Image Credit: Siva Prasad Marar

Assamese long fiction of the twenty-first century exhibits a renewed preoccupation with the question of identity. Although formation of identities in the line of ethnicity has been dominant in Assamese Literature of the post-War period and especially in the tumultuous decades of the Movement, a few female writers with their fictional works produced in the last two decades have been able to carve out a niche for themselves through their exploration of alternative regimes of representation. Theng Fakhri Tehsildaror Taamor Tarowal (2009), the last work of fiction by Mamoni Raisom Goswami, a literary stalwart of the region, is an insightful take on the processes of historical ‘subject-making’ as well as subjectivation viz-a-viz a socio-culturally vibrant region of Assam. Goswami builds her thematic universe by looking at history from the other end of the telescope and asserts agency to subject positions that are either denied or omitted by the prevalent historical discourse.

There has also been a new generation of writers who are extending their efforts to devise an utterly new trajectory of narrativity that sustains as well as interrogates the question of identity. Anamika Bora’s Astitva (2018) stands out as an intriguing narrative that skillfully negotiates formation of subjectivities which is contingent upon indigeneity and territoriality. With a nuanced understanding of the importance of little-narratives in erecting alternative versions of history, Bora’s novel narrates the historical predicament of the indigenous Assamese faced with large scale migration from East Bengal right through the period of British colonial occupation up to the present times. The novel retells the lie of the land around the Nagaon region of Assam, by narrating the poignant saga of downfall of an extended indigenous Assamese family of landowners as their land rights slips into the hands of the Bengal-origin migrants. To that end, the narrative exploits the metaphor of the ‘soil’ to fashion it with the idea of the ‘indigenous’. The coinage ‘son of the soil’ thus finds expression in varied ways in the text.

Autochthony is one of the ways to come to terms with the indigene’s identity through assertion of her rights over territory, as the term, which has its origins in classical Greece, stands for being sprung from the soil itself. As Peter Geschiere observes: “[autochthony] seems to represent the most authentic form of belonging: ‘born from the earth itself’—how could one belong more?” (Geschiere 2). Bora’s novel emphatically asserts the indigene’s belonging by means of establishing an umbilical and sensory link between the son and the soil. Early in the novel, the protagonist Mahat Koch, who is the eldest son of the famed landowner Gelai Mohajon, displays his passionate association with the land:

Mahat lifted the piece of soil up to his nostrils and smelt it. His mouth got succulent with water. He hungrily put a lump of soil in his mouth and dissolved it in his blood. The riverine soil of a fertile land left farrowed for years: sensitive to touch like the fecund body of a maiden. (Bora 23) [My translation]

However, various conflicts within the family of the indigene rupture this link, resulting in gradual takeover of the land by the migrants. The historical event of the incessant influx from East Bengal into the region in search of better livelihood leading to an existential crisis of the indigene, finds expression in the novel through a group of hard-working migrant farm labourers as they start acquiring land from the indigenous landowners who just are complacent about their possession of land. Over the decades this complacency costs the indigene dearly as they are predicated to the territorial periphery by the migrant population with their overwhelming birth-rate better understanding of possession.

The predicament of the indigene is symbolized in Bora’s novel through the character of Mahat’s first wife Sonphooli. Introduced to the readers as a timid and naïve housewife of an influential family, Sonphooli gets addicted to opium thanks to her step-mother-in-law Phoolmati’s conspiracy to render her childless, and thereby gradually loses her sanity. Sonphooli’s growing insanity coupled with her inability to beget a child becomes symptomatic of a pervading condition well articulated in the novel. It can be understood that Sonphooli’s predicament signifies the crisis of the indigene having been parted with her habitat:

“I’m having the appetite to eat soil, O Xoru! I feel like having even the soil of this courtyard! Uh! I’ll sprinkle water on the dry, dusty soil of the roads to recover its fragrance and eat that too.” (Bora 116) [My translation]

Here, Mahat’s primordial hunger for the fertile, fragrant soil in the beginning is contrasted with Sonphooli’s clinical appetite for the infertile soil. The height of this crisis is reached in the climax when Mahat’s son Krishnakanta breaks down after realizing his inability to return to a primordial sense of selfhood which is supposedly rooted in the soil, as his rights over land is taken away from him:

Mahat died – Krishnakanta didn’t cry as he was intoxicated by the greed of property. Bhunsuki died – Krishnakanta secured ownership of the land bequeathed to Bhunsuki. Yet, the same Krishnakanta now, listening to the sound of the Doba, which contained the pangs of deserted villages, started crying aloud and grabbed the land where he was standing”. (Bora 292) [My translation]

