Major Themes of 'The Collector's Wife'

Characters in The Collector’s Wife
1. Siddarth Bezbaruah: The DC of Parbatpuri district

2. Rukmini Bezbaruah: Part-Time college teacher of Dinanath Saikia College
and the wife of Siddartha Bezbaruah, the DC of Parbatpuri.
3. Manoj Mahanta : A highly educated salesman who works for CFT Tyre
Company.
4. Priyam Deka: Rukmini colleague who teaches along with her in the Dept. of English
of Dinanath Saikia College
The Themes of Death, Violence and Terror in The Collector’s Wife
In Mitra Phukan’s The Collector’s Wife (2005), the concept of death is imbued with

strong significances. As such, death can no longer be termed as the guarantor of eternal
peace, nor is it the secret truth of a person’s identity. Rukmini, in The Collector’s Wife,
upholds the viewpoint that in order to know what living is, one must negate it. Death has
been a constant theme in Mitra Phukan’s writings. For her, death is a strategy that hangs
suspended, neither affirming nor assuaging anything. For Phukan, death is essentially a
political issue.
Phukan’s gamut of writings unfold atrocious incidents like the mass killings in Assam
during the students’ agitation movements, the violence of the banned outfit ULFA, the
TADA terror, the always newly devised land-framing policy, the migration of the outsiders,
to name a few. In ‘The Collector’s Wife’, for character like Nandini—the SP’s wife, death is
what one perceive to be true as they are not sure whether the person they are looking for is
dead or alive. They are willing to take either version depending on what they perceive.
Coming from a place like Parbatpuri validates their identity as victims. Parbatpuri is a small
town “surrounded by hills on three sides, and bordered by the vast expanse of the Red River
on the fourth.” The place has something about it.
In The Collector’s Wife (2005), the threat of violence creates a structural enclosure.

For Rukmini and her District Collector husband, Siddharth, who are very much in such an
enclosure, there is refusal of the necessity of coming out. This enclosure symbolizes an
imprisonment through death. The place where Rukmini lives has a strange insularity.
Metaphorically, “death” is the only means of connection between her inner orb and the
external world.As Phukan describes the location of the DC’s bungalow in the second chapter
of the novel:
The town’s cremation ground stood beside the road as it straightened out. The
people of Parbatpuri had, decades ago, subtly had their revenge on their colonial
masters by making sure that the smoke from their funeral pyre rose up in the
direction of the DC’s house…Still, when the occasional cholera or gastro-enteritis
epidemic raged through Parbatpuri, the mourning relatives of the victims felt, even
in their grief, a sense of subtle satisfaction that disease-ravaged bodies were being
cremated at the very feet of the one person who was supposed to be responsible for
the well-being of the district. All attempts by successive DCs to shift the cremation
ground to another location had met with firm opposition by the town’s
leading citizenry, whose unity at such times was surprising, given the discord that
raged between them on most other occasions.
In The Collector’s Wife (2005), violence proclaims negative determinations of

