“It is the dog that makes us human”

Abstract This article examines the portrayal of trans-species empathy in the Adi writer Lummer Dai’s Assamese novel Mon aru Mon (Heart to Heart). Placing my investigation of Dai’s novel at the intersections of literary canine studies and “border-crossing” (Black) studies of empathy with nonhumans, I consider the representation of interspecies identification and trans-species relationality. While moments of sentimental identification and anthropomorphic projection are present, Dai’s text also contains moments that attempt to empathetically imagine the alterity of the dog’s corporeal experiences. Mon aru Mon is an ambivalent text that simultaneously evokes empathy for a particular canine character while foreclosing empathy for other canines inhabiting the margins of the text. However, this foreclosure of empathy for anonymous canines becomes a lens for analyzing the unstable and precarious status that dogs occupy in rural Adi society in the borderland state of Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India.