FRONTISPIECE - Zombies in no-man’s land : Amit R Baishya

Amit R Baishya takes us to the no-man’s zone between India and Bhutan through the testimonio-fiction of former rebel Raktim Sarma. 

Sarma reveals the existential
fears of the guerrilla that
his personal destiny may
have become unmoored from the
collective context of the revolution

Former United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) rebel, Raktim Sarma, is the author of Borangar Ngang and Kafila. Both are fictional accounts loosely based on his experiences as a guerrilla. While the former represents life in the underground camps in Bhutan (up to Operation All Clear in 2003), the latter narrates events occurring after Pratyush, the protagonist of both novels and a fictional alter-ego of Sarma, is released from prison. 

Borangar Ngang represents Sarma’s strongest literary achievement and is comparable with some of the best examples from the genre of guerrillero testimonio emerging from Latin America. Well known books from this genre include Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diaries and the former Sandinista Omar Cabezas’ Fire on the Mountain. Sarma insists in his introduction that his novel should be read as a fictional account based on his experiences. I will therefore, refer to it by an awkward neologism of my own: testimonio-fiction.   

Sarma’s testimonio-fiction has to be located first within a genre in Assamese literature dealing with the experiences of guerrilleros in “no-man’s zones” between the boundaries of India, China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan. Probably the best example of this is Parag Das’s novel Sanglot Fenla which shares some notable features of the guerrillero testimonio. The second genre with which it shows an affinity possesses a distinct narrative structure characterised by two main features. First, although these texts are non-fictional testimonials in the first person, they resemble the structure of the literary bildungsroman – the narrative of gradual individual growth into a particular form of consciousness. However, the difference between the bildungsroman and the testimonio, as the literary critic John Beverley points out, is that in the former, a collective social situation is experienced as personal destiny while in the latter, the narrator speaks in the “name of a community or group, approximating in this way the symbolic function of the epic hero...”  

Amit R Baishya

Ball State University, Indiana

Second, we can say that guerrillero testimonios reveal an epical or epochal notion of the everyday with the figure of the male guerrillero at its center. A similar sensibility permeates Sanglot Fenla. For instance, in the closing scene, Diganta, the protagonist of the novel, and another guerrilla, Probin, walk out “like courageous soldiers”. They reject the lucrative incentives that former militant, Ranjit, and other “traitors” to the cause offer them in return for their surrender. At this point, Diganta is released after prolonged incarceration and excruciating torture by security forces. The last lines of the novel are revealing – “Dawn was a long way off.” The first part of Sanglot Fenla concludes here. As a literary trope, Barbara Harlow notes, such inconclusive endings play with the symbolism of dawn and darkness and signal a “commitment to the future.”  

The world depicted in Borangar Ngang is different. It would not be incorrect to call it an anti-epic. The life-worlds of guerrilleros are simultaneously death-worlds which, to quote the postcolonial thinker Achille Mbembe, are “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” Usually, the persistence of revolutionary hope sustains the guerrillero’s belief that inhabiting the death-world in the present presages a passage into a life-world. However, in Borangar Ngang, the death-world is experienced as a world bereft of possibilities. Doubts about the failure to hope for the final culmination of the “people’s” revolution are constantly expressed. These doubts reveal the existential fears besetting the guerrilla that his personal destiny may now have become unmoored from the collective context of the revolution. 

Given the anti-epic nature of this novel and the subtle departure from recognisable forms of anticolonial and revolutionary political action, does the narrative gesture towards a different space of the ethico-political? The form of the political that the text gestures towards is different from arguments presented by literary works on revolutions in colonial or neocolonial areas – namely, the growth of an individual revolutionary consciousness and the gradual immersion in the cause through a “love” for the people. Central to this different ethics and politics is what Mbembe terms “the generalised instrumentalisation of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.”    

Thus, in Borangar Ngang, we notice a relentless focus on the dying and decaying body of the defeated, isolated guerrilla abandoned in “wild zones.” At the beginning of the novel, Pratyush feels at home in the bucolic pleasures of nature. However, as the guerrilla band disintegrates from lack of organisational support, internal dissension and acts of betrayal, the natural environment is represented as anything but bucolic. The guerrillas regularly cross the heavily forested zones in the Indo-Bhutan border into Assam and back. The lack of water in the densely forested areas often force the guerrillero to lap the water that collects in the footmarks left by elephants. The army’s techniques to capture guerrillas also resemble those used for trapping animals. The narrator recounts an episode where a guerrilla contingent is ambushed by the army. While many guerrillas are killed, an injured guerrilla named Bonojit Deka falls into the hands of the armed forces. His eyes are gouged out, acid is poured on his face and his corpse is strung on a tree while the army lies in wait for the guerrillas to come and claim it, much like a hunter strings up bait.  

However, the potential of being reduced to the level of zombies in no-man’s zones has an antidote: love. The affect of love is best illustrated in a lengthy incident in the novel that involves one of Pratyush’s closest comrades, Anurag.  Anurag’s band is ambushed by the army on a reconnaissance mission across the no-man’s land in Bhutan and four of them including Anurag go missing. They are given up for dead, until one, Deepkon, messages via radio that he is stranded in the forest and badly injured. When the army finally withdraws, the guerrilla band sends out a search party that includes Pratyush, to retrieve the (presumed) dead bodies. After two days of searching, they hear someone crying out weakly in the distance. They come across Deepkon lying hidden within some tall elephant grass: 

(Deepkon’s) bullet-ridden leg had swollen considerably and resembled a bloated banana tree… They had never imagined that Deepkon would be alive like this. The sight before them horrified Pratyush and his troop. The smell of rotting flesh was wafting in the air. Kamal examined Deepkon’s bullet-ridden leg by lifting it carefully and saw, to his horror, that hundreds of insects came crawling out of the holes that had been bored into the flesh by the bullets. Deepkon screamed in intense agony. The horrifying sight of insects crawling out of the body of a living person filled Pratyush with so much disgust that he was forced to close his eyes. 

Somehow clinging on to life, the body called Deepkon resembles a form of death-in-life. We notice an absolute disjunction between the speaking and the living being here. Pratyush cannot bear to look at this sight. Sarma shows us the gruesome scene for a split second before telling us to turn our eyes away. This recurrent showing of the disjunction between the speaking and the living being and then enjoining us to turn the eyes away undercuts the epic, heroic tonality of the classical form of the guerrillero testimonio and instead enjoins us to focus on the reduction of the human body to the level of thinghood in a no-man’s zone that is outside the reach of law.

Sarma’s testimonio-fiction shows how “ordinary” feelings like love, friendship and trust can still sustain horizons of hope and orientations towards futurity, even when any semblance of a recognizable form of life, as in the instance narrated above, dissipates in zones of emergency. More than anything else, the exploration of the ordinary dimensions of human existence in states of emergency in Borangar Ngang remains Sarma’s most enduring achievement.