Decoloniality as Diffusive Relationality: Janice Pariat’s Fiction as Expression of the Unmappable

Abstract

This essay examines the fictional outputs of Janice Pariat, a Khasi Anglophone writer from India’s Northeast, as distinctive narratives that moot a counterpoint to the postcolonial dispensation of the region and provokes a new way of reading it. Pariat takes on the amenable geographies she inhabits as ephemeral spaces of relational entanglements and induces a self-reflexive and diffusive dimension of representation within the historicity of Northeast Indian writing. Resisting earlier homogenizing narratives, Pariat’s unmappable agencies (the human and the non-human) explicate the nuances of experiential decoloniality. Her locales move fuzzily from the jagged terrains of the Northeast through the (sub)continental metropolis and back, leaving diffusive traces of a presence that is supra-regional. The discursivity getting consolidated thus validates a narrative gnoseology that debunks the postcolonial episteme of the Northeast as an introverted discursive space.

Keywords:

• decoloniality
• fiction
• the unmappable
• relationality
• India’s northeast

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Pariat’s latest work of fiction came out in October 2022 and like her previous two novels, its characters chosen from varied spatio-temporal coordinates traverse and transcend geographies by fashioning fuzzy positionalities to convey a vital message on symbiotic existence. See Pariat (2022).

2 Inspired by Anais Nin's autobiographical novel The Four Chambered Heart (1950), Pariat almost ironically admits that the autobiographical elements in The Nine Chambered Heart amount to 57.8% in an interview by Urvashi Bahuguna. See Pariat (2017b).

3 Nem's enigmatic attraction towards Nicholas in Delhi and his subsequent search for him abroad has a link to his past relationship with Lenny as an adolescent back in his hometown which had turned traumatic with Lenny's death. However, it is fathomable that Pariat's own experience of studying art history in London and sharing her time between Delhi and her hometown in the Northeast is re-traced and reworked in the novel. Aruni Kashyap's review of Seahorse acquaints the reader with the blend that Pariat makes possible among the real, the imagined, and also the speculated spaces. See Kashyap (2014).

4 As authors we must have the freedom to claim imaginative spaces and a “nowhereness”—Pariat declares in her column in The Hindu Businessline on 25 September 2015. In the same article, she warns her readers against "destroying any attempt at truly 'decolonising' the future by forever viewing others as past colonised selves." See Pariat (2015).

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Anshuman Bora

Anshuman Bora is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Debraj Roy College, Golaghat, Assam, India. He is pursuing doctoral research on the interface between Life Writing Studies and Assamese Rebel Narratives from Cotton University, Guwahati, India (formerly Cotton College). His areas of scholarly interest are Critical Posthumanism, Digital Commons, South Asian Popular Culture, and Contemporary Assamese Literature.