Dhrijyoti Kalita

Non-human Vitalities: Necropolitics and Interspecies Relationality in Arupa Patangia

Kalita’s Fictions

Arupa Patangia Kalita’s literary oeuvre has distinctly highlighted on the complex

interactions of the human and non-human realms. Many of her fictions, originally written in

Assamese, are articulated through an intense style bristling with affect that portrays the

nonhuman as vibrant, and uncannily agential entities. This deep ecological and relational

commitment towards the non-human realm is also evident in some of her well-known short

stories like “Bonjui” (“Wildfire”) and “The Half-Burnt Bus at Midnight” – the two texts I

analyze in this paper. In these two stories, I claim, she particularly demonstrates how forms of

political violence impact human and non-human worlds alike. They also promise a “politics”

(Ranciere 152, 2010) where the cluster of both human and non-human perceptions and practices

contribute equally to shape a common world. At the same time, the stories prominently

foreground the non-human realm as agential and dynamic.

Furthermore, I also pay closer attention to the imbrications of the phantasmatic and the

non human in “Bonjui” (“Wildfire”) and “The Half-Burnt Bus at Midnight.” Discussing the

uncanny in contemporary fictions of the Anthropocene, Amitav Ghosh mentions something

interesting in this regard: “…uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we

recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of non-

human interlocutors” (40). What provokes further reflection is the query that Ghosh poses here:

“And if these are real possibilities, can we help but suspect that all the time we imagined

ourselves to be thinking about apparently inanimate objects, we were ourselves being ‘thought’
by other entities?” (42). How do supposedly inanimate objects “think” us, interact with us?1

Ghosh’s provocation inspires me to look deeper into the “codes” of the vitalist representations of

the nonhuman in Kalita’s fictions. Both “Bonjui” and “The Half-Burnt Bus at Midnight” enmesh

the codes of realism and fantasy. Non-human actants participate in the “human” world in a

seemingly uncanny way in these stories, and are endowed with vitality and dynamism. Such

endowments individuate these entities and show their co-constitutive entanglement with the

human domain and vice versa.

However, while the stories evocatively display the co-constitution of the human and the

non-human domains, the specters of necropolitical terror always lurk in the shadows. According

to Achille Mbembe, necropower/politics refers to forms of social existence engendered by the

brutal exercises of sovereign power and its techniques of death through which vast populations

are “subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (40). While

this is an extremely important concept for this paper, it is crucial to note that Mbembe refers to

only human populations in his works. More recently, this concept has been extended by Sarah

Groenveld to consider the mutual devastation of human and non-human domains by

necropolitical modes and techniques. She writes, “A focus on death allows for different kinds of

questions to be asked about ethical relationship between humans and animals and calls attention

to the fact that death is common to all species” (Groenveld 12, 2014). Her concept of “species

necropolitics” challenges the notion of anthropocentrism and proposes that death and grievability

are points of connection between humans and nonhumans. Through such recognitions, we can

1
These, of course, are the essential insights of vital materialists like Jane Bennett as well.
contend with the vulnerability and precarious conditions that impact humans, animals and the

environment.

The issue of species necropolitics is approached quite distinctly in both the stories.

“Bonjui” evokes the concept of “species necropolitics” by recognizing a dog’s death as possibly

more grievable as compared to human deaths that occur alongside.2 The dog is an integrated

and integral part of a dynamic landscape where different objects constantly interact with each

other and expose their animated selves. The story deals with inter-species reliance and

relationality. The dog’s death at human hands is a fatal blow to this co-constituted world.

In “The Half-Burnt Bus at Midnight,” a river emerges as the potent agent of necropolitics.

Here species necropolitics is portrayed not through the destruction of the animate bodies and the

lived environment, but through an anthropomorphized portrayal of a natural entity that takes

revenge on the human realm. The anthropomorphized figuration of the river in the story plays on

the vulnerability of a human society settled on its banks. In the backdrop of a necropolitical

regionalist movement led by an unnamed ethnic community of Assam, the river assumes the role

of a revenge-taker as it directs a half-burnt ghostly bus to kill and destroy humans and other

living entities in the town. The initially nourishing river metamorphoses into an agent of death as

all forms of species life are singed by its anger and malevolence. Placing this story in the

genealogy of the paradoxical representation of water bodies in Assamese “river fictions,” I will

2
In Precarious Life, Butler suggests:

Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather there is something living that is other than
life. Instead, “it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note,” as it is sustained by no
regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes
and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. (34)
argue that anthropocentric arrogance is undercut in this story through a representation of the river

as a necropolitical agent.