Although Astitva translates as ‘existence’, the narrative is an explication of the ‘essence’ of the indigene faced with the problematics of being by means of belonging. Autochthony thus is the rationalizing force in the formation of subjectivities in the novel. Autochthony, however, is not without its problems. Geschiere observes that: “…autochthony with its earthly references—the soil, funerals, belonging—presents itself as a sort of primal identity. Yet in recent years the problems with the notion has become clear. It has an unfortunate tendency to fix what is in constant flux.” (Geschiere 31)

While Anamika Bora’s in Astitva aims to capture the more or less essentialist notion of identity, another powerful female writer of the region Arupa Patangia Kalita in her novel Felanee (2003) offers an alternative to that notion. The novel narrates the fate of characters coinciding with the history of post-colonial Assam and fictionalizes a violent phase of the Assam Movement. The protagonist Felanee embodies a pluralistic sense of selfhood as she has mixed blood of persons running in her veins from both indigenous and migrant communities living in western Assam. As the Movement, which was largely driven by the urge to recover and proclaim the primal identity of the indigene, was turning violent with almost no scope of asserting alternative identities, Felanee’s world too is destroyed by vicious acts of violence. Even then, she survives and ceaselessly asserts her belonging. It is noteworthy that her name itself is onomatopoeia of ‘being thrown away’ in the dialects of Western Assam, as she was discarded at birth: “She was Felanee. The sound of a splash in water got entangled with her name. Having thrown to water, she became Felanee.” (Kalita 10) [My translation]

Kalita’s narrative thus is a reaction against the essentialist notions of selfhood. Felanee, rather suggests a throughout revision of the discourse of belonging. Gestchiere’s observation is relevant in this context as he paraphrases Gerd Baumann who puts forward “[the] plea to take the word belonging itself more seriously and to follow its different languages that so strongly assert themselves in quite different recent configurations” (Geschiere 32). Indeed, Kalita’s novel explores an alternative idiom for assertion of subjectivities that address a dynamic notion of belonging. The climax of the novel affirms an emphatic assertion of such subjectivities through the parable of kanhi grass and its relation to soil: “The seeds of Kanhi grass have got wings. They float in the river. They fly. And flourish as soon as they get hold of a fallow land.” (Kalita 254) [My translation]

Thus, autochthony is a difficult terrain in Felanee. Unlike Bora’s thesis, the narrative forces one to rethink the relationship between the soil and its possessors, as the same is consolidated through performativity of resistance. But at the same time the sensory linkage of the locales and the geographies with subjectivities formulated in the narrative also intertwines autochthony with the text and makes it an indispensable part of textuality. Sten Pultz Moslund takes on the significance of autochthonous narrativity as he claims that:

To read literature’s sensuous geographies is to read the place world as it appears in literary language as an event of bodily sensations: in reference to the setting, for instance, or in the movements of characters and in their spatial activities, in descriptions of places, landscapes, flora, fauna, climate, or in the appearance of things in a text through the invocation of shapes, textures, colors, or olfactory and sonorous intensities. (Moslund 10)

Moslund’s view of the ‘place world’ in relation to corporeality can be traced both in Bora’s and Kalita’s novels as markers of local specificities of identity in the manner pointed out already. The attribution of subjectivities to the lived physical world of the characters vindicates a sensory mode of belonging in both the two texts. In Astitva, the distinguished spatial activities of the indigene are framed in idiolects that form a register to be masterfully embedded by Bora in the narrative. A similar register earns credibility in Felanee too, which is out an out a part of the geography that the narrative exploits. In fact, differences apart, both the two novels give way for a discursivity of autochthony which tend to energize alternative representational modes for addressing the seemingly irredeemable question of identity, given the ontology of the region.

It will not be an over-simplification to say that situating autochthony in Anamika Bora’s Astitva and Arupa Patangia Kalita’s Felanee is representative of the quest for epistemologies that offer resolutions to the question of identity in contemporary Assamese fiction.    

Works Cited

Bora, Anamika. Astitva [Existence], Guwahati: Papyrus, 2018.

Geschiere, Peter. The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe, Chicago: Chicago UP, 2009.

Kalita, Arupa Patangia. Felanee [Felanee]. 2003. 5^th ed, Guwahati: Jyoti Prakashan, 2014.

Moslund, Sten Pultz. Literature’s Sensuous Geographies: Postcolonial Matters of Place, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.