Gender and Identity Politics: Arupa Patangia Kalita’s <i>Felanee </i>(The Story of Felanee) and Rita Chowdhury’s <i>Ei Samay Sei Samay </i>(Times Now and Then)

Abstract

This paper explores how two contemporary women writers in Asamiya refract the question of identity politics through a gendered prism in a multiethnic and multilingual landscape of the Brahmaputra valley in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The period since the late 1970s has been one of intense sociopolitical movements, armed rebellions and state supported armed repressions in large parts of northeastern India. While a few women (including the writer Rita Chowdhury (1960-) discussed in this paper) have been at the forefront of some of these movements such as the Assam Movement (late 1970s and 1980s), women in general have been at the receiving end of the violence unleashed both by armed rebels fighting against the Indian state as well as by the state’s armed machinery. An understanding of this context is crucial to conceptualise the terms through which we shall approach the texts Felanee (2003) and Ei Samay Sei Samay (2007) as both texts are situated in conflict-ridden times. While Rita Chowdhury’s Ei Samay Sei Samay draws on the author’s experience of being closely involved in the Assam Movement, Felanee spans a time period which saw several movements and rebellions, sometimes running parallel to each other as ethnic groups increasingly claimed nationhood within or outside the political borders of the Indian state. Finally, the article gestures towards another issue – the question of whether writers in Asamiya engage with identity politics differently from Northeast Indian writers writing in English. While most writers writing in English have received critical attention, I believe it is equally important to understand how writers in the vernaculars have engaged with similar questions.