I.Grievable Lives: Species Necropolitics and the Prabhubhakta Kukur in “Bonjui”

“Bonjui” is a story about a white breed dog – one that almost resembles snow – living in a

remote, unnamed mountainous valley in India’s northeastern region. The locale in which the

story is set is surrounded by dense forests and is far away from “law and order, civilization and

society” (78). The dog has a peculiar tendency – he feels a strong affinity for people who are

dressed in military or police uniforms to the extent that he automatically gets servile and

compliant in front of their uniformed presence. In this remote valley, a safe haven for activities

that fall outside the purview of the law, there arrives a group of militants dressed in camouflage

uniforms with whom the dog immediately develops a strong companionship. The dog, who

acknowledges the militants as his masters, is always by their side and protects them from being

caught by the state administration provided they are fully dressed in their uniforms. Almost as if

he possessed some magical power, the dog would get prior sense of any threat on those whom he

protects. He warns them beforehand, helping the militants in this way to elude the state forces.

During their operations, the dog would also often show the militants secret pathways to enter and

leave their camp in this secluded valley. For a long time, the militant group remains at large with

the help of this mysterious dog. The media capture the dog’s photo with a zoom lens and name

him Enigma. Finally, the state forces manage to trace down the location of the group’s hidden

camp in the valley with the help of four trained hunting dogs. By the time the group is aware, the

state forces have approached quite close. So, they decide to exercise the only choice available at
that moment – commit suicide by blowing themselves up. The story ends with a bomb blast that

causes a huge bonjui (wild fire) in which the militants die. The dog, who becomes a blazing

agnipinda (fireball), embraces death with the militants.

“Bonjui” figures among the stories of prabhubhakta kukur (master-worshipping dogs) in

Assamese literature, though extant readings of the story confine it only to an analysis of the

“subjection” of the militants and their helpful dog by the state. For example, Ashim Chutia’s

reading of “Bonjui” focuses on the necropolitical struggle between different sovereign entities –

the state and the militants. But since the focus in such readings is always the battle between two

necropolitical entities, this move pushes aside an understanding of the autonomous presentation

of the non-human species to the peripheries. These readings also do not pay any attention to the

ethical relationality that develops between the human and the animal, and to the interspecies

“interdependence between human and non-human species that the right to kill denies”

(Groenveld 15, 2014). Most importantly, what these readings miss out on is the strong testimony

of the nonhuman that the story offers enabling us, therefore, to grieve the loss of these entities.

Thereby, the portrayal in the text challenges the very notion of ourselves, like Butler suggests, as

autonomous, non-relational and self-sovereign (23). Kalita’s subtle deconstruction of the

narrative grammar of the prabhubhakta narrative and the placement of the dog figure in a larger,

relational, multispecies field inaugurates the possibility of viewing the dog’s life as precarious

and grievable. It also functions as a testimony of the supposedly “mute” animal.

Prabhubhakta kukur fictions are secularized versions of medieval prabhubhakta narratives

(often ensuing between a devotee and an image of divinity). Such stories often end with the

death of the dog. Yet the dog figure in such stories is repeatedly presented as subservient to or a
mere appendage of the human domain. If we consider stories like “Gypsy” by Hiren Gohain,

“Kukur” (Dog) by Golap Khaund, “Lakhuti” (Walking Stick) by Atulananda Goswami, or

“Mantrir Kukur” (The Minister’s Dog) by Nagen Goswami, we notice that such stories fail to

generate appropriate grievability for the dog in readers. These stories are still about “companion

animals” that do not allow space for the alterity of the dogs to emerge.3 The dogs are invested

with value only through their interactions with the human domain. Since these stories portray the

dog in the usual anthropocentric light of the prabhubhakta, they hardly invest any subjectivity or

interiority to the dog. The dog’s love and faithfulness is described sentimentally from the

outside. Although Chutia delimits the scope of “Bonjui” by including it along other

prabhubhakta kukur stories in his compilation of Assamese fictions on dogs, Swargarohanor

Sangee (“Companion in the Ascent to Heaven”), I suggest that “Bonjui” should be considered

rather as a deviation as it cannot be circumscribed under such stereotypical anthropocentric

representational frameworks.

The prabhubhakta narrative that started initially with an emphasis on the guru-shishya

(teacher-student) relationship in medieval Assam followed an essential pattern of relationship

between the divine and the devotee from the medieval reformist Vaishnavite movement. In

3
My use of the term “companion animal” draws from Ahuja’s comments on the preponderance of this category in
animal studies: “These linkings of species power to other forms of social power usually fail to recognize the
violence of incorporation, the subjection inherent in drawing animality into the horizon of biopower; furthermore
they conflate humanism and anthropocentrism, arresting difference within the category of the human in order to
rhetorically produce an excluded animal. This also offers little attention to the processes of speciation through which
these bodies are discursively materialized. (It is no surprise that companion animals, farmed animals and charismatic
“wildlife” species − physiologically close enough to humans for us to imagine certain interests − appear most often
in animal studies.)” (144). I think the dog figures in the stories mentioned above are represented as “physiologically
close enough to humans for us to imagine certain interests.”
Assam, it emerged out of a corpus of medieval Assamese texts, like Namghosa (Prayer Verses),

that drew its hagiographic lineage from the medieval cultural preacher, Madhavdeva. In these

works, Madhavdeva delineated his relationship with his highly revered guru (teacher),

