unimaginable even in their wildest fantasies.” Let’s reconsider, in this context,
Cabezas’s statements again:
when you lose things you’ve brought with you, and when your own body,
your own substance, has decayed and fallen away from you, your identity
has one last refuge: in the ideas and the memories that are lodged in your
brain, which you have guarded and cherished and preserved in the innermost
recesses of your brain as the fuel of all your forces.
(203–5)
In this ecodrama, the human becomes a sovereign subject by confronting death.

This is “life which assumes death and lives with it” separating itself in the mean-
while from the realm of the natural (“Necropolitics” 14).
In contrast, in Deepkon’s case, the guerrilla is not the biopolitical agent that
remolds the world, but the necropolitical zombie who is virtually swallowed
(grax) by carnivorous nature. There is no assumption of or living with death in
this case. Deepkon’s own “substance” decays, falls away, is almost merged
with the environment and becomes the habitation for other forms of teeming
life. In spawning alien life, his corporeality becomes a degradation of the ideas
of human life – hence the narrator’s statement that how “Deepkon could
survive in this manner was unimaginable even in their wildest fantasies.” The
problem of what constitutes life here, to recall what Veena Das says, is not just
a dispute over form, but over the ideas constituting pictures of life itself. By freez-
ing in horror and repeatedly turning his gaze away, the witness exposes the sheer
necessity and the simultaneous impossibility of bearing witness when confronted
with an extreme form of the inhuman.
The visual register here is complicated further by Deepkon’s voice, which
demands a response from his comrades. Deepkon’s seemingly disembodied
voice appeals to them repeatedly for water. A clear disjunct between the luxurious
forms of life streaming out of his body and his nearly automatized, mechanical
voice accentuates the horror. Deepkon’s vocalizations remind us of the observa-
tions that Michel Delville and Andrew Norris make about hunger narratives.
Hunger narratives, they write
deal with the failure of self-possession . . . [and] emphasizes the fundamental

otherness of foodstuff and its tendency to disrupt our ability to think of
ourselves as self-present human beings, separate from the things that are
likely to disquiet us.
(47)
In situations of starvation, orality “emerges . . . as the hypersensitized conduit of

both food and speech” (47). The mouth that eats gets conflated with the mouth
that speaks, while the body is reduced to “only a belly with a few accessory
organs” (Orwell, cited in Delville and Norris 47). Furthermore, this mechanical
repetition via the mouth that conflates the act of eating with the act of speaking
shows that Deepkon’s language of testimony “is a language that no longer signi-
fies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is without language, to the
point of taking on a different insignificance” (Agamben Remnants, 39). What
is borne witness to cannot “already be language or writing” (38). The “lacuna”
of non-language at the heart of human language collapses, leading to a “different
impossibility of bearing witness – that which does not have language” (39).
How do the witnesses respond to this repeated, inhuman testimony that never-
theless demands a response? One of Pratyush’s comrades offers Deepkon his
sweat-soaked shirt, which that the latter begins to suck at greedily. Looking
away, the narrator then states: “Ah, the bitter taste [nirbhejal xwad] of revolu-
tion!” (147). The closure of this scene with the invocation of gustatory perception
is a moment not only of a growth of extreme self-consciousness in a space where
life and death cross-hatch, but also a moment of subjective fragmentation in the
face of a kothor bastab (cruel reality). The witness cannot bear to see any longer
and turns his eyes away. But the invocation of the gustatory functions as a sus-
pended closure to that horrifying encounter with the figure of the inhuman that
is the disintegrating body of Deepkon.
Dismembered lives: narrating history’s footnotes

in Aulingar Jui
Among the ULFA fictions, Mahanta’s AJ is the most provocative and self-
reflexive work. Mahanta (real name: Jiban Krishna Goswami) was a former
camp commandant in the ULFA, who also escaped from Bhutan during Opera-
tion Clear Out. The novel is based on his personal experiences of witnessing
the ways of life of a group of Konyak Nagas who reside in the other borderland:
the no-man’s zones between India and Myanmar.25 The fictional productions by
Sharma and Dorjee foreground the contingencies of militant experience. In con-
trast, AJ places militant activity in the background; instead, it focuses on the
everyday experiences of people residing in a village named Honyat Basti
(village) in the no-man’s zones between India and Myanmar.
AJ has received more critical attention than any Assamese militant novel. In
“Emerging Genre,” Manjeet Baruah places AJ within the lineage of Assamese
“frontier literature,” and makes the important point that earlier examples – like
Birendrakumar Bhattacharyya’s Yaruyingam – established a dialog between the
differential processes of nation-building in the frontier spaces as opposed to the
rest of the nation. Moreover, Yaruyingam also treated secessionist movements as
part of “the larger political movement of the frontier.” In contrast, references to
nation-building/separatism are marked by their absence in AJ. In “Readings
from No-Man’s Lands,” Rakhee Kalita Moral reads AJ as an ethically oriented
ethnographic fiction that attempts to bring to life the “other’s” history from
“their point of view” (18). This is an important observation because the other
residing in the frontier has often been denied coevalness in Assamese literature.
Both Baruah and Moral, however, do not engage with the originality of AJ’s
form, which they place within the genealogy of mimetic realism. This lack of
engagement with the formal dimension is evident in Baruah’s essay when he
claims that writers like Mahanta use narrative structures already in existence
since the 1980s. Moral pays closer attention to the formal dimensions of the
text, especially the fascinating preface. However, she makes the error of
placing its narrative address implicitly within the codes of ethnographic realism
that enables the “other” to speak in her own voice. Closer attention to AJ’s
preface reveals a struggle to frame a representational framework that adequately
captures the contingencies of life, survival and death in a no-man’s zone. Further-
more, Moral’s lead question of “Who narrates?” branches out to a more compli-
cated question: how to narrate? In a world where the national order of things has
become a naturalized modality for representing geopolitical space, and in the
absence of standard chronotopic frameworks for representing no-man’s lands,
how then to begin framing the conditions of possibility for narration?
Mahanta’s “preface” to the text bears the title “Soritroyanot pristobhumir jon-
trona” (The Difficulties Posed by the Background for the Characterization).
Unlike many other authorial prefaces in Assamese fiction, which are self-
contained paratexts, Mahanta begins by describing the historical background
and then suddenly “jump cuts” to a portrayal of the journey of the protagonist
of the novel, Atanu Baruah, to Honyat Basti in the latter half. Thus, what
seems like a documentary-style “voiceover” for around the initial six pages
abruptly segues into the diegetic space. Furthermore, the preface introduces two
major trajectories with associated figures that weave their way through AJ. First is
the exploration of “stunted temporality” – an “account of being spatially enclosed
and temporally in a limbo status for an indefinite period” (Navaro-Yashin 7).
Later, we notice the zone imaged as a durgo (fortress) with invisible boundaries.
The denizens of the durgo must know the dimensions of such an open-air prison
intimately if they are to survive. Second, although the subjects of this no-man’s
zone are entrapped in a sort of open-air prison, the text also represents a highly
“elastic geography” where subjects respond to “multiple and diffused rather than
a single source of power” and where survival is more deadly than in a “static,
rigid” zone (Weizman 7).
The figure that captures the experiences of survival in an “elastic geography” is
the ambivalent one of dwi-khondito (dismemberment). This figure is often nega-
tively related to states of being-an-animal and disability in AJ, although it also
functions as a narrative prosthesis that helps us track the gradual remaking of
Atanu’s self. Unlike the complex portrayal of Babula or the figuration of the
snail in “Soru Dhemali Bar Dhemali,” animality and disability are deployed in
a largely reductive metaphoric vein in AJ. There is hardly any attempt to
contend with the lived experience of the disabled character or the form of alterity
that the animal might represent. However, dismemberment plays a different role
as far as the question of self-making is considered. The figure of dismemberment
shows how “the ruse of prosthesis fails in its primary objective: to return the
incomplete body to the status of a normative essence” (Mitchell and Snyder, Nar-
rative Prosthesis 8). However, this failure, I argue, is eventually an ethical move.
Atanu’s desire in the text initially is to make himself whole by supplementing
what he thinks he lacks. This propels his journey into the no-man’s zone.
However, at the end he learns that the desire for an illusory wholeness is a
ruse; instead, he learns how to live-with and endure the diminished contingencies
that constitute life in the no-man’s zone.
The first sentence of the preface’s initial “voiceover” says: “People are some-
times rootless, sometimes dwi-khondito. No, not everyone. Such devastating
storms only impact the lives of certain people” (Mahanta 1). The narrator begins
with a generalization about being dwi-khondito, and, characteristically, reduces
the focus from the general to the particular. The “modern world,” the narrator con-
tinues, “has not encountered or does not dare to encounter” the stories and histories
of people inhabiting this dexohin dex (countryless country). In his “Introduction” to
the English translation of AJ (titled Remains of Spring), Manjeet Baruah makes the
important point that
[I]t is the No Man’s Land that is understood as a guerrilla space. The town of
Mon in the state of Nagaland in India, for example, is not implied as a guer-
rilla space despite it not being free from the crossfires of political violence. It
is because what is used as a distinguishing marker of a guerrilla space,
besides topography per se, is the impermanence of settlement due to its loca-
tion in an active war topography.
(xxv)
As far as the descriptions of the impermanent locations operate in the text, such
forms of paradoxical adnomination as dexohin dex recur as a recurring stylistic
feature gesturing towards the fact that descriptive language proceeds through par-
adoxes to represent this place that is simultaneously a non-place. How does one
narrate the lives of people who survive despite being pisto (squeezed), who per-
severe despite being tired? Mahanta writes: “The roots of the privations in the
background can also be considered the source of agony driving the characteriza-
tion” (1).
The preface turns to a telescoped historical explanation of the processes that led
to the current state. The story begins with a romanticized “early history” of human
settlements in this region, something that has been memorialized via “folktales.”
While there were friendships and enmities, the “voiceover” continues, there
existed a general state of well-being for these populations that had an intimate rela-
tionship with the forest. Historical time begins to accelerate for this story when the
land is dismembered between two modern nation-states. “Suddenly,” the “voice-
over” continues:
on the birthdays of two behemoths [daityo], the sharp sword of a represen-

tative of the civilized world named Radcliffe dismembered [dwi-khondito]
this land into two as if he were cutting a birthday cake. On one side India,
on the other, Burma. . . . You are Indian citizens, you are Burmese: the
sahib went away after explaining this simple fact to the people.
It is rumored that Radcliffe sahib nonchalantly puffed away at his pipe
while he was plotting his curved lines.
(2)
While the contingencies of pre-colonial history and Radcliffe’s “fateful lines”

is undoubtedly more complex than what is presented to us by the severely tele-
scoped “suddenly,” this turn towards satirical characterization is an important nar-
rative move.26 By simultaneously characterizing and demonizing (daityo, “demon/
behemoth”) the two post-colonies – a gesture that reverses the frequent demoniza-
tion of “wild” populations residing in borderlands – and satirically portraying Rad-
cliffe as the nonchalant sahib who presided over the births of the two daityos, the
narrator institutes contiguities between the governmental strategies of the colonial/
post-colonial dispensations regarding these frontier zones. The no-man’s zone par-
adoxically emerges as a third “country,” albeit a countryless country, a prosthetic
space, one that is both excessive (an inhabited space between and beyond coun-
tries) and a lack (not having a political status), lying in-between these two
daityos. A hitherto “free” people now became “prisoners” of a politically created
impasse called “no-man’s land.” Furthermore, employing the technique of the
“jump cut” that I alluded to, the scale of daityo in this passage stands in stark con-
trast to the “miniscule narratives” that AJ desires to narrate.
The shift in scale marks a contingent point of beginning for the events to
unfold. The scene of the sun setting on the British Empire transitions abruptly
into a frightening scenario in which the sounds of shots from “unknown guns”
resonate around the Patkai hills. The two daiytos encircle this zone, leading to
a counter response led initially by the Angami leader Phizo, who formulates
the demand for an independent Naga nation. “Time rolls on,” the hills start “trem-
bling” and the space of the forest becomes “impatient.” The revolutionary aspi-
rations of the Naga people gain ground leading to intense military action on
both sides of the border. Thus, arose a situation where
Even today, the people of that countryless country wake up to the noise of
bullets, go to sleep at night in between the cautious war-games of fervent rev-
olutionaries . . . this exceptional [byotokromi] life had become someth-
ing everyday [gotanugotik] for them . . . In the wake of those devastating
storms that shattered all the dreams of youth and life, these children of the
soil would ask themselves the same anguished question repeatedly: why are
we a dwi-khondito people?
(Mahanta 6)
The experience described here is that of the passage of stunted temporality in a

dexohin dex. In a space where the exceptional event(s) bleeds into the everyday,
the passage of time is experienced as a form of cyclical repetition (“wake up . . .
go to sleep”).
Two paragraphs later, the preface “jump cuts” to Atanu – a person journeying
to this “ancient world.” On the surface, the initial presentation of Atanu seems
congruous with the established narrative framework of the “modern” subject
escaping to an asynchronous “ancient” world. Atanu, we are told, has reached
the end of his tether. Long unemployed, he feels like a burden to his family.
His willingness to go with Aniyam, a denizen of the no-man’s land and his
guide in the journey across the hills, represents a “last gamble” for him (7).
The purpose for Atanu’s journey is not revealed immediately; instead, two
figures that represent forms of hill–valley encounters make their appearance.
First, Atanu climbs up and down along the remote, laborious pathways in the
numerous hills that lie between “modern” spaces and Honyat Basti. Second,
from the perspective of the denizens of the “modern,” Atanu gets lost in the
heart of the “olive-hued forest.” The hill and the forest are spatial markers that sep-
arate the “modern” valley from the “primitive” hills. Very soon, these spatial
markers assume a different hue.
As Atanu struggles to climb one hill after another, Aniyam, who seems to be
absolutely at home, turns around and says: “From now on, you shall only climb
up and down these hills. Ascend and descend, climb up as much as you climb
down” (41, Kalita’s translation). Here we learn that Atanu plans to open a
school in Honyat Basti. The school is Aniyam’s long-cherished desire, and
Atanu agrees to help him set it up. The process of unlearning is also initiated
here: Atanu comes as an educator; however, by the end, he begins to unlearn
the naturalized dichotomies between the “modern” and the “ancient.” Kalita cor-
rectly suggests that this metaphor of climbing up and down sums up the predica-
ments of people whose “lives stretched long and endlessly like a journey that
would not end” (18). But, pushing her point further, I argue that this sequence
also shows how the “hilly,” forested landscape appears radically alien to the
valley denizen who struggles physically as he climbs one elevation after another.
Furthermore, such occasions also stage dialogic interactions between the perspec-
tives of valley people who climb “up” and hill people who go “down.” After Atanu
asks for yet another break and they rest on a hilltop, Aniyam asks him, “Teacher,
why did you leave such a beautiful country and come to this wild region of ours?”
(45). Taken aback by this question:
Atanu vacillated, the weight of certificates – the symbols of modern culture

and civilization – on his back. Aniyam considered Atanu’s place beautiful . . .
From the hills on the border he [Aniyam] had spotted huge buildings, the
factories in the tea-gardens, vehicles, the rapidly moving trains . . . he felt
scared of coming down into the plains. How could Atanu tell Aniyam
about the darkness under the clay lamps, the desperate search for a founda-
tion by a highly-educated, degree-laden youth?
(46)
A difference between the modes of enunciation in novels like BY and AJ is imme-

diately apparent from this passage. In BY, the hills and their denizens are placed in
a time-space of precapital, and the monologic discourse of the narrator is not
interrupted by a viewpoint from the other. AJ marks an ethical advance from
BY because of its dialogic structure. Consider, for instance, how the denizen of
the “hills” figures here – as Aniyam comes “down” from the hills, he is intimi-
dated by the spaces of the “modern.” This encounter with the appurtenances of
modernity reinforces the “wild” nature of his habitation for the relatively insu-
lated Aniyam. However, Aniyam’s sense of wonder at these technologized
forms impels Atanu to reflect on oppressive symbols of the modern world. The
encounter between the two characters looking “up” and “down” initiates specters
of comparison that gradually unsettle their respective viewpoints about the “prim-
itive” and the “modern.”
In the chapters prior to this conversation between Atanu and Aniyam, Mahanta
introduces us to the other major characters and describes both the structures of the
ordinary and the framework of split sovereignty in the no-man’s zone. The four
major characters are Laipa, a village youth; Umoli Apa, an aged retired Naga
fighter and a sort of guardian for Honyat Basti; Amon, Laipa’s fiancée; and
Tempu, Laipa’s cognitively disabled younger brother. Manjeet Baruah correctly
suggests that three spatial nodes are established in these chapters as central to
the life of the village: the huts, the school and the morung ghar (the meeting
place in the village where public deliberations are held) (“Introduction,” xxx).
The huts and the morung ghar especially are important visible emblems in the
village, both during the brief moments of peace and as symbols of devastation
during war (Aniyam, for instance, despairingly sees the burning cinders of the
huts and the morung ghar when he enters the devastated village). However,
Baruah misses out on another node that is crucial to the action in the novel: the
underground shelter (UG) in the recesses of the forest that the people escape
to while there is shelling. This space plays an important role in the forest
scenes later.
The action proper in the diegetic space begins when Laipa runs to save his life
when the village is shelled by the Burmese army (Tatmadaw). Laipa had gone
fishing when the village comes under attack, and the first chapter narrates how
he preserves himself while worrying about the loved ones he left behind. This
experience of attack is not new for Laipa and the denizens of Honyat Basti. Fol-
lowing Elizabeth Povinelli’s definition of the ordinary as the “local spacing of
eventfulness” (133), I suggest that the emergency is woven into the fabric of the
everyday for the denizens of Honyat Basti. Thus, even during situations of play,
the children of Honyat Basti “keep their ears pricked like rabbits” (23). Moreover,
the forest, a topos viewed as hostile and inhuman in BY, becomes the place of
refuge from the shelling. The narrator says:
His [Laipa’s] aim now was to camouflage himself among the shrubs and dis-
appear into the thick forest. . . . Once he would be able to do that, he would
be safe. He believed that the forest had provided them such refuge and invis-
ibility since antiquity. It would do the same today as well.
(12)
In this frontier economy, the hills and the forests become spaces of camouflage
and refuge, further reversing the pahar–bhaiyam dichotomy when viewed from
the vantage point of the other.
The first two chapters also provide us with a glimpse of ambiguous sovereignty
in these zones. Both Mbembe and Scott’s formulations critique this isomorphism
between sovereignty, state and territory. The isomorphic view that Mbembe cri-
tiques does not fit the framework of split sovereignty in the no-man’s zones.
In such spaces, the organization, navigation and distribution of space and resources
cannot simply be viewed “as the preserve of . . . executive power alone, but rather
one diffused among a multiplicity of – often non-state – actors” (Weizman 7). Such
diffused sovereignty is evident in the contingencies described in AJ, which are
subject to the demands of numerous militant groups. Furthermore, villages
located in the no-man’s zones are already buffeted by the military power of the
two nation-states. Thus, their everyday is defined by the normalization of a form
of “state of siege” (Mbembe, “Necropolitics” 30).
However, a different economy also opens in this besieged space due to the
existence of numerous independentist organizations that have their bases here.
The narrator refers to the practice of sakhan through which the villagers carry
goods and supplies across long distances in baskets made of wicker and
bamboo.27 The villagers are compelled to take sakhan to the militant camps.
Kalita says: “their lives were . . . seamlessly intertwined with the ways of the
rebels in a mutually sustaining manner. While the villagers supplied them food,
sometimes clothes, they . . . were assured protection and other kinds of assistance”
(“Readings” 18). However, this economy and the assurance of protection were
accompanied by threats, coercion and the reality of punishment by separatist
groups. The ranapeyu (liasioning officer) of Honyat Basti is punished when he
tries to cheat the militants.28Sakhan, thus, was both a system of mutual assistance
and a form of coercive taxation. Furthermore, if a village failed to warn the mil-
itants of the arrival of the Burmese or Indian armies, they were fined.
While the Tatmadaw, especially, is represented as an agent of terror and destruc-
tion, complex systems of communication with it also exist, as is evident in the epi-
sodes where secret negotiations for Laipa’s release are conducted between the
army, the militant groups and the villagers. Laipa is eventually released, but
only after brutal torture that impairs him. Otherwise, the military regimes regulate
the population in these zones through war. What Mbembe says about necropoliti-
cal formations in Africa is comparable:
the intent [of power] is no longer to discipline as such. If it still maintains its
tight grid of bodies (or their agglomeration within camps or so-called secur-
ity zones), this is not so much to inscribe them in disciplinary apparatuses as
to better inscribe them, when the time comes, within the order of that
maximal economy that has become the “massacre”
(“On Politics” 324)
Indeed, AJ shows that the exercise of sovereignties in this no-man’s zone does not
have the intent of disciplinarization; instead, in this state of siege that has become
normalized, ordinary life in the village lurches from one massacre into another as
the Burmese and Indian armies engage in orgies of destruction almost on a repet-
itive basis.
The strength of AJ does not lie in the representation of maximal economies like
the massacre, but in the portrayal of the small events of life in the spacing
between one massacre and the other. AJ’s primary focus is on the “ordinary,
chronic and cruddy” dimensions of life and survival rather than the “catastrophic,
crisis-ridden and sublime” (Povinelli 3). In his preface, Mahanta says that the
“exceptional” has become “ordinary” in this zone. However, while the expecta-
tion of catastrophe is always on the horizon, glimpses of the uneventful ordinary
emerges and endures in this in-between state. The exploration of such minutiae of
survival remains the most evocative aspect of AJ.
The figure that captures this temporality of continuance through endurance is
the durgo (fortress), a direct allusion to the normalization of the state of siege.
This figure emerges at the end of the novel when Atanu is about to go through
his first experience of an attack by the Tatmadaw. As the village prepares for
this new attack, one of the militants advises Atanu to keep on traveling okai-
pokai (round and round) the parameters of the no-man’s zone. He is also
advised not to venture into Burmese or Indian territory – stepping into these
zones could mean instant death. This observation is also repeated by Umoli
Apa prior to the army’s shelling of Honyat Basti. Atanu ruminates here that he
has entered a durgo: “Death is certain if one moves outside, death is certain if
one stays inside” (Mahanta 168). The durgo is not a space of refuge, but a met-
aphor for an entrapped mode of being in a state of siege. During Atanu’s frenetic
escape at the end, he learns that his chances of survival are maximized if he heeds
this advice. At this point, he remembers Umoli Apa’s warning again: “Apa said
that to survive one has to keep moving round and round in the no-man’s zones”
(194). The denizens of this no-man’s land, later inclusive of Atanu, realize that
they are entrapped in a durgo: the chances of survival, especially during times
of crisis, depends on how well they knew the dimensions and limits of their cage.
Similarly, survival against attacks by the Burmese army in the durgo entailed
the development of flexible modes of communication and mobility. The novel
recounts how young men from the villages perch themselves on trees to look
out for any sign of military movement. The attacks by the army hardly ever
take them by surprise as news travels across villages by mouth. Furthermore,
the borderland subjects are also accustomed to what Martin Daughtry calls the
“belliphonic”: the “spectrum of sounds produced by armed combat.” Belliphonic
sound, Daughtry emphasizes, operates in ambiguous ways – it “can be received
as simultaneously a rich source of tactical information and a profound source of
trauma” (5). The traumatic aspect is noticeable in the chapter where Laipa flees
the terrifying sound of shelling, and where the children keep their ears pricked up
like rabbits. On the tactical side, people are also able to gauge the position of the
army by listening carefully to the sound of shelling. The timbre of the shelling
allows them to guess which village is under attack and how far the army is
from their current location. If the army is audible they stay put. However, it is
time to move whenever the Tatmadaw become inaudible and “Burmesebur jon-
golot herai goise” (gets lost in the jungle).
The most important locus of survival for them at that point is the UG. When-
ever an attack by the army is imminent, the people in Honyat Basti escape to an
underground shelter, located two hours away by foot and nestled in a valley
between two hills. The Indian border is about two hours away. Thick vegetation
grows on the path to the UG so that it stays hidden. The narrator says:
The word UG was picked up by these people in the basti from the militants.
Whenever there is the possibility of attack from either the Indian or the
Burmese army they seek refuge in the UG camp. They also build a couple
of huts there for use in an emergency.
(26, Kalita’s translation)
The UG, thus, becomes both a locale for camouflage and waiting as well as a
space of social exchange. The second chapter of AJ describes the routine of
the people in the UG in detail. The children play their usual games but with a
heightened sensory awareness of the belliphonic. Usually, people stay there for
a few days, expecting the Indians or the Burmese to move away quickly after
their orgy of destruction. They have enough supplies to tide them through the
latest crisis. However, trouble begins when the struggle gets drawn out. The pri-
vations of the people in the UG increase as supplies run low and they are sub-
jected to a period of seemingly interminable waiting.
However, the consciousness of entrapment and learning to wait for and endure
danger does not diminish the fact that AJ is primarily a representation of damaged
life and states of near to utter exhaustion in a necropolitical zone. If the national
armies periodically exercise the right to kill, the durational experience of being
entrapped in a durgo is an illustration of what Jasbir Puar has recently termed the
complementary logic of the right to maim – “creating injury and maintaining . . .
populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive” (The Right, x). This por-
trayal of debilitation whilst remaining alive manifests across a broad continuum
of effects – from the premature aging of the inhabitants of Honyat Basti to the
maiming and debilitation of Laipa’s body by torture.29 Furthermore, in its repre-
sentation of the cruddy nature of the ordinary in Honyat Basti, the novel haunt-
ingly “conjures another form of violence: the violence of enervation, the
weakening of the will rather than the killing of life” (Povinelli 132). The nar-
rator captures this form of violence when he laconically states: “Besides pain
and uncertainty, all the other necessary conditions for life are absent here”
(Mahanta 161).
This violence of enervation is captured especially in the way that people expe-
rience the passage of time in the no-man’s zone. Speaking about the experience of
time in no-man’s zones, Yael Navaro-Yashin writes: “time is caught, like the flip-
second of the camera shot, in-between. Somewhere in the middle, life was frozen,
trapped, held on hold. . . . Already inhabiting an afterlife . . . death arrives here only
as a second call” (117). This idea of inhabiting an afterlife captures the temporal
experience of the people of Honyat Basti. Umoli Apa’s first statement to Atanu is
“Have you come here to be dismembered too?” Atanu is initially flummoxed and
shocked when Umoli Apa says this, as he thinks it refers to his own bodily dis-
memberment. One common primitivist stereotype of the Nagas, consolidated by
colonial discourse and persisting beyond it, is that they were “naked” headhunt-
ers.30 A bhaiyam subject like Atanu initially shuttles between the two ends of
the discourse of primitivization: he is often terrified by fantasies about the practice
of headhunting at the beginning of his journey while he also considers the Nagas
as “simple” noble savages. When he hears Umoli Apa talking about being “dutu-
kura” (in two pieces), the first thought he has is about his own bodily dismember-
ment. However, in a reversal of his horrifying fantasies about the other, Aniyam
explains that Umoli Apa was not referring to Atanu’s dismemberment –
instead, his statement referred to the “dutukura hoi thaka manuh” (dismembered
people) of Honyat Basti, whose habitations remain entrapped between India,
Myanmar and the other sovereign entities (72). This phrase – dutukura hoi
thaka manuh – and the reversal of the figure of dismemberment captures this
experience of inhabiting a permanent state of being in an afterlife and being
entrapped in a durgo.
Furthermore, for the people of Honyat Basti, time is measured by the gap
between one attack and the next – in fact, narrating stories about earlier attacks
and their relative intensities becomes one of the primary features of everyday exis-
tence. After an attack, everything “begins again from zero” with the consciousness
that anything they build is liable to be smashed into smithereens any time. “Living
in ruins,” as Navaro-Yashin says, “is the condition that has been normalized” (115).
Each attack carries within it the “seed” of the next. During the lull between attacks,
the feeling of freedom from the durgo is “temporary” (86, 181). However, in such
gaps, people began to dream of something different – like Aniyam’s hope of build-
ing a school. However, the imminent attack by the Burmese army that closes the
novel destroys these dreams; instead, the only festival that would now be cele-
brated is that of “destruction.” Both “dreams” and “resolutions” are “extremely cir-
cumscribed” in the no-man’s zone. The past and the future collapsed into each
other – it was as if people live in a moment of the continuing present. As the nar-
rator says: “They left the past behind in an orgy of destruction and were anticipat-
ing the future in in the midst of certain destruction” (169).
If the novel primarily mirrors Atanu’s experience, it also illustrates how his
experience of temporality gradually comes to merge with this notion of the after-
life. This is evident from the open-ended closure of the novel. After debating
relentlessly throughout the text whether he wants to stay in the no-man’s zone,
Atanu finally takes the decision to stay in Honyat Basti after the Tatmadaw attack
the village and the villagers flee to the UG. However, the impaired Laipa’s situa-
tion takes a turn for the worse. Atanu, Umoli Apa, Aniyam, Amon and a few
others decide to risk carrying Laipa to a hospital that lies on the Indian side,
braving the shelling. During their laborious climb, the contingent comes under
attack from Indian forces. Umoli Apa and Laipa presumably die, while Atanu,
Aniyam and Amon flee for their lives. They keep running okai-pokai in the
durgo and finally take refuge in a cave. AJ closes with them waiting in the cave
as the attack continues. The last lines show Atanu ruminating on the effects of
being trapped in a space of afterlife:
Atanu reflected on how people could survive like this. For whose benefit do
people exist in this state of dwi-khondito? Country? Society? Civilization?
Culture? . . . Breaking the silence of the cave, an utterance inadvertently
escaped Atanu’s lips: “Oh! This life!”
(200)
Atanu, the “outsider,” too is sucked into this flow of the eternal present, caught in
transit in a limbo-like space. Thus, one primary feature of Atanu’s bildung in AJ
is enduring and merging himself experientially in this state of afterlife – an in-
between space where life is kept on hold.
Mention of dwi-khondito brings me to the other primary figure besides durgo.
References to a dismembered condition both open and close AJ. In between these
points, references to dwi-khondito proliferate and extend in two directions: one
very reductive in its representation of animality and disability, the other a narra-
tive prosthesis for self-making. In the animacy hierarchy established in AJ, ani-
mality and disability here become reductive symbolic figures for the situation
of existing in a state of death-in-life in the no-man’s zone. Animality lies at
the lowest rung and is preceded by disability as the text “conceptually arranges
human life, disabled life, animal life . . . in orders of value and priority”
(Chen 13). Conversely, dwi-khondito becomes a narrative prosthesis for tracking
the mutations in Atanu’s self-formation as he undergoes a process of unlearning.
At the level of self-making, Atanu seems to give up a desire for an illusory
wholeness and instead learns to accept the risks of dismembered condition that
exist in the afterlife.
The animal associations with dwi-khondito appear quite early. In the second
chapter, Senbang, one of the small children in Honyat Basti, traps a baby squirrel
and ties it with a rope at the UG. He begins to drag it around and once even pulls it
through the fire. The narrator says: “Senbang wouldn’t let him live and wouldn’t
let him die. Just like the lives of the dismembered people in the no-man’s zone.
Neither death nor life; neither citizenship nor freedom” (35). This series of nega-
tives (neither this, nor that) becomes a recurring expression for capturing the
in-between, entrapped existence of the people of Honyat. The animal series
reaches it culmination just before Tempu’s death. As Tempu’s fever rages,
Umoli Apa decides that a more drastic treatment is necessary. He takes a puppy
that often follows Senbang in the village and, to Atanu’s horror, decapitates it in
one stroke. The limbs are torn, blood is collected, and the dismembered body of
the dead animal is thrown to one corner.31 Tempu is asked to drink the dog’s
blood. However, this does not help Tempu and he dies that night. Following
Tempu’s death, the narrator says:
Tempu is dead. An extremely ordinary death! No one in the larger world will
learn about his death. Probably only those who knew or heard about Tempu
would know the amount of pain and the miserable reality embedded in the
background of his death.
. . . Atanu climbed up the elevated hut at the back. . . . Once Atanu entered
the hut, his eyes fell on the dismembered body of Senbang’s beloved puppy
lying on the dry bamboo. The head was towards India, the rest towards
Myanmar.
(167)
Two types of deaths are compared in this passage. First, we have the extremely
“ordinary” death of Tempu. His death is mourned by those closest to him. In the
subsequent chapters, we learn that his death is forgotten almost immediately by
the Honyat Basti denizens as they flee to save their lives. His death becomes a
symbol of invisibility to the outside world and can be paralleled to the fate of
the inhabitants of the no-man’s zone. Their lack of political status also means
that their lives hold little to no value to the outside world. Judith Butler’s point
about “grievable life” resonates with the scene of Tempu’s death: “if a life is
not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth
a note” (Precarious, 34). History does not need its footnotes like Tempu or
Honyat Basti – “Footnotes are inessential at best; at worst they trip up the
greater narrative” (Sacco 9).
However, if Tempu’s life corresponds fleetingly with the criterion of grievabil-
ity, what of the puppy? Like Saadat Hasan Manto’s famous “Dog of Tetwal,” the
carcass of the puppy lies unclaimed and unmourned in the no-man’s zone.
Further, in a heavily symbolic overdetermination, the two inert, dismembered
parts of the animal’s body point mutely, yet accusingly, towards the direction
of the two daityos that slowly squeeze life out of villages like Honyat Basti.
Anat Pick argues that “animals constitute an exemplary ‘state of exception’ of
species sovereignty.” In associating the motif of dismemberment with an actual
instance of animal dismemberment, AJ exposes the shared vulnerability of the
animal on which “power operates with the fewest of obstacles” and the human
animal abandoned and leading damaged lives in a space of exception (Pick
15). But recognition of shared vulnerability does not diminish the fact that the
animal is used here as an overdetermined symbol representing damaged forms
of human life. There is no encounter with animal alterity here: the dog’s dismem-
bered carcass does not even possess the power to haunt as Atanu quickly moves
on and stops thinking about it. The dog, to invert Donna Haraway’s statement, is
there only to think with, but not to live with (Companion Species, 5).
This overdetermined image of animal dismemberment is foreshadowed earlier
and is associated with the cognitively disabled Tempu. News of Laipa’s capture
by the Tatmadaw had just reached Honyat Basti. Tempu then begins gesticulating
in agitation, making inarticulate, animal-like sounds. Umoli Apa, understanding
what he wants, asks him whether he wants a gun to shoot his enemies. Atanu
is surprised by this because he thinks Tempu is incapable of understanding that
he lives in a no-man’s zone surrounded by two countries. When Umoli Apa
asks him who he wants to shoot with his “gun,” Tempu, without any hesitation,
“made an estimate of distance and pointed one hand towards Burma and the
other towards India” (107). While Atanu realizes that the benga has a conscious-
ness of his situation, this image of Tempu standing angrily with his hands pointing
towards the two countries anticipates the later episode of the dog lying unclaimed
in the in-between space.
Tempu-as-symbol, pointing towards both countries while being rooted in the
no-man’s zone, becomes a metaphor for the prosthetic social reality that is
Honyat Basti. Once again, disability here becomes a metaphorical portal for
representing prosthetic reality. At the level of the collective imaginary, this met-
aphor betrays “nostalgia for unity and wholeness of the body, it’s completion”
(Grosz 73). The “phantom limb” that is the dexohin dex is shown as desiring
an ascension into a whole national “body.” In this respect, AJ remains entrapped
within the political logic of the national order of things and cannot envisage sur-
vival in the no-man’s zones as anything other than the jagged, fragmented tem-
poralities of endurance in a space of disqualified life. Its pathos emerges from
an appeal to make this lack visible, as if this politics of visibility will return
the prosthetic supplement to a transcendence of its status in the future. But the
as if is crucial here; the “curative” teleology associated with the narrative prosthe-
sis hasn’t occurred yet. Hence, the subjects of the zone wait for an unanticipable
future entrapped in the durgo.
But if we emphasize the symbolic dimension exclusively, there is a missed
opportunity to contend with Tempu’s lived experience in this same scene. As a
thought experiment, if we shift the locus of representation to Tempu, we can de-
symbolize this act of pointing and consider the agency of what Rachel Kolb
calls the “signing body.” I suggest that the cognitively disabled Tempu’s gesture
of pointing in both directions offers resources to think about his embodiment
and ways of relating to the world in a material way instead of the symbolic, over-
determined interpretation that this scene is geared towards. People who live in
close proximity with him, like Umoli Apa, understand the significations of his
signing body. This understanding that exists among the people of Honyat Basti,
and Amon’s acts of caring for Tempu like a “mother” during Laipa’s absences, ges-
tures towards localized formations and systems of care-work for disabled subjects.
But while the “outsider” Atanu too recognizes that Tempu understands, in an abilist
manner he reacts to this as something “surprising.” The encounters with disability
and animality then represent the limits of the reformation of Atanu’s ethical vision.
While the representation of concrete animal and disabled figures are reductive
in AJ, something different occurs with the trope of dismemberment at the level of
Atanu’s bildung. While AJ cannot envisage a “cure” for the populations residing
in a non-national space, Atanu learns to live with a prosthetic reality. Once again
dwi-khondito plays a crucial role. Recall the first lines of AJ: “People are some-
times whole, sometimes dwi-khondito.” While these lines describe the denizens
of the no-man’s zone, they are also applicable to the protagonist of AJ. Atanu
desires wholeness but feels circumscribed by his life in the valley. The stench
of hopelessness afflicts him and impels him to escape to the hills to fill the
void in his life. Initially, he perceives his journey to the hills in the quasi-mystical
vocabulary of a “calling”: “Atanu had heard that the forested, mighty hills and
mountains sometimes extended their hands to human beings. When the time
came . . . human beings would respond to this call” (49). His desire to escape
to the “remote” hills carries echoes of a romanticized idealization of the bhaiya-
mor subject escaping to “wild” pahariya nature. However, the conversation with
Aniyam represents the first instance for his “provisional and . . . deferred arrival
into the performative of the other, in order not to transcode but to draw a
response” (Spivak, Death, 13). Subsequent encounters with the denizens of the
no-man’s zone takes him deeper into the performative universes of the other.
Things begin to shift gears after a conversation between Atanu and Umoli Apa
when Laipa is a prisoner in the Burmese army camp. Atanu is put off quite several
times by Umoli Apa’s gruff mannerisms. After Atanu opens up about his past
somewhat during this conversation, Umoli Apa tells him that he is Laipa’s father
(Atanu learns after Umoli Apa’s death that the latter was lying to test Atanu’s cred-
ibility). After revealing his great “secret,” Umoli Apa clams up and refuses to say
anything more. Up to that point, Atanu was caught between the desire to escape
back to his natal place and the commitment that he had made to Aniyam.
However, reference to dwi-khondito recurs in a different guise in this section:
Atanu felt as if two friendless, limbless lives . . . very slowly began getting
dwi-khondito in the silence that lay between them. There was no indication
of any geographic border, no line of control . . . or the tall observation posts
meant to hunt down people who crossed the border.
(Mahanta 138)
In this complex passage, the space between two “friendless, limbless” lives is
momentarily bridged. The important point is that the two bodies are presented
as incomplete (“limbless”) at the origin. The other important figure is the
spatial one of the border, which is breached by the coming into proximity of
the “friendless, limbless lives.” The conversation creates a fleeting mode of
being-together, before the subsequent silence effects a further dismemberment
of already incomplete bodies. However, for Atanu, this moment of separation is
the first time that he begins to witness the “human” emerge from with Umoli
Apa’s opaque exterior. From that point onwards, Umoli Apa’s subjective topogra-
phy appears in a new light – a process that culminates in some of the last lines of
the text: “What was the meaning of that laughter that made Atanu tremble? A
human being squirming and entrapped within that hard exterior!” (200). The
process of recognition initiated by this conversation enables him to contend with a
different corporeal topography split between a “surface” and “depth”: a “human”
entrapped within an opaque exterior of forbidding alterity. The spatial topography
of the no-man’s zone seems to find its close match in the corporeal topography of
this person, who had earlier resembled a form of opaque, “barbaric” alterity.
This recognition of the stakes of being-entrapped brings the metaphor of dis-
memberment with respect to Atanu’s self-formation full circle. As Atanu hides
in the cave, the thought of escape comes once more to his mind:
Should he go away? . . . He remembered his mother, his beloved sister. . . .

