Migrancy and Memory in Siddhartha Deb’s Novel The Point of Return

Abstract

Siddhartha Deb’s novel The Point of Return (2002) is a nuanced study of the fractured relationship between an indigenous tribal people and Bengali migrants in the undivided state of Assam, and the exilic condition of these migrants in the Northeast of India (especially in Assam and Meghalaya). It also shows the painful process of cartographic reconfigurations of state boundaries along ethnic lines, and the resultant violence, uprootedness, alienation, and continued memory of loss. The paper seeks to investigate how the writer traces the lives of the first generation migrants who came to the new land in search of a better life but were condemned to live precarious lives in their adopted homeland. The novel is also about the post-partition generation who inherited the memory of their parents and grandparents and had to negotiate their own sense of belonging and identity in the face of ethnic assertion by indigenous people in the eastern borderland region. The legacy of this conflict lives on in the Northeast as the post-partition generation continues to grapple with issues like displacement, cultural confrontation, and homelessness. At the same time, we have examined how Deb utilizes the mode of memory to tell his story of migrancy and the trauma of loss and dislocation. The act of remembering, the urge to recall and revisit the historical loss, fracture, and trauma, are insistent in the text even as it grapples with issues like home, identity, citizenship, and belonging in the postcolonial nation-state.