Subversive Narratives of Borders and Nations: A Reading of Debendranath Acharya’s Jangam and Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

Abstract

The proposed paper studies the narratives of ‘borders’ and ‘nations’ on the border lands between India and Burma invoking two works of fiction written in Assamese and English respectively. Jangam (1982) an Assamese novel by Debendranath Acharya is read with The Glass Palace (2000) by Amitav Ghosh to study the stateless lives of people who become victims of operative forces controlling the exclusionary lines of border and nation. Set on the backdrop of World War II, both the novels address the ramifications of border and nation in the lives of common people. They probe less explored geography of the Indo-Burmese border and the ebbs and flows during the colonial and post-colonial times. Popular representations depicting this particular geography have remained elusive, comparing for example, the Indo-Pakistan border. It is argued that the historical narratives of cross border migrations in the colonial times can be reviewed through regional writers’ expressions about home and homelessness. The fixity of borders and the consequent realisations of belonging to a nation for both the Indian migrants in Burma and their counterparts in India not only call for fluidity in the way home and homelessness are understood, but also are read against the temporal re-imaginings of national identities. Exploring beyond the historical records of such episodes, these works of fiction offer nuanced and poignant picture of what politics does to everyday human life. The contorted lives of migrants crossing these contested borders suggest that borders are sites of negotiations where ideas of nation and nationalism are constantly interrogated and ideas of ‘insider/outsider’ and ‘home/world’ are redefined.