Shankardeva (Das 5). However, with the proliferation of short and long fiction after the

consolidation of print-capitalism from the late 19th century, the narrative shifted its focus to

connote the faithfulness of the most common domesticated nonhuman animal: the dog. The

human-canine relationship becomes a cipher for the near religious devotion that the shishya has

for the guru.

In “Bonjui”, however, Kalita attempts a rigorous interrogation of the anthropocentric idea

of prabhubhakta (master-worshipper) – first, by outlining a vitalized ecological setting that

appears almost as a dynamic character in itself, and second, by the placement of the dog in a

constant interaction with this vitalized landscape. Thus the “nonhuman” is viewed as an agent,

instead of passive receptacles that act as mere setting. The story begins with a lengthy, poetic

description of a landscape that comprises of a row of hills with a river surrounding the valley – a

landscape seemingly bereft, at least from the initial descriptions, of any human fashioning and

intervention. In this animated landscape, the hills interact and compete with each other to catch

sunlight, they blow whistles, they climb, change color and play with the river that comes down

the hills. The playful river also comes “hopping” (76) with the stones and pebbles en route its

journey downwards. At a certain place, the hills even sing and play “making a circle hand in

hand with each other around a blue-water lake” (76).4 This landscape evidently has a deep,

4
All translations from “Bonjui” are mine.
dynamic ecological history of its own. At the same time, it seems that it keeps the multispecies

interactions limited to the “natural” elements and inhabitants in this hilly topography– the hills,

the rivers, the insects, the yaks, and the wild goats.

Foregrounding such a dynamic interaction among species, the story apparently brings to

our attention the phantasmatic reality of a mayabi desh ( a magical country) that lies totally

outside the purview of a secularized world viewed in anthropocentric terms (77).5 Natural history

seems to take precedence over human history, at least initially. Kalita begins by setting up a

vibrant “ecotheater” (Baishya 3, 2016) whose spatio-temporalities encompass legendary and

natural histories. Thus, the narrator says that the prince of the legends would descend down

possibly from his jaadur dolisa (magical carpet) to look for his “magical singing bird hiding

behind the silver leaves in a golden tree that bears fruits of diamond” (77). This partly fictive

and romanticized landscape is also an active space of smooth interfaces where occupying objects

and beings live both autonomous as well as correlational lives bound by a certain animating

principle of connected subjectivities. By instilling, thus, “animacy” (Chen 8, 2012) to the objects

and species occupying the landscape, the story displaces the idea that there is a fixed assignment

of animate values to things in the world determined solely by human language and structures of

cognition.6

In “Bonjui”, the modes of communication among the different species are articulated

5
The term “mayabi” (magical) is a recurring metaphor in Kalita’s fiction. For a discussion of a different usage of the
term in Kalita’s novella, “Arunimar Swades” (“Arunima’s Motherland”), see Baishya (“Secret Killings”).
6
Mel Y Chen argues that objects generate a multiplicity of meanings and thus are open to inquiry and
resignification. In their book Animacies, Chen describes animacy as a “quality of agency, awareness, mobility and
liveness” (Chen 2, 2012).
through the vitalized description of the ecotheater in the narrative. For instance, in the story,

there is a poignant description of little flowers caressing their hands over the bruises of the man-

felled trees – a gesture of sympathy or cohabitation – which can be correlated with what Eduardo

Kohn writes: plants constitute “selves” and are capable of empathizing with the pain of

companion species in the ecotheater (Kohn 75, 2013).7 In his discussion of the Assamese novel

about Indian refugees from Burma, Debendranath Acharya’s Jangam (“The Movement”),

Baishya does not delineate clearly what he calls “ecotheater” in terms of the complex

relationship evolving between the nature and the human. Extending his points, I argue that in

texts like Jangam and “Bonjui,” the environment functions as a highly dynamic and sentient

entity. This vitalized portrayal simultaneously articulates a sentient background to the narrative.

But this background does not in any way designate stability and stasis to the environment per se.

The environment, I argue, does not exist in some abstract anthropomorphized form; instead, it

exists in a vitalized form with dynamic interactions continuously taking place among numerous

objects and species. Stories like “Bonjui” gesture towards the fact that it is only our

anthropocentric investments that usually reject this reality – the co-constitutive reality of the

environment as a vital ecotheater that both acts, co-shapes and is acted upon.