Each memory increased the agony in his heart. But wasn’t the destruction
of Aniyam’s dream much more painful than such agonies? Atanu felt as if
he was slowly becoming irresolute. Slowly and slowly he was getting dis-
membered. He again remembered Umoli Apa’s statement: “Have you
come here to be cut into two pieces?”
(199)
These thoughts occur just prior to the moment when Atanu promises Amon
and Aniyam that he will stay in Honyat Basti and try to rebuild life once again
from zero. Notice how the metaphor of dismemberment changes valence. No
longer does it refer only to impaired existence. No longer does Atanu view the
hills as a locale of prosthetic supplementation to recover some originary unity.
Instead, Atanu’s gradual process of unlearning through an identification with
the process of “slowly . . . getting dismembered,” commences through a
gradual entrance into the performative space of the other and ends with his
sense of self suspended in limbo. Such “suspended endings,” as Elleke
Boehmer writes in the context of South African writing in the immediate post-
Apartheid era, reveal that the idea of “normalcy” in such emergency zones
remains tenuous and fragile (48). The ordinary remains predicated on the local
spacing of catastrophic eventfulness.
Similarly, Atanu’s attempt at finding his “whole” self is revealed to be an illu-
sion; instead, he comes face to face with his subjective dissolution (and possibly
even to live with this sense of subjective dismemberment). Although nonhuman
and disqualified alterity remains outside his range of vision, Atanu lets himself be
“destabilized by the radical alterity of the [borderland] other, in seeing his or her
difference not as a threat but as a resource to question . . . [his] . . . own position in
the world” (Saldanha 118). That paradoxical movement represents the educator’s
true ethical bildung in AJ.32
Notes
1 The Nagas have been demanding a sovereign country since the formation of the Naga
Club in 1929. Changed later to the Naga National Council (NNC) in 1946, and under
the leadership of Phizo, it was the apex Naga body fighting for Naga independence.
Beginning in 1947, the NNC and the newly formed Indian government engaged in a
series of talks concerning the future of the Nagas within India. The failure of the talks
led to a brutal military occupation and armed skirmishes between the NNC and the
Indian Army that lasted throughout the 1950s. The granting of statehood within the
Indian Union in 1963 did not appease many Naga nationalists, who dismissed it as
a sellout. In 1980, an alternative movement titled the Naga Socialist Council of Naga-
land (NSCN) was formed. The NSCN changed the name of Nagaland to “Nagalim” to
encompass the Naga inhabited areas in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur
and Burma. NSCN further split into NSCN-IM (Isak-Muivah, the most powerful of the
Naga groups) and NSCN-K (Khaplang), which later split into NSCN-Kehoi-Khole.
The NNC remains active though weak. See Longkumer, Reform, and Franke for dis-
cussions of the Naga independence struggle.
2 See Eaton; Longkumer, Reform; and Thomas for discussions of Christianity in a Naga
context. See Pachuau for a reading of contiguous colonial/post-colonial discourses
with respect to Mizoram.
3 Phanjoubam writes:
“the Inner Line,” . . . came into existence by the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation
of 1873. . . . The Inner Line was designed to separate the British revenue districts in
the plains from the non-revenue “wild” hill territories surrounding the Assam plains.
It was in many ways the British administration’s answer to tackling the non-state
spaces they encountered in the North East region after they took over Assam in 1826.
(“Neville Maxwell”)
4 The word “tribal” is not used pejoratively in the Northeast Indian context.
5 Both Misra (“Introduction”) and Kar (“The Tongue”) argue that a Eurocentric idea of
modernity prevalent after colonialism interfered with the “robustly polyglot character”
of the pre-colonial system of administration in Assam. The standardization of the
Assamese language, a product of the collaboration between Christian missionaries
and the local colonized elite, led to the marginalization of other spoken forms. The
standardized Assamese was a conglomeration of a variety of speech practices.
6 See Sarma (38–41) for a discussion of such works. Also see Prarthana Saikia for a
nuanced, recent consideration of ethnographic fiction. Saikia is herself a fiction writer.
7 All translations from the Assamese are mine unless otherwise indicated.
8 See Khataniyar.
9 For recent considerations of cultural production by ULFA members, primarily memoirs
and poetry, see Barbora (“Uneasy Homecomings”) and Moral (“Living and Partly
Living”; “The Woman Militant”).
10 On December 15, 2003, the Royal Bhutanese Army (RBA) launched a massive mili-
tary operation named Operation All Clear against three closely allied separatist groups:
the ULFA, the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) and the Kamatapur
Liberation Organization (KLO). More than 3,000 inmates of the camps – both combat-
ants and non-combatants – fled and dispersed across eastern and southern Bhutan. The
Indian army was not directly involved in the operation, but it captured militants who
attempted to flee across the border, and in some cases, eliminated militants like
Ashanta Baghphukan and Robin Handique. Prize catches included Bhimkanta Borgo-
hain, one of the founder members of the ULFA, and Mithinga Daimary (alias Megan
Kachari), the publicity secretary of the ULFA. On December 26, 2003, Borgohain,
along with thirty-seven women and twenty-seven children, formally surrendered to
the Indian army in Tezpur, Assam. See Prabhakara, Panging.
11 The Dzongkha term Lhotshampa refers to the Nepali-speaking people who inhabit South-
ern Bhutan. The Lhotshampas are primarily Hindu. Hutt writes that from the point of
view of the official Bhutanese national narrative, all Lhotshampas are descendants of eco-
nomic migrants from neighboring Nepal, who settled in Bhutan in the nineteenth century.
Since the 1980s, there have been increasing tensions between the Lhotshampas and the
Drukpas. Inter-community economic rivalry and the hierarchies between “civilized” and
“savage” peoples are two of the major historical reasons for this conflict. Some Lhot-
sampa dissidents were qualified as Ngolops (anti-national terrorists). The Lhotshampas
resisted many of these legislations leading to massive political demonstrations in South-
ern Bhutan in the 1990s. Since the 1990s there has also been a steady trickle of Lhot-
shampa refugees escaping state reprisals to refugee camps in Nepal.
12 See Smith, Webster, Keane and Katoch for accounts of this region during World War II
and the construction of the Stilwell Road.
13 For Nagas in Burma, see Saul. For accounts of the KIA, see Lintner.
14 The ULFA has split in recent years.
15 Smith and Hughes identify “ambivalence” and the “fragmentation of the subject” to
distinguish the ecogothic from a more holistic Romantic approach to nature (2).
16 See Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure” in Visions.
17 The legitimization of the male guerrillero in in a line of patriarchal filiation runs parallel
with the erasure of the voices and roles of female militants. Similar patterns are repeated
in Assamese militant texts like Sanglot Fenla, where female militants are absent.
18 Bhimkanta Buragohain was one of the founding members of the ULFA. He was affec-
tionately referred to as “Mama” (mother’s brother) by ULFA cadres. He was captured
during Operation All Clear and incarcerated for a while. He died in 2011. BY is ded-
icated to him.
19 Zimmermann writes that the classical polarity in Sanskrit literature is between gramya
(domesticated) versus aranya (wild), which in turn draws from the binary of grama
(village) versus aranya (forest) (101). Gramya animals have sacrificial value, while
animals from the aranya are wild (214).
20 Although the reference to no-man’s zones seems to imply that the forest is almost terra
nullius, the narrator mentions a few times that only forest guards from India and
Bhutan, army personnel, nomadic fishermen, smugglers, poachers and guerrillas
cross through these remote and inhospitable regions (140). However, these fleeting
presences are not explored further.
21 There are numerous moments in the text when the narrator haltingly recognizes that the
“sohoj sorol” people are more “complex.” For example: “Even though they are sohoj
sorol, they are very alert about financial matters” (54).
22 Romanticism influenced the early development of modern Assamese literature in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Samudra Kajal Saikia writes:
a group of young people, including Chandrakumar Agarwala, Lakshminath Bezbar-

uah . . . started a journal called Jonaki and inaugurated a new romantic horizon in
Assamese poetry, putting focus on nature, man and nationalism . . . Alongside, the
shift from . . . medieval classical literature also insisted [sic] the poets to put human-
ism [manobatabaad] in the center. The Ramanyasbaad [Romanticism] was the first
successful movement in Assamese modernity, paving the way for modernism.
(293–94)
23 Nostalgia was coined by a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, in 1688 (Boym 3).
24 Smell, like touch, suggests intimacy with the object of disgust, and is related to the
experience of eating.
25 Konyak is the name of a sub-tribe of the Nagas. The word “Naga” is a conglomerate
and encompasses various sub-tribes.
26 For a discussion of Radcliffe’s lines, see Van Schendel’s The Bengal Borderlands
(Chapter IV). Khongreiwo writes:
All Naga territories in present Northeast India and northwest Burma were desig-
nated as “Un-administered Area” by the Government of India Act 1935; and it
was only in 1967 (with the “Burma-India Boundary Agreement”) that the
international boundary that divides India and Burma was finally drawn in its
entirety, piercing from north to south through the heart of the Naga country. Fol-
lowing the same principle, post-colonial India and Burma transformed those
“frontiers” into “borderlands” (that is, the geographical spaces on both sides of
a border/boundary) by drawing imaginary, but fixed, lines on maps and by install-
ing concrete security posts and boundary stones all along the borders (438).
27 For a description of sakhan, see Bhattacharyya (41–42). Kangliyanar Maat has an

extended description of this practice.
28 Manjeet Baruah discusses a relevant point:
in the character of the ranapeyu or the liasoning officer appointed by the Naga polit-
ical groups from among the villagers, the text tries to show that the Naga political
groups are cautious about any attempt at change in the village by the villagers them-
selves, that is, people emerging with their own politics different from the groups.
(“Introduction,” xxxiii)
29 Prolonged habitation in a deathworld meant that it was difficult to distinguish the age
of people, as Atanu notes (172).
30 See Zou; Kar, “Heads.”
31 Dog meat is part of Naga cuisine, a reason for which the Nagas are often othered and
deemed “barbaric” in mainland Indian culture. For a consideration of the complex roles
that dogs play in the Naga ecumene, see Kikon’s “From the Heart”
32 The new version of AJ published by Pangea House adds three chapters where Atanu,
Aniyam and other survivors return to Honyat and rebuild their lives. However, I think
the open-ended closure of the first edition, where Atanu is trapped in the cave is much
more effective at an ethical level for the reasons delineated above.
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4 Survivance and supplements
Revenants and animality in
“The Last Song” and
“Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali”
Introduction
Theorists of the short story (Gerlach; Winther) identify closure as the primary
formal element that distinguishes short fiction from the novel. In the short
story, John Gerlach says, certain signals assume a greater structural prominence
than in the novel because of its condensed form. Anticipation of the ending “is
used to structure the whole” (Gerlach 3). Many Assamese short stories based
on situations of political terror employ “shocking closures” (Baishya, “Secret
Killings,” “Close Encounters”). Deploying numerous symbolic signals through-
out the diegesis, such stories usually end with a moment of physical incapacita-
tion where it is as if “a series of pictures which did not have shape before, come
together in a single picture; one which both instantly understands and does not
comprehend at all” (Aretxaga 128). Shocking closures reveal the breakdown of
a subject’s trust in the world which s/he inhabits. They are powerful narrative
vehicles for explorations of political terror as the impact of extreme violence
often tears the symbolic fabric of a supposedly intimately known lifeworld and
exposes the subject to the terror of the unimaginable.
Imran Hussain’s “Jighankha” (The Slaughter, 1998) and Arupa Patangia Kalita’s
Arunimar Swades (2001) are good examples of this use of shocking closures.
“Jighankha” is predicated on metaphors of vision. At the closure, the protagonist
Mahichandra’s implicit trust in his world is shattered when he realizes that his
beloved son, Sonti, may be a brutal killer. The true horror emerges when the
gentle and sensitive Mahichandra gazes uncomprehendingly at the ronga ronga
sokuhal (demonic eyes) of his beloved child, an alien otherness lodged in the
person he thinks he knows intimately. Arunimar Swades, based on the period of
the secret killings of Assam, is structured around a series of enclosures that
sustain fragile boundaries between the “inside” and the “outside.” The “inside,”
the Protogonist Arunima’s home, offers a place of refuge, which is sensitively ren-
dered through a phenomenological representation of the protagonist’s sensual and
imaginary frameworks. These enclosures – both the physical and the psychic – are
shockingly destroyed at the closure of this searing story when the mayabi jui
(magical fire) of terror, which mesmerizes and summons Arunima’s militant
brother-in-law to the hills, boomerangs and mercilessly incinerates everything
139 Survivance and supplements 139
the protagonist cherished about her supposedly secure and homely “inside.” At the
end, Arunima is a mute, devastated witness to the destruction of her beloved house
and the death of her family members. These shocking closures entail the “death”
of a form-of-life. It is difficult to imagine the days after such catastrophic devasta-
tion as the stories end at a moment of stasis and incapacitation.
This chapter explores a pair of short stories that deploy a different type of closure.
Drawing from oral and folkloric traditions and practices, such open-ended closures
gesture towards modes of survival after the capture of life by necropower. Both
Temsula Ao’s English short story “The Last Song” and Jehirul Hussain’s Assam-
ese “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali” (“Minor Preludes, Major Preludes,” henceforth
SDBD) close with textual supplements that propel the reader to a “there” that is
beyond any simple opposition of life and death.1 “The Last Song” closes with a
supplementary segment that begins with “P.S.” in which an aged female storyteller
enjoins her youthful audience to listen to the ghostly song of a woman who had
been brutally raped and murdered “thirty years ago” during a raid conducted by
the Indian army on a Naga village. While the major diegetic space is framed as
a written text, the “P.S.” stages a scene of oral storytelling. While this tension
between the written and the oral seems to be the primary opposition in the text,
the circulation of other terms related to the categories of the vocal and the aural
undercut the binary of written (modern)/oral (traditional). SDBD closes with a sol-
itary sentence that is separated from the rest of the diegesis by a spatial marker.
This sentence laconically states that a hitherto motionless snail that had been
extracted from the chest of a corpse, and then thrown away and forgotten by a
group of children, begins moving slowly and imperceptibly. Unlike the puppy
that is a mute symbolization of ungrievable life in AJ, the snail is the trace of sur-
vivance and escape from necropolitical structures.
Two Derridean concepts – survivance and supplement – provide the frame-
work for my discussion of the textual supplements in the two stories. While I dis-
cussed the concept of survivance in Chapter 1, it is important to turn to what
Jacques Derrida writes in “Living On”:
This enduring, lasting, going on stresses or insists on the on of a living

on that bears the entire enigma of a supplementary logic. Survival and reve-
nance, living on and returning from the dead: living on goes beyond
both living and dying, supplementing each with a sudden surge and a certain
surcease.
(39)
These observations echo in Derrida’s explication on survival and living on in The

