IMAGINING FRONTIER GOVERNMENTALITY: RIAZ HASSAN'S THE UNCHOSEN AS A JANUS-FACED BORDERSCAPE

Abstract

This article examines Riaz Hassan’s The Unchosen as a Janus-faced literary critique of frontier governmentality and the colonial legal regime known as the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR). Drawing on Benjamin Hopkins’s concept of frontier governmentality, the article argues that the FCR functioned not merely as a juridical code but as a spatial and epistemological tool designed to inscribe the tribal borderlands as zones of permanent exception. By reading The Unchosen through the lens of border poetics, the study explores how the novel subverts the imperial frontier discourse that justified the FCR under the guise of customary autonomy and indirect rule. The narrative constructs a Janus-faced borderscape in which resistance and complicity are inseparably entangled, revealing how colonial legality corroded tribal cohesion and reconfigured indigenous governance. Through testimonial memory, narrative fragmentation, and affective silences, Hassan’s text challenges the authority of the colonial archive not by offering a coherent counter-history, but by foregrounding the lived contradictions and moral ambiguities of exceptional legality. The novel’s subaltern voice—ambivalent, fractured, and at times deliberately opaque—resonates with Gayatri Spivak’s notion of epistemic violence and Aleida Assmann’s theory of restorative memory. Ultimately, The Unchosen functions as a narrative borderscape that reclaims agency in a landscape disfigured by imperial cartography and legal design. By tracing these discursive and aesthetic tensions, the article contributes to the interdisciplinary intersection of postcolonial literary studies, legal history, and cultural border theory.

Keywords : Frontier governmentality; Janus-faced border; Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR); border poetics; Riaz Hassan; The Unchosen; state of exception