The Act of Watching with One's Own Eyes

Abstract

Contemporary cultural productions from India's northeastern borderlands, both in English and languages like Assamese and Meitelon, powerfully illustrate how subjects who inhabit states of dispossession continue to imagine potential forms of action and collectivity beyond the forms of ‘death’ and non-being that states of exception supposedly engender. Moreover, such works also show how relational forms of subjectivity herald renewed possibilities of being and existing in postcolonial ‘death-worlds.’ A good illustration is Siddhartha Deb's English novel An Outline of the Republic (2006), which shows how the psychological investments of a male mainland Indian narrator in the discourses of sovereignty are gradually rent asunder as he begins to identify with the existential predicament of a subject in a state of dispossession: a woman from the northeastern Indian state of Manipur who becomes a sacrificial pawn in the political endgames played between statist and non-statist authorities. I argue that the narrator's encounters with supposed forms of death-in-life in the borderlands, and the ‘strange’ recognitions that accrue from these, facilitate a subjective metamorphosis in two ways: ethically, it helps the narrator acknowledge the demands of dispossessed others; politically, he recognizes alternative modalities of being and existing beyond sovereign governmentality and autonomous subjectivity.