Last Interview, where he connects these ideas to terms that Walter Benjamin
deploys in his essay on translation:
I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which
is not to be added on to living or dying. It is originary: life is living, life is
survival. . . . To survive in the usual sense of the term means to continue to
live, but also to live after death. . . . Benjamin emphasizes the distinction
between überleben on the one hand, to live after death, as a book can
survive the death of its author, or a child the death of parents, and on the
other hand, fortleben, living on, continuing to live. All the concepts that
have helped me in my work . . . notably those regarding the trace or the spec-
tral, were related to this “surviving” as a structural and rigorously originary
dimension. It is not derived from either from living or dying.
(23–24)
In both passages, Derrida talks about categories that go beyond imaginaries of life
and death. To live on is to continue to live while one is still a living being, but
also to live after death. Derrida’s work on spectrality and survival, thus, have
this doubled sense of “living on” at its core. As he emphasizes, his works on
trace and the spectral is intimately connected to this doubled sense of survival.
Michael Marder glosses: “Spectrality (the return of a ghost who/that is neither
simply alive nor dead) and survival (a simultaneous continuation and suspension
of life) are the names Derrida bestows upon the shifting margins of life and
death” (52). These shifting boundaries between life and death are evident in
the closure of the two stories. The spectral voice in “The Last Song” signals
the return of the revenant, not as a figure demanding justice, but as a form of
ethical receptivity to a gift that potentially sutures the fractured life of a trauma-
tized community. The imperceptible movement of the snail, an animal form that
symbolizes death and stillness, and an unacknowledged dan (gift) from the river
Dhansiri, reveals a trace of survival beyond the limits supposedly set by human
mortality at the edges of a necroworld in SDBD.
Furthermore, the stress on the “on” in “living on” already demonstrates the
“enigma” of a supplementary logic at work. The supplement, as we know from
Of Grammatology, functions doubly as a “surplus” that “cumulates and accumu-
lates presence” and as a replacement that “intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-
place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void” (144–45). As textual supplements,
the “P.S.” in “The Last Song” and the solitary concluding sentence in SDBD func-
tion simultaneously as a surplus beyond the closures effected by the limit event of
death, and as an insinuation “in-the-place-of” a voided presence (the ghostly voice
as a replacement for the lead character’s singing voice in “The Last Song,” the sug-
gestion of an anthropomorphic transference of the “life” of the human corpse to the
seemingly “dead” form of the snail in SDBD). Such supplemental closures offer a
contrast to shocking closures that depict nervous incapacitation and sudden ends in
states of terror. They are narrative signposts of continuity and overlife after the
capture of life by agencies of necropower.
Voices and something more: subverting the rape

script in Temsula Ao’s “The Last Song”
In my reading of Sombori’s narrative earlier (see Chapter 2), I deployed Veena
Das’s observation that “voice emerges at the moment of transgression . . . the
zone between two deaths is identified as the zone from which the unspeakable
truth about the criminal nature of the law can be spoken” (Life and Words, 61).
Eventually, though, the emergence of Sombori’s voice in the space between
two deaths is stymied by Dhrubajyoti Bora’s textual erasure of Sombori’s
agency. “The Last Song,” in contrast, offers us a subversive reading of a rape
script and a different representation of voice that stands in contrast to the “Amrit-
xya Putra” section in KG. I argue that Ao manages to write a subversive rape
script in three ways:
1 Through a staging of the voice’s demand to be heard and remembered

beyond the subject’s brutal sexual assault and subsequent death. We are no
longer the realm of the space between two deaths, but in a space beyond a
subject’s death.
2 The byplay between the categories of “orality,” “vocality” and “aurality.”
These categories, for me, are more important than standard readings of the
story (Pou, Literary Cultures) that focus exclusively on the clash between
orality and writing.
3 Representations of how the legacies of the past are woven with and continue
to resonate in presents scarred by terror and violence. Besides voice, aurality
and orality, weaving emerges as the other major figure of relationality in the
text.
Voice has a slightly different signification in this section. The medievalist Paul
Zumthor defines “orality” as the “functioning of the voice as the bearer of lan-
guage” and “vocality” as the “whole of the activities and values that belong to
the voice as such, independently of language” (quoted in Cavarero For More
Than, 12). “Vocality” enables us to interpret voice as an autographic sign – a
sonorous and acoustic modulation – that translates a lived and pre-verbal and pre-
speech experience of a subject. While voice is often subordinated to the sphere of
speech or of orality, a vocal emission not intended for speech (cries, grunts, yelps)
is not merely “a mere leftover” or remainder, but rather constitutes an “originary
excess” that is also paradoxically figured as a lack.2 Adriana Cavarero extends
Zumthor’s distinction between the two spheres to argue that:
the sphere of the voice is constitutively broader than that of speech: it

exceeds it. To reduce this excess to mere meaninglessness – to whatever
remains when the voice is not intentioned toward a meaning, defined as
the exclusive purview of speech – is one of the chief vices of logocentrism.
This vice transforms the excess of the voice into a lack . . . speech becomes
more than an essential destination for the voice; it becomes a divider that
produces the drastic alternative between an ancillary role for the voice as
vocalizations of mental signifieds and the notion of the voice as an extraver-
bal realm of meaningless emissions that are dangerously bodily, if not seduc-
tive or quasi-animal.
(For More Than, 13)
The supplementary segment in “The Last Song” depicts a scene of oral storytell-
ing, as an old female storyteller – the archetypal “granny” figure in the folkloric
tradition – begins to relate the story of the protagonist Apenyo’s rape and
murder by the Indian army “thirty years” earlier. At first glance, it may seem as
if the addition of the supplement to the digesis introduces a tension between the
written (the segment about Apenyo’s life in the diegesis narrated in the past
tense and the third person) and the oral (the supplementary section that is in the
present tense and stages a scene of oral narration). A closer look at the story
reveals that a complicated interaction ensues between two embodied dimensions
crucial for a staging of the oral: the question of voice and vocalization and the
depiction of the aural. The staging of this embodied scene of oral storytelling is
contrasted with the depiction of Apenyo’s voice in the space of the diegesis,
and with the old storyteller’s urgent exhortation to the younger generation to
listen carefully both to the natural environment and the traces of Apenyo’s
ghostly voice that it carries. Crucially, Apenyo is never directly depicted as a
bearer of everyday speech, the medium for the “vocalizations of mental signifieds.”
Apenyo’s voice is instead depicted either as an “extraverbal realm” of seemingly
meaningless emissions, such as her screams as a child, or as a “seductive” singing
voice later in the story that has the power of holding everyone in thrall.
Along with Easterine Kire and Monalisa Changkija, Ao represents the van-
guard of Naga writing in English. Ao is primarily known for her poetry and
her two collections of short fiction. Besides publishing her memoirs, she is
also a well-known academic and folklorist who has published substantially on
the oral tradition of the Ao Nagas. Both her research on oral traditions and writ-
erly self-presentation as an heir to such traditions has significantly impacted the
reception of her poetic and fictional works. In her preface to These Hills Called
Home titled “Lest we Forget,” she writes:
The inheritors of such a history have a tremendous responsibility to sift

through the collective experience and make sense of the impact left by the
[Naga independence] struggle on their lives. Our racial wisdom has always
extolled the virtue of human beings living at peace with themselves and in
harmony with nature and with our neighbors. It is only when Nagas re-
embrace and re-write this vision into the fabric of their lives in spite of
the compulsions of a fast changing world, can we say that the memories
of the turbulent years have served us well.
(These Hills, x–xi)
Overcoming alienation by sifting the “collective experience” is the key element

that Ao highlights. This process of sifting has two dimensions. First, the role
of the storyteller and the art of storytelling are cast as belonging to a mnemonic
project that preserves the links with a past sundered by terror and rapid change.
Furthermore, this project also has an ecocritical dimension (“living at peace with
themselves and in harmony with nature”) that is concretized in Ao’s fiction, her
endeavors in collecting folktales from the oral tradition and her poetry.
Commenting on Ao’s poem “The Oral Storyteller,” Sayantan Chakrabarty
advances a few claims that resonates with my earlier arguments:
for Ao, storytelling is encumbered with a serious problem. Storytelling is

performative; the place acts as a performative agency and the storyteller ani-
mates the place. Development has destroyed the specificities of the place that
the story tells. If Ao takes up the task of telling stories, then the material
grounding for the stories needs to be restored.
(15)
Chakrabarty’s major concern is with discourses of development and moderniza-

tion. I focus on the impact of political terror. However, our viewpoints converge
in the focus on the “performative” aspects of oral storytelling in Ao’s oeuvre,
both in her fiction and her poems. But, while Chakrabarty focuses on place
and place-making, I focus on the link between vocality and aurality in the perfor-
mance of the oral. Like “development,” political terror too sunders the “material
grounding” for the transmission of stories. The old storyteller’s injunction to
listen to the voices of nature and of the effaced past at the end of “The Last
Song” is an attempt to restore and reconnect with this lost material grounding
through the medium of the body and the senses. Indeed, to go back to Ao’s pref-
atory comments, if the “racial wisdom” of the Nagas emphasizes the “virtue of
living at peace with themselves and in harmony with nature and our own neigh-
bors,” then the mnemonic project of oral storytelling becomes crucial in the
rewriting of this “vision in the fabric of their lives” (italics mine).
I emphasize fabric because, along with vocality and aurality, the figure
of weaving is fundamental for an appraisal of “The Last Song.” If Apenyo inherits
the gift of singing from her deceased father, Zhamben, her mother, Libeni, gifts her
the important skill of weaving. In “The Last Song,” both Libeni and Apenyo are
depicted as expert weavers and the villagers are represented weaving shawls and
lungis (a type of sarong). Weaving also has a specific sociocultural resonance.
As C. Walu Walling writes, among the Ao Nagas, the concept of religion is
denoted by the word yimsu. Yim means “village and its inhabitants” and su
means “shawl.” So yimsu translates into something like “village shawl.” Walling
suggests that this understanding of religion has close affinities with the Latin ety-
mology of religion: religare, or “to bind” (7). The practices of oral storytelling,
Walling emphasizes, is important in the transmission of communal binding.
Sticking with etymology, Gayatri Spivak stresses that the word “text” derives
from the Latin texere, or “to weave.” Her invocation of “text-ility”: “the trouble to
imagine a text – understood as a textile, woven web rather than narrowly as
printed page” (Spivak and Evans, “When Law Is Not Justice”) has significance
for “The Last Song.”3 Indeed, in the story the connection between the main die-
getic space and the supplement should be understood as a woven web. Further-
more, in “The Last Song,” the protective web/shawl of the community is broken
by the sudden irruption of political terror. Significantly, after Libeni is raped
while trying to protect Apenyo, her rapist uses the lungi she was wearing to
wipe himself after the act. This new lungi had been woven by Libeni herself and
is simply thrown away by the soldier as an inert, meaningless thing. Further on,
after the mother and daughter’s corpses are reduced to ashes by the marauding
soldiers, they are recognized by a fragment of Apenyo’s newly woven shawl.
Here the instrumental use of the shawl and its reduction into burnt fragments
symbolizes the destruction of the protective fabric draped over the community.
This traumatic tear in the web of community is sought to be sutured by the act
of oral storytelling during the closure. The byplay between vocal aspects of
oral storytelling and the ethical imperative to listen, therefore, is an attempt to
reinstate the lost text-ility of the village community.
“The Last Song” is a “vococentric” (Chion) text in the sense that Apenyo’s
voice structures the sonic space that contains it. Apenyo is never depicted speak-
ing directly; her unique signature is her “exquisite singing voice.” She was “born
to sing” and when Libeni would take her to “community singing events” on fes-
tivals, her daughter’s singing “mostly consisting of loud shrieks and screams”
accompanied by her twisting body would chime along with the “collective
voices.” While Apenyo’s screams would alternately amuse and irritate the onlook-
ers and singers, these were early signs of her “singing genius” (22).
These quotations from the opening paragraph establish two trajectories for voice
and vocality in the text. The first is how Apenyo’s unique voice functions as a for-
cefield organizing everything around it. The second is the representation of agency.
Scholars who have studied the agency of infants focus on such modes of babbling –
in this case, depicted by Apenyo’s “loud shrieks and screams” – as a way in which
the baby attempts to lure the interlocutor into its web of desires (Dolar 27). This
depiction of vocalic agency is further extended when Apenyo moves on from
the period of sonic prehistory (the unformed babble) and slowly enters the symbolic
order of speech. When she could “talk a little” and accompanied her mother to
church on Sundays, she would try to join in with her “little screams” which
were “not quite audible” when there was group singing. However, when there
was a special number she would try to “sing along,” causing Libeni much embar-
rassment. At home, Apenyo would never keep “quiet” – instead she “hummed or
made up silly songs to sing by herself,” which annoyed her mother (Ao 22).
Up to this point, the focus has largely been on Apenyo. From here, Apenyo’s
story connects with elements that predate her emergence as a conscious subject.
In other words, Apenyo’s emergence as subject is connected to the legacies that
she receives from her parents: the gift of song from her deceased father,
Zhamben, and of weaving from her mother. Both gifts function as important
figures in the story. If the absent father’s gift makes her soar in the realm of air,
the materials her mother makes grounds her in the earth. Libeni believes that
Apenyo “inherited” her gift of singing from her husband, who died in Assam
when the infant was only nine months old. Zhamben was a “gifted” singer of
both traditional Naga songs and Christian hymns. He had a special talent for
picking up the new tunes of hymns, for which he became the lead male voice
in the church choir. Apenyo goes a step beyond her father: while her father was
gifted, her singing voice as an adult is described as “exquisite” and “enchanting,”
possessing the capacity of making “even the commonest song sound heavenly”
(23). Until now, the voice had been depicted as an indicator of the infant/child’s
autonomy and agency. But from this point onwards, the singing voice begins
to assume an otherworldly quality. As Cavarero writes in her discussion of
opera in For More Than, there is a “sexual difference” instituted between the fem-
inine/vocal (song) and the masculine/semantic (speech). Ao’s repeated emphasis
on the divine quality of Apenyo’s voice rather than the song’s verbal content res-
onates with Cavarero’s point that in singing “voices . . . frustrate the role of speech,
an enjoyable triumph of the vocal over the semantic” (For More Than, 122).
These two depictions of the voice – the agential aspect rooted in the fleshiness
of the living body, and the otherworldly aspect that transcends ordinariness
and seduces the listeners – come together during the scene where the Indian
army attacks the new church in the village. Apenyo is scheduled to sing a solo
number after participating in the choir. When the sound of gunfire begins, the
choir sing on, “unfazed.” However, their fear and anxiety increase as the shelling
approaches nearer. When the congregation is surrounded by the Indian soldiers,
Apenyo suddenly “burst into her solo number, and not to be outdone by the
bravery or foolishness of this young girl, and not wishing to leave her thus
exposed, the entire choir burst into song” (27). This act angers the soldiers, who
consider it “open defiance” and their wrath descends on the villagers. While the
members of the choir begin to flee in terror, only Apenyo stands her ground.
The corporeal agency inherent in the initial, defiant burst into song mutates into
something transcendent. She seems possessed by the otherworldly power of the
song and is now rendered as a being that is now other to her self: “She sang on,
oblivious of the situation as if an unseen presence was guiding her” (27). Standing
in the congregation, Libeni sees her daughter “singing her heart out as if to with-
stand the might of the guns with her voice raised to God in heaven” (27). Although
she desperately implores Apenyo to stop, her daughter doesn’t pay heed. When the
captain of the army drags Apenyo away by the hair, the mother hears her daughter
“singing the chorus of her song over and over again.”
Apenyo’s gang rape is displaced and described from the standpoint of two wit-
nesses. Unlike “Amritxya Putra,” the two scenes of witnessing aren’t eroticized or
displaced to the realm of metaphor. Instead, its brutal nature is underscored with
matter-of-fact description. The first witness is Libeni, who sees the captain raping
her daughter while the other soldiers await their turn. Libeni rushes forward with
an “animal-like” growl, before she is stopped violently and hauled away to be
raped herself. Once again there is an emphasis on the vocalic dimensions: the
daughter’s as otherworldly excess, the mother’s as quasi-animal (the text states
that she tries to defend her brutalized daughter like a cornered “animal”).
The second instance comes from the standpoint of the rapist (the captain). Sig-
nificantly, Apenyo’s brutalized body is still invested with agency even when the
incident is focalized through the captain’s perspective:
Seeing that it would be a waste of time and bullets to kill off all the witnesses
in the church, the order was given to set it on fire. Yelling at the top of his
voice, the Captain now appeared to have gone mad. He snatched the box of
matches from his Adjutant and set to work. But his hands were shaking; he
thought that he could still hear the tune the young girl was humming as he
was ramming himself into her virgin body, while all throughout the girl’s
unseeing eyes were fixed on his face.
(29)
The important point in this passage is that the rape script is subverted not by objec-
tifying the victim’s body as a piece of unresponsive “dry wood” (as in Sombori’s
case), but by combining the breakdown of the visual apparatus with the represen-
tations of the dimensions of the voice and of hearing. Apenyo’s unseeing eyes fixed
on the aggressor’s face gesture to “a human essence that, deformed in its very
being, contemplates the unprecedented act of its own dehumanization” (Cavarero,
Horrorism, 16). Conversely, the horror that the captain feels when he remembers
this scene, epitomized by his “hands shaking,” has less to do with the instinctive
fear of death and more with the “instinctive disgust for a violence that, not
content merely to kill . . . aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body, tearing
at its constitutive vulnerability” (Cavarero, Horrorism 8). Apenyo’s corporeal
uniqueness is sought to be destroyed, along with the others who are burned
alive in the church. But, paradoxically, her unique bodily signature – her singing
voice – persists, adding to the horror of the remembered scene for the witness
who was also the aggressor. The captain’s sonic reminiscences of her “humming”
coalesces with another excessive vocal element – his “yelling” – which seems to
prefigure his madness later.
I will return to the paragraph quoted earlier in my discussion of voice, aurality
and haunting in the concluding portion. For the moment, I’ll track the figure that
is associated with the gift of the mother: weaving. Libeni is reputed to be one
of the best weavers in the village and the mother–daughter bond in the story is
concretized by the gift she passes down to Apenyo. As Apenyo reaches adult-
hood, she too becomes an “excellent weaver” like Libeni. As the village looks
forward to the day of the consecration of the new church, the women of
the village, Apenyo and Libeni included, begin planning new clothes for their
families: “brand new shawls for the men and new skirts or ‘lungis’ for the
women.” This double invocation of “new” invests the woven products with a
life-affirming, protective quality. This aspect is emphasized on the day of the con-
secration as Apenyo is described “looking resplendent in her new lungi and
shawl” (25–26).
However, once the soldiers begin their mayhem, this emphasis on newly woven
clothes assumes a deathly hue. As Libeni tries to get away from the soldier who
grasps her after she runs towards her daughter, who is being raped, “he (the
soldier) bashed her head on the hard ground several times knocking her uncon-
scious and raped her limp body, using the woman’s new lungi afterwards,
which he had flung aside, to wipe himself ” (28). While the hideous nature of
this rape is strongly emphasized, the “new lungi” is “flung” aside and used as a
valueless instrument of disposal. This mutation of life-affirming weaving into a
valueless thing-like symbol of a necroworld is further emphasized as the villagers
attempt to identify dead bodies in the devastated church the day after the massacre.
All they find are undifferentiated “masses of human bones washed clean by the
night’s rain.” The only recognizable object of human making the villagers come
across is “Apenyo’s new shawl,” which was “still intact beneath the pile of
charred bones” (30). They surmise that mother and daughter lie under that shawl;
a grotesque, deathly inversion of the undifferentiation of mother and child prior to
the act of giving birth.
While the bones of the others are placed in a common coffin, those of the mother
and daughter are placed together. Their funeral is “somber and song-less,” but the
designation of their burial site leads to conflict. Although the village had accepted
Christianity “long ago, some of the old superstitions and traditions had not been
completely abandoned.” These deaths were considered “unnatural” and, despite
the influence of Christianity, many of the villagers were reluctant to bury them
in the village graveyard (30–31). In The Ao-Naga Oral Tradition, Ao discusses
Menen Mong (Menen standing for dirty or sinful), the period of mourning stipu-
lated for “unnatural deaths.” While villages used to observe a six-day period of
mourning for such deaths, the family members of the deceased would observe a
process of purification called Menen-pongi (Ao translates it as “washing away
sin” or “atonement from sin”). They would abandon their homesteads and live-
stock, live outside the village in a makeshift shelter, and after a month-long
period of mourning would cleanse themselves in a river and start their life anew
(67). The name of the deceased person would not be renewed by the clan, thus
beginning a process of forgetting. In “The Last Song,” the younger generation in
the village, many of them converts to Christianity, opposed this diktat of their
elders. A compromise solution is reached in which the bones are buried just
outside the boundary of the graveyard “to show that their fellow villagers had
not abandoned their remains to a remote forest site” (31). However, no memorial
headstones were erected for any of the dead people.
Although Apenyo and Libeni’s bones are treated as matter out of place and are
suspended in a liminal zone between memorialization and obliteration, their story
and that of the Sunday when they were raped, killed and incinerated lives on
through the medium of Apenyo’s voice. This aspect of survivance is depicted
through a doubled accounting of the effects of Apenyo’s voice towards the end
of the text – the vocal and the aural are conjoined in these instances. However,
the effects of the voice on the auditors are different: in the case of the captain,
it becomes a portal for his descent into madness, in the case of the oral storyteller,
it becomes a means for suturing the wounds caused by terror.
The first person on whom the effects are described is Apenyo’s rapist: the
young army captain. In the passage I quoted earlier, we come across the following
line: “his hands were shaking; he thought that he could still hear the tune the
young girl was humming as he was ramming himself into her virgin body,
while all throughout the girl’s unseeing eyes were fixed on his face.” While I
have discussed this sequence in terms of bodily agency, consider here the
effects of Apenyo’s voice on the aggressor. Unlike the eyes which can be shut
or averted, the ear is not amenable to being closed directly. At best, it can be
closed with a bodily or prosthetic supplement – fingers, hands or other objects.
Thus, as a sense-organ the ear places us in a different relationship to otherness:
if we hear, we have far less agency in pre-empting or evading the call of the
other that may address us suddenly and without warning.4
The “unseeing” eyes of Apenyo issue a haunting call that the young army
captain cannot forget. However, this depiction of the ocular is accentuated
and amplified by the aural dimension. Potentially lethal, the “female singing
voice cannot be domesticated; it disturbs the system of reason by leading
elsewhere” (Cavarero, For More Than 118). The lethal, undomesticated
last song of the raped girl haunts him – his hands shake, he slumps down on
the ground and yells like someone “mad” as he gives the order to torch the
church. Later, we learn that while Apenyo lives on in the memory of the
village, the captain is traced to “a military hospital in a big city where he was
being kept in a maximum-security cell of an insane asylum” (31). While Som-
bori’s narrative reinstitutes the essentialist victim–perpetrator binary and
renders the victim voiceless, “The Last Song” shifts the blame to the perpetrator
without overpowering or silencing the woman’s story. The aggressor is held
“fully accountable” (Gunne and Thompson 17) as the resonant, agential voice
of Apenyo haunts and infects him from beyond the grave, driving him to
madness.
Haunting and the ethical injunction to be possessed by the voice of the other is
emphasized differently in the supplementary section. Through the staging of a
scene of oral storytelling and the shift to the present tense in the “P.S.,” “The
Last Song” complicates the relationship between the orality–vocality–aurality
triad. When we consider the concrete details of the representation of oral story-
telling in “The Last Song,” a complicated scenario unfolds. The concept of
orality, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier writes, presupposes an emphasis on the rela-
tionship between “the written text and the mouth” (7). Ochoa Gautier further
says that studies of orality “tend to concentrate on theorizations of its literary
dimensions described as the other of writing . . . and its acoustic dimensions
are often subsumed under other linguistic elements” (6). Indeed, the depiction
of orality as the other of writing and as a specific form of difference for cultural
traditions in Northeast India is repeated both in Ao’s critical works on folklore
and orality, and in the pronouncements of other literary critics from the region
who have written about orality and writing (Tilottama Misra, “Introduction”;
Pou, “Of People and Their Stories,” 243). What is missing in these pronounce-
ments on orality is a consideration of the acoustic dimension, or as Ochoa
Gautier writes, “the uses of the ear in relation to the voice” (7).
If we move from Ao’s depictions of orality in her works on folklore to her
staging of a scene of oral storytelling in the supplementary section, we notice a
shift that emphasizes the uses of the ear in relation to the voice. Three words dom-
inate this supplementary section: “tell,” “listen” and “hear.” “Tell” emphasizes the
importance of the mouth and vocality and is supplemented by other vocalic ele-
ments such as the old lady’s “shouting” and “humming.” “Hear” circulates as
an injunction or attempt to orient the body towards the direction where impercep-
tible sonic elements emanate, like the sounds of nature or Apenyo’s “acousmatic”
(Chion) voice.5 “Listen,” in contrast, reverses the orientation of the body towards
the sonic object; the ear here transforms into an active ethical and relational sen-
sorium receptive to the voices of forgotten others.
On this December night, the granny is not her “usual chirpy self” and seems to
be “agitated over something.” When one of her auditors asks the reason for her
irritation, she replies that on certain nights a “peculiar” wind blows through the
village. It seems to start from the graveyard and “sounds like a hymn.” When
one of the youngsters replies that they cannot “hear” anything, granny rebukes
them “that youngsters of today have forgotten how to listen to the voice of the
earth and the wind” (32). Through the connection established here between the
vocal and the aural, Ao expands the canvas to establish connections between wit-
nessing an individual death, collective memories of trauma, the alienation from
community and the relationships with the nonhuman environment. The ethical
act here is envisioned as one of training oneself to listen carefully, to be receptive
to the voice of the nonhuman and spectral other(s).
The effects of the ear as the primary ethical sensorium are heightened even
further as the story draws to its close. The youngsters discern a “low hum” as
the old storyteller literally shouts at them to listen even more carefully. Storyteller
and audience “strain to listen more attentively.” The old woman jumps up and
asks each one whether they “heard” Apenyo’s last song. Like Apenyo’s posses-
sion by an “unseen presence” during the final performance of her song before she
is dragged away by the soldiers, the storyteller’s act of humming the “tune softly,
almost to herself” initiates a process where “she seems to have changed into a
new self, more alive and animated than earlier” (32). The contrast between the
effects of hearing Apenyo’s song on the captain and the storyteller couldn’t be
more different: if the captain cannot evade the call of the violated other, is
infected by it and eventually becomes insane, the gradual possession by the
acousmatic voice of the ghostly other re-animates the storyteller. The actual
act of storytelling, of re-memorializing the traumatic past can begin only at
that point. “Come and listen carefully,” the storyteller says as the tale of the bru-
talized girl is enshrined in collective memory. To listen carefully is to preserve,
Trinh T. Minh-Ha says. But listening, she continues, is an intense and involved
corporeal experience: “In the process of storytelling, speaking and listening
refer to realities that do not involve just the imagination. The speech is seen,
heard, smelled, tasted and touched. It destroys, brings into life, nurtures” (121).
Similarly, through her focus on the embodied aspects of storytelling in “The
Last Song,” Ao shows how something that has been destroyed comes back to
life and then is passed on as a gift to the new generation to be nurtured and
kept alive.
This injunction to listen here can be contrasted with a scenario in Ao’s poem
“The Oral Storyteller.” The figure of the grandmotherly oral storyteller recurs in
both texts. In this poem, the grandmother figure laments that her grandsons
dismiss her counsel as “ancient gibberish.” In the concluding lines of the
poem, the speaker says that “when memory fails and words falter” she is “over-
come by a bestial craving.” She desires to “wrench the thieving guts” out of the
“Original Dog” and consign all her stories “to the script in his ancient entrails.” 6
As in “The Last Song,” orality and writing are again contrasted as values. Oral
storytelling revitalizes the female figure’s “life force.” But her grandsons discount
her “rambling stories” and say that “books” will do just fine. As a storyteller
rapidly denied her audience in the evening of her existence, the grandmother
has a violent zoomorphic fantasy – a “bestial craving.” This reference to the
“Original Dog” reverberates with a previous use of animal imagery in the
poem. The stories that were transmitted to her made “warriors and were-tigers”
come alive. Other animals, too, who were “once our brothers” came alive
through these renditions. These “brothers” were once kin to the community,
before the invention of language relegated them to the level of the “savage.”7
Just as the folkloric tradition suggested that “human” separation and alienation
from nature, animality and multispecies harmony coincided with the invention
of language as a system of difference, the new language concretized through
the figure of the “book” will relegate oral storytelling to the realms of forgetful-
ness. The technicity of language in its mutations through the successive states of
undifferentiation, orality and writing figures as an imperializing force. In the
fading embers of her existence, the “outmoded” oral storyteller melancholically
wishes to consign her stories to another forgotten, albeit originary, figure of
writing: the forgotten script in the old dog’s ancient entrails. Modes that are van-
ishing (like orality) are conjoined with a primal scene of forgetting.
Precisely the opposite scenario occurs in “The Last Song.” In “The Old Story-
teller,” the life force of oral storytelling is defeated by the formidable technē
of writing. But, in “The Last Song” it is as if the dead letter of writing (the nar-
ration of Apenyo’s life in the past tense) is reanimated and re-membered through
the vocal-aural act of oral storytelling that is added on as a supplement to the
major diegetic space. Furthermore, this reanimation is activated through the
complex weave of relationality established between life, death, voice and listen-
ing. Here, the voice does not concretize the transgression of the law from a space
between two deaths; instead, it returns from a space beyond death to reinfuse
the grandmother’s oral attempt to “pass on the story” with a new life (33). The
domain of survivance then is not circumscribed by the account of Apenyo’s
life and death, as the main diegetic space initially sets it up to be. To play with
Derrida’s statement, the beyond that is the supplementary “P.S.” in “The
Last Song” is not Apenyo’s survivor, but the survivor of Apenyo. The relation-
ship between the apertures of the mouth and the ear then becomes the crucial
node of survivance. The mouth issues the call to listen attentively, both to the
environment and the effaced past. In orienting itself attentively to the call of
the other, the aperture of the ear receives the gift of these effaced others. This
gift of more life and survivance is oriented towards the renewal and reanimation
of the text-ility of a traumatized community, transgressing the boundary instituted
by human mortality and the incapacitations and dismemberments wrought by
necropolitical terror.
Snail watchers: corpses, creatures and vulnerability in
“Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali”
This section on Hussain’s SDBD focuses on figurations of animality, the co-
shaping of humanness and the portrayal of vulnerability in states of terror.8 More-
over, I move away from animal studies’ focus on megafauna and/or companion
animals and zoom in on a relatively inconspicuous animal form: a snail. A snail’s
life is not as grievable as a domestic dog’s, for instance, may be. But therein lies
the advantage of thinking with reduced scale – a process that can reveal forms
and quiddities of unperceived animal agency. I analyze the conjunctions between
two vulnerable figures entangled in a multipartner mud dance: a corpse of an
unknown young man and a snail. The corpse’s vulnerability is recognized at
the end as it is transformed from an abject-object into a figure that the children
in the story identify with. However, the snail represents the figure of absolute
alterity. As in my analysis of “The Last Song,” the figuration of the gift
returns, but with a slightly different signification. Both the corpse and the snail
are dan (gifts) from the river. But while the corpse’s vulnerability is recognized,
the snail represents the ethical figure of the “pure” gift: that which is irreducible
to exchange or calculation. The trace of absolute alterity lies in this encounter
with a figuration of the “pure” gift.
The key concept in this section is the aporetic nature of the pure gift. In Given
Time, Derrida suggests that for a gift to be a “pure” gift, it has to exist outside the
economy of exchange. The gift defies the metaphysics of presence and cannot be
placed within frameworks of anticipation. But in and through this act of defying
presence, it opens the space-time of the absolutely other. As Derrida writes:
The gift, like the event, as event must remain unforeseeable, but remain so
without keeping itself. It must let itself be structured by the aleatory; it
must appear chancy or in any case lived as such, apprehended as the inten-
tional correlate of a perception that is absolutely surprised by the encounter
with what it perceives, beyond its horizon of anticipation.
(Given Time 122)
Thus, the pure gift, by throwing a wrench in the framework of anticipation, puts
time out of joint. The final movement of the snail – the figure of radical alterity
and of the pure gift in the story – occurs in a space asymmetrical and outside the
range of vision the children inhabit. Furthermore, the last sentence in which the
snail moves outside the range of the children’s vision is separated from the dieg-
esis by a spatial marker making its own status as a supplement clear. Through this
supplementation, SDBD shows how an order of being can be interrupted, gestur-
ing towards other potentialities of survival.
SDBD opens with a group of children playing on the sandbanks of the river
Dhansiri. Since it is winter, the river is in spate. The trickster-like figure of the mis-
chievous Tolan alias Pelu (meaning “tapeworm”) is slapped by the de facto leader
of the group, Jogeshwar, because he constantly teases and harasses the girls in the
group. We learn that Jogeshwar is the brawny sovereign of the group but cannot
operate without the crafty Pelu’s suggestions. Although Pelu is physically
weaker, he has a gift for music and rhyming. As quarrels between the children
erupt and resolve, we learn that a cremation ground lies on the opposite side of
the river. The children eagerly await a cremation, especially if it is of a member
of the Marwari community (known as a community of traders). The Marwaris,
unlike the Assamese, throw loose change as they carry the corpse to the cremation
ground. The word that Pelu and the others use to describe them is dani (gift-giver).
On this day, they notice a funeral procession approaching the cremation ground.
Pelu and Jogeshwar swim to the other side to check. They are disappointed to dis-
cover that the funeral procession is that of an Assamese person. They are also
admonished by one of the members of the funeral procession. Jogeshwar, frus-
trated and angry at this insult, decides to return home to his beloved mother.
As he is about to leave, Pelu hollers excitedly that another dani – supposedly a
log floating down the river – has arrived. Although the word is not directly men-
tioned in connection to the river in the story, we learn that during the monsoon
season, it becomes a dani. Logs often float down the river; the villagers pull
them out and make a profit by selling them at the nearby market. Excitedly,
the children gather on the riverbank as Jogeshwar dives in to haul the “log”
out. To his horror, he discovers that the “log” is the corpse of a young man.
As he hauls the corpse out of the water, Pelu puts his hands inside the shirt
and pulls out a slimy snail attached to the chest. Trying to scare the girls, Pelu
throws the snail in their direction. Almost immediately, the children forget
about the snail. They are interested in whether the corpse has any money in
his pocket. We also learn that the previous year, another corpse had floated
down the river and the village ruffian had extracted money from it. Jogeshwar
rummages through its pockets but is disappointed to only find a photograph of
a woman. As he is about to throw the corpse into the river, one of the children
exclaims that the photograph of the unknown woman must be that of the
young man’s mother. At the mention of “mother,” Jogeshwar, Pelu and the
other children begin to view the corpse with a great degree of sympathy and iden-
tification. Imitating the village shaman, Pelu initiates a conjuring ritual to bring
the corpse back to life. The other children join in enthusiastically and gradually
get immersed fully in Pelu’s incantations. The story ends with Jogeshwar shout-
ing that the corpse was coming to life; meanwhile, unnoticed by anyone the hith-
erto immobile snail begins to clamber slowly up the banks of the river.
Two contextual issues are important for an analysis of SDBD. The first is the
background of the secret killings of Assam, already discussed in the Chapter 1.
Given that this story was first published in 2000, it is safe to assume that the
bullet-ridden anonymous corpse that flows down the Dhansiri is a victim of this
period of the secret killings. If the terror-scarred period of the late 1990s is the
historical backdrop, then the popular Assamese dramatic form of the bhaona pro-
vides SDBD its primary allegorical context. Although the story alludes to influ-
ences from pan-Indian public culture (Hindi films, cricket, popular television
serials aired on the national channel Doordarshan), the representation of and
allusions to the bhaona is its heartbeat. The bhaona was popularized by one
of Assam’s major cultural figures, Srimanta Sankardeva, in the medieval period.
It is a dramatic art form, replete with songs and dances that are usually based
on specific episodes from Hindu epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharat.
Discussing the structure of the bhaonas, Maheswar Neog writes:
[A] number, usually held to be twelve, of musical preludes, called dhemalis,

