ABSTRACT
This chapter reads two novels by former United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) militants, one of the prominent independentist groups in Northeast India: Raktim Sharma’s Boranga Yan and Anurag Mahanta’s Aulingar Jui . While they are part of the trajectory of the Assamese ethnographic novel that represents the borderland other from the standpoint of the “modern” self, they also depict encounters with injured, dying or damaged lives in no-man’s zones. Boranga Yan is based on the ejection of ULFA militants from their Bhutanese bases during a military operation in 2003. Boranga Yan is an example of the ecogothic where guerrillas facing defeat witness inhuman scenes of their comrades’ corporeal disintegration in the forest. Aulingar Jui focuses on a Naga village in the no-man’s zones between India and Myanmar. Sovereign power is flexibly wielded by statist forces and para-statist organizations. Two figures – pertaining to entrapment (durgo – fortress) and impairment (dwi-khondito – dismembered) – are used to depict life in this no-man’s zone. While these figures are associated with a series of reductive comparisons with forms of animality and disability, there is an ethical inversion as well as the major protagonist, an Assamese outsider who escapes to the Naga village, eventually learns to live with restricted possibilities of life.
