Whispers of Dissent: Resistance and Silence in The Collector’s Wife by Mitra Phukan

Abstract

Mitra Phukan’s The Collector’s Wife (2005) explores the turbulent socio-political landscape of 1990s Assam through the lens of a seemingly ordinary protagonist named Rukmini Bezboruah, the wife of a senior bureaucrat. Beneath its surface narrative of personal grief and civil unrest, the novel constructs a quiet but compelling portrait of resistance. This paper examines how the collector’s wife articulates dissent not through overt rebellion, but through nuanced portrayals of silence, emotional detachment, and internal conflict. Rukmini’s position as both an insider to power and a silent observer of its abuses makes her a powerful figure of contradiction and resistance. The novel interrogates the complex realities of living amidst insurgency, where violence becomes normalized and moral certainties blur. Rukmini’s reluctance to conform to the expectations of her public role, her emotional withdrawal from a strained marriage, and her empathy for victims of state and insurgent violence collectively represent subtle forms of resistance. Silence becomes a method of survival, but also of protest marking a refusal to be complicit in a system built on fear, disappearance, and dehumanization. This paper argues that   The Collector’s Wife challenges the dominant binaries of resistance by foregrounding female subjectivity, personal trauma, and ethical introspection as legitimate sites of political engagement. Rukmini’s inner world, shaped by unspoken grief and subdued rebellion, becomes a powerful counter-narrative to both state hegemony and revolutionary violence. Through this, Phukan redefines resistance not as loud defiance but as the whisper of dissent that survives in silence.
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