have been in vogue[(in the bhaonas]. Very generally, only two called major
and minor (soru and bar) dhemalis are performed. . . . Most of these (dhema-
lis) are various concerts on khols (drums) and tals (cymbals), but singing of
verses called ghoshas are resorted to in a few.
(15)
Dhemali, of course, could also refer to games played by children. However, I

translated it as “preludes” to keep the allusions to the structure of bhaona
intact. The play-acting of the children, thus, becomes a “minor” prelude to the
“major” one of the secret killings.
The bhaona referred to extensively in the diegetic space is that of Abhimanyu
Badh. Abhimanyu Badh draws on an incident from the Mahabharat in which
Abhimanyu (the Pandav prince Arjun’s improbably young son) manages to sin-
glehandedly pierce through a circle-like battle-formation called the chakrabehu,
but cannot find his way out. Abhimanyu learnt the way inside the chakrabehu
when he was still inside his mother, Subhadra’s, womb. Tragically, he couldn’t
hear how he could fight his way out of the formation because Subhadra fell
asleep. Eventually, he is cut down by legions of the Kaurava army after
putting up a valiant fight. In different versions of the Abhimanyu story, the
burden of mourning is split between two female figures: either the mother (Sub-
hadra) mourns the dead son or Abhimanyu’s young widow (Uttara).
The tragic story of Abhimanyu’s death has been reworked several times in the
allegorical mode in modern Indian literature, especially in the late colonial period.
Discussing these reworkings, Pamela Lothspeich writes that the figure of Abhi-
manyu is both an allegory for the injustices propagated by the Raj (the Kaurav
army stands in for the Raj) and a hopeful one since the young hero represents
a model son, husband, citizen and soldier (Lothspeich 44). Thus, Abhimanyu’s
characterization in such representations has a dual signification: he is both a
tragic symbol of youth cut off in its prime and a hopeful figure who is a
model for emulation. These significations are apparent when we consider the
reworking of the Abhimanyu story in the nineteenth century Assamese poet
Ramakanta Choudhuri’s magnum opus Abhimanyu Badh Kabya.9
In contemporary Assamese reworkings of Abhimanyu, the emphasis on him as
a hopeful figure who is a model son, husband, citizen and soldier changes.
Instead, he functions as a tragic figure symbolizing the destruction of the potential
of youth entrapped in a spiral of violence. Besides Hussain, Sanjib Pol Deka also
uses the Abhimanyu reference in his short story “Eipine Ki Ase?” (“What Lies
Over There?” 2010) where a surrendered militant realizes before his death that
his violent past has entrapped him in a chakrabehu from where there is no escape.
As he is killed by his former comrades, his wife – who clearly bears comparison
to Uttara – weeps during a performance of Abhimanyu’s death scene in a bhaona
staged in their village. In Hussain’s story, the focus shifts away from Uttara. The
specter that haunts the text is the nurturing and grieving figure of the Subhadra-
like mother.
Jogeshwar had the feeling as if he too had been shot dead with bullets. His
corpse was lying on the riverbank. As if through a haze, he saw his mother
along with those of Tolan, Indra, Jadu, Binapani and Mamoni running
towards the riverbank. They were holding the corpse very tenderly. The
head of the corpse was on his mother’s lap. His mother was stroking the
head tenderly.
(14)
Thus, the boy-warrior Abhimanyu in both these stories becomes a tragic figure
for the unfulfilled potential of youth and of entrapment, both individually and
socially, within a vicious necropolitical circle of violence with no exit. Simulta-
neously, there is a gendered division of labor in the case of mourning: the burden
of grief falls either on the wife or the mother. Jogeshwar’s dream sequence
repeats this gendered trope of mourning.
This standard allegorical dimension that deploys bhaona and the mythic
subtext leads commentators like Hiren Gohain (“Jehirul Hussainor Galpa”)
and Areendom Barkataki (“Axamiya Suti Galpa”) to suggest that SDBD is a por-
trayal of the “innocence” of children that survives the degradation of society due
to the impact of violence and terror. Debabrata Sharma reads it as a surrealist
work that pits the “dance of death” against the hopeful music of life represented
by the children and emphasizes the story’s lyrical and musical qualities (452).
However, such readings focus only on the standard, mythical allegory that con-
cerns the “human” dimension in the text. Consideration of another figuration
of life – the largely indiscernible snail – reveals that another dimension of alle-
gory is also operative. This other dimension of allegory, emerging from the folk-
loric context, undercuts the interpretive frames that the standard allegory pushes
us towards. Extending the insights of Spivak from A Critique of Postcolonial
Reason, Brent Hayes Edwards defines allegory as:
.parabasis, “the activism of speaking otherwise.” Allegory is a practice of

“persistent interruption” in language where the cognitive or epistemological
is continually breached by the performative or ethical, forcing the attentive
reader to move against the current of the prose, to hear the charge of what
it pushes away.
(8)
To connect this to the dan, if the human corpse is rehabilitated into a cognitive
circuit of social exchange through the deployment of the trope of nurturing
motherhood, the snail – a material-semiotic figure I will locate and place in the
folkloric tradition – breaches the diegetic space as an ethical figure that forces
us to hear the charge of what the current of the prose pushes away.
To return to the dimension of the standard mythical allegory of Abhimanyu, the
intertextual deployment of bhaona in general and the tale of Abhimanyu in par-
ticular are located at the intersection of three other elements that frame the pre-
sentation of the relationship between the corpse and snail in SDBD: a) the
structure of sovereign power operative within the group of children; b) the figu-
ration of “motherhood” and the manner in which it undercuts the structure of
masculinist sovereignty, while still operating within the confines of a gendered
matrix; and c) economies of gift-giving in the text. The soru (minor) model of
sovereignty is illustrated through the distributional matrix of the characters and
the representation of sports and games. The topography of sovereignty operates
through the fusion of two halves: the “brawny” Jogeshwar holds the sovereign
monopoly over violence in the group. He is referred to as bayan (the orchestrator
of a bhaona) by the others, emphasizing his dominant position in the group. But
he cannot “reign” effectively without the input of the physically weaker but
extremely crafty Pelu. Furthermore, Pelu is also the de facto leader when it
comes to leading the group in rhyming and singing; even Jogeshwar accepts
his superiority there. In a use of another animal metaphor, we can consider the
liminal status of the “tapeworm” (Pelu) of the group. Pelu hardly ever takes
part in the rough-and-tumble games played by the boys. While the girls are rel-
atively subordinate as characters, their games and activities take place in a sphere
clearly separate from the boys. Pelu constantly transgresses; one could even say
that he slithers like a tapeworm between the domains marked out for boys and
girls. Both the boys and the girls, furthermore, threaten him with physical vio-
lence. He is slapped twice in the story: once by Binapani and the second time
by Jogeshwar. Yet his trickster-like qualities, craftiness and ability to transgress
demarcated gendered domains make him indispensable to the group and to
Jogeshwar’s performance of his sovereign role.
This representation of sovereign topography in the children’s world is also con-
nected with the figuration of games and sports. Here, the dual signification of
dhemali both as musical overtures and as games/sports is crucial. Historians
and sociologists (Huizinga; Elias and Dunning; Caillois) who have reflected on
homo ludens emphasize that such phenomena, while producing excitement and
a sense of teamwork, also have a mimetic appeal that is comparable to deadly
pursuits like war. Norbert Elias writes that sports “offers people the liberating
excitement of a struggle involving physical exertion and skill while limiting to
a minimum the chance that anyone will get seriously hurt in its course” (Elias
and Dunning 77). His pronouncements fit the representation of the games
played especially by the boys in SDBD – they play cricket and football raucously
or mimic scenes of violence from folktales (the attack on Abhimanyu) and
popular culture (martial arts films, scenes of violence from Bollywood films).
Simultaneously, the mimetic aspect also has a gendered dimension: the girls’
dhemali mimic rituals of domesticity and marriage. Even in the soru realm, we
are presented with a naturalized binary division between the public (masculine)
and private (feminine) realms.
The naturalization of the gendered public/private distinction in the sphere of
the ludic extends to the representation of sovereignty and economies of care.
The representation of primarily masculine sovereignty is undercut by the figure
of nurturing motherhood. Initially, the image of the nurturing mother is directly
associated with Jogeshwar:
He was feeling hungry. He remembered his mother, especially when the

pangs of hunger struck him. Whenever he said he was hungry, his mother
said “Just wait a bit, honey,” and got something or the other for him to
eat. He had no inkling how and from where his mother procured food
even though there was hardly a morsel in the household. It was as if his
mother magically conjured foodstuff.
(9)
The figure of the nurturing mother returns later to both humanize the hitherto
objectified corpse and to suture the stalled machine of sovereignty: both Jogesh-
war and Pelu are initially immobilized when they realize that the photograph of
the woman found on the corpse is not the young man’s lover, as they assumed,
but his mother. Here’s the relevant passage:
His mother’s? As soon as someone said mother, Jogeshwar froze in his spot.
He looked once at the photograph and the shaggy, bearded face of the youth.
Suddenly, his heart was struck by an inexplicable tumult. Innumerable ques-
tions began assailing him. Where was this person from? Who riddled him
with bullets in this way? It touched him – the poor thing probably carried
the photo around due to the deep love he bore towards his mother. Whenever
he remembered his mother, he probably took the photo out and gazed at it.
(12)
Towards the end, as Pelu mesmerizes everyone with his song, the Abhimanyu
intertext intervenes again as Jogeshwar imagines his mother’s reaction to his pos-
sible death:
Jogeshwar had the feeling as if he too had been shot dead with bullets. His
corpse was lying on the riverbank. As if through a haze, he saw his mother
along with those of Tolan, Indra, Jadu, Binapani and Mamoni running
towards the riverbank. They were holding the corpse very tenderly. The
head of the corpse was on his mother’s lap. His mother was stroking the
head tenderly.
(14)
The spectral image of Subhadra-like motherhood “touches” Jogeshwar and the

others and, through an invocation of the haptic, facilitates a connection between
them and the previously objectified corpse. This directly leads to the final scene
where they mime a shaman’s ritual. However, the lines between the “real” and
the “performative” begin to get blurred as they get affectively immersed in
play-acting the ritual. Furthermore, Pelu’s invocations, repeated by the other chil-
dren, constantly beseech “mother” to come and look at her dead son. The invoca-
tion of “mother” enables the children to objectify their grief, and through that
process, “bear witness to the loss that death has inflicted” (Das, Life and Words
48–49). Nurturing motherhood thus becomes crucial in translating the grief felt
by the children into the realm of speech. This act of witnessing and the subsequent
public mimesis of the ritual initiated by the invocation of the figure of motherhood
converts the “bad death” of the young man into a “good death.”
However, naturalized representations of the nurturing qualities of motherhood
and of the domestic feminine sphere (even in the representation of the ludic)
remains the story’s biggest limitation. Papori Bora’s critique of the culturally
located figuration of motherhood as “peace-makers” in Northeast India is relevant.
Bora writes that this “politics of motherhood” takes on “the traditional role of
mothers and recasts it as a larger political project of protecting sons and daughters
from the violence of the Indian state” (172). This aspect is evident in the story as
motherhood sutures the fracture of the soru model of sovereignty through a gen-
dered ethics of maternal care. However, the mother figures are depoliticized. As
Anne McClintock writes in a different context, this is an example of a “retrospec-
tive iconography of gender containment, containing women’s mutinous power
within an iconography of domestic service” (72). Besides re-creating heterosexual
norms such “discourse(s) too ends up recreating the very sites of women’s dom-
ination” (Papori Bora 172). For the female figures in the text, it is as if politics and
participation in the public sphere cannot be imagined outside the depoliticized dis-
courses of protective motherhood and/or domesticity.
Gift-giving, besides motherhood, is the other circulating figure in the story. The
crucial word here is dani. Based on the Sanskrit root, dan, dani means someone
or something that provides a lucky break – like a lucky cast in a game of dice
(Hemkosh 551).10 In SDBD dani refers to people or entities who generously
bestow money or wealth. Therefore, translating the word as “gift-giver” isn’t inac-
curate. Within the diegetic space, the Marwaris, a prominent business community
in Assam, are figured as danis because of their custom of distributing loose change
as they carry a corpse to the cremation ground. From the Marwari side, such dan
represents a form of disinterested prestation that is believed to bring merit to the
dead.11 On the other side, a Marwari funeral means a financial bonanza for the
group of poor children while an Assamese one means disappointment on that front.
Dani could also mean a source of money and wealth. Although it is not directly
referred to in the story as such, the river Dhansiri also functions as a gift-giver.
The open chronotope of the river bears “gifts” from elsewhere. An important
passage in the early half of the story establishes this:
Once, during a period of heavy rainfall, large logs of wood were carried by
the strong currents of the river. The villagers collected these logs by attaching
iron hooks at the end of ropes. They let the wood dry, chopped them up, tied
them in bundles, transported them by boat, and sold them in the city on the
other side of the river.
(4)
This seemingly stray reference assumes a different hue later when the children
mistake the floating corpse for a log of wood and begin chiming with Pelu:
“Here come the danis.” Here the reference is to the gifts borne by the river,
but this misrecognition is soon dispelled. However, consistent with the pattern
of doubling in the story, we learn that a year earlier the river had brought
another, rather macabre “gift” to the village. This was a corpse of an unknown
person that the village ruffian, Reb, had fished out. Reb had ferreted a bundle
of money from the dead man’s pockets and then thrown him away into the
river like a log of wood. Pelu reminds Jogeshwar about this dan and both
search the corpse’s pockets for money. It is precisely then that they discover
the snail and the photograph of the corpse’s mother.
Corpses frighten, Margaret Schwartz writes, because they are “vulnerable
and passive – because it scares us to imagine our own bodies as subject to the
biological imperatives of decomposition” (“Iconography” 1). Furthermore,
corpses function as reminders of the “power of death . . . that always threatens
subjectivity from elsewhere” along with the constant potential of destabilizing
the present (Schwartz, Dead Matter 2). Corpses provide a mirror of absolute vul-
nerability immanent in all of us. Steven Miller stresses this point further by focus-
ing on ordinary speech acts. Consider, for instance, phrases like “to play dead” or
to be “left for dead.” As Miller says, “to be dead” becomes a “position within life
beyond life” and the many ways of occupying this position “bear witness to the
condition of radical helplessness” (115).12
However, if we look at the reactions of the children to the corpse, fright, horror
and a recognition of the corpse’s helplessness doesn’t describe their initial
reactions. Money ferreted from dead bodies seems to have become routine in
this deathworld. Pelu and Jogeshwar, especially, aren’t scared of the corpse
at all; instead, they treat it instrumentally as an object, inserting this sudden
appearance of the cadaver within the framework of economic exchange emanat-
ing from the earlier instance that occurred a year earlier. At one level, the chil-
dren’s reaction to the corpse shows how terror has become banal in this
lifeworld; on another, the cadaver represents an inert object in a dehumanizing,
instrumental regime of exchange. At first, the corpse stands for an instrumental
object that “gives” (a dani) with no need for any form of reciprocity. In fact,
its instrumental status is re-emphasized when Jogeshwar, with extreme disap-
pointment, is about to throw the corpse back into the river just like a useless
object bearing no value when all he finds is the photograph and the snail in
its pocket.
However, the discovery of the photograph and the gradual attention paid to it
by the children begins the process of the re-insertion of the corpse into a symbolic
economy mediated by the maternal. It also inaugurates a scenario where the
children have a direct encounter with the face. I am alluding to the Levinasian
thematic of the encounter with the face of the other here:
The approach to the face is the most basic responsibility. As such, the face of
the other is verticality and uprightness; it spells a relation of rectitude. The
face is not in front of me . . . but above me; it is the other before death,
looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who
asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice
in death. Thus, the face says to me: you shall not kill. In the relation to the
face I am exposed as a usurper of the place of the other.
(Levinas 23–24)
The axiomatics of height and verticality – the face “above me” – is key here as
Levinas envisages this encounter not as a relationship where power is exerted, but
instead as an obligation. My face is something “I” cannot see; instead, I am obli-
gated to respond to the faces of others that appear before me. In this response lies
my basic ethical responsibility.
There are two faces that the children encounter in the story: that of the mother
in the photograph and the corpse. Both represent forms of death. The photograph,
as Andre Bazin reminds us, “embalms time” (8). It too is a shell that encases
something that is akin to being mummified. Furthermore, the photograph, analo-
gous to the corpse, occupies an “in-between” space; while it conjures the effect of
a being-present in the here and the now, its referent is always elsewhere. Finally,
it is the call of the figure from elsewhere – the gradual recognition of the woman
in the photograph as the militant’s mother – that begins the process of re-inserting
the corpse into the symbolic system. The discovery of the photograph facili-
tates the recognition of the corpse’s vulnerability as a sudden address from else-
where that they cannot preempt. The corpse gradually becomes a someone from a
something.
Significantly, the summon of the other in the photograph also coincides with a
closer encounter with the face of the corpse. When the corpse is first pulled out of
the river, the face is mentioned briefly, but glossed over: “It was the corpse of a
young man: well-built, fair, handsome. A dense beard covered his face” (10).
Consider how the valence shifts when the address of the other-as-mother hails
Jogeshwar:
As soon as someone said “mother,” Jogeshwar froze in his spot. He looked

once at the photograph and the shaggy, bearded face of the youth. Suddenly,
his heart was struck by an inexplicable tumult. Innumerable questions began
assailing him. Where was this person from? Who riddled him with bullets in
this way? It touched him.
(12)
The address of the other-as-mother in the photograph impels the children to

focus on the face of the corpse and consider his mute appeal to not “let him
die alone.” Almost immediately, the children begin to identify with the corpse. A
girl, Binapani, says that the corpse looks like someone she knows. Pelu soon
begins his incantation and the rest join in. What began as a play-acting, a
mimesis, of the shaman’s incantations soon begins to blur with the real as Pelu
seems to be “possessed” while the rest of the children weep in unison. The
ludic gesture, as Brian Massumi writes, “releases a force of transindividual trans-
formation” (5).
While the “bad” death of the unknown corpse is seemingly transformed into a
“good” death after the discovery of the photograph and the transindividual trans-
formations affected by the ludic, communal incantation, how do we read the enig-
matic closure of the story?13 Crucial here is the fact that the snail appears at
virtually the same moment as the photograph, although it is immediately
thrown away and forgotten. In one sense, this animal figure exists in a constant
state of exception (Pick 16). Anything could be done to it at any time; the chil-
dren can stomp on it or smash it if they want. Instead, they throw it away in
disgust and then immediately forget about its existence. While the corpse’s vul-
nerability is recognized, the snail represents another unacknowledged figure of
vulnerability and of life. If it remains unacknowledged and “below” the line of
vision of the children, what is its role in the story?
Let me answer this question by tracking a provisional representational itinerary
of the snail.14 Snails are considered an edible species both historically and in con-
temporary times in certain parts of Assam. Moreover, during the period of Ahom
rule in the medieval and early modern period, lime extracted from a subspecies of
the snail – the junai samuk – was used as building material for houses. In fact,
snail lime was used in the construction of important historical monuments such
as the Rang Ghar and Talatal Ghar (Barkataki, Gogoi and Borah; Kishore K
Bora), emphasizing its connections to construction of habitations. Although
snails have had a significant presence in Assam’s sociocultural life, they are
hardly present as prominent figures in folklore. One appearance is the Tiwa
tale titled the “The Story of the Kumjelekua and the Hare,” which as Nandana
Dutta writes is a “variant of the tortoise and the hare tale” (10). Kumjelekua
means slug.15 Here the slowness of the slug/snail depicts a form of endurance,
patience and resilience.
There is also a very powerful poem titled “Saamuk” (Snails) by Anupama
Basumatary, an Assamese poet from the Bodo community.16 Instead of the
radical separation that occurs between the bodies of the “human” and “animal”
in SDBD, an equivalence is established between the poetic persona and snails
in “Saamuk.” The first half of this poem shows the child persona of the
speaker participating in the act of eating and ingesting a snail. While the
speaker says that in the past it had been a “fun” activity to watch the “recoiling
tongues” of the “upside down snails” as she removed their shells and sucked their
sap, the end of the first stanza shows that there is a “strange” recognition of their
vulnerability both with the references to the “recoiling shells” and the sonic
memory of the shells thrown on the floor that creak with a strange rhythm
hiding “the agony of their dying.”
However, in the second stanza of the poem, this ominous rhythm becomes a
cipher for describing the poet’s existential condition as an adult as an equivalence
is established between the vulnerability of the “animal” and the “human.” Incor-
poration through ingestion now transforms into a projected identification with the
“shell” of the human body. In the moment of the “now,” the “I” crawls around the
sea and the shore looking for the “root” of the strange note as the “marauding
waves” fling her back. An “unseen hand” picks her up, sucks her sap and
leaves her empty as the “shell” of her body “creaks in the agony of her heart
breaking.” The act of ingestion by the self in the first half, one that robs a
shell of life, is inverted in spiral fashion in the second as the subject’s bodily
casing is sucked dry by a powerful force from the outside. The violence done
to the body of the snail in the first stanza thus coincides with the violence
done to the vulnerable human body in the second. This recognition of shared vul-
nerability between human and animal sets Basumatary’s snail apart from Hus-
sain’s. In SDBD, there is no coincidence or identification with the snail.
Instead, it is radically separated and ejected from the world of the human.
While Basumatary’s poem is one of the few major references to snails that I
found in Assamese literature, this animot pops up in several other traditions in
the world, from Yoruba mythology, medieval European manuscripts, Shakespear-
ean plays like As You Like It, Che Guevara’s guerrilla manual, the works of Vir-
ginia Woolf and Günter Grass, short stories by Patricia Highsmith (the title of this
section is derived from one of her stories), poems by Federico García Lorca, Mar-
ianne Moore, Ted Hughes and Les Murray, paintings by Henri Matisse and Joan
Miro, and horror manga like Junji Ito’s Uzumaki. The stillness of the snail repre-
sents a living, vital form whose lack of movement also paradoxically gives it
the appearance of death. Its body is a conglomerate of hardness outside and
a soft, fleshy vulnerability inside. They exude “slimy affect” (Elissa Marder
190) as they leave their viscous, translucent bodily signatures as traces on the
soil. Furthermore, their bodies and habitats collapse neat divisions: as Peggy
Kamuf writes, their organ of locomotion is also their organ of digestion. They
live in both land and water. The snail has been used sometimes to depict sensi-
tivity, sloth, perseverance, voluptuousness, monstrosity (snails consume vegeta-
tion voraciously), cowardice (they hide immediately in the “house” they carry
on their bodies), illusory courage (the shell being a sort of illusory armor). and
androgyny. Moreover, snails are also called “gastropods” (stomach-feet), or
more appropriately as Kamuf says, “tongue-foot” (2). They evoke disgust
because they leave a trail of slime or mucus behind them.17
But the invocation of slime, their bodily signatures, can also be read in another
way. Commenting on Francis Ponge’s line that the snail is “the friend of the soil
which he kisses with his whole body,” Peter Trnka writes:
The snail travels slowly and . . . close to the earth. In its solitudinous hugging
of the earth, the snail is proud and needs nothing. . . . The snail is content in its
love of the earth . . . [it] leaves a slimy trail on the earth as a sign of its love. . . .
The snail’s relation to its home forms a further ethical element. . . . Human
monuments tend to exaggerate our affective capacity, while the shells carried
along the backs of mollusks well express their lives.
(54)
With these characteristics of the snail in mind, let’s turn to the closure of the story.
While Jogeshwar shouts that the corpse is coming alive and exhorts Pelu to con-
tinue, the last line of the story reveals the movement of the hitherto inconspicuous
snail: “And exactly at that moment, unobserved by anyone, the snail that had been
extracted from the young man’s chest and hurled on the sands began clambering
on the riverbank very slowly” (14). The movement of the snail – “exactly at the
same moment” that the mimesis of the conjuration ritual seems to be successful –
gestures, I suggest, to the folkloric dimension. Folklorists like Attipate K. Rama-
nujan and Maria Tatar argue that scenarios of metamorphosis and shape-shifting
abound in folk and fairy tales. Furthermore, as Tatar writes: “the stories themselves
function as shape-shifters, morphing into new versions of themselves as they are
retold and as they migrate into other media” (56–57). Such scenarios of metamor-
phosis, shape-shifting and transference between figures related to the human, the
demonic and the animal abound in South Asian and Assamese folktales.
Consider for instance the folktales transcribed and written by one of the foun-
dational figures of Assamese literary modernity, Lakshminath Bezbaruah. In
popular tales like “Tejimola,” the eponymous heroine, who is murdered by her
stepmother, comes back in the form of a flower. In tales like “Betu Konwar,”
the lives of demons are stored inside the bodily vessel of a bhomora (bee) –
the hero can destroy the demons only after capturing and killing this insect.
In these anthropomorphic folktales, vital parts of the human self are preserved
in the corporeal shells of animal others. SDBD both utilizes and reverses such
scenarios. The snail is extracted from the corpse’s shirt pocket close to the
heart, which is considered to be the source of life and vitality. Both the corpse
and the snail remain immobile. However, “exactly at the same moment” when
Jogeshwar shouts that the corpse is being reanimated, the snail begins to move
(unobserved by anyone). This raises the possibility that perhaps Pelu’s incanta-
tions worked, although not in the way he intended. While the ritual was intended
to raise the dead, maybe the “life” of the corpse was transferred to the perceived
form of death-in-life that the snail represents.
If we admit this possibility of metamorphosis and transference, a familiar sce-
nario in the folkloric tradition, it enables us to conceptualize an even more radical
encounter with the gift. One of Derrida’s guiding theses in Given Time is that for a
gift to be acknowledged as such, it must not appear as a gift because a recognition
of this fact re-inserts it within the cycle of repayment, debt and exchange. Unlike
the logs of wood or the corpses floating down the river that are then received as
objects facilitating forms of exchange, the snail is rejected and forgotten by the
characters. However, the snail’s reappearance in the last sentence suggests that
it is not a “simple non-experience, a simple non-appearance, a self-effacement
that is carried off by what it effaces.” Yet, it is a gift-event nevertheless in that
it happens “in an instant that no doubt does not belong to the economy of
time, in a time without time” (Derrida 174). Structurally the supplementary status
of the last sentence in SDBD gestures to an event outside the economy of narra-
tive time. It occurs simultaneously, but outside the range of vision of the charac-
ters in the narrative.
Furthermore, although it is sidestepped, the snail is not relegated to nothing-
ness. Recall what Trnka writes: “The snail is content in its love of the earth . . .
[it] leaves a slimy trail on the earth as a sign of its love.” The snail “hugs” the
earth in an intimate embrace. The corpse of the young man is sundered from
its grounding in the earth and thrown into the water. The snail, an amphibious
being, attaches itself to his body in the water. At the end, it is the snail that re-
establishes the instrumentalized corpse’s connection to the earth; the last view
of the corpse shows it half-submerged in the limen between land and water.
Besides, if the “life” of the dead man transfers itself to the snail, then its shell
represents a different sort of ethical relationship between the body and the
home. Sundered from its “human” body and reduced to merely a corporeal
shell by the brutal murder, the young man possibly finds a continued “life” by
housing himself in the home of the snail. This is not a form of anthropomorphism
in which the human is separated from the biosocial, but a much more subversive
take on the concept where the “human” and the “animal” are enmeshed in a dif-
ferent sort of interspecies affiliation and carnal intimacy. Unlike Basumatary’s
poem, SDBD does not end with a recognition of shared vulnerability. Instead,
the snail becomes a symbol of and material form of overliving – a dividend
and an extra beyond the brute facticity of mere life.
Two forms of “life,” thus are contrasted in the closure. On the one hand, there
is the “surplus value of life” epitomized by the dhemali of the children. There is a
surplus element of “energy or spirit” that vitalizes the children, make them other
than what they are. This excess is “felt as a palpable enthusiasm carrying a force
of induction, a contagious involvement” (Massumi 9–10). On the other hand, as
the figure of parabasis, we have the humbler presence of the snail, this “friend of
the soil” (Ponge), which gestures towards a different type of ethical relationship.
By contracting the presentation of the promise of survivance to this virtually
invisible, “low” animal form in the last sentence, SDBD leaves us with a trace
of creaturely survival. This is accentuated by the signing body of the snail,
which seemingly escapes the deathly circle of the necropolitical chakrabehu. It
leaves its slimy affects and signs behind on the earth, although the children do
not notice it. Moreover, as in the Tiwa tale of the kumjelekua, the snail survives
through its ability to endure and its patience. While the river’s real dan is not
directly recognized, through its invisible and unacknowledged gift, SDBD ges-
tures towards the potentialities of survivance – towards other modes of existence
and possibilities of life that endure at the edges and margins of a deathworld.
Notes
1 The status of the short story is different in these two literary traditions. The relationship
between long and short fiction is very different when we compare vernacular traditions
with South Asian Europhone ones (see Pravinchandra). Mary Louise Pratt points out
that in Europhone contexts the genre has a “reputation of a training or practice
genre, for both apprentice writers and apprentice readers” (“The Short Story” 180).
This asymmetrical relationship between the short story and the novel is also noticeable
in the Anglophone literary tradition from Northeast India as many writers, for example
Jahnavi Baruah, have “graduated” from short to long fiction. Baruah’s first publication
was the short story collection Next Door (2008). She came into the spotlight with her
debut novel, Rebirth (2011), which was feted in the award circuit. Ao remains the
notable exception in this oeuvre of writing, as she hasn’t published a novel yet.
In contrast, while Assamese writers like Indira Goswami are known both for their
novels and short fiction, important authors such as Manorama Das Medhi and Jehirul
Hussain are known almost exclusively for the latter genre alone. These examples
show that while the inability to develop the great “national” fictional art form – the
novel – is often viewed as a “literary failure” (New 24) in many Europhone contexts,
the robust health of the “fragmentary” genre of the short story in non-Europhone tradi-
tions like the Assamese reveal different histories, reading publics and readerly invest-
ments. In the Assamese case, material factors influencing publication and distribution,
the role of literary journals in disseminating short stories, and the influence of local
genres like the sadhukotha have accorded the short story a comparable status to the
novel.
2 Also see Marculescu.
3 Also see Spivak, “Ethics and Politics” (19).
4 Sterne refers to the political theology of hearing that has been contrasted, often unfa-
vorably, with the ocular realm. He refers to the components of the “audiovisual litany”
as: “hearing immerses its subject, vision offers a perspective; sound comes to us, but
vision travels to its object; hearing is concerned with interiors, vision is concerned with
surfaces . . . hearing tends towards subjectivity, vision tends towards objectivity” (15
and passim).
5 “Acousmatic” means a voice without a body.
6 This reference to the “Original Dog” comes from a Naga myth. In “From the Heart,”
Kikon writes:
They [dogs] also feature centrally in the most famous origin myth about the Naga
script, which is connected to identity and language. According to legend, a dog
ate the Naga script written down on animal skin, and from that day onwards,
Naga tradition and knowledge has only been received and shared orally.
7 For a recent consideration of cryptozoological entities like were-tigers in Naga socie-

