11, March 2025

Sense of Alienation and Separatism in Northeast India: A Poignant Reflection on the Human Conditions in the Novels of Mitra Phukan and Dhruba Hazarikha

Author(s): 1 Karthiyayini S, 2 Dr. B. Pavithra

Authors Affiliations:

  1. PhD Scholar, Department of English, PSG Coollege of Arts & Science,  Coimbatore, India
  2. Assistant Professor, Department of Engliish, SG Coollege of Arts & Science,  Coimbatore, India

DOIs:10.2017/IJRCS/202503002     |     Paper ID: IJRCS2025030002


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This research investigates the intersections of space, identity, and power in the socio-political landscape of Assam, using Mitra Phukan’s The Collector’s Wife and Dhruba Hazarika’s Sons of Brahma as central literary texts.  While tracing these narratives of lives across the contours of insurgency, the study has unfolded as to how various pressures across the outside world work on them, and such multifarious complexities are a fact of human identity formation across insurgency movements and separatist elements. Using Michel Foucault's heterotopia and Victor Turner's liminality, this research explores how characters such as Rukmini and Jongom move through contested spaces of power and belonging, themselves transforming through various processes of internal conflict and social upheaval. That this tension between loyalty to the colonial husband and nationalist sympathies in Rukmini and disillusionment with separatist violence in Jongom reflects how spaces, whether physical or symbolic, structure their identities and allegiances points out that the study also foregrounds the resilience of the human spirit in Assam's fractured, contested landscape amidst socio-political turbulence.

alienation, separatism, identity conflict, political ideologies, social turmoil

1 Karthiyayini S, 2 Dr. B. Pavithra(2025); Sense of Alienation and Separatism in Northeast India: A Poignant Reflection on the Human Conditions in the Novels of Mitra Phukan and Dhruba Hazarikha, International Journal of Research Culture Society,    ISSN(O): 2456-6683,  Volume – 9,   Issue –  3.,  Pp.5-8.        Available on – https://ijrcs.org/

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