In a turn of events, however, this remote valley – which is far away from “civilization,

society and law and order” (78) – becomes a safe home for a militant group that has already

achieved a great deal of notoriety for activities like killing, kidnapping, and demands for ransom.

The group ensconces themselves in two camps – one in the unknown depths of the valley and

7
In How Forests Think (2013), Eduardo Kohn writes that “self” need not necessarily be human. He states that,
“selfhood emerges…as the outcome of a process that produces a new sign that interprets a prior one” (75).
another down the hills. Despite all forces invested, the state administration has a hard time

getting their hands on this terrorist group. This is because the terrorists have their best

companion – a dog – by their side who has voluntarily consigned himself the responsibility

of helping and protecting his human companions all the time. The dog continues to carry out

such a task because of a peculiar “weakness” (79) for uniforms or for uniformed peoples. The

narrator says: “He gets automatically kind towards people dressed in uniforms…He needs no

command, quite spontaneously he takes the responsibility of protecting these people on himself”

(79). So contrary to the much-acclaimed prabhubhakta epithet attached to the dog by Chutia, the

animal figure is presented as a being working through his own cognition and agency. The dog’s

cognition connects his self to the surrounding ecology of selves through a structural exchange of

signs. Like Kohn writes, such symbolic exchanges are analogous to the logic through which

words operate in a human language (83). Thus, by setting the dog as alter-self against the

humans, Kalita thoughtfully attempts to dethrone anthropocentric supremacy achieved in the text

primarily through violent acts of sovereign necropolitics such as the search and the ambush

operation conducted by the Indian army at the end of the story.

The portrayal of the dog’s subjectivity and his capacity to read and decipher signs enables

him to transcend human boundaries, help out the militants and wander off wherever he likes. The

dog himself is a pure white breed dog, “almost resembling snow” (79), who has supra-normal

associations with the companions surrounding him – the mountains, the trees and the river. The

dog is white because “he takes white snow from the mountains and makes a coat for himself. The

black dot on his forehead, he gets from the black hills. The white mountains have also given him

his eyes…” (79). A fully interactive, mutually contingent and positive liaison is evident in the
relationship of the dog and the other species in the valley. Thus, the portrayal of multispecies

relationship is very different from the anthropocentric ways of thinking relationality with species

like dogs. Here, I am referring to the prabhubhakta narrative paradigm which often morphs into

a portrayal of human sovereignty over the supposedly “dumb” beast.

The dog in the story is also presented like a “white” phantom living in a solitary house, far

from the human crowd. The dog appears as a creature who lives “somewhere between the real

and the supernatural” (Dayan 16). Similar tones of ghostliness in dogs can also be found in the

story “Ghostie” (Hazarika 66), written by the popular Anglophone writer from Assam, Dhruba

Hazarika, where a group of children encounter a mysterious dog every day. The narrative

revolves around their attempt to probe if the dog is really a ghost. In Hazarika’s story though, the

dog, Ghostie, is a morbidly silent creature. Even his feelings and actions are interpreted by the

people near him seemingly because he is bereft of any subjective existence. Ghostie’s painful

and mysterious disappearance stirs grief at the end of the story, but this affect does not become

evocative because the dog is represented as a silent and helpless creature in the text. In contrast,

in “Bonjui”, the dog’s death is appallingly grievable as it signifies the sudden loss of a vitalized

entity endowed with interiority.

The dog’s interiority is accentuated even further by his act of dreaming. The dog often

dreamt about an army man – the man who once rescued him from freezing out in chilling cold

and took him to his camp in the valley when he was quite young and had lost his mother. Kohn

writes, “…the question of how dogs dream matters deeply…because imagining that the thoughts

of dogs are not knowable would throw into question whether it is ever possible to know the

intentions and goals of any kind of self” (132). It can very well be understood how the dog, who
is deeply attached to the uniform, tries hard to make sense of the other species. The military

fatigues here function as an index of recognition. The dream of the dog also connects two selves

and, like Kohn writes, implies mutual constitution and represents the ethos of companion

species.8

The relevance of the dog’s dream, which is based on interspecies connections, offers a

sharp contrast to the graphic account of the militants’ feasting and dancing. The story here

highlights the anthropocentric human’s dualistic vision of predator/prey, in which the humans

appear as the sole manipulators of nature from outside: “Lying near the stove was a severed head

of a fawn. Its eyes still dilated. A part of its protruding tongue was cut, the head was rolling here

and there owing to their heavy dance grooves” (86). The ruthlessness portrayed through the

rolling of the dead fawn’s head coincides with the noise of loud music to which the militants

dance and feast palpably implying a fear of death that lies hidden behind their illusory exhibition

of power. This illusory power is fully laid bare at the end of the story when the militants

themselves are ferreted out by the hunter dogs deployed by the state forces. In a way, the story

overturns the role of the predator militants by unsettling their complacence and setting them up

as prey against others of their “own” species.