ties, see Heneise.
8 I translated this story.
9 Choudhuri’s epic poem is a colonial-era reworking of a long line of badh-kabyas that
can be traced back to a contemporary of Sankardev named Ram Saraswati.
10 See Benveniste for a discussion of the Hittite/Indo-Iranian root dō. As Benveniste
notes, this could mean both “give” or “take” depending on the construction. While
this paradoxical combination of giving and taking is missing in the figuration of the
Dhansiri river, an important dani in SDBD, rivers functions as both givers and
takers in Assamese fictions on floods like Syed Abdul Malik’s Surajmukhir Swapna
(Dreams of the Sunflower).
11 This practice of throwing coins en route to the cremation ground can be traced back to
the Rajasthani custom of Bakher in which when a rich person dies coins are scattered
all the way from the house to the cremation ground while the poor pick up coins. The
Marwaris trace their origins to Rajasthan.
12 These theses about the vulnerability of dead bodies are not generalizable. A counter-
example from Assamese fiction is Yeshe Thengche Dorjee’s novel Saav Kata Manuh
(The Man Who Dismembered Corpses). This novel is about the life of an Ao Thampa of
the Monpa community residing in Arunachal Pradesh. Ao Thampas are entrusted with
the task of ceremonially dismembering dead bodies into 108 pieces and immersing these
body parts into the river. The dismemberment of dead bodies is not a case of “radical
helplessness,” but a practice of ritual consecration.
13 See Das Life and Words, 48 for a distinction between good and bad deaths.
14 For a detailed overview of cross-cultural representations of the snail, see Williams.
15 A slug, as Williams reminds us, is a snail without a shell (13–14).
16 Another Assamese poet who uses snails occasionally as images in his romantic poems
is Nilim Kumar. However, the references in his poems are too fleeting for detailed con-
sideration here.
17 For discussions of snails see Randall, Mandel, Muecke and Berlatsky.
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169
5 Being-as-following
Modalities of survival and relationality
in An Outline of a Republic and
Felanee
Introduction
In this chapter I pair Siddhartha Deb’s English novel An Outline of the Republic
and Arupa Patangia Kalita’s Assamese fiction Felanee. I paired these two texts
because they are both amenable to allegorical readings. Outline positions itself
as an allegory with global scope with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and
Lord Jim as its intertexts. In a nod to Conrad, the hypodiegetic narrative
(which centers on a British World War II soldier named Jim) is titled “Eastern
Eyes.” Joining a global line of rewrites of Heart of Darkness, Outline reorients
the metropole–colony dichotomy into the post-colonial cartography of mainland–
borderland. Critical works on the Northeast Indian region often emphasize the
transformation of the colonial frontier into a post-colonial borderland. The specters
of comparison instituted between the colonial and post-colonial dispensations
using Conrad’s novels as intertext harken back to the narrative of movement
from frontier to borderland, while emphasizing the intimate connections between
modes of governmentality that unite both the colony and the post-colony. To
be sure, the major difference between Heart of Darkness and Outline is that
while Marlow evinces a great degree of horror and dread at the possibility of
being absorbed into the orbit of the colonized other, Amrit Singh, the mainland
protagonist of Deb’s novel, like Atanu in AJ, has transformative encounters
with the borderland other during his journey through a space he initially considers
a heart of darkness. This facilitates a radical reframing of his idea of selfhood and
his acceptance of the gifts given by others. Hence, Outline – while it inserts itself
within a global narrative chain that shows the continuities between modes of
governing colonial frontiers and post-colonial borderlands – is also a revisionist
post-colonial allegory that demonstrates how the subject’s ethical failure at
refashioning his perceived image of self opens him to the unanticipated gifts
given by disavowed others.
Recognizing the allegory in Felanee requires familiarity with Assam’s necro-
political historical “text” from the 1980s–2000s. The text encompasses major his-
torical events such as the Assam Agitation, the rise of the United Liberation Front
of Assam (ULFA), the Bodo nationalist movement, the atrocities carried out by
the SULFA (surrendered ULFA militants) and the period of the secret killings.1
170 Being-as-following 170
The titular character is an allegorical representative of multiethnic existence in a
state that has been brutally “thrown away” to the margins by the terror and vio-
lence unleashed by agents of necropolitics in Assam. This is evident from Fela-
nee’s hybrid genealogy and her frequent ruminations on the life-sustaining
aspects of Assam’s multiethnic ethos of manabata. This view of shared coexis-
tence relegated to the margins is not a simple recourse to nostalgia about a pre-
lapsarian past, but a powerful allegorization of the potentiality of a future
community-to-come. However, the narrative prosthesis that enables the allegory
of a “healthy” society – with the eponymous Felanee as its exemplar – to emerge
in the novel takes shape only through a contrast with and gradual disqualification
of the disabled character, Sumala. This represents Felanee’s biggest ethical lim-
itation, although I consider it to be a powerful feminist text of survival overall.
While allegorical interpretations of these two texts are unavoidable, what inter-
ests me in both are those moments when the allegorical frame is ruptured to
reveal quotidian dimensions of survival, modes of being-with others and emer-
gent intimations of the political in necropolitical zones. I wager that these quotid-
ian dimensions of survival are revealed in the texts through the agency of things.
Till this point in CL, I have used “thing” more in the senses of objectification and
dehumanization. To be reduced to a thing, in this sense, is to be acted upon as a
passive object. Here though, I contend with the vitalizing materiality of things.
Things are actants, and in both texts, human subjects follow their lead and
allure.2 This aspect of following the lead of things exposes modes of relationality
that either remake or solidify the representation of the primary protagonists as
ethico-political agents. Thus, in Outline, Amrit, the mainland Indian protagonist,
is initially allured by a photograph of an abjected Manipuri woman named Leela.
Amrit travels through his post-colonial heart of darkness in search of Leela’s story.
During his journey through the borderlands, his view of the periphery changes
congruently with his shifting perceptions of the photograph. Initially, the photo-
graph appears as an embalmed casing that houses a form of the living dead:
Leela’s abjected bodily posture. However, the photograph is slowly vitalized as
Amrit journeys through the borderlands. He notices aspects in the photograph,
the supposedly abject woman’s agency and the complexities in the borderland
mise-en-scene that he hadn’t witnessed or been aware of earlier. This changed rela-
tionship to the increasingly vitalized thing is the central node for the remaking of
Amrit’s sense of self. He lets go of his desire for masculinist self-sovereignty and
instead embraces the risks of what I will call “ethical failure.” While Outline
remains bound within a predominantly masculinist vision, Amrit manages to
briefly glimpse alternative, nongovernmental forms of the political helmed by
Leela and her comrades at the end.
Felanee conjoins the aspect of following things with an exploration of natality
and relationality. Feminist versions of relational ontology, especially the work of
Adriana Cavarero, place emphasis on the gifts and legacies of the oftentimes
unknowable past. Both Hannah Arendt (Cavarero’s major philosophical inspira-
tion) and Cavarero herself place the question of natality as the fundamental figure
for politics. In The Human Condition, Arendt writes:
speaking in terms of existential modalities, the difference between, or the
opposition of, Politics and Philosophy, is equivalent to the difference
between, or the opposition of, Birth and Death; or in conceptual terms, to
the opposition between Natality and Mortality. Natality is the fundamental
condition of every living-together and thus of every politics; Mortality is
the fundamental condition of thought, in so far as thought refers itself to
something that is as it is and is for itself.
(cited in Cavarero Relating, 28)
Cavarero’s feminist reformulation of Arendtian positions pushes the question of

natality into the domains of relationality and recognition of vulnerability. She
writes that Arendt’s theoretical horizon “makes birth into a phenomenal scene
capable of conferring upon identity its expressive, contextual and relational
status” (Relating, 28). Every newborn, she argues, is unique, immediately expres-
sive, exposed to others, and vulnerable in the sense that it can be both wounded
and cared for. Therefore, Cavarero argues, the infant is the exemplary figure of
both the unique existent and of vulnerability. Furthermore, this conceptualization
of the relational self shows that the story of one’s emergence as a subject emerges
through the telling of an-other. Cavarero calls this the “ethic of the gift” in the act
of relating narratives. In other words, the very constitution of the “I”-as-self is a
gift that I inherit from others within a relational field.
We have already seen one version of this ethic of the gift in my reading of “The
Last Song.” “The Last Song” is predicated on the relational aspects of sociocul-
tural systems where in modes of oral narration still thrive. This oral aspect does
not take center stage in Felanee. In Felanee, the titular protagonist starts life as
an infant who is inadvertently “thrown away” as her mother, Ratnamala, is
killed in a brutal outbreak of ethno-nationalist violence. Thus, there is an imme-
diate loss of origin in Felanee’s case as she is sundered from the realm of oral
transmission that passes from grandmother to mother to daughter. I mention
“grandmother” because Felanee’s grandmother, Jutimala, dies mysteriously after
a transgressive relationship with a person from a different tribe and a lower
caste. Ratnamala, too, marries a man from a different community, and is killed
with her husband when their community is targeted during a riot. In the absence
of her forbearers, how does Felanee access the pasts that she has never seen?
This is where the agency of things come in. All that Felanee possesses as memo-
rials to her grandmother and mother, both of whom she had never seen, are a few
pieces of jewelry, which was in the safekeeping of kindly neighbors and was
passed on to her when she grows up. As she touches and caresses the jewelry
during moments of reverie or is allured by them inadvertently, her imagination
is transported back to the vitalizing dimensions of visions of multiethnic coexis-
tence that forms of necropolitical terror have sundered in the present. These
acts of following the leads of ordinary things left as gifts by others reveals the
gradual formation of Felanee as an ethical subject. She adheres to the ethical
framework of manabata; although she was thrown away, she refuses to throw
anyone away.
Felanee’s ethical openness to the calls of others and her capacity for affective
labor also facilitate her eventual emergence as a biopolitical subject. I am oper-
ating with a slightly different idea of biopower/politics than Michel Foucault’s
idea of the governance of life. Michael Hardt writes:
Affective labor is better understood by beginning from what feminist analy-

ses of “women’s work” call “labor in the bodily mode.” Caring labor is
almost entirely immersed in the corporeal, the somatic, but the affects it pro-
duces are necessarily immaterial. What affective labor produces are social
networks, forms of community, biopower.
(“Affective Labor” 96)
Foucault, Hardt argues, sees biopower only as an imposition from above by agen-
cies of sovereignty. However, aligning his concept with work in feminist theory,
Hardt posits a “biopower from below” – forms of cooperative relationships that
“produce and reproduce life” (99). Felanee illustrates this form of collective bio-
political production, as a multiethnic cast of women surviving in necropolitical
zones remake their ordinary through forms of affective and material labor. The
central node of this emergent biopolitical community is Felanee: her ethical
stance towards the calls of others enables her to imagine and concretize forma-
tions of female biopolitical collectivity.
The act of watching with one’s own eyes: “strange recognitions”

in An Outline of the Republic
Contemporary developments in feminist narratology emphasize that the hostility
often expressed towards poststructuralist articulations of non-narrativizable and
clearly demarcated beginnings reveals a fear, as Butler says, that “the absence
of narrative will spell a . . . threat . . . of a certain kind of death . . . of the condi-
tions of [a subject’s] own emergence” (Giving, 65). In contrast, articulations of
relational forms of narrative and subjectivity stress the importance of forms of
connection and accountability that cannot always be sufficiently narrated or the-
matized. Such relational forms herald not the death of subjectivity as such, but
rather the overcoming of a phantasmatic image of the sovereign subject – what
Judith Butler calls “a fantasy of impossible mastery . . . a loss of what one
never had” (Giving, 65).
In this section, I use “sovereign” in two ways. I refer both to political modalities
that seek to contain the exercise of power in the socialized fantasy of a “unitary”
center, and to imaginaries of well-defined, autonomous forms of subjectivity.
These two modes often operate hand-in-hand and authoritatively demarcate
clear beginnings and ends in certain types of narrative form. I will further
analyze how Outline – a work that has intertextual resonances with Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim – illustrates the death of “a fantasy of impossible
mastery” both in the political and the subjective senses. Such narratives of subjec-
tive “death” and dissolution, as in Outline, inaugurate possibilities of alternative
potentialities of being-with others in social ecologies that begin to resemble
deathworlds.
Outline, I wager, houses itself within and simultaneously deconstructs the nar-
rative codes of the colonial/post-colonial masculinist quest narrative – a sover-
eign narrative form par excellence. The gradual process of the dissolution of
fantasies of self-sovereignty desired by Outline’s narrator proceeds simulta-
neously with the increasing visibility within the textual space of other forms of
subjectivity and collectivity. In this staging of narrative dissolution, the male nar-
rator, hailing from mainland India, slowly begins to recognize alternative modal-
ities of being and seeing as he travels through India’s northeastern borderlands.
The narrator, Amrit, begins his journey with the intention of piecing together
the story of a Manipuri woman named Leela. Amrit is haunted by a photograph
of Leela being publicly humiliated by agents of sovereign power. Leela, he
assumes, has been relegated to an abject, mute state of death-in-life. He considers
it his burden to speak for her – a process, he hopes, that will enable him to
subsume her story as “my” story (18). However, as he gradually opens himself
to the demands expressed by the supposedly mute Leela, he manages to
produce a different account of self that moves away from the narcissistic impli-
cations of “my” story. Furthermore, the narrative autocritique of the desire to
produce a sovereign “I” helps Amrit recognize alternative forms of action and
spaces of the political that were invisible to him at the beginning of his journey.
As may be evident by now, many cultural productions from or set in India’s
northeast illustrate that the exceptional exercise of sovereign power does not
always necessitate the debilitation of action and world-making. Sometimes, sub-
jects and populations that are abandoned and exposed to death and dispossession
manage to frame singular forms of action and collectivity. These forms challenge
dominant narrative codes that reproduce what Jacques Ranciere calls the “order
of the visible and the sayable” (29). Therefore, to explore such alternative poten-
tialities of survivance we need to attend to what lies betwixt and beyond the
immediately perceptible level of the visible and the sayable. Outline, I believe,
manages to perform this task very effectively even though it is eventually con-
strained by the fact that the shift in the order of the visible and the sayable
occurs only at the level of individual subjectivity and does not move towards
collectivity.
Being and seeing in Outline

Outline and Bijoya Sawian’s novel Shadow Men are slightly distinct texts in the
corpus of Anglophone texts from the region because they narrate how mainland
Indian citizen-subjects, who fantasize about autonomy and self-sovereignty,
begin to contend ethically and politically with forms of collectivity and action
beyond the order of visible and the sayable. Furthermore, the intertextual parallels
between Outline and Heart of Darkness illustrate that the formal end of colonial-
ism does not necessitate the dismantling of colonizing structures of governance in
post-colonial locales. Deb writes that Conrad felt the desire “to show what existed
beneath the visible surface of things, even if his discovery did not always lead to
the most insightful of conclusions” (Deb, “Near” 19). This desire to “show what
existed beneath” resonates with the alternative title of the non-U.S. edition of
Deb’s novel – Surface – as well as the spatial metaphor in “outline.” Outline
explores the paradoxes inherent in the oppositions of surfaces and depths, of
being seen and becoming invisible in the post-colony. Indeed, this desire to see
beyond the immediate order of the visible and the sayable is also “outlined”
by one of the epigraphs to the novel (taken from Heart of Darkness) – “Do
you see the story? Do you see anything?”
Unsurprisingly, ocular metaphors abound in Outline. The four parts of the book
are titled “Shadows,” “Darkness,” “Light” and “Fire.” These ocular metaphors that
seemingly gesture towards a teleological culmination of a quest are, however,
slowly deconstructed as the plot progresses. Amrit, Outline’s narrator, is a frus-
trated middle-aged journalist. He unearths a forgotten, six-month-old photograph
of Leela in the “morgue” (the basement) of his newspaper, the Sentinel’s, office in
Calcutta. From the very beginning, thus, Leela is presented as a form of death-in-
life that the male narrator wants to liberate from a crypt. In the photograph, Leela
is seated with an expressionless face, flanked by two masked gunmen. She had
been disciplined by an independentist militant group named Movement to Resus-
citate the Liberation Struggle (MORLS) that accused her of being a porn actress
and a representative of Indian imperialism. Amrit also discovers a memoir on the
northeastern Indian front of World War II written by Euan Sutherland, the editor of
the Sentinel’s colonial-era predecessor, The Imperial. Sutherland narrates his
encounters with a British soldier named Jim during the Japanese invasion of the
eastern frontier of the British Empire from 1942 to 1944. This hypodiegetic nar-
rative – based on Lord Jim – is slowly filtered to us in fragments as Amrit reads
Sutherland’s memoirs during his journey across the borderlands.
The discovery of the two things in the morgue leads Amrit to accept the offer of
a shady German stringer named Herman, who wants him to write an exemplary
story on India’s “misery.” Herman suggests that Amrit’s initial leads could be a
good story with “sex, violence, political turmoil, the remoteness of the border,
with the World War II campaign . . . like a heavy, detailed backdrop in an old
painting” (37). Amrit’s subsequent quest has two goals: to unearth Leela’s story,
and to seize the circumstances and shape a unique role for himself. His self-per-
ception of his life as without shape and meaning could be shaped anew (33). This
quest leads Amrit to travel through the northeastern Indian states of Assam, Naga-
land and Manipur, and into Myanmar. As Amrit proceeds deeper into his “heart of
darkness” he is intrigued by the Kurtz-like figure of Malik, his grandiose plans for
a development program labeled the “Prosperity Project” and by the latter’s con-
nection with Leela’s predicament. Amrit never meets Malik as he is kidnapped
and killed by MORLS before Amrit reaches Manipur. Amrit returns from the bor-
derland without meeting Leela, either. Back in Calcutta, he discovers that Herman
was probably a member of an evangelical church. The text closes in an open-
ended fashion with Amrit relinquishing his desire to write Leela’s story and
walking in the enveloping darkness towards the Hooghly river.
In her study of colonial-era quest romances, Mary Louise Pratt analyzes the pro-
cesses through which such texts produce the self-effacing subject-positions of
“anti-conquest” narratives (75–78). For Pratt, the subject of such narratives travel-
ing to the imperial frontier is usually a male, middle-class character who represents
himself as an innocent, passive and “non-interventionist . . . presence” (78). While
the egalitarianism of this passive, self-effacing subject-position offers certain pos-
sibilities of critique, it never directly interrogates the hegemonic power formation’s
“authenticity, power and legitimacy” because it is heavily invested in the frame-
work of the education and reformation of an individual self (84). On the surface,
Outline resembles this narrative framework of the “anti-conquest” narrative,
which it repeats in the mainland–borderland locale in the post-colony. Although
Outline seems to mimic this structure, it ends up deconstructing it from within.
Amrit’s gradual recognition of other(s) and the “wisdom” he gleans from them
does not coincide with the fulfillment of the task he sets himself: publishing the
story behind the situation represented in the photograph or meeting Leela. More-
over, since the closure is left open-ended, we cannot be certain that the desired
process of the metamorphosis of the individual self is completed. Deb emphasized
Amrit’s “failure” in a personal communication with me. Deb wrote that he
was . . . interested in the idea of failure, in Amrit’s inability at the end to con-
clude his set tasks or to even immerse himself fully in the struggles of these
remote borderlands. The easy, romantic but dishonest choice would have
been to make him feel solidarity, the more realistic and cynical choice
would have been to make him feel that the struggles didn’t matter.
Deb’s reflections on Amrit’s “failures,” I think, share elective affinities with

Butler’s reflections on narrative and accountability. For Butler, “ethical failure”
is a counter to a certain ethical violence that accrues from any illusory investment
in the notion of a radically autonomous self (21). To accept the risk of such failure
is to expose oneself to a field of relationalities and modes of obligation to
the demands of unacknowledged others, even in cases where the particular self
was not directly complicit with the abandonment and abjection of the other (12).
In Outline, Amrit’s process of unmooring himself slowly from his initial desire
for self-sovereignty is facilitated by his ability to embrace, albeit partially, the risk-
laden demands of the supposedly mute subaltern – Leela. However, the question of
the wisdom Amrit possibly attains via his ethical failure(s) seems to be rather inde-
terminate as it does not impel him to immerse himself fully in the struggles of the
borderlanders or even to write an account of Leela’s tribulations. We do, however,
notice that a far subtler change does occur in Amrit’s perceptions of self. Initially,
Amrit wants to make Leela’s story “my” story. His journey into the “periphery” in
search of Leela is conjoined with the project of writing a desired version of his self.
However, Amrit’s relationship to Leela’s story passes from stages of narcissistic
identification (she is his “sister,” his “double” waiting for him at the edge of the
republic) to an eventual receptivity to her suffering that is very different in
nature from the fantasies he initially projects on the photograph of the supposedly
abject woman. The eventual revelation of Leela’s actions, both before and after her
public humiliation, brings about a “strange recognition” in Amrit. To be sure, this
awareness does not propel him from the claustrophobic horizon of his “I” to the
collective, political dimension of a “we.” However, borrowing from Butler, we
can say that Amrit learns to give “an account of himself” as opposed to his
initial project of “telling a story about oneself” (Butler 12). This process of
giving an account of himself leads him to recognize that Leela had “faith” and
sense of selfhood that he lacked (Deb 306).
In addition, I wager that the political dimension of the “strange recognitions”
facilitated by Amrit’s ability to gradually acknowledge the demands of the suppo-
sedly mute subaltern leads to his ability to distinguish “policing” from “politics.”
For Ranciere, policing refers to “the set of procedures whereby the aggregation
and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribu-
tion of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution” (28).
Policing here should not be identified solely with the state-apparatus, but rather as
an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing . . . being,

and . . . saying, . . . it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees
that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is
understood as discourse and another as noise.3
(29)
A heavily militarized state of emergency and sovereign imaginaries that produce

