ABSTRACT
While literary work on LGBTQ+ issues in Assamese language has been limited, the works of Pranjal Sharma Baishistha, Gobinda Prasad Sharma, Arup Kumar Nath, Jayanta Saikia, Aruni Kashyap, Geetali Dutta, Moushumi Kandali, Monikuntala Bhattacharya, Dr Akashitara, and Rudrani Sharma in the form of articles, short stories and novels have examined what being a ‘queer’ person in Assamese society entails—fears, anxieties, uncertainties and rejections. Having outlined the emergence of queer Assamese literature, this chapter will elaborate on the authors like Panchanan Hazarika with his golpos ‘Andharotkoiudaah’ and ‘Xomudroxofen’ and Bipasha Bora’s work ‘Xomrajya’ whose fictional work show different forms of writing and experiencing the self-identified queerness as a resistance to gender normativity in Assamese literature. They both construct alternative narratives that shatter the image of the queer in a private space as a disembodied object, and redefine queer as a complex social subject. This chapter seeks to explore how spaces (public and private) in Hazarika and Bora’s fiction are lived by the characters and the manner in which resistance is understood as constitutive of their agency. This work thus tries to contribute new insights into re-imaging queer space in Assamese literature.