The purpose of the story is to evoke grief on the dog’s death, which is tantamount to the

loss of the embodied being, relationality and the dynamic agency the “animal” stands for. This

tendency can be placed in the larger oeuvre of Kalita’s fiction. In her young adult novel Kaaitot

8
Please note that I am using the far more capacious term “companion species” instead of “companion animals.”
Haraway’s definition of the term in The Companion Species Manifesto influences me here: “… “companion species”
is about a four-part composition, in which co-constitution, finitude, impurity, historicity, and complexity are what
is” (16).
Keteki (Flower on Thorns), she depicts how a prolonged spell of grief on the death of the dog

Bhulu finally has a transformative effect on the little boy, Jaanmoni, that inspires him to create a

painting of Bhulu. However, compared to this text, “Bonjui” illustrates stronger grounds to

grieve the dog, not because of his prabhubhakta nature or for his silent compliance with human

actions, but for the loss of his vitality and interiority that is further heightened by the man-made

“death-world” (“Necropolitics,” 40) in which the other species in the story lives.

“Bonjui” thus focuses on the agency of the dog with which the humans simultaneously

become physically dependent as well as vulnerable. For example, when a team of uniformed

customs officials once visited the valley to inspect the rampant opium cultivation there, they had

to rely on the dog, who showed them pathways through the forested valley to their destinations.

The dog helped them twice in their expedition – once, he barked to signal that a python was

silently hanging from a tree on their way and next, when he alerted them about the unseen cracks

on the wet ground thus leading them safely by a different way to their destination. The officials,

in their report, admiringly commented on the dog as Abishashyo (Unimaginable). The dog is

elevated to the position of a formidable being and, possibly, an adversary.

However, the death of the dog and the militants in the story project a sense of shared

vulnerability between their bodies. The story, nevertheless, elicits more attention on the dog’s

death by a tactful subversion of the death of the militants. At the end of the story, the militants

are befuddled by the sight of the approaching state forces that leaves them with no choice but to

immediately commit suicide. So, they plant a powerful bomb that not only kills them, but also

the dog who is chained and waits outside. But after the blast, the story removes the militants

from the scene quite abruptly. It focuses instead on the dog and states how the blast changes the
dog into a blazing fireball as he whines and moves inside a bigger fireball eventually

succumbing to death. Death eventually is programmed like an equalizer in the story that

seemingly proposes the idea of relationality and interdependence between species – the idea of

an alternative community that is set apart from the regular hierarchical orders. “Bonjui” focuses

on the dog’s crises in a manner that underscores a contiguity of his body with the militants’. The

dog’s body figures here as an inevitable part of the ties that compose all of us in a community. It

reveals that these ties are sufficiently potent to constitute what we all are as vulnerable beings

existing in precarious economies of risk.9 The death of the dog in “Bonjui” not only suggests the

loss of a single entity, but the loss of a community that while co-constitutive, is always at risk via

acts of species necropolitics. Thus, by evoking a sense of loss not of a something, but of a

someone, a vital “self” inside a community of precarious beings, the narrative succeeds at

constructing the dog’s life as highly grievable.

II. The River Plays Hide-and-Seek: Agency of Life and Death in “The Half-Burnt Bus at
Midnight”

“The Half-Burnt Bus at Midnight” (henceforth “The Half-Burnt Bus”) is set in a small,

serene, unnamed town, which is girdled by a river. The town lies in a peripheral area of the

Indian nation-state and bears the brunt of its negligence. The people here are poor and somehow

manage to make a living with two meals a day. They live, abandoned, like “a flock of chickens

without the mother hen” (149). These people, who are mostly kheda khowa (internally displaced)

populations, have settled in the riverine town having been driven out of their homes in different

9
Mackenzie Wark says that the word precarious, with its roots in Latin, has a double signification: i) something
obtained by asking or praying, dependent on the favor of another, and ii) dependency of circumstances, “being at
risk” (191). It is the second sense that I am highlighting here.
villages in an ethnic cleansing “campaign”. The river slowly becomes a part of the daily lives of

these dislocated people: “The people living here treat the river as if it is their own pond in the

backyard” (151). The river keeps the town fairly well supplied and its banks green. The

townspeople, displaced victims of ethnic cleansing pogroms, feel safer as they settle at the banks

of this river. Wherever the river flows, things flourish and the town appears replete with renewed

life.