and sustain images of this region as a locale of permanent war expose a particular
order of the visible and the sayable for Amrit. His encounters with apparatuses and
discourses of policing fuse with his reception of Leela’s story and make him recog-
nize that political action “makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes
heard a discourse where . . . there was only place for noise” (30). It is true that Leela
haunts most of the narrative as a mute signifier in a photograph. We never actually
see her in the flesh. But we hear her disembodied voice in two of her letter frag-
ments and are also privy to an account of some of her political actions after her sup-
posed reduction to abject muteness. Through these, we learn that Leela embraces
the potentialities of survivance after the symbolic death that the patriarchal sover-
eign economy seeks to consign her to. Eventually, Leela’s “faith” in the possibilities
of overlife makes Amrit more receptive to the political struggles of the borderlan-
ders. Thus, the recalibration of Amrit’s ethical and political viewpoints occurs
simultaneously during his journey. The next two sections will flesh out the processes
through which the recalibration of Amrit’s ethico-political stances is set into oper-
ation in Outline. I will also explore the connection of these recalibrations with
the portrayal of how Amrit begins to give an account of himself.
Police stories
Before traveling through the borderlands, Amrit views the northeastern region as
spatially distant and frontier-like. No story taking place in that region, he says,
seemed complete (Deb 9). He also blocks out noises in his post-colonial heart of
darkness. For instance, Amrit witnesses the funeral of a slain ex-militant named
Santanu on his very first day in the northeast. He notices a lone woman at the
funeral. The woman – Santanu’s fiancée – later beseeches him to write a story
on this death. Santanu was a surrendered militant who extorted money for her
father. Santanu and her father were also business partners, and it was the latter
who arranged her marriage with him. However, Santanu’s utility had soon dimin-
ished for her father and the politicians who initially protected him. Eventually,
her father connived in Santanu’s assassination. Amrit runs away from her
demands because he is more interested in pursuing the story of the “exotic”
female in the photograph. This story – promising sex, violence and political
turmoil – fits into a regime of visibility and a perpetuation of an image of the bor-
derland as a “formation of power endowed with a characteristic sensory life”
(Mbembe, Critique 106). In contrast, Santanu’s story represents a form of mere
background noise that the reporter going elsewhere for an important story has
no time to investigate (72).
This proto-colonialist view on noise, an echo of the “incomprehensible”
noises made by the natives in Heart of Darkness, slowly begins to change as
Amrit moves further into the periphery. Close encounters with technologies of
rule such as checkpoints and border-posts expose the relentless policing of bor-
derland space. Moreover, Amrit also confronts the discourses that sustain an
image of the “miraculous” dimensions of sovereign subjectivity, epitomized in
the portrayal of Malik, Outline’s Kurtz. These encounters with the technologies
of policing and the allure of sovereign subjectivity slowly reveal a “set of pro-
cedures . . . [for] . . . the organization of powers . . . [and] . . . the distribution of
places and roles,” in this peripheral space. In this respect, the representation
of the checkpoint is crucial. While border-posts demarcate an inside/outside
dichotomy for the nation-state, the specular logic of the checkpoint blurs these
boundaries within its territory. A checkpoint is framed by a “map of anticipa-
tion” that attempts to neutralize the possibility of insurrectionary violence
against the state. Pradeep Jeganathan says that the checkpoint’s temporal logic
is that of the future anterior: it is the point that “acknowledges the emergent
quality of violence without producing a normalization that is also its effacement”
(74). By subjecting oneself to a search at the checkpoint, the citizen-subject posi-
tions his/her “political affiliation in terms of alliance or enmity” to the state and
works through his/her own subjection. The borderland territory Amrit makes his
journey through is pockmarked with checkpoints. Negotiating these checkpoints
is a practice of everyday life for borderland subjects, thus stipulating a code of
behavior. In contrast, here is Amrit’s first experience of a checkpoint manned by
a mobile army patrol:
Most knew the routine already: the men climbed off the bus . . . leaving their
bags behind, their hands empty and faces blank. . . . they formed a loose line,
not looking at me as I joined them, still holding my bag.
(205–6)
When the bus is stopped by the army patrol, most passengers already know the
form of subjection expected of them. They climb off the bus, leaving their bags
behind, their hands empty and their faces impassive. Jeganathan characterizes
the modes of subjection at the checkpoint as a “double play” – the soldier and
the person checked must “agree on the resultant answer of the irreducible play
between citizen and subject” (79). If this play of recognition is interrupted,
the subject is liable to be detained by the agents of sovereign governmentality.
In this case, which provokes Amrit’s bewilderment, the play between the
citizen and the subject is interrupted. Amrit, a mainland subject unused to the
protocols of borderland checkpoints keeps his bag with him, provoking the sol-
dier’s ire. The soldier shouts at him. By the time Amrit goes through the next
checkpoint, this play has been internalized. He complies with a “detached”
air, not reacting to the humiliation of a young man who is ordered to strip
naked in the cold air (207).
An incident that occurs immediately after the first checkpoint also makes Amrit
cognizant of the racialization of space in a post-colonial Indian context. A
common racial stereotype associated with northeasterners in India is that they
look more “Oriental” and hence different from “mainland” Indians. They are
imagined as part of what Baruah calls the “Mongolian Fringe,” a stereotypical
view that has a long colonial genealogy. Perceptions of corporeal-racial differ-
ence have also led to incidents of violence against northeasterners in urban
centers like Delhi and Bangalore in contemporary times (McDuie-Ra Race and
Racism, Debating Race). This fact of racial difference is exposed in the check-
point incident. When the soldier starts shouting at Amrit and scatters his belong-
ings, he is unable to accept his humiliation without resisting. Addressing the
soldier in Hindi, Amrit demands to know who his commanding officer is. This
use of Hindi combined with his physical appearance (his “big, Northern face”),
which marks him as racially different from his fellow passengers, intimidates
the soldier, and Amrit is let go. Amrit marvels at how “things had been overrid-
den by my features and the Hindi I spoke” (207). This encounter underscores the
specular logic of these practices of security for Amrit. The soldier lets Amrit go
because of two elements that mark his body as racially different from the border-
land subject: his ethnicity and his language. The counterpoint of the racialized
body that is stopped at checkpoints is provided later by the Burmese dissident’s
account (Amrit meets him at the border town of Moreh at the India–Myanmar
border) of his experiences in India: the Indian soldiers “did not distinguish
between his face and that of the Indian hill tribals” (287–88). Through these
encounters, Amrit notices how different “bodies inhabit space, and . . . the racia-
lization of bodily as well as social space” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics 111).
Such encounters with practices predicated on race-thinking align with the
gradual revelation of the hollow core of the “miraculous” dimension of coloniz-
ing subjectivity. The representation of Malik is crucial here. There are several
points in the plot where Malik, like Kurtz, is described as an artist and a
genius. Malik’s distinguishing feature, like Kurtz’s, is the acousmatic trace of
his voice. Like Kurtz, the hollow man called Malik constructs an elaborate
façade, ironically called the Prosperity Project, that serves as a glossy “surface”
camouflaging other activities such as printing counterfeit notes. Whether it is the
counterfeiting of official notes or the staging of Leela’s chastisement by MORLS,
Malik’s activities are an example of the artist who believed in seizing the circum-
stances and shaping a role in the flux. The emphasis on shaping is crucial because
the borderlands, like colonial frontiers, are perceived as formless, anarchic spaces
by many mainland subjects, including Amrit at the beginning of the narrative.
Race-thinking and the frontier mentality thus fuse together to produce this
region as exotic and other from the mainland. This mentality is evident in sugges-
tions of the Indian army officer, Captain Das’s, to Amrit. Thinking, he says, has to
be “fluid” in such a turmoil-ridden area. Opportunities for remaking the mainland
self are more available than the constraints that bedevil life in the mainland. Das
continues: “you must accept this, the absence of old rules and the ability to make
new ones . . . the feeling of almost being free from gravity” (Deb 223).
The absence of old rules and the ability to make new ones invokes the topos of
an unrestrained “state of nature.” In the Indian sovereign imaginary, the north-
eastern borderlands often represent an area of great turmoil where a Hobbesian
war of all against all supposedly continues unabated. This topos also lies at the
root of the mythic stature endowed to Malik by some characters in the text.
Here, for instance, is what a government official tells Amrit about Malik early
on: “a man who is a remarkable thinker. . . . A creator of order in the wilderness,
a messenger of hope for an area plunged in darkness” (42–43). For Captain Das,
Malik was an “artist,” who understood the power that images possess (226–27).
Implicit in such pronouncements is a political theology that predicates that sov-
ereign subjectivity should be envisaged as a decisionist act of “miraculous”
dimensions. Referring to this miraculous dimension of colonizing subjectivity,
Achille Mbembe says that it is “a subjectivity seeing itself as absolute but
which, to experience that absolute, must constantly reveal it to itself by creating,
destroying, and desiring the thing . . . that it has previously summoned into exis-
tence” (On The Postcolony, 189). The colonial frontiers and the post-colonial
borderland are similar worlds of “limitless subjectivity” for presumed god-like
sovereign agents like Malik. Malik’s symbolic actions establish an illusory
form-of-law in this “war-ridden” space. Through his faith in the power of
images, Malik demonstrates an acute awareness of the empty space where the
law originates and the autonomy of the sovereign decision comes into view.
Both the government and the independentist militias are attracted to Malik’s
aura because he seemingly possesses the key to the miraculous secret of sover-
eign subjectivity.
The aura of sovereign power exuded by Malik initially fascinates Amrit, even
though he says that he feels a sharp antagonism to Malik throughout his journey.
In the end, he becomes indifferent to Malik’s fate as the hollowness that lies
behind his glittering surface is exposed. This indifference to and critique of
Malik’s aura is evident when he says that Leela had a sense of self that the
vacuous Malik never thought worth possessing (306). This is where Outline sig-
nificantly rewrites the quest scenario presented in Heart of Darkness. During
his moment of “summing-up,” Marlow ambiguously suggests that he gains
“wisdom” from Kurtz (70). The colonized, represented as mute, noisy or half-
formed presences do not figure in this moment of summing-up. In contrast,
Amrit disavows his initial fascination with the proto-colonial figure and instead
begins to listen and “speak to” the borderlanders. Amrit, of course, realizes that
Malik will remain a legendary figure in the mainland. The symbolism embodied
in Malik has an enduring afterlife, a fact Amrit realizes during his final conver-
sation with the director of the German cultural center in Calcutta. The director
says that Malik seems to be an an amazing man for having managed the Pros-
perity Project so well. Amrit’s ironic reply, one of the closing lines in the
novel, illustrates how cynical he has become of the aura of sovereign subjectivity
at the end (317).
Overlife and survivance

For a text dominated by the glossy surface of images and image-makers with no
depth, it is crucial that the ethical imperative to write an account of oneself begins
when Amrit begins to follow the lead of an image in a photograph. Amrit’s even-
tual skepticism about sovereign subjectivity aligns with his gradual ability to
imaginatively “speak to” the subaltern in the narrative: Leela. At the beginning
of Outline, he identifies his personal fantasy of the passive nature of his self
with the supposedly abject Leela’s situation of public humiliation. His enemy,
Amrit says, “was within” as he did not know how to act on the impulses that
seethed inside him (5). He desperately grasps at the chance of unearthing
Leela’s story because he feels that he will finally be able to narrate a coherent
story about himself. But, at the end, the person who wants to tell Leela’s story
as his-story ends up giving an account of himself.4 Even though he doesn’t
meet Leela in person, Amrit eventually relinquishes his desire to reduce her sin-
gular story to a version of his own. His growing discomfort with this desire is
already evident during his bus journey to Moreh on the Indo-Myanmar border:
“My sense of unease deepened as I considered the woman I would be talking
to . . . someone who had Leela’s name and personal history but was . . . far
removed from the character I had built up” (271). At the end, he abandons the
project of framing Leela’s story altogether. This “failure” culminates in his narra-
tive dissolution in the last scene; like Atanu in AJ, it is as if he accepts the risks of
living-on with a fragmented notion of self.
In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak famously argues that when
the subaltern does speak, we often do not have the frameworks to recognize
such articulations as forms of resistant speech. To return to Amrit’s initial situa-
tion, his inability to acknowledge the subaltern’s demand is evident in his
first reactions to Leela’s photograph. Photographs, Victor Burgin says, are
usually deployed such that we don’t look at them for long: to “remain long
with a single image is to risk the loss of our imaginary command of the look,
to relinquish it to the absent other to whom it belongs” (152). By no longer
receiving our look, the image assures us of our founding centrality. In the
beginning, Amrit reassures himself of his subjective centrality by barely glanc-
ing at Leela’s photograph.
Amrit’s perception of the photograph, however, changes character as he pro-
ceeds deeper into the borderlands. In the first two instances when the photo-
graph appears, Amrit says that Leela has no expression on her face (34–35,
64–65). The scenario is described in the second instance: Leela is wearing a
traditional-looking skirt and is flanked by two men with their masked heads
and torsos visible. However, there are significant differences in the description
of the photograph when it makes its appearance next (84–86). Prolonged con-
templation on the photograph invites frustration for Amrit. At this point,
Amrit’s gaze is diverted towards the scene’s construction. The camera’s flash
renders the woman’s complexion much lighter than the men, making it seem
as if she were of a different ethnicity. Significantly, Amrit begins to perceive
a latent narrative in the photograph. She was “slender” and seemed to be in
her early twenties. But her face seemed to possess “a wariness” that hid some-
thing and put her beyond the reach of the men who had put her up “for display.”
Amrit now spots an “alertness” and a “lack of embarrassment” in the woman’s
eyes, as she seems to be defying the predatory gaze of the camera and the men
behind the camera (85).
For Roland Barthes, a punctum is a minor detail, a “partial object” in a photo-
graph that captivates the subject’s attention. But this captivation by a minor detail,
he suggests, intensely mutates the viewer’s interest as the detail seems to rise of
its “own accord into affective consciousness” (42). Amrit’s captivation by the
small details he notices in the picture begins to transform the hitherto living-
dead figure into an animated being that issues a demand, much like the photo-
graph of the mother in Hussain’s SDBD. Amrit’s subjective perception of the
punctum in the photograph helps him discern that Leela’s wary face issues a
demand to the photographer and the viewers who look at that photograph in
the future. Her intelligence, wariness and alertness ostensibly belie any percep-
tion of her as an abject-object. To be sure, the photograph is a violation as it
was taken in a coerced state of dispossession. Nonetheless, the wariness and
the possible lack of embarrassment communicated by her gaze, revealed only
by Amrit’s careful and slow contemplation of the photograph, possibly constitute
her demand that her indignity be acknowledged.
Although Amrit’s desire to appropriate Leela’s story as his own does not dis-
sipate altogether after this episode, it changes how he looks at her significantly.
Instead of Leela being a depersonalized, abjected form of death-in-life, a narrative
slowly begins to emerge. Fragments of other aspects of this narrative filter
through to him during his journey through the northeastern states of Assam,
Nagaland and Manipur. But his “strange recognition” comes full circle when
he finally talks to Leela’s aunt in Imphal and manages to read extracts from
her letters. These letters – our only direct access to Leela’s voice – illuminate
a modality of being and acting for Amrit that is radically different from his
initial self-perceptions and the attendant apathy towards political and social
action. In a crucial segment from Leela’s letter fragment, she says that she
notices things people usually gloss over such as “the decrepit and the defeated
and the solitary, perhaps because I identify with these aspects.” Then, she narrates
the story of how she sees a Russian woman selling watches in the streets near
Janpath:
Her face is hard . . . the men passing by say she’s a prostitute and discuss how
much she would cost. Some of them crowd around her . . . try to touch her, so
that she has to stand with her arms straight out even if they hurt. Why do I
see these things and nurse them and take them home with me? . . . I must
leave Delhi.
(254–55, emphases mine)
Leela’s letter seems to draw upon the rhetoric of self-identification. But at a

crucial moment (the “I must”), she undercuts the “rhetoric of tears” into a “rhe-
toric of outrage” (Woodward 65–70). The response invited by Leela’s action is
complex; her outrage eventually becomes her way of refusing to inhabit the rhe-
torical space of privatized gestures of sympathy and pity. Instead, she leaves
Delhi to work at the Prosperity Project and is ready to defy Malik when she
learns that the project is a sham. Till the very end she continues to act, as illus-
trated by the testimony of the exiled Burmese medical students with whom she
collaborates after her public chastisement. Her cross-border collaboration with
the dissidents gives us a brief glimpse of the possibility of a transnational, non-
governmental space of the political. Dispossessed subjects from two post-colonial
nation-states (India and Myanmar) collaborate to work towards potential political
futures that are habitable. These actions reveal that Leela is not constrained by her
supposed reduction to the mute status of bare life. Instead, she draws upon the
resources of overlife – that surplus gift, which per Bonnie Honig, ought to
have died, but lives on.
How does Amrit respond to Leela’s gift? A segment where Amrit witnesses a
protest march that occurs immediately after his return to Imphal from the Indo-
Myanmar border provides a clue. It was a “strange recognition” for him – its
seemed as if a “touch of grace, of wisdom, had been conferred upon me by
Leela.” Imphal and the borderlands never “looked” as beautiful to him as it
did then. He begins to “see distinct, individual faces, some calm and resigned,
others that were not were here not just to defend some boundary or the other
but to show the uncaring, unheeding world that they existed and could not be for-
gotten” (309–10). The ocular metaphors that dominate this text begin to assume a
different attunement – one that is receptive to the difference of the other.
The “wisdom” Marlow gleans from his sojourn to his heart of darkness
remains famously ambiguous. But the “touch of grace, of wisdom” that Leela
and the students provide is of a different timbre. What seemed separated
earlier seems to be conjoined by this invocation of the haptic. The wisdom that
they relay helps Amrit see distinct, individual faces in what was perceived
earlier as a homogenized mass. The “surface”-level ocularcentric metaphors in
the earlier sections of the text are turned on their heads. Amrit begins to see what
the borderland subjects attempt to show to the world outside. What was perceived
as noise becomes gradually intelligible; what the I/eye glossed over earlier as
“incomplete” and “formless” begins to assume a different narrative framework.
Of course, Amrit does not immerse himself in the struggle of the borderlanders.
But doesn’t this passage reveal an exposure to a different way of seeing and
being-with others, one that acknowledges the ethical valences of failure, subjec-
tive dissolution and potential relationalities with the narratives of supposedly
invisible and mute others?
To be thrown away: survival as gift in Felanee

Like KG, Felanee is also a fictional recounting of the legacies of political terror in
Assam in the post-1980 era.5 However, there are three major differences between
these two Assamese texts. First, KG and the trilogy of which it is a part begin
roughly in the late 1980s and extend up to the mid-2000s. Felanee takes us
further back, to the early 1980s, and considers the violence wrought especially
on ethnic and linguistic minority communities during the Assam Agitation
(1979–1985) and after. Second, although KG privileges a middle-class perspec-
tive, its polyphonic structure enables it to explore the impact of political terror
across classes and social segments. Felanee focuses on the life and predicament
of a subaltern female character – the titular heroine of the novel. Felanee deploys
the titular character as the centralizing node to explore the lives and fortunes of a
multiethnic cast of characters who inhabit first a camp for displaced people and,
later, a basti (a word that can be translated as both as settlement and slum)
in a small town near the Bhutan border. Third, there is an allegorical component
to Felanee that is absent in KG. The titular character, whose name means “thrown
away,” becomes a figuration of what violence and terror “throws away” from
earlier manifestations of the good life.6
Felanee begins with a brief prehistory of the titular character. The first few
chapters narrate the story of Ratnamala and Jutimala, Felanee’s grandmother
and mother, both victims of violence. Ratnamala, an Assamese child widow,
has an affair with a Bodo man, is ostracized by her community and dies myste-
riously after giving birth to Jutimala. Jutimala, who marries a Bengali man named
Kshitish Ghosh, is killed during the language riots that occurred in Assam in the
1960s. During this occurrence of violence, her infant is thrown into a pond, but
survives – hence her name Felanee, or “thrown away.” The history of Felanee, the
character, begins with the ethno-nationalist violence that occurred during the
Assam Agitation in the early 1980s. Felanee’s husband, Lambodar, a person of
the Koch ethnicity, is decapitated during the violence and Felanee herself sur-
vives as an internally displaced person (IDP) in a camp with her son, Moni.7
With the help of a kind neighbor and relative named Bulen, Felanee moves to
a basti where she encounters a large cast of working-class female characters
of different ethnicities. Felanee manages to eke out a living by making and
selling moori (puffed rice) and murhas (seats made of bamboo) with the other
displaced women. She also manages to educate Moni somewhat. Felanee’s expe-
riences in the basti takes us through the ULFA years, the military operations, the
rise of the Bodo movement and the reign of terror perpetuated by the SULFA. By
the end of the novel, Moni is a young man. He becomes an expert chauffeur but is
captured by the army as he leads the members of the basti in a protest march. One
of Felanee’s final acts is to lead the women in a march and picketing of the army
cantonment, which sees Moni and the other detained people of the basti released.
The novel ends with Felanee and the other women cutting some kanhi reeds to
construct the roof of her house. A direct connection is instituted between the resil-
ience of the women and of the kanhi reeds that is cut and thrown away only to
regenerate again.
Critics praise Felanee’s meticulous attention to the lives and struggles of the
subaltern characters. Akhilranjan Dutta says that Felanee shows the intense strug-
gle conducted between the “macropolitical” domain and that of “micro-life and
livelihood” (37). Tilottama Misra suggests that texts like Felanee and Rita
Chowdhury’s Abiratra Jatra portray the “multi-cultural dimension” of Assamese
society, a source of great strength in the polity that has enabled it to cope with “all
kinds of social tension.” This strong, resilient fabric, she continues, has been
broken by militant movements based on ethnic difference. About the titular char-
acter, Tilottama Misra writes:
While trying to celebrate the heroism of the common people who possess
immense resilience and survive despite repeated catastrophes, the author
traces the process by which a timid and traumatized woman, a mere victim
of violence, ultimately emerges as a doer.
(251–52)
Dutta evades the literary qualities of the text and reads it more as a sociological
document. Tilottama Misra, who is more attuned to the literary, uses two teleo-
logical frames that I want to complicate further. The first teleology is present
in Felanee, although Misra does not pay attention to the crucial structural role
of disability as narrative prosthesis. I am referring to the declension narrative
of the “corruption” and “sickness” of a nostalgic picture of inter-community
harmony that is destroyed by ethnic violence. This narrative is predicated on a
contractualist idea of community formation in which an ideal consensus has sup-
posedly been achieved among different constituent parts of a community over
time. According to this narrative, what forms of violent, identitarian movements
do, is that their atomized imaginaries of self-formation and community breaks
down a wholesome, life-sustaining social contract of reciprocity and mutual coex-
istence. This breakdown in a contractualist social fantasy of mutual cohabitation
is viewed as an impairment or a form of death. In the novel, the concrete figura-
tion of living death, and later, actual death is Sumala. There is no way that
Sumala’s speech can appear between the space of her two deaths, as her cogni-
tively disabled condition is represented as an automatic foreclosure of forms of
humanized expression. Sumala’s symbolic overdetermination as disabled in the
text, I argue, enables a picture of “wholesome” multiethnic coexistence, epito-
mized by the figure of the protagonist, Felanee, to come into view.
There is more to Felanee than the nostalgic allegorical formulation of multieth-
nic community. Felanee is only tangentially about a form of common being (in this
instance, a shared cultural identity that has evolved over time); rather, its radical
move lies in the gradual development of a contingent form of being-in-common
that takes shape through biopolitical labor. Felanee simultaneously works
against the grain of this tendency towards allegorization through its powerful por-
trayal of relational subjectivity, female agency, affective labor and the affirmative
potentials of biopolitical production. To trace the contours of relational subjectivity
and the formation of biopolitical community in Felanee, we need to put pressure
on the second teleology that Tilottama Misra implicitly relies on in her argument:
the movement from “mere” female victimhood to a “doer.” Close attention to
Felanee reveals that a far more complicated version of female agency is present
throughout the text. Felanee is not a “mere” passive, “timid” character at the begin-
ning who becomes active later. There is a nuanced representation of her agential
capacities throughout that is simultaneously placed in an everyday relational
field where she interacts in complex ways with gifts from the past and with
other entities, both human and nonhuman. Felanee’s ethical approach to the
world emerges from and is sustained by the way she follows the gifts of the numer-
ous human and nonhuman entities populating this text.
Furthermore, attention to the thingly dimensions of the text reveals that
Felanee is not merely a gesture of nostalgia for a steadily receding ideal of whole-
some inter-community harmony, but rather a generative survivalist fiction in line
with Honig’s concept of overliving. If the past provides the resources for ethical
relationality, the text labors to reveal potentialities of deferred-yet-possible
futures. These potentialities are actualized in the text through a meticulous atten-
tion to the material and creaturely dimensions that constitute the warp and woof
of everyday life. Felanee places its narrative of the human and manobata
(humanism) in a sociopolitical ecology that is constantly shaped and reshaped
through the vital materiality of things, affective labor and forms of social net-
works formed through biopolitical production. These affirmative forms of
female collectivity persist and survive despite the ubiquitous presence of necro-
political terror.
The allegory of wholesome community and narrative

prosthesis in Felanee
Tilottama Misra’s nostalgic-melancholic invocation of a “lost age” of wholesome
community is a tenable reading, especially if we consider the allegorical reso-
nances of Felanee’s story and its contrasts with micronarratives like the Sumala
thread. The key passage that highlights this allegorical impulse occurs during
the midpoint of Felanee. At this point, Bulen, a Bodo man who is a relative
of Felanee’s, has become an adherent of the Bodo nationalist cause. Bulen
exhorts Felanee to wear a dokhona, a traditional dress worn by Bodo women.
When Felanee reaches home after her conversation with Bulen and begins prepar-
ing moori to sell the next day, she begins ruminating:
. . .she wondered about the various people whose genes ran in her blood.
Her grandmother, Ratnamala’s?
Her grandfather, the elephant mahout Kinaram Boro’s?
What about her mother? Did she have more from Ratnamala or Kinaram?
And what about herself? Did her blood have stronger genes from Khitish
Ghosh[?] . . .
Felanee thought of her grandmother, Ratnamala’s gold chain, and the
dokhona woven by Kinaram’s mother. She had her mother’s shell bangles
set in gold. She had the Muga clothes that Moni’s father had given her
when Moni was born. What should she wear? What should she keep?
Baishya had asked her to take off the shell bangles lest people mistook
her for a Bengali. . . . Bulen, on the other hand told her, that if she wanted
to survive, she should wear a dokhona.
(185–6)
We witness Felanee reflecting on the complexity of her hybrid identity. In situa-

tions of extreme violence perpetuated by forces beholden to the illusory absolut-
ism of ethnic purity, Felanee’s reflections on the “genes that ran in her blood”
symbolize the vulnerability that pluralistic forms of multiethnic coexistence are
subjected to in contingencies that demand a clear demarcation between self
and other. In moments like these, Felanee becomes more than just a character
who endures violence and terror. Even her name attains a different significance:
as an allegorical figuration, she is the representative of what is thrown away and
treated as waste matter by numerous agents of sovereign terror. However, she
lives on in the margins.
The allegorical representation of harmonious interethnicity in Felanee has a
major ethical limitation: the figuration of Sumala as a concretization of narrative
prosthesis. If Felanee represents a vitalizing principle of life and futurity, her nar-
rative arc is also contrasted with the destinies of characters who symbolize forms
of actual or social death. The micronarrative of Bulen and his disabled wife
Sumala is key. Through the Bulen–Sumala thread, Kalita critiques the cultures
of impunity that resulted from Bodo nationalism.8 Sumala’s character serves as
the most important symbolic contrast to Felanee. I will, however, begin this dis-
cussion by considering the characterization of Bulen so that the contours of the
declension narrative about the impairment of an existing formation of the good
life become clearer.
Bulen is distantly related to Felanee’s deceased grandfather, Kinaram Boro,
and considers Felanee and Moni to be members of his family. He suggests that
Felanee and Moni move from the IDP camp to the basti. Bulen’s wife,
Sumala, is traumatized by the brutal flaying and decapitation of her brother,
Madhab Das. Das is a communist and is killed by people sympathetic to the
9
Assam Agitation. Sumala witnesses his brutal killing and subsequently loses
her reason. She is the most prominent disabled figure in Felanee. Initially,
Bulen cares for Sumala tenderly, an aspect that also extends to the care and con-
sideration he bestows on Felanee and Moni. This aspect of care is concretized
through the dexterity with which Bulen tends to the patch of land near his
new habitation, and the occasional material gifts that he brings for Felanee
and her son. The patch of land near the river thrives because of the magic of
his “green fingers.” Bulen also leaves gifts like “rice, lentils, a chunk of
sweet red gourd, a few potatoes” every time he visits Felanee. These material
gifts are greatly appreciated by Felanee, who always “found it amazing, the
way he managed his household – like a woman!” (75–7). Significantly, frame-
works of care and especially care for the disabled – first by Bulen and later by
Felanee – are once again framed through the gendered trope of nurturing moth-
erhood. On the one hand, this gestures towards the unpaid affective work that
women often do in this regard; on the other, it also reveals the gendered imagin-
aries that underpin care work.
This ascription of nourishing maternal care to the character of Bulen meta-
morphoses drastically into an uncaring, predatory form of masculinity during
the middle that coincides with the period when the Bodo identitarian movement
begins to gain prominence. This transformation is marked by a shift both in
Bulen’s garden and in his practices of giving gifts. When Felanee visits
Bulen’s house later, she notices that the castor plants that had grown at edge
of Bulen’s compound had “grown into a thick hedge that wouldn’t allow even
a chicken to pass through” (153). More importantly, she sees a new plant in
the middle of his yard that was separated from the rest of the compound with
an intricate bamboo fence. The ground near its base was mopped clean and
there was an earthen lamp lit below it. Although the plant isn’t named, the nar-
rator here is referring to the bwrai bathou, a cactus-like plant that is central
for Bathou puja (worship). This rite, central to the traditional religion of
the Bodos, was revived during the Bodo self-determination movements (Pull-
oppillil and Allukal). The focus on spatial enclosure – the thick hedge and intri-
cate bamboo fence – is indicative of the gradual hardening of identitarian
boundaries. Furthermore, when Felanee asks about Sumala, she hears a new
note in Bulen’s voice as he describes her as a “broken tree” that cannot “sprout
new roots” – a stark metaphoric contrast to the luxuriant growth of plants in
Bulen’s garden.
Sumala is dressed in a dokhona, the traditional attire of Bodo women. For the
first time, Felanee hears Bulen’s demand that she too wear a dokhona. As the
granddaughter of Kinaram Boro, she has Bodo blood in her, he says. Wearing
a dokhona becomes a matter of community honor. Spatial enclosures begin to
merge here with forms of corporeal enclosure, a process of encaging further
emphasized by Felanee’s ruminations when Bulen demands that she pay obei-
sance to the revered tree: “The tree with its tentacles seemed to spread and
engulf her. She had no way out. Whichever route she took, the leaves would
get her. Where would she escape?” (174–76).
Bulen’s metamorphosis into a figuration of the inhuman is further emphasized
by a change in his practices of gifting:
Bulen had something wrapped up in newspaper. Usually, he would bring

