Faultlines of Belonging: Literary Representations of Borderland Identity in Land Where I Flee (2015) and The Woman Who Climbed Trees (2023)

This essay examines select literary narratives from the eastern Himalayan region articulating the tension and negotiation surrounding identity at the Indo-Nepal borderlands. Through a comparative study of Prajwal Parajuly’s Land Where I Flee (2014) and Smriti Ravindra’s The Woman Who Climbed Trees (2023), the essay examines how transnational movement, internal displacement, and regional power dynamics intersect with caste, gender, and nationalism to shape the Nepali speaking subjectivities at the borderlands. These narratives argue how borders function paradoxically as both fluid, permeable zones and rigid, regulatory structures, producing shifting distinctions between self and other. In this dual capacity, borders operate as generative sites of identity formation, where subjectivities are negotiated, contested, and continually reconstituted within the interplay of constraint and possibility. The essay highlights borders as affective landscapes where the borderland subjects navigate essentialist classifications imposed by the state, and engage in performances to assert shifting identities and expressions of belonging.