But one day, an unmanned half-burnt bus enters the town at midnight. It winds its way

through the town heading towards the garage of De Babu, the only rich man in the town. On its

way, the bus kills and destroys everything that it encounters – trees, birds, insects, reptiles and

people. Immediately after the bus reaches its banks, the river turns dark and an odd putrid smell

comes out of it. The river then travels along with the bus, side by side, until the latter reaches its

final destination. A few young men working at De Babu’s garage decide to repair the bus, but are

instantly turned into stone as they touch it. The story ends with a revelation informing the readers

that the bus is actually a ghost bus. It was burnt the previous morning by “the community that

wanted its own state” killing all passengers inside (160).10

“The Half-Burnt Bus” is mostly read as a magic realist story of necropolitical violence.

The entrance of the bus seemingly divides the diegetic space into a “before” and “after”. Before

the bus enters, the town seems relatively peaceful and bucolic (although this is complicated by

the fact that the people who have settled there are victims of violence). Commentators read this

division in an allegorical manner – the “before” standing in for a period of multicultural harmony

10
I am relying here on the English translation of the story by Ranjita Biswas.
that is sundered by a symbol of violence and terror. For example, Subramanian writes that “the

bucolic setting gets scorched by the bus…quite similar to the fate of Assam, a noble, ancient and

gracious land, now reduced to a landscape infested with killers and rapacious oppressors.”

Again, Kashyap writes that the story smoothly welcomes us to a “violent universe” by focusing

on the beautiful description of a peaceful riverine town. But by focusing only on the aspect of

violence, such readings, I argue, fail to take into account the crucial agential role played by the

non-human entities in the story such as the river. The noteworthy fact is that the story is not

limited to projecting only a violent landscape. Most importantly, non-human elements like the

river and the bus are signified as dynamic agencies through which sovereign and species

necropolitics are figured in the narrative. Furthermore, if readings of the text focus on non-

human elements, it is the bus that takes center stage (as the title itself suggests) while

undermining the polyvalent role of the river, which seems relegated as the passive background of

the story.

“The Half-Burnt Bus” can be listed among “river fictions” in Assamese literature like

Syed Abdul Malik’s Surujmukhir Swapna (Longing for Sunshine) and Nirupama Borgohain’s

Sei Nodi Nirabadhi (The Incessant River). In such fictions, rivers play an active role as a

palpable presence alternating between figurations of aspects of both life and renewal and death

and destruction. The chronotope of the river is in any case a dominant motif in Assamese literary

narratives given the fact that a considerable portion of the Assamese population live in close

proximity to a riverine water body. Most of the narratives are set near the Brahmaputra – the

central river flowing through Assam – and its many other tributaries. In such a backdrop, it is

almost imperative that the function of the Assamese “river fictions” is to realistically materialize
the lives of the populations in Assam in the context of their quotidian relationship with the water

bodies. By successfully bestowing the river with the potent agency that enables life and death in

the narrative, much like the portrayal of the river as “tezal” (animate) in Borgohain’s Sei Nodi

Nirobodhi, Kalita subtly moves away from the portrayal of human destruction via necropolitics

to a conjoint portrayal of the effects of political terror on the human and the nonhuman. The river

in Kalita’s story is an indispensable part of regular human activities. Furthermore, the

phantasmatic portrayal of the river projects it as a dynamic self that constantly plays hide-and-

seek in the narrative. The river first allows life to flourish, and then ushers in necropolitical terror

in the town after the entrance of the half-burnt bus.

At the beginning, the story indicates that the river can be a locus of contradictory effects –

it can be the harbinger of life as well as of death. By suggesting that the river plays hide-and-

seek (luka-bhaku), Kalita alludes to a deeper, substantial role that the river plays in the narrative,

“Sometimes you can see the river right next to the road, sometimes it looks on from a little

distance, then it disappears altogether, as if in hiding, then reappears and flows coolly along”

(148). From this description, it becomes clear that the river here is a vitalized entity endowed

with its own agency and discretion. It figures, thus, through an interplay of presence and

absence. This is emphasized by a figure of playfulness: with the reference to luka-bhaku, a

children’s game. Later, this metaphor will turn around as the river treats the lives of humans as

mere playthings.

Similarly, as in “Bonjui”’s depiction of the forest, objects in the dynamic ecotheater of

“The Half-Burnt Bus” also appear animated and co-constitutive. The hills take on the hue of

peacock feathers, the sky adds a tinge of orange and the fishes in the stream wake up and then
disappear. The river, which is a part of this landscape, borrows green from the trees and orange

from the skies. Sometimes it assumes a grave appearance like the sandbanks and sometimes, in

anthropomorphic fashion, also dances “bending her waist” (148). The alternation of qualities of

visibility and invisibility through the playful metaphor of hide-and-seek, thus, creates a bucolic

image in the beginning.

The unnamed town is also a hybrid universe of people coming from different parts and

from different ethnic communities. Although it’s a hybrid community, hardly any conflict occurs

among the settlers, once again harkening back to powerful images of intercommunity harmony

that is the hallmark of Kalita’s fictions. The river apparently unifies all people coming from

different communities. The people here use the river without discrimination – the Bihari

community use it during the chhat puja, the Assamese to perform the ritual bathing of the cattle

on the morning of the Bihu festival and so on. The river is also used for washing clothes and

bathing. Thus, in the initial descriptions of the narrative, the river is a symbol of life and

prosperity.