something for Moni. Sometimes it would be a gourd or bananas, or some
greens or small fish.
But today he opened the packet straight away. It was a green and red
dokhona with a yellow flowered border. In a prickly tone, he said, “If you
want to survive, wear this.”
“What is it?”
“Can’t you see?” He asked, spreading out the dokhona.
(178)
Notice the temporal contrast between the habitual (“usually”) and the unprece-
dented (“But today”). The gifts earlier pertained largely to the domain of food
and were life-affirming. Besides, Bulen did not expect any payment or reciproc-
ity. This sudden shift in the gifts he usually brought is also marked by a change in
his behavior. Without ceremony, he thrusts the dokhona before Felanee. Bulen
here makes a patriarchal demand: Felanee must wear the dokhona if she
desires to live. Not wearing it could mean her death. The gift here clearly operates
through the demand for an expected counter-gift: the woman wearing the insignia
of the community on her person.
Felanee soon learns that Bulen’s brusqueness is impelled by anger at the fact that
his fourteen-year-old niece was raped by police forces because she had participated
in a procession for the rights of Bodos to have a separate state. Both the girl’s
mother – Bulen’s aunt – and Bulen hurl accusatory language at Felanee using pro-
nouns like “yours” and “ours.” The aunt says, “Look at what your government has
done,” while Bulen says that just as “your people went in processions during the
Assam agitation,” they marched for “our own state” (179). The use of these col-
lective pronouns hardens the enclosures drawn between the self and the other.
This is also the first time that Felanee notices Bulen’s tic of striking the ground
violently with a weapon. Later she thinks that this action is akin to Bulen “strik-
ing at human flesh.” The metamorphosis of the peaceful, caring person to a pred-
atory, near-demonic form is almost complete. No wonder then that the distinct
corporeal characteristic that is emphasized in the metamorphosed Bulen are his
“bloodshot eyes.” Very soon, he abandons Sumala and becomes a ruthless militant
(179–80).
Bulen’s metamorphosis proceeds simultaneously with his neglect and eventual
abandonment of Sumala. As a disabled character, Sumala suffers from the same
limitations that have been discussed in connection to Tempu. Her infantilization
is evident from the beginning. She was often “coaxed and cajoled” into eating by
Bulen and he would bathe her “as he would a baby.” He would stroke her head
and put her to sleep, and Felanee could often discern the “faint strains of a
lullaby” (75). As a character, she is the recipient of Bulen’s “maternal” care, a
role that is taken over by Felanee when she is later abandoned: “Some days,
Felanee would put her to sleep, singing her a lullaby. She would then look up to
Felanee with a smile, just like an infant” (239–40).
Sumala’s abandonment is accompanied by changes in her body. These corpo-
real changes are emphasized when Bulen comes to visit Felanee one night after
he has left Sumala:
Like a dog seeing its master after a long spell, she whined, and came towards
him. Bulen looked at her. In the long skirt that Felanee made her wear, she
looked like a reed with clothes hanging on it. Her dried up breasts looked
like a couple of caterpillars wound around her wrinkled and sagging skin.
Her open dress revealed her private parts. On her dried up frame the black
and purple dress flapped like the wings of a vulture. She crawled,
whining, towards Bulen like an infant towards its mother.
(242)
What is critical here are the profusion of similes comparing Sumala to forms of
abjected animality and nonhumanness (“dogs,” “reed,” “caterpillar,” “vulture”).
These animal similitudes especially signify both forms of docility (the domesti-
cated dog) and allusions to forbidding, death-like animal alterity (“caterpillars,”
“vulture”). Mel Chen says that animality can horrify as it represents the “interme-
diary zone between human and nonhuman status” (105). Sumala moves in that
threshold between human and nonhuman. What evokes Bulen’s “disgust” and
Felanee’s pity is this perceived existence in a state of being almost “human”
but not quite. This threshold existence troubles the imagined boundaries of
“life” and “death” – a figuration of life here is represented in terms of images res-
onant of decay (caterpillars) or death (vultures).
Furthermore, the representation of the disabled figure in terms of threshold con-
ditions of animality and nonhumanness culminates in a grotesque inversion of sit-
uations of primary dependency – the monstrous “infant” crawls whining towards
her mother-father, Bulen. But instead of care, she is met only with disgust and
“intense hatred.” After Sumala’s piteous attempt to arouse Bulen when she
crawls towards him and touches his “private parts,” Bulen pushes her “away
from him with his heavy boots” (243). Cultural phenomenologists like Sara
Ahmed, who study the relationship between disgust and power argue that
“disgust reactions . . . are also about objects that seem ‘lower’ than or beneath
the subject” (Cultural Politics, 89). This spatial distinction between “aboveness”
and “belowness,” Ahmed argues, “become properties of particular bodies, objects
and spaces” (Cultural Politics, 89). In manifestations of disgust, the bodies of
others “are constructed as non-human, as beneath and below the bodies of the
disgusted. . . . They embody that which is lower than human or civil life” (Cultural
Politics, 97). This spatial element of the animalized Sumala below Bulen, who is
then brutally thrust away by his boots, show how she embodies what is considered
lower than human or civil life.
Unlike Felanee, Sumala is reductively reduced to her symbolic functions only.
While in Tempu’s case, the symbolic overdetermination is complicated somewhat
with brief glimpses of his agency and of systems of care in Honyat Basti,
Sumala’s agency is not endowed any recognition. This erasure of agency is
evident in the reminisences of Felanee, the direct witness to this scene of abjected
intimacy between Bulen and Sumala:
Suddenly, Moni’s mother noticed that Sumala was groping in the region of
Bulen’s private parts. . . . She remembered a scene is Bulen’s household
years back one evening when Sumala was reasonably well. Her body was
still attractive and filled up at the right places. This was when Sumala
could even cook an occasional meal for Bulen. For some reason Bulen
was very angry that evening. Sumala whined and kept going to him. Each
time, he pushed her away with his strong elbow. Bulen was wearing a
gamosa knotted at his waist. Parting the gamosa she groped for his sex
organs. Bulen kept pushing her away. Even in her foggy and fuzzy state,
she knew that this was the man who gave her food. And she knew where
the key to this man’s pleasure lay. She knew what turned him on.
(242–43)
Sumala, Felanee remembers, was “reasonably well” and sexually attractive at that
time. She was well enough to “cook an occasional meal for Bulen.” However,
when it comes to the question of the sexual encounter, any consideration of
Sumala’s sexual desire vanishes. Her desire is represented either in pitiable ani-
malistic terms (Sumala “whines”) or as a form of repetitive automatism (“kept
going to him”). This aspect of automatism is accentuated in the present as the
abjected body of Sumala is represented as repeating this action almost instinctu-
ally. By representing Sumala’s desire as instinctual and automatic, the disabled
subject is desubjectivized, even though there is a quickly disavowed recognition
that she may have had a certain amount of agency in the past. Retrospectively
putting these two actions in a causal chain, Felanee’s reminiscence further ban-
ishes Sumala as a form of disqualification.
Sumala’s disqualification is emphasized when her dead body is found lying close
to the military camp near the basti. Her corpse also bears marks of brutal sexual
violence: “Her naked body was disfigured and there were distinct signs of brutality
on her person. In place of her breasts there were two raw bleeding wounds. Her
emaciated genital passage was a huge open wound.” When her corpse is shunted
on to a police van, it was pushed inside with so much force that the “sound of a
bone being broken in her leg could be heard” (246).10 Not only is she abjected
in life, but her corpse is also denied dignity after her death. She is thrown away
like garbage and represents a form of “bad” death. Within the symbolic economy
of the novel, she is truly felanee – a valueless, waste object that is thrown away.
Butler’s observations about grievability in Precarious Life resonate here:
Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that
is other than life. Instead, “there is a life that will never have been lived,”
sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The appre-
hension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of
precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of
the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start.
(15)
Like the dismembered puppy in AJ, Sumala exists and dies as “something living
that is other than life.” Because the criterion of grievability is largely withheld
from her characterization as threshold character, she is not figured as a form of
“life,” let alone precarious life. Instead, Sumala functions as the abjected
double of Felanee. Like the titular character, she too is abandoned and thrown
away; however, because of the reductive representation of disability as desubjec-
tivation and absolute lack of agency, the possibility of any alternative narrative
for Sumala is foreclosed. Suffering a social and, later, actual death, she is a char-
acter who functions exclusively as a form of narrative prosthesis. As an allegor-
ical figuration, therefore, she functions as the abjected dimension of being thrown
away, a figuration of negativity through which the representation of Felanee as
survivor and symbolic representative of the biopolitical community-to-come
can be heightened further.
Female agency and the secret life of things

Despite these allegorical tendencies in Felanee, I emphasize that the possibility of
a different reading of the agency of the titular character lies immanent in the text.
This portrayal of survival through a relational depiction of subjectivity unmoors
Felanee, as a character, from a purely allegorical figuration and enables us to con-
sider the affective and materialist dimensions of quotidian survival. These expres-
sions of agency manifest themselves through Felanee’s relationship to scenes
from the past that she has never witnessed directly and her affective engagements
with the world of things. These engagements reveal the formation of Felanee as
an ethical subject.
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler extends Cavarero’s points about natal-
ity and politics in a psychoanalytic direction. Any project of narrating a self is
intrinsically connected to, as Butler says, “primary forms of relationality that
are not always available to explicit and reflective thematization” (20). For
instance, since I am not consciously present at the moment of my own birth,
the story of my “origins” always persists as a “gift,” by way of narrative, that
I inherit from others. Such “gifts” (think about stories told about relations who
died before we became conscious beings, but which become important cogs
for the way we form narratives of our selves) are important for any account
we seek to provide about ourselves. Thus, I become a narrative “I” by bearing
witness to what I could not possibly have seen. Such forms of imaginative “wit-
nessing” connect me to what predates my emergence as a knowing subject. An
accounting of such dependencies and forms of “unknowingness” also has impli-
cations for our ethical bearing towards others. As Butler writes:
it is precisely by virtue of one’s relations to others that one is opaque to

oneself, and if those relations to others are the venue for one’s ethical
responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the sub-
ject’s opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most important
ethical bonds.
(Giving, 20)
These ideas about relationality and subject formation provide us a good handle
to approach the larger narrative structure of Felanee. As mentioned, Felanee does
not begin directly with the story of the titular character but starts off-center by
focusing briefly on the stories of Ratnamala and Jutimala, Felanee’s grandmother
and mother. This aspect was criticized after the publication of the English transla-
tion. Jai Arjun Singh’s scathing review is a good illustration:
the inertia in the early chapters of Felanee doesn’t seem harnessed to a larger
cause, . . . The story arc is odd . . . the first . . . chapter is a static account of
the lives of Felanee’s grandparents and then her parents . . . ends with the
newborn baby girl being rescued, and before we know it Felanee is grown up.
Such superficial dismissals of the narrative occur because the crucial ethical
aspect of intergenerational transmission is not considered. Far from being a stul-
tifying story arc, the first few chapters of Felanee are crucial for any appraisal of
the novel’s relentless critique of the imagined “purity” of identity and an under-
standing of the ethical bonds that the titular protagonist fosters and maintains
throughout the story. Felanee’s ethical bonds are forged through her acts of imag-
inatively bearing witness to pasts she has not seen, but only heard about through
the stories told by others.
Furthermore, the important aspect of these acts of imaginative witnessing is that
they are mediated via the agency of things. Consider the passage about Felanee’s
hybrid identity after her conversation with Bulen quoted in the preceding section.
Here, Felanee not only reflects on the hybridity of her identity, but also on the
material “gifts” given to her by representatives of generations that preceded her:
the gold chain, the shell bangles set in gold, the Muga clothes, the dokhona.
While each “gift” functions as a marker of identity for ethnic communities –
shell bangles (Bengali), Muga clothes (Assamese), dokhona (Bodo) – they also
represent figures that “return” to the past and bear witness to what Felanee has
never seen.
The passage on multiethnic identity that I quoted in the previous section is
one in a long narrative chain of Felanee’s reveries on things that she inherits
as “gifts” from the past. These reveries on things, through an activation of Fela-
nee’s sensory apparatuses, imaginatively connect her with the female predeces-
sors she never saw or knew. While the passage on multiethnic identity occurs
during the middle of the plot, I chose two passages from the beginning to illus-
trate this narrative chain about her affective relationship with things because I
want to demonstrate that Felanee does not emerge as an agent only when she
is faced with a crisis (as for instance, picketing the arm cantonment with a
group of women after her son has been detained). Instead, quotidian modalities
of agency and relationality are evident throughout the text and solidify her pre-
sentation as an ethical agent.
Passage I
She opened the small bundle of cloth and took out the heavy gold chain made
with starfruit shaped beads. The locket was enameled and studded with rubies.
Her heart was pounding. . . . Her mother had brought it wrapped in rags when
she came from the home of Khitish Ghosh and his cousin Ratan, who’d
brought up Felanee. She had hidden it away in a dark corner of the house,
away from prying eyes. . . . As she held it she remembered, once again, the
stories she had heard about that gruesome night when the air was filled
with flames and her mother lay dying. . . . She saw a reflection sparkling on
the wall. It was the jewellery she’d left on the bed; the sun’s rays had
fallen on it. Quickly she covered up the jewels with a pillow. How had she
dared to take this chain out? In it was enveloped the history of her grand-
mother, Ratnamala’s, life. A history that the Mouzadar’s family had wanted
to erase. People said she looked like her grandmother.
(13–14)
Passage II
Her bangles made a tinkling sound as she oiled her hair. The bangles had once
belonged to her mother. She wondered what her mother looked like. She must
have been fair with small eyes that crinkled up when she smiled. She must
have had a rounded, well filled out body. . . . Brushing her lips against her
bangles she tried to smell her mother’s fragrance. Whenever she used spices
or soap, or chopped greens, or ground mustard paste, she thought she could
smell her mother’s fragrance on her hands or in the bangles that once belonged
to her mother.
(15)
In these passages, a complex weave of relations where Felanee attends to the call
of things and plots a history of both necropolitical terror and of life is instituted.
Both thing theorists (Bill Brown, Shaviro) and vital materialists (Bennett) deploy
variations of this distinction between object and thing in their work. Drawing on
Barthes and Alphonso Lingis, Bill Brown considers the provocation of the thing
both from the standpoint of the punctum and the imperative. The punctum is the
subject’s captivation by the detail of the thing “however minor and inadvertent
the detail.” The imperative is the demand made by the object’s “insistence” –
for instance, the way our attention is drawn to a piece of glass gleaming in the
sunlight (22–23). Developing Bruno Latour’s work, Jane Bennett considers
things and matter as “actants”: “a source of action that can be either human or
nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence
to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events.” Things are
“vital” in her conceptualization because they “not only . . . impede or block the
will and designs of humans but also . . . act as quasi agents or forces with trajec-
tories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (viii).
Returning to the passages from Felanee, we notice how things issue calls that
human subjects are impelled to follow. In the first passage, Felanee begins by con-
templating the immediate history of the gift that she holds in her hand: the gold
chain. This chain was given for safekeeping by her dead mother. Felanee inherited
it from the people who took care of her. She forgets the chain for a while and gets
lost in thoughts of the present. Her reverie is interrupted by the “reflection spark-
ling on the wall.” The allure of the thing insists on her attention and impels her to
think about the history of the piece of jewelry. It is a trace of her grandmother’s
history, a history her natal family wanted to erase because of Ratnamala’s trans-
gression of caste, class and ethnic boundaries. (A young Assamese caste-Hindu
widow who belonged to the ranks of the feudal aristocracy, she eloped with a
tribal working-class Bodo man and bore him a child.) It is not only an heirloom
from the past, but also a symbol of hybridity-at-the-origin that purist pogroms
want to efface, whether in the past or the present. If Bulen’s walls and boundaries
signify increasing enclosure, this encounter with the thing signifies an opening to
the history of dead, erased and silenced others.
The aural, the haptic and the olfactory come together in the second passage.
The bangles tinkle against each other and interrupt Felanee’s absorption in
other things. In the routine of daily life, Bill Brown says, “perception perpetually
forecloses sensuous experience in order to render the material world phenomenal,
which means rendering it habitable” (59). Something slightly different occurs in
Felanee’s case. Felanee does not experience the thing as something separate
having mere use value. She “brushes it against her lips” and imagines that she
can smell her mother’s fragrance in the bangles when she performs some of
her mundane daily chores as a housewife: cutting vegetables or grinding spices.
Instead of perceiving the thing as something separate and part of the phenomenal
object-world, she experiences its allure at a sensuous level. Bill Brown’s com-
ments about misuse value are apposite:
Thingness is precipitated by a kind of misuse value. By misuse value I . . .

name the aspects of an object – sensuous, aesthetic, semiotic – that
become palpable, legible, audible when the object is experienced in whatever
time it takes . . . for an object to become another thing.
(51)
This notion of misuse value helps us conceptualize the thing beyond the realm of
utility. There is always something in a thing that exceeds utilitarian discourses.
Things become vitalized and function as “transmitters of affect,” to mangle
Teresa Brennan’s terms, as emotional investments are made in them. Also impor-
tant in Brown’s passage is the question of temporality – the “whatever time it
takes” for the object to be experienced in its “palpable, legible, audible” thing-
hood. In the passage on the bangles, the reverie begins when Felanee is free from
her housewifely activities and has time to oil her hair. The reverie, Bachelard
reminds us, is simultaneously a condition of “detemporalization” and “desocia-
lization” (The Poetics 116). For a moment, memory and imagination combine in
this detemporalized, desocialized state to summon forth an image of a person
Felanee has never seen. Furthermore, the expressive organ of the hand makes
the thing “palpable, legible, audible.” Bachelard writes that the hand “helps us
dream matter.” Moreover, the movements of hands during a reverie initiates a
“rhythmic activity” which “shares the chief characteristic of duration: rhythm”
and has the potential to involve our entire bodily being (“The Hand Dreams”
104–5). In the first action, the state of detemporalization is initiated when
Felanee oils her hair with her hand. This movement of the hand makes the
bangles tinkle and transports her into a state of reverie bringing up an image
of her mother in her “mind’s eye.” The role of the hand is further emphasized
in the second action – as she uses spices, grids paste or chops greens, the com-
bination of the olfactory and the haptic enable her to imagine that she could
smell her mother’s fragrance on her hands. We can, pace Bachelard, call this
a period of “inward duration,” one that does not always have a definite end in
view, but by mobilizing the other senses enables the subject to experience the
palpable thingness of the object.
Felanee’s reveries facilitate her imagination of her unseen mother-as-other.
Married to a Bengali person, it is very likely that Jutimala dressed in a sari.
But Felanee’s act of imagining her mother wearing a dokhona, a far cry from
the patriarchal dictates made by Bulen, shows once again how she is open to
the capacious possibilities of hybrid formulations of identity. These acts of imag-
inative witnessing precipitated by the medium of things remind us once again of
Butler’s statement:
it is precisely by virtue of one’s relations to others that one is opaque to

oneself, and if those relations to others are the venue for one’s ethical respon-
sibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject’s
opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most important ethical
bonds.
(Giving, 20)
The bonds that Felanee develops from other things and recognition of her subjec-
tive “opacity” means that, as a subject and ethical agent, she refuses to throw
anyone away.
Affective labor and biopolitical production in Felanee

If the relationship to material “gifts” from earlier generations enable the subject
to return to effaced pasts, the representation of everyday, public work and affec-
tive labor also reveal how survival is oriented towards the future. I emphasize
“public” because the passages on reverie I quoted in the previous section
show how a gendered division of labor operates in the beginning that closets
Felanee in the realm of the domestic. In her consideration of Edmund Husserl’s
famous phenomenological description of his table, mediated via work in femi-
nist scholarship on household labor, Ahmed notes the gendered exclusions of
the feminine and the domestic: “What is behind Husserl’s back, what he
does not face, might be the back of the house – the feminine space dedicated
to the work of care, cleaning, and reproduction” (Queer Phenomenology 30–31).
Similarly, the places in the house where Felanee “chopped greens, or ground
mustard paste” represent clearly demarcated gendered spaces, like the
“back of the house” in Ahmed’s passage. Indeed, a consideration of Felanee’s
reveries on things must consider the fact that these occur in the demarcated
spaces for housework where the female subject has very little free time. More-
over, free time for contemplation occurs rarely, as in the instance when she oils
her hair.
Necropolitical terror recalibrates this sense of the ordinary and the division
between the domains of the public and the private. This does not, of course,
mean that gendered divisions of labor disappear after the hit of terror. Men like
Bulen, even though he takes care of his garden and homestead initially “like a
woman,” are clearly invested with greater mobility and access to the realms of
labor and politics. The women are denied such participation and must frame
novel political forms of their own (such as picketing the army cantonment at
the end). But what does happen is that the women residing in necropolitical
zones band together as a collective to survive. In other words, they distribute
affective labor in modes of care demonstrated towards others and cooperate to
make products that they can sell in public domains to eke out a precarious exis-
tence. Thus, there is a clear move from the realm of the “domestic” to the
“public” in the representation of Felanee’s subjectivity. The things Felanee
makes and sells – moori and murhas – facilitate the imagination of a different
future for herself and for Moni. Moreover, making things also helps her form
deep friendships and alliances with other women, like Kali burhi (old woman),
Minoti and Jon’s mother. Felanee also passes on this gift for survival to other
abandoned female subjects like Ratna. (After helping the raped Ratna to abort
her child and allowing her time to recover, “everyone was amazed when they
found Ratna accompanying them [Felanee and company] to the market with a
couple of murhas in her hand” [277]).
To return to the allegorical mode predominant in Felanee, it will be useful to
consider the characterization of Kali burhi, the primary agent who provides
Felanee with the gift of work. Kali burhi’s actual name is Arati. She is an aban-
doned woman, Bengali by ethnicity, who becomes famous in the basti for her
devotion to the Goddess Kali. Like the figure of the young widow in Mahasweta
Devi’s Bengali short story “Sanjh Sakaler Maa,” (Mother of Dusk and Dawn),
Kali burhi fakes possession. What Vrinda Dalmiya says in the context of
Devi’s story is applicable to Kali burhi: “it is the societal acceptance of her as
a Divine Mother that enables her to function . . . in an overwhelmingly harsh envi-
ronment” (129). The name Kali burhi automatically makes us read this character
in an allegorical fashion. The goddess Kali has often been read as a symbol of
powerful, independent femininity. Furthermore, as Dalmiya argues, Kali’s fig-
11
ure paradoxically symbolizes both caring and tenderness through the traditional
roles she is associated with as a wife and mother, and a manifest form that is
“violent and uncaring.” Dalmiya continues that Kali comes to “symbolize the par-
adoxical dyads:passivity/aggressiveness;traditionality/unconventionality; beauti-
ful/grotesque; tender/terrifying” (127). These aspects are manifested in Kali
burhi’s characterization as she is both an agent of care and a manifestation of
a forbidding alterity that strikes both terror and devotion in witnesses when she
transforms into a manifestation of the goddess.
In contrast to the idealized, nurturing image of the mother–child bond that we
see in the relationship between Felanee and Moni, Kali burhi’s maternal relation-
ship with “wards” like Felanee displays elements of the paradoxical dyads that
Dalmiya mentions. This is evident in one of the first meetings between Kali
burhi and Felanee, where the old woman admonishes her for crying and giving
the impression that she needed the help of men to survive. After yelling at
Felanee, Kali burhi produces a “small white chilli” and says: “Women have to
be like this chilli. . . . Tiny to look at but real fire once in the mouth” (66).
This pedagogic statement by the hitherto forbidding personality of Kali burhi
keeps returning to Felanee as an emulative model of self-making during times
of crisis.
Immediately after issuing this statement, Kali burhi takes Felanee to a small
enclosure near her house and begins schooling her in the methods of making
good moori. The foul-mouthed Kali burhi continually reprimands Felanee for
her initial reluctance in making moori. But very soon, as Felanee becomes
attuned to making moori and selling it to survive, these gestures are revealed
for what they are: the gift of survival from a formerly abandoned woman who
manages to live on and become economically independent. Very soon the frail
old woman passes the baton on to Felanee and gradually withdraws from the
world, something she indicates during this initial meeting: “This will give you
a living; it will also give my old bones a rest” (68). Felanee becomes another
link in this affective chain of female biopolitical production as she passes on
the gift of survival to subjects like Ratna.
This figure of the gift of survival through biopolitical production comes full
circle after Kali burhi’s death. When the old woman was possessed by the
spirit of Kali, people saw her with tresses of long hair. The devotees assumed
that Kali burhi miraculously grew this hair because she was possessed by the
goddess. A stunning revelation greets Felanee when she opens one of Kali
burhi’s boxes after her death:
She found long tresses of matted hair. The sight of this matted hair was
familiar to everyone in the settlement. From where did Kali Boori get
this, she wondered? With this she converted herself from Arati to Kali. . .
And she lived like a fiery hot chilli, with her foot on Mahadev – like
Maa Kali!
(201–2)
Kali burhi’s conscious manipulation of possession by the deity, the revelation that
hits Felanee here, is emphasized later when it is compared to the possession of
Jon’s mother, one of Felanee’s closest companions from the basti:
The three women also felt that Kali . . . [burhi]being possessed and Jon’s Ma
being possessed were two different manifestations altogether. One knew that
what she was doing was so that she could live, and the other was on the path
to death, without knowing what she was doing.
(223)
Like Atanu’s transformative encounter with Umoli Apa, the vulnerable “human”
that lay behind the forbidding exterior façade of Kali burhi is exposed to Felanee.
While this recognition is connected to the figuration of corporeal and psychic dis-
memberment in AJ, in Felanee it occurs through the mediation of the thing. As
Felanee falls into a reverie about the matted hair, her mind replays everything
that Kali burhi had admonished her with. The transmission of affect from the
thing impels her to return to the past. Suddenly bringing her mind back to the
present, Felanee touches the matted hair, sobs and says to herself: “No, I didn’t
cry any more. I didn’t die. I may not have turned into a white hot chilli; but I
did become tough” (202). The gift from the other is accepted, understood and
transformed into a powerful resource for survival.
These vitalizing legacies of affective labor and biopolitical production coalesce
with figurations of mundane, everyday work at Felanee’s closure. After releasing
the detained menfolk from the army camp, Felanee along with a few other women
go to the fields to cut reeds. We come across the following conversation:
“The reeds are getting wet,” she [Felanee] cried out to Jon’s mother.
“So what?” she answered.
“They’ll rot, won’t they?”
“Spread them out in the sun to dry.”
“What if there is no sun?”
“What nonsense! There can’t be many wet days in winter.”
“If this lot rots then come back and cut some more.”
“You can’t finish an ocean of reeds, can you?”
“The seeds have wings, remember?”
“They come floating in the river.”
“They fly.”
“When they hit barren soil they germinate.”
(311–12)
As an organism, the inconspicuous, yet luxurious, growth of kanhi reeds, like the
polyvalent figurations of poruwa (ants) I discussed earlier, functions as a figura-
tion of survival. The reeds are cut, die and rot; but they also defeat any attempt at
extinction through their sheer multiplicity. Similarly, the poruwa-like women
suffer from deluges, but survive to sustain potentialities of life and living.
Stephen Kellert says that insects often function as signs of absolute difference
from humans because “the extraordinary ‘multiplicity’ of the invertebrate
world seems to threaten the human concern for individual identity and selfhood”
(quoted in Eric Brown, 7). In this case, though, the collectivity of poruwa-like
women is a manifestation of the potentialities of a form of swarm intelligence.
Contiguously, the seeds of the kanhi fly elsewhere and regenerate. This is not
life that is held hostage by deathly forms of “plant horror” as in BY, but the
setting into play of a cyclical movement in which death becomes the constant
generator of new life. As an organic metaphor, the kanhi reeds powerfully cap-
tures the predicaments of working-class women who are dislocated repeatedly,
and supposedly condemned to states of living death, but find the wherewithal
and capacity to survive and live on.
Read in a materialist direction, this conversation also shows forms of affective
labor that aid biopolitical production. Consider the actions that are described
here: the women cut the reeds; some of the reeds rot, but the women keep
coming back to cut them again. Like the everyday, repeated actions of making
and selling moori and carrying murhas to the market – a repetitive cycle of quo-
tidian work that all of them have participated in after enduring states of dispos-
session – these actions of cutting the reeds, laying them out to dry, selling them
and coming back to cut them once again reemphasizes the materialist dimensions
of survival. Despite the ubiquitous presence of necropolitical forms of terror, the
women continue to work, endure, survive and imagine futures by inhabiting such
symbiotic political ecologies. These collective enterprises also reveal a dimen-
sion of affective labor that are rooted in the corporeal and thrives on human
contact and interaction. These aspects of affective labor are materialized by
modes of care that the women demonstrate towards each other: Kali burhi
towards Felanee; Felanee towards Sumala, Ratna and many others. As Hardt
suggests in “Affective Labor,” such forms of labor produce forms of community
and can be considered a form of “positive” biopolitical production. This form of
biopolitical production is evident not only in the concrete products of the
women’s labor, but also in the “immaterial” forms of social networks they
produce, which include frameworks of care, cooperation and possibilities of col-
lective political action.12 While Outline gives us a brief glimpse of such collec-
tivities from an outside, Felanee concretizes it by helping us descend into the
multipartner mud dance that is the ordinary.
I want to end CL with this resonant, generative image of survival symbolized
by kanhi reeds because it is my belief that this is what literary narratives depicting
states of terror do: they show how the descent into everyday life engages the life
of the other and materialize promises and horizons of the political. The texts I
discuss here can be considered “regional” texts that deal only with “local” con-
cerns and relatively unknown events – I have faced this sort of objection often
when presenting versions of my work in various forums. My response to this
is that the focus on everyday forms of survival in the literary narratives analyzed
here help us “de-exceptionalize the exception” (Hardt “Palestine”). Through such
representational acts that de-exceptionalize, the literary works analyzed in CL
show how the suffering, endurance and modes of survival displayed by popula-
tions in this supposedly peripheral borderland region resonate with the struggles
of others in necropolitical zones elsewhere.
Notes
1 The Assam Agitation (1979–1985) was the culmination of a long history of Assamese
linguistic subnationalism that can be dated back to the colonial period. The immediate
impetus for the agitation was the demand that “foreigners” should not be allowed to
settle in the areas traditionally inhabited by people indigenous to the region, and per-
ceptions of differential treatment by the central government. The issue of immigration
by “foreigners” is connected to contested practices of settlement of populations, espe-
cially from the neighboring province of Bengal, during the colonial period, and the
legacy of the partition of India in 1947, which created a crisis of citizenship. The
Assam Agitation ended when the Assam Accord was signed between the center and
student leaders of the movement in 1985. Subsequently, the regional party, Axom
Gana Parishad (AGP), came to power with a massive mandate. See Baruah, India
Against Itself; and Udayon Misra for accounts of the movement. At the same time,
the Assam Agitation also unleashed a lot of violence against ethnic minorities and
people opposed to its premises or targeted as the other. The infamous Nellie massacre
of 1983 is the most well-known of these incidents.
Bodos are the largest “plains tribe” group in Assam (Tribes in the Northeast have
been categorized as “hills” or “plains” from the colonial era). Although the demand
for a separate state for the Bodos was first made in 1967, it began gathering momentum
in the mid-80s. Sanjib Baruah writes that “to some extent the movement for a Bodo
homeland was an outgrowth of the Assam movement” (India 156). The leaders of
the Assam movement were not sufficiently inclusive and contributed to the process
of what he calls the “ethnicization” of the Assamese. Organizations like the ABSU
(All Bodo Students Union) also raised the call for separate statehood – named Bodo-
land – on the claim of indigeneity and historical marginalization by the upper-caste
Assamese. This movement was manifested both politically and culturally. Culturally,
the Bodos claimed differences from the Assamese in food, dress, religious customs
and language. Bodo nationalism also took a militant turn with the formation of
groups like the NDFB (National Democratic Front of Bodoland).
The SULFA (Surrendered ULFA) refers to a group of surrendered ULFA members.
SULFA members were notorious for operating as paralegal forces of authority and
terror allegedly under government patronage. The SULFA was largely associated
with the cultures of impunity in late 90s Assam as they controlled a lot of lucrative
businesses and were also responsible for assassinations and harassment. The SULFA
was used as death squads during the period of the secret killings.
2 To be something or someone, Derrida writes in The Animal, necessitates that there is
always an action of following something or someone. To be is to respond to the call of
the other – this may be the call of a human or a nonhuman in Derrida’s schema. Tra-
ditionally, metaphysics left the “animal” – Derrida’s primary concern – out of the orbit
of being because it supposedly merely reacted as opposed to responding. It’s this
erasure of the animal’s response that metaphysically establishes the self-sovereignty
of the anthropocentric human. If the question of a response to the other is obviated,
then the question of obligation, hospitality to the other and relationality is foreclosed.
3 Ranciere’s framework is based on the Aristotlelian distinction between the expressive
power of speech (logos) and the unique capabilities of voice (phone)
4 The other thing that involves Amrit affectively is Sutherland’s manuscript about Jim.
Here the act of reading inserts Amrit into the performative space of the spectral other.
Jim’s suicide closes Sutherland’s narrative. Amrit seemingly repeats this move at the
end; however, it is very likely that he accepts the risks of a dissolution of self at the
end rather than commit suicide pace Jim.
5 I use Deepika Phukan’s translation of Felanee.
6 For an account of the impact of necropolitical violence on women’s lives, see the report
by the Center for North East Studies and Policy Studies titled Bearing Witness.
7 Assam is supposed to have the highest number of IDPs in the world.
8 Through the micronarrative of the young unnamed militant and his two lovers –
Minoti and Ratna – Kalita critiques the deathly dimensions of predatory Assamese
nationalism.
9 The brutal violence directed against communist party members, who opposed what
they called the fascist tendencies of the Assam Agitation, was one of the darkest chap-
ters of that period. Hiren Gohain, a leading left-wing Assamese intellectual, was pub-
licly assaulted and narrates this incident in his biography Iman Tita Sagoror Paani
(The Waters of the Bitter Ocean). A fictional representation can be found in Toxeswar
Chetia’s Tezor Akhore Likha (Written With Words of Blood).
10 Bulen also dies in an undignified manner as he is hunted down by the army.
11 It is important, though, to keep in mind Dalmiya’s cautions to allay an overgeneralized
appropriation of Kali as a feminist symbol (129–30).
12 An instance is the picketing of the army cantonment. KG hints that Sombori partici-
pates in such actions; Felanee shows how it happens.
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Index
Aajir Asom 96 Artha 52, 73

