ABSTRACT
This chapter pairs Siddhartha Deb’s novel An Outline of the Republic with Arupa Kalita’s powerful survivalist Assamese novel, Felanee. Both texts have allegorical undertones. The ethical attitudes manifested by the protagonists emerge from them following the affective calls of things. Things function as vitalizing entities that allure subjects. Intrigued by the chance discovery of an unknown woman’s photograph, the mainland Indian protagonist in Outline travels through what he perceives as a post-colonial “heart of darkness” – the northeast Indian borderlands. His shifting relationship with the photograph and his experiences in emergency zones initiates a transformative process of recognition. Felanee focuses on a working-class woman named Felanee (which means “thrown away”) who lives on after ethno-national violence dismembers the lifeworld she knew intimately. The titular character’s portrayal as a survivor is manifested by her relationships to things that she receives as gifts from pasts she never witnessed directly. For instance, her mother, who dies just after she is born, in a previous occurrence of violence, leaves her shell bangles for her daughter. Felanee ruminates on these gifts during moments of reverie. Her imaginative associations with effaced pasts, mediated via the agency of things, is a powerful index of her ethical attitudes.