Moving on, it appears that by allowing lives to flourish, the river seemingly projects a bait

to entice the people to come and settle on its banks:“New houses have been coming up in the

open fields and on the bank of the river…now even on the land level to the river, houses have

been built as if in frenzy” (151). The story also depicts the river as an aural presence constantly

appearing through the narrative, “After a while, you can spot a river which runs alongside the

road all the way through…flowing serenely by the backyard of a house, the window of

another…” (148-149). By designating it a constant aural presence in the background, the story

does not just limit the river’s role as an agent of life and vitality, it further endows it with a
sinister role as the riverbank turns into a necropolitical locale. The river lulls the settlers into a

false sense of security. It seems as if the river itself has spatially planned the town to gradually

unleash the powers of death, “The little river girdles the town, flowing serenely by the backyard

of a house, the window of another, even the front doors of some other homes” (149). Ensnared in

the illusion of safety, the settlers seem to forget the violence and terror that lurks outside or that

they have escaped from.

Moreover, unlike the absolute attributions of serenity and bucolic calm bestowed on the

river by commentators like Subramanian, the river is also portrayed as an unpredictable element

in the story. It signals and symbolizes terror from time to time. It is on the banks of this river that

the army puts up its temporary camps “on the days when trouble brews”11. But occasionally, the

narrator also cautions us that the river should not be taken “for granted” (151) – perhaps the

water level might rise some day and make its banks uninhabitable. Much in line with the

polyvalent figuration of water bodies in Assamese river fictions, Kalita particularly emphasizes

the volatile agency of the river that cannot be neglected despite the bucolic representation in the

beginning.

11
The story is based on the political background of the tumultuous post-1987 period in Assam. Although the ethnic
communities remain unnamed, we can surmise that it is based on the Bodo identitarian movement. Post-1987, the
ethnic Bodo people of Assam politically mobilized to demand a separate state of their own, Bodoland. A violent
spree of riots and killings occurred between 1987 and 1996 that targeted not only the Assamese population, but also
many other ethnic, religious and linguistic groups like the Bengalis, the Muslims and the Santhals. Sanjib Baruah
writes, “The most disturbing aspect of the political violence around the question of a Bodo homeland is a pattern of
violence that sometimes looks like an ethnic cleansing campaign” (194). The story attempts to capture the period
around this ethnic cleansing campaign. For more details on the Bodo movement, see Chapter 8 of Baruah’s India
Against Itself.
 With the arrival of the half-burnt bus in the town, the hitherto vitalizing and life-giving

entity that is the river immediately unravels its lethal facet. Soon as the bus reaches the town, the

river sheds off its life-giving attributes and turns into an ugly, dark color and announces the

advent of a “death drama” (Bataille 12). It also seizes beauty from other objects and stealthily

guides the half-burnt bus to its catastrophic destination. The narrator says: “And the river? It was

as if it had plucked off the moon from the sky and gathered it in her breasts…the sky above the

water became dark too…the silver fish came floating up on the surface, all dead” (154). The life-

giving elegance of the river at once becomes seemingly hideous and demonic. The ominous

transformation of the river has already been signaled in the cues provided earlier; it seems like

the sudden entry of the mechanical object transmogrifies life and vitality into bitterness and

death.

The ghostly bus brings death to the town as it heads to the garage of De babu. From the

narrative, it is clear that the bus reaches the river first and it enters the town only with directions

that the river shows: “At that point, the river also took a turn. At that junction, one could see a

sizeable sandbank…As the bus followed…its shadow fell on the sandbank” (155). A comparison

with another Assamese river fiction about a deathly river will be germane here. In

“Brahmadatya-Brahmajal” (“Huge Monsters-Huge Rivers”, 2007) by Mouchumi Kandali, the

river appears as a source of evil by accepting human sacrifices and by allowing the entry of

market capitalism in an ancient society. In Kandali’s work, the chronotope of the river shifts its

agential positions– it is childlike (mischievous yet amenable), and at the same time, mysterious

like the hills, as it becomes shelter for unknown monsters. At times it becomes sweat in a human

body, but also functions as a brew that can intoxicate. In spite of the numerous activities that
Kandali assigns to the river, what draws our attention is the predisposition for the game of hide-

and-seek, which is also similar to the essential trait of the river in “The Half-Burnt Bus”. Thus, in

both fictions, the rivers are depicted as “trans-corporeal” (Alaimo) selves that can easily develop

smooth interfaces with bodies, ecosystems and the wider world surrounding them. The rivers

here are further rendered as bodies that think (similar to Kohn’s title How Forests Think) – that

play hide-and-seek – and become a constitutive part of the network of interchanges and

entanglements in an ecotheater.