Abeles, M. 27 “art of witness” 25–6, 31
Abhimanyu Badh Kabya 153–4 Arunimar Swades 138
Abiratra Jatra 184 Assam: animal folklore in 76–7; bandh
affective labor and biopolitical production in 36; ethnographic novels of 94–5;
195–200 fictional chronicles of necropolitical
“AFSPA: Legacy of Colonial terror in 52; flooding in 37; hill regions
Constitutionalism” 3 of (see hill regions); manabata
Agamben, G. 4, 17, 66, 102; on “bare life” (humanism) in 10–11; secret killings in
28, 85n9–10 13–14
Ahmed, S. 18 Assam Agitation 200n1
Akoijam, A. B. 2–3 As You Like It 161
allegory 154, 169–70, 196–7; of Aulingar Jui 9, 23, 95–7, 99; animality
wholesome community and narrative represented in 34–5; dialogic structure of
prosthesis in Felanee 185–91 121; disabled characters in 33–4; Naga
alter-embodiment 20–1, 33, 40n20 territories in 92–3; narrating history’s
Amery, J. 11–12, 17; on sense of givenness footnotes in 116–30; no-man’s zones in
18–19 98, 123
Anchalik Mahila Sajagata Samiti 72 aurality 143, 146, 164n4
Animal, The 200n2 “authoritarian accent” 3
animal corporeality 22–3
animality 34–7, 41n35–7; dehumanization Bachelard, G. 195
and 63, 82–4; folklore and 76–7; in Banerjee, P. 72
“Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali” 151–63 Barbora, X. 62
animals, dismemberment of 127–8 Bardoloi, R. 94
anthropocentrism 31–2, 40n22 “bare life” 28, 85n9–10
anticipatory consciousness 106 Bargu, B. 7
anticipatory imagination 12–13 Barker, C. 32
anti-conquest narratives 175 “baroque staring” 76
anti-testimonio, Boranga Yan as 102–7 Barpujari, U. 14
ants 36–7 Barthes, R. 180
anxiety 56–7 Baruah, M. 116–17, 118
Ao, T. 7, 9, 26, 30, 139; see also “Last Baruah, S. 3, 93
Song, The” Basumatary, A. 160–1, 163
Ao-Naga Oral Tradition, The 147 Bazin, A. 159
Arendt, H. 28–9, 170–1 being and seeing 173–6
Aretxaga, B. 3, 14–15 benga 76, 78, 86n16
Armed Forces Special Powers Act Benjamin, W. 139–40
(AFSPA) 1, 2–3, 6, 39n2 Bennett, J. 193
205 Index 205
Bernstein, J. M. 11–13, 65 Chapar Anchalik Mahila Samiti 72
Beverley, J. 103 Chatterjee, P. 80
Bezbaruah, L. 162 Chen, M. 21–2, 35, 189
Bhattacharyya, B. 116 children, sovereignty in world of 155–6
Bhattacharyya, R. 99 Choudhuri, R. 153
Bhutan 98–101, 107–8, 116, 131–2n10–11 Chowdhury, R. 96, 184
Bhutanot Heral Dhutiman 95–6, 98, 99 Christianization 93, 131n5
bildungsroman 103 closure in short stories 138–9
biopower 2; from below 172 colonialism 3, 131n5; anticolonial
Blanco, M. d. P. 74–5, 83 nationalism and 32–3; anti-conquest
Bloch, E. 56, 106 narratives on 175; colonizing
Bodo nationalist movement 169–70 subjectivity and 178–9; in the hill
body, the: animalization and torture of 63, regions 92–3; as “thingification”
82–4; brutalized in rape 145–6; as corpse 21–2; see also postcolonialism
151–63, 190; death of 112–15, 151, 158, concentration camps 115
161, 164–5n12; degradation of 104–5; Conrad, J. 115, 169, 173–4
disability of 18, 20–1, 32; resistance by Cortazar, J. 50–1
7; as signing body 128; sovereignty of Critical Events 17
11–12, 35, 122–3, 155; voice and Critique of Postcolonial Reason, The 154
115–16; vulnerability of 28–9
body-as-witness in Boranga Yan 100–16 Das, P. 80, 98, 99, 102–3, 105
Bolivian Diaries, The 100, 105 Das, V. 10, 17–18, 32, 58, 59, 115,
“Bonjui” 23 140–1
Bora, D. 7, 9, 16, 33, 52, 141; see also Daughtry, M. 123–4
Kalantoror Gadya “Deaf Body in Public Space, The” 20
Bora, P. 157 deafness 20–1
Boranga Yan 9, 18, 95–7; as anti- Deb, S. 7, 9, 30, 169, 173–4; see also
testimonio 102–7; dialogic structure of Outline of the Republic, An
121–2; foothill lifeworlds and nostalgia de Certeau, M. 16
of 107–11; necropolitics, foothill Deka, K. 14
lifeworlds and the body-as-witness in Deka, S. P. 153
100–16; no-man’s zones in 97–8; Delville, M. 115–16
transactional relationship between reader Derrida, J. 29–30, 41n37, 79, 139–40,
and narrator in 106–7; witnessing raw 150–1, 162, 200n2
life in the aranya and descent into the desubjectivation 76–7, 101
horroristic ordinary in 111–16 Devi, M. 196
Boym, S. 110 disability 18; alter-embodiment and 20–1,
Brison, S. 11 33, 40n20; benga category of 76, 78,
Brown, B. 194 86n16; disgust at 189, 191; haunting
bureaucracy of the state 50–1; archival and 73–85; as metaphor 32–4, 40n21;
function of writing for 58–9; Bora on post-colonial literary treatment of 32,
53–4; rape scripts and indifferent 66–73 41n33
Burgin, V. 180 Discipline and Punish 60
Butler, J. 4, 28–9, 127, 172, 176, 191–2 Discourse on Colonialism 21–2
dispositioning 56–7
Cabezas, O. 100, 103, 104 Dokhuma, J. 26
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” 180–1 Dorjee, J. 95, 98
Cavarero, A. 28–9, 113–14, 141, 145; Douglas, M. 16
Arendt and 170–1 Du Bois, P. 83
Cavell, S. 7, 17–18 Durable Disorder 93
Cesaire, A. 21–2 Dutta, J. 95
Chakrabarty, S. 143 Dutta, N. 160
Changkija, M. 142 Dutta, U. 80–1
206 Index 206
Eaton, R. 92–3 foothill sensibilities 108–9
Edkins, J. 23–4 For More Than One Voice 141, 145
Edwards, B. H. 154 Foucault, M. 1, 4, 17, 60, 172
“Eipine Ki Ase?” 153–4 Frames of War 28
Ejan Prapton ULFA’r Swikarokti 99 French Revolution 17
elastic geography 117–18 Furet, F. 17
Elden, S. 10
ethnographic novels 94–5 Garland-Thompson, R. 20–1, 34, 75–6
everyday, the: anticipatory imagination in Gerlach, J. 138
12–13; concept of life in 17–18; concept gift(s) 8, 27, 150, 151–2, 162–3; agency of
of the event and its relation to 17; things as 33; ethical receptivity to 140;
disability studies in 18, 20–1; experience ethic of the 29–30, 171; in feminist
of waiting in 15–16; literary narratives version of relational ontology 170–1;
and 23–37; manabata (humanism) in giving of 157–8; “I”-as-self as 29–30;
10–11; as more dispersed, diffused and selfhood and acceptance of 169; of
mundane form 9; nonhuman entities in singing 143–4; survival as 31, 183–200;
21–2; and the ordinary 9–23; and of weaving skill 146
orientation in space 19–20; rape scripts Given Time 30, 151, 162
in 54, 66–73; rituals in 16–17; as rupture Giving an Account of Oneself 29, 191–2,
caused by extreme pressures of the 195
terrorizing event(s) 9; scholarly turn to Gogoi, M. 105
5–6, 9; secret killings in 13–15; social Gogoi, R. 95
“dysappearance” in 20–1; sovereignty in Gogoi, S. 95, 99, 102–3
11–12; speech impairment in 20; subject Gohain, H. 154
to unmaking and ruination in states of Gooch, J. 102
terror 11; time as a weapon in 16; guerrillero testimonio 100–2; transactional
unmade by state terror 54–66 nature of 106–7
extreme realism 25–8 Guevara, C. 100, 101, 103–6, 111, 161
Gupta, A. 58–9
Fanon, F. 35
fear, spreading of 60–1 Hage, G. 15–16, 69
Felanee 11, 29, 33, 37; affective labor and Haraway, D. 31–2, 127
biopolitical production in 195–200; Hardt, M. 36, 102, 172
agency of things in 171; allegory in Haritaworn, J. 6
169–70, 185–91, 196–7; biopower from Harlow, B. 105
below and 172; exploration of natality haunting, disability 73–85
and relationality in 170–1; female Heart of Darkness 115, 169, 172, 177, 179
agency and secret life of things in 191–5; Herzfeld, M. 16, 69
introduction to 169–70; survival as gift Highsmith, P. 161
in 183–200 hill regions: colonialism and 92–3; cultural
Feldman, A. 14, 60–1 exchange in 93; dismembered lives of
female agency and secret life of things in 116–30; introduction to 92–9; and
Felanee 191–5 necropolitics, foothill lifeworlds and
femina sacra 66, 70 the body-as-witness in Boranga Yan
feminist relational philosophy 28–30, 100–16; UFLA narratives and 95–8
171–2; on the act of watching with one’s Hinduism 93
own eyes and strange recognitions in Honig, B. 30
An Outline of the Republic 172–83; rape Hughes, T. 161
scripts and 66–73 Hughes. B. 20
Ferguson, F. 72 Hull, M. 58
figuration 31–2 Human Condition, The 170–1
Fire From a Mountain 100, 103 hunger narratives 115–16
flooding 37 hunger strikes 7, 40n12
207 Index 207
Hussain, I. 138 Latour, B. 193
Hussain, J. 7, 9, 18, 22, 35, 139, 181; Lentin, R. 66
see also “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali” Levinas, M. 159
Husserl, E. 196 life, concept of 17–18
Life and Words 17, 59
Iccha Annicha Swatteu Kisu Kotha 99 “lifedeath” 30
“imaginary of the state” 58 Lintner, B. 99
incapacitation 6–7 literary narratives: animality in 34–7;
India Against Itself 85n3 “art of witness” in 25–6, 31; dealing
insects 36–7, 112–13 with political terror 25–6; defining the
Irom, S. 7 literary field in 25; of endurance and
Ito, J. 161 survival 26–8; extreme realism in 25–8;
feminist relational philosophy in 28–30;
Jara, R. 103 flooding in 37; “gift” in 29–30; of
“Jighankha” 138 history’s footnotes in Aulingar Jui
Jilangamba, Y. 6 116–30; metaphorization in 32–5,
40n21; mirroring in 73–85, 125–6; from
Kachari, M. 95 Northeast India versus Northeast Indian
Kachin Independence Army (KIA) 99 literature 24; rape scripts in 54, 66–73;
Kafka, F. 51 reconsidering the question of the
Kalantoror Gadya 9, 16, 52, 183; political using 23–4; revolutionary
animalization and torture in 82–4; 105–6; role in inquiries on the everyday
disabled characters in 33, 34; loss of trust in states of terror 23; of terror in
in 65–6; maleficent state and unmaking Kalantoror Gadya 60; on vulnerability
of the ordinary in 54–66; patriarchy 28–9; see also short stories
portrayed in 55; plot of 52–3; rape script “Living On” 139
in 54, 66–73, 141; setting of 52; terror, Lorca, F. G. 161
mirroring and disability haunting in Lord Jim 172, 174, 200–1n4
73–85; terror provoked by state power in
59–60; torture in 61–4 Mahanta, A. 7, 9, 23, 33, 92, 95–8, 116–17,
Kalita, A. 14, 15 129; see also Aulingar Jui
Kalita, A. P. 7, 9, 11, 15, 23, 29, 138, 169; Mahlke, K. 50–1
disabled characters and 33; on the Makam 96
mayabi state (see mayabi state); manabata (humanism) 10–11
see also Felanee Manipur Police Commandos (MPC) 1
Kamuf, P. 161 Manorama, T. 7
Kangliyanar Maat 95–6, 98, 99 Manto, S. H. 127
Kar, B. 93 Mao Tse-Tung 101, 103–4, 106, 111
Kaushik, S. 100 Marcus, S. 67
Kellert, S. 112 Marder, M. 140
Kikon, D. 9, 108 Massumi, B. 160
Kimura, M. 9 Matisse, H. 161
Kire, E. 142 Matta, M. 25
Kohn, E. 37 mayabi state 51–2; rape scripts and 66–73;
Kolb, R. 20–1, 128 terror, mirroring and disability haunting
Kunstman, A. 6 by 73–85; terror by 51–4; unmaking of
the ordinary by maleficent 54–66
Last Interview, The 139–40 Mazumdar, C. 105
“Last Song, The” 30; closure in 139; Mbembe, A. 2, 4–5, 17, 122; on colonizing
dead woman’s voice in 30, 38, 140; subjectivity 178–9; on imagining politics
oral storytelling in 142; subverting as a form of war 100; on interrelationship
the rape script in 140–50; text-ility of between death, body and meat 112; on
143–4, 150 mirroring 78–9; on no-man zones 97;
208 Index 208
on survival 27, 104; on war and peace Nellie massacre of 1983 9
39n2 Neog, M. 153
McClintock, A. 157 Nervous System, The 15, 19
McDuie-Ra, D. 9–10, 25 Ngai, S. 56
metaphorization 32–5, 40n21; foothill Ngangom, R. 24, 27–8, 30
lifeworlds and 109–10; of mirroring Noli Me Tangere 32–3
78–9 no-man’s zones 97–8, 112, 118, 122–3,
middle-class terror 53–4 132n20; passage of time in 125; spatial
militarization, terror of 6–7 topography of 130
mind-body split 105 Nongkynrih, K. S. 24
Minh-Ha, T. T. 149 nonhuman entities 21–2; animal
Miri Jiyori 94–5 corporeality and 22–3; see also animality
Miro, J. 161 Norris, A. 115–16
mirroring 73–85, 125–6 Northeast Indian borderlands: hill regions
Misra, T. 24, 53, 94–5, 184, 185 of (see hill regions); literatures from
misuse value 194–5 24; (see also literary narratives); location
Mitchell, D. 75 of 2; necropolitical violence and terror
Mitchell, W. J. T. 22 in 2–4, 7–8, 10; as shatter zones 4–5,
Moore, M. 161 40n8; “top-down” manner of distributing
Moral, R. K. 116–17 power in 4; turn toward analysis of the
motherhood 155–7 everyday in 9
Movement to Resuscitate the Liberation Northeast Migrants in Delhi 9
Struggle (MORLS) 174 nostalgia 56; foothill lifeworlds and 107–11
Murray, L. 161
objects and objectification 21–2, 31–2;
Naga National Council (NNC) 99, 130–1n1 animality and 34–5
Naga territories 92–3, 130–1n1 Ochoa Gautier, A. M. 148
naked protests 7, 40n12 Of Grammatology 140
natality 28–9, 41n30, 170–1 On the Postcolony 79
nature and anthropocentrism 31–2 Operation All Clear 98–9, 131n10
Navaro-Yashin, Y. 125 Operation Clear Out 116
Nealon, J. 4 orality 141, 148–9
necropolitical terror 2–4, 7–8, 10, 196; oral storytelling 142–3, 148–50
defining the literary field covering 25; as ordinary, the: aranya-as-horrorscape and
descent of humans into states of 111–16; maleficent state and unmaking
animality 35; experience of waiting in of 54–66; where to look for 10; see also
15–16, 69–70; in Kalantoror Gadya everyday, the
59–60; loss of trust in the world due to “Ordinary Ethics” 10
11, 12–13, 65; mirroring and disability Outline of the Republic, An 30, 169; being
haunting in 73–85; murder of and seeing in 173–6; introduction to
Chongkham Sanjit as 1–2, 39n1; rape in 169–70; overlife and survivance in
16; rituals in 16–17, 53–4; secret killings 180–3; as police story 176–80; “strange
in 13–15; sense of givenness in 18–19; recognitions” in 172–83
torture as 12–13, 19; unmaking of the overlife and survivance 180–3
world in 61–2; vulnerability and 28–9
necropolitical theory 7 Pachuau, J. 9
necropolitics 2, 4, 79; in Boranga Yan pastoral power 86–7n19
100–16; focus on the everyday and Paterson, K. 20
survival in 7; literary narratives of 26; in patriarchy 55
no-man zones 97; scholarly turn to the Peluso, N. L. 82
everyday in 5–6, 9; in shatter zones 4–5, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 1
40n8; zones of 1–8, 97–8 Pereen, E. 74–5, 79, 83
Negri, A. 36, 102 Peters, J. 101
209 Index 209
physical disabilities 20–1 Sandahl, C. 20
Pick, A. 127 Sanglot Fenla 80, 98, 99, 103, 105; as
police stories 176–80 revolutionary narrative 105–6
Ponge, F. 161 Sanjit, C. 1, 39n1
Poole, D. 58 Sarma, J. 14
Possoco, S. 6 Sarma, P. 95
postcolonialism 3–4, 7–8; disability and 32, Sarma, R. 7, 9
41n33; mechanisms that produce Sawian, B. 173
otherness and 51–2; struggle for Scarry, E. 61–2
independent Nagalim in 92; Schrift, A. 29
see also colonialism Schwartz, M. 158
Povinelli, E. 27, 121 Scott, J. 4–5, 40n8, 92, 122
Prakashan, B. 96 “Second Time Around” 50–1
Pratt, M. L. 175 Secret Killings of Assam 13–15
Precarious Life 190–1 self-control 63–4
“Promise of Monsters, The” 31–2 self-respect 63–4
Puar, J. 2, 5, 124 self-sufficient body 28
Sen, G. 24
Queer Phenomenology 18 Shadow Men 173
quotidian, turn to the 5–6 Shakespeare, W. 161
Sharma, D. 154
Rabha, S. 81 Sharma, R. 95–7, 100
Rahman, T. 1–2 shatter zones 4–5, 40n8
Rajkonwar, K. K. 95, 99 Shaviro, S. 22
Ramanujan, A. K. 162 short stories 163–4n1; closure in 138–9;
Ranciere, J. 176 introduction to 138–40; see also “Last
rape scripts 16; brutalization of the body Song, The”
in 145–6; in Kalantoror Gadya 54, signing body 128
66–73; mystique around rape and 67; Singh, B. 17
ostracization in 68; subverted in the “The snails 160–3
Last Song” 140–50; survival post-rape Snyder, S. 75
and 70–2 social “dysappearance” 20–1
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali” 18, 22, 181;
(RSS) 93 closure in 139; corpses, creatures and
realism, extreme 25–8 vulnerability in 151–63
Remains of Spring 96 sovereignty: animals and 35; bodily 11–12,
“rhetoric of outrage” 182 122–3; colonizing subjectivity and
“rhetoric of tears” 182 178–9; in world of children 155
rituals 16–17, 40n14, 53–4; of arrest in speech impairment 20
Northern Ireland 61; of terror in Spivak, G. 4, 143, 180–1
Kalantoror Gadya 60 state, the see mayabi state
Rizal, J. 32–3 state fetishism 51
Rodriguez, I. 103 “Story of the Kumjelekua and the Hare,
“romance of sovereignty” 2 The” 160
romanticism 110, 132n22 storytelling, oral 142–3
routine, mutilation of 54–66; dispositioning subject-object distinction 21–2
and 56–7; nostalgia and 56; patriarchy SULFA militants 169–70
and 55; state power and 59–60; writing Sunder Rajan, R. 67
and 58–9 Surface 174
survival: after rape 70–2; endurance and
“Saamuk” 160–1 26–8, 104; entrapment and 124–5; as gift
Saikia, A. 82, 95 31, 183–200; in hill regions (see hill
Saikia, Y. 10–11 regions); introduction to modalities of
210 Index 210
relationality and 169–72; performance of Vajpeyi, A. 3, 4
power and 31; survivance in 29–31 Van Dam, J. 76
survivance 29–31; overlife and 180–3 Vandergeest, P. 82
Swargarohonor Sangee 23 Van Schendel, W. 4–5, 9
“swarm intelligence” 35 Vishnupad 2
vocality 141, 143
Talukdar, M. 14 voice(s) 115–16; in Assamese literature 96;
Tatar, M. 162 aurality and 143, 146, 164n4;
Taussig, M. 15, 19; on state fetishism 51 ethnographic 107–8, 117; female
Tehelka 1 agency and 54; guerrillero 102–3;
terrorism, critical interest in 50, 85n2 literary reading and 23; in oral
Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act storytelling 142–3, 148–50; rape and
(TADA) 65, 85–6n12 silencing of 66–73; in response to
text-ility 143–4, 150 rituals of terror 60; return of dead
Tezor Andhar 52, 73, 82 woman’s, in “The Last Song” 30, 38,
These Hills Called Home 142 140; subverting the rape script in “The
“thingification” 21–2 Last Song” 140–50; visual register
time as a weapon 16; in no-man’s zones complicated by 115; “voiceover”
125 117–19
torture 12–13, 19; Alleg on 85n11; in vulnerability 28–9; of dead bodies 151,
Kalantoror Gadya 61–4; unmaking 158, 161, 164–5n12
of the world in 61–2
transindividual transformation 160 waiting, experience of 15–16, 69–70
Trial, The 51 Walling, C. W. 143
Trnka, P. 161–2, 163 Wark, M. 28, 41n29
trust in the world 11, 12–13, 65 “weaponization of life” 7
Tutuola, A. 78–9 Weber, M. 51
“Two Arunachali Writers” 94 When Species Meet 31–2
Wittgenstein, L. 17
United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) Woolf, V. 161
13–14, 52, 85n3; conflict between Wretched of the Earth, The 35
United Reservation Movement Council writing, archival function of 58–9
of Assam (URMCA) and 81; dominant
public images of 80; in Felanee 169–70; Yaruyingam 95, 116–17
literary works by militants of 95–8;
major bases of 98–9 Zama, M. C. 26
United Reservation Movement Council of zomia 4–5, 40n8, 92, 99
Assam (URMCA) 81 zones of death 2
Uzumaki 161 Zumthor, P. 141

(Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series) Amit R. Baishya - Contemporary Literature From Northeast India - Deathworlds, Terror and Survival-Routledge (2019) (Z-Lib - Io)

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(Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series) Amit R. Baishya - Contemporary Literature From Northeast India - Deathworlds, Terror and Survival-Routledge (2019) (Z-Lib - Io)

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i

Contemporary Literature from

The Northeast Indian borderlands, a cultural crossroads between South, Southeast

Amit R. Baishya is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the

Documentary Film in India

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Typeset in Times New Roman

1 Necropolitical literature from Northeast India, the everyday

2 The mayabi state: narratives of torture, sexual violence and

3 Of hill spaces: survival in duress in no-man’s zones in

4 Survivance and supplements: revenants and animality in

5 Being-as-following: modalities of survival and relationality

CL Contemporary Literature from Northeast India

1 Necropolitical literature from

States of terror: necropolitical zones in Northeast India

[T]he history of boundaries in Africa is too often reduced . . . to the frontier

Thinking through necropolitics on the terrain of queer critique brings into

One among the . . . casualties of militarism is that it incapacitates. The AFSPA

[T]he notion of the ordinary takes us to an important characteristic of everyday

is the certainty that by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the

This sense of amazement engendered by sheer powerlessness and the breaching

As children we expect each discomfort, sickness, injury, hurt, each pain to be

Acts of dehumanization like torture and the habitation of quotidian necropolitical

In the name of search operation [sic], SULFA members, aided by security

Dismembered body parts of people who were made to “disappear” turned up in

1 Ananta Kalita’s disappearance: “In one of such deadly nights, unknown

2 Jyotish Sarma’s disappearance: “Around 11 in the night, they [Sarma’s

About the ritual dimensions of arrest, Allen Feldman writes:

This ritualistic dimension of power is evident in the scenes described. There is a

When one is confronted by social and physical inaccessibility one is simul-

Paterson and Hughes’ example of speech impairment can also be thought of as a

What a phenomenology of alter-embodiment, like Kolb’s account, enables us

Drawing on the metaphysical subject–object distinction, Mitchell deﬁnes the

has to do with the showing-forth of that which is strictly speaking inacces-

Instead of a sovereign, self-contained subject that apprehends the object as a rel-

Literary narratives, endurance, survival, ﬁguration

Increasingly a distinction is drawn between what we call “politics” – the

Edkins’s deﬁnition of the “political” gestures towards an emergent, unpredictable

[T]he question of the gift is a political question . . . which addresses funda-

survivance as sur-vivance – more life, surplus life. . . . Survivance, survival . . .

Figures help me grapple inside the ﬂesh of mortal world-making

The reference to “ﬂesh of mortal world-making entanglements” keeps the

“Objects” like bodies do not pre-exist as such. Similarly, “nature” cannot

No longer are we in the realm of egocentric anthropocentrism that designates

“The entire paddy ﬁeld was submerged in water.”

Plan of the work

Mahlke establishes an opposition between passion (“hot-blooded . . . banana repub-

this necessary institutional interpenetration of reason by violence not only

As a journalist, it would not be correct to get involved in such affairs at a

The mutilation of “routine”: torture, the maleﬁcent state

a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an

my utterances become vulnerable because my words may be transﬁgured

It is usually a norm to arrest the person in front of his family members. . . . It

[A]rrests are spectacles that elicit subject positions by commanding complic-

Bora’s description of what is possibly a classroom in a school echoes one of

By destroying self-respect [atmoxomman] . . . the very personhood of a

The aim of interrogation is not solely to extract truth. . . . Besides extracting

While interrogation is supposed to be predicated on the dualistic structure of ques-

“What news of the boy?” Choudhury queried.

The chilling aspect of this passage, accentuated by Choudhury’s cynical laughter,

Rape scripts: bureaucratic indifference and

At the mercy of sovereign power, woman, due to . . . her sexual vulnerability,

[they] are able to marshal about 40 to 50 women, and sometimes more in a