Subversion of Anthropocentricism: Study of the Representation of Animal in select Contemporary Assamese Poetry

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Animals have always been a matter of treatment in literature but the matter of concern is that this representation is very often been done from anthropocentric perspective being informed by the tendency of othering the animals in terms of the binary opposition of human/non-human. The human gaze often paves stereotyping of a particular animal; animals are often endowed with human emotion, guilt, pride and deviousness keeping aside their own instincts; animals are very often used as metaphor or symbol to describe human condition. Animals are seen being part of political and ideological construct even. All these together characterize the typical literary representation of animals in literature. With the rise of the ecocritical sensibility and environmental activism, resistance has been observed against such conventional depiction of animals though yet to be grown prominently. Such resistance can also be observed in some poems by a number of contemporary Assamese poets, where the binary and hierarchy of man-animal is minimized and emphasis has been put on exploring the intrinsic features and conditions of the animal being represented. Strong emotive voices have often been rendered to the animal and hence subverting the anthropocentric gaze which always sanction oppression. The poems are often informed by the realization on the part of the poetic persona as being the part of the same cycle of nature as the animals are. This realization leads to his or her identification with nature which is far more pragmatic in tone than the Romantic transcendence. A total number of five contemporary Assamese poets have been selected for the present study; the quoted parts of the poems under observation have been translated into English by the researcher himself and only for the research purpose. The selected poems have then been scrutinized in terms of the theoretical framework set for the present study which in turn leads to explore the different aspects and perspectives of the representation of animal in contemporary Assamese Poetry. Key Words: Anthropocentricism, Subversion, Animal, Assamese Poetry, Representation.