While the bus embarks on its journey of death and destruction, the river also travels

alongside making its surreptitious appearance only irregularly. But before the bus reaches any

venue of destruction, the river reaches there already in a way alluding that it is this entity that is

directing the ghostly bus: “The river goes through the open field in a straight line from this

corner…The sun from the east had just touched the field when the bus arrived there” (157). The

river here precisely targets the objects in the topography that the bus indifferently travels

through. For instance, there are two strong images of targeted destruction that insinuate visual

excess in the story – the burning of a large reserve forest and the withering of lotus flowers in an

old pond. The forest destroyed is a government reserve forest – itself a statist, nationalist re-

ordering of “nature” (Peluso and Vandergeest). The spectacular destruction of such grand

ecological architecture, which is “full of saal and segun trees…bushes of dhekia ferns” (158) is

contrasted with the more mundane withering of the lotus flowers “that have been there for ages”

(156) in the pond. The withering and destruction of these plant forms also direct us to think in

lines of the annihilation of floral life forms that represent, as Meeker and Szabari write,

tremendous vitality and life in excess (34). While plants represent life in excess, these conjoint
images of destruction depict the terrifying excessiveness and luxuriousness of death in a

necropolitical locale.Incidentally, this conjoint image also corresponds to the snuffing of the life-

giving vitality represented by the river in the story. After the execution of such large-scale

destruction, the river stops playing hide-and-seek and emerges along with the bus: “Destroying

the forest thus, the bus went on…The river too emerged at this point” (158). Kalita here exposes

the river’s bellicosity by showing it as a sly, malevolent appearance. It is no longer playful,

rather it treats all forms of life as mere playthings.

The story ends when the bus enters De babu’s garage after completing its task of

eliminating almost every object in the setting. At De babu’s garage, some of the young men

approach the half-burnt bus to repair it with hammers and tools. But soon as they touch the bus,

they are immediately turned into statues of stone. The narrative reveals that the ghostly bus was

burnt the previous morning by “the community that wanted its own state to establish its right

over others” (160). The burning of the bus – paralleling the burning of the river forest – killed all

passengers inside and by the time the police, military and administrators arrived, not a trace of

the travelers remained. The violence which seemed to be bracketed “outside” at the beginning of

the story, penetrates into the inside − there is no escape from political terror at the closure. The

bucolic representation is completely shattered. Moreover, human-wrought events of species

necropolitics like the destruction of human and floral lives in the story presume that nature and

the abandoned human lives are passive life forms. Similarly, the juxtaposition of the withered

flowers and the sapping of human vitality in the scene where the people turn into stone, shows

how categories like “life” and “death” shift speedily in a necropolitical universe.

The crux lies, I wager, in the anthropomorphic shift that takes place in the story. At the
end it is actually the river that emerges as a revengeful entity. It expresses its destructive agency

by quashing all vain anthropocentric efforts of relegating life-forms as passive and inferior. The

river here can be merged with figurations of popular images of vengefulness like that of the

goddess Kali given that, both are bracketed with shifting the nature of things either to life or to

death.12

Conclusion:

With the advent of modernity, the literary genres which are replete with fantastic elements

are usually partitioned from the “literary mainstream.” This also corresponds to the chasms that

separated nature and culture and the human and the nonhuman. However, the fantastic elements

that have been relegated as atavistic can notably guide us to discern, like Ghosh writes, “a

universe animated by non-human voices” (97). This focus has seemingly become an imperative

again considering the zeitgeist of contemporary times as the “humanist” world is now suddenly

surrounded by apocalyptic events like climate change and global warming. Texts like “Bonjui”

and “The Half-Burnt Bus at Midnight” deploy fantastic elements to show the co-presence and

shared vulnerability of human and nonhuman realms. By incorporating vitality to non-human

objects and beings, the texts dispel the common notion of the nonhuman as uncanny,

otherworldly and spatio-temporally other. They further entrench the oft-ignored fact that

nonhuman entities vitally co-constitute humans as both share the same world ruled by

12
Kali is a Hindu goddess and an archetypal image for birth and death, and creation and destruction. A multitude of
interpretations are available around the symbolic significance of Kali, chief among them are paradoxes like violence
and appeasement, birth and death, womb and tomb, fighter and protector, et al. Such a paradoxical nature of Kali
that embraces all opposites, as Sukalpa Bhattacharjee writes, is “the ground realized as the truth of its ultimate
signification” (4322).
necropolitical precarity. Kalita’s fictions of political terror, thus, push us into thinking about

the effects of necropolitics in a more holistic way, encompassing human and nonhuman domains

alike.

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