irreversible death and destruction. But also crucial is its ability to blur the line between the
living and the dead, the real and the unreal, the true and the false, and the material and the
ideal. Falling in love with Manoj, a sales manager who works with the CTF tyre company is
an act of transgression for Rukmini, the prim and proper wife of the powerful Collector.
Rukmini teaches English Literature in a local college and everything in her life is settled, at
least on the surface level. Set in the 1970s and 80s, the novel showcases the grim events of
insurgency which were a direct offshoot of the students’ agitation in Assam. At the backdrop
of deaths, kidnappings, extortion, and social instability, the novel captures the ostensible
reformulations of power and resistance, both in personal and political terms. The ever-
growing physical intimacy between Manoj and Rukmini is played against a world that
underlies the impact of the fear factor in times of violence, the acceptance or rejection of a
new group of people, such as in an individual’s change of social status, or an entry into a
different category of social membership. The latter fact is highlighted by the activities carried
out by Arnob Chakravarty, both a leader and a teacher, and his likes. These people incite the
mob and are really good at it. However, Rukmini’s transgression, her affirmation of other
alternative modes of existence, and her constant trepidation for atrocity remould her now and
then in the text. This self-consciousness, however, is a crucial and necessary condition of the
sensitive understanding of transgression in the cycle of social relations. In The Collector’s
Wife (2005), this mode of transgression is based on an effect of traces and remnants, marked
by a ghostly logic of death and survival.
In the final denouement of The Collector’s Wife (2005), Mitra Phukan shows how
violence has the power to legitimate the secret, and harden it into truth. Both Manoj’s and
Siddharth’s violent death is precisely the point where the secret is sealed as an authentic truth.
Secrets are many in The Collector’s Wife. There is an index of impropriety about the tie
between Manoj and Rukmini; the fling that Siddharth is having with Priyam, Rukmini’s
colleague; the fact that Rukmini is carrying Manoj’s child; the biological truth of the baby
that Rukmini is hiding from her mother-in-law and others; the true identity of Anil,
Rukmini’s driver etc. But what is conjured up for Rukmini at the end is a secret too – she has
to live this secret, not fearing its disclosure. She was oblivious of the fact that Siddharth
scarified his life in order to rescue Manoj from the clutches of the insurgents. This revelation
can be an entrapment for her or rather a condition that enables her to realize a different
identity. By casting her eyes on the dead bodies of the two important men in her life, she
immersed herself in a deluge of tears:
Poor baby. Deprived of not one but two fathers in one go, biological and adoptive, killed at
almost the same instant. She had been a fool, she thought hazily, to have imagined that she
could get away with it. That it was going to be okay. That she could carry one man’s child,
and expect another to be the father. Her audacity must have tempted Fate, who, in a fit
of irritation, had decided to destroy both men…She realized that her cheeks were wet. She
hadn’t been aware that the tears had come. Tears for two men. One who had died, not
knowing that he was going to be a father. And another who had been prepared to be a
father to an unborn child, not his (Phukan: 348-49).
Violence, as entrenched in the double deaths, can also paradoxically reveal the sphinx as
having no secret at all. However, such an act shifts identity to another elaborate surface. The
closet herein can be the entire space of the society, not at all impervious to sight. Time and
again, this old closet are always emptied out for new contents. The closet structures death as a
violent law. The multiple secrets in the text are confined in sealed compartments, in exquisite
cabinets, and within a private chamber that boasts of a ritual of intimacy. But are such
ingenious preparations to secrecy enough to conceal the identity of these characters?
Moreover, secrecy, encrypting, and enciphering are various forms of surface patterning that
are characteristically ambiguous. The intricacies of these signifying practices seem to
acknowledge, in different contexts, the desire to hide and reveal.
The final scene of The Collector’s Wife captures the “impossibility” of death if we

tend to highlight the experience of the mother, Rukmini, in this context. The impossibility of
death turns into an inner experience for the mother in pain, anticipating the birth of a
progeny. Motherhood is something which is interpreted through social construction.
Motherhood is a legal fiction, from which it draws and has drawn its authority. The
interlinking concepts of birth and death undermine the fact that to know the father, whereas to
know the mother, we need sensible perception. The text captures both the experiential
quotient and surrogate factor as important constituents of the word “mother” and “father.” If
seen from a different angle, a vision of liberation is apprehended in Rukmini’s life now. The
language of creation is always centred, is always selective and restrictive. Also,
representation of death becomes a matter of intentionality. Nature preserves the violent and
sometimes murderous intentions of the creator. Quite simply, this act of negation or death is
conserved at the heart of every act of creation.
As portrayed in The Collector’s Wife, what is integral to the performance of violence

is a sense of mourning. This kind of mourning in time and space is also tied to a sort of
emotional display. In the text, the writer considers death as a part of political and moral
judgment. There is also an attachment of death to the site of grieving. It is a site that is not
necessarily separated from that of pleasure or “merriment.” In The Collector’s Wife, in
Rukmini’s home, the boundaries between pain and pleasure, mourning and levity, are fluid
and nowhere to be found . This is an affront to the assumption that grief is inseparable from
its inward privacy. The uncertainty attached to the characters/victims not only portray a
peculiar intensity that is inseparable from a larger unsettlement, but it also shows an
understanding of the victims’ expression as spontaneous, “dictated’’ by grief. The text
portrays a civilization that assimilates cultural difference in itself. In the emergence of this
narrative, the shift from death to mourning is doubtless of immense significance. It also
marks a transition from fatalism to outcry, especially with a reference to the moral codes of
bourgeois Assamese civility.
In The Collector’s Wife, the concept of death is imbued with strong significances.
Rukmini, in The Collector’s Wife, upholds the viewpoint that in order to know what living is,
one must negate it. In the similar vein, we can say that the measure of a thing is the effort
made to destroy it. Hence, death is a signifier with a varied and characteristically paradoxical
function at work.

Major Themes of 'The Collector's Wife'

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Major Themes of 'The Collector's Wife'

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Characters in The Collector’s Wife

1. Siddarth Bezbaruah: The DC of Parbatpuri district

The Themes of Death, Violence and Terror in The Collector’s Wife

In Mitra Phukan’s The Collector’s Wife (2005), the concept of death is imbued with

In The Collector’s Wife (2005), the threat of violence creates a structural enclosure.

In The Collector’s Wife (2005), violence proclaims negative determinations of

The final scene of The Collector’s Wife captures the “impossibility” of death if we

As portrayed in The Collector’s Wife, what is integral to the performance of violence

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