Questions of Identity in Assam: Location, Migration, Hybridity 9788132105114, 8132105117

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Questions of Identity in Assam

Questions of Identity in Assam Location, Migration, Hybridity

Nandana Dutta

SAGE Studies on India’s North East

Copyright © Nandana Dutta, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2012 by Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in Sage Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA Sage Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom Sage Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10/13 pt Minion by Diligent Typesetter, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dutta, Nandana, 1960–   Questions of identity in Assam: location, migration, hybridity/Nandana Dutta.     p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   1. Assam (India)—Ethnic relations 2. Ethnicity—Political aspects— India—Assam. 3. Group identity—Political aspects—India—Assam. 4. Ethnic conflict—India—Assam. 5. Cultural fusion—India—Assam. 6. Immigrants— India—Assam. 7. Assam (India)—Emigration and immigration. 8. Assam (India)—Politics and government. 9. Assam (India)—Social conditions. I. Title. DS485.A88D7975    305.800954'162—dc23    2012    2012027009 ISBN: 978-81-321-0511-4 (HB) The SAGE Team: Shambhu Sahu, Dhurjjati Sarma, Rajib Chatterjee, and Rajinder Kaur

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Contents List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

The Conditions of Knowledge Location, Migration, and Hybridity The Assam Movement Thirty Years On

ix xi xv

1

48

Memories and Violence Remembering the Assam Movement

101

Identity Questions Narrating Past and Present

142

Framing the Question Who Are the Assamese?

189

Conclusion: Shifting the Terrain, Renewing the Narrative Bibliography Index About the Author

240 251 261 270

List of Abbreviations AAGSP AAMSU AASU ABSU ABVP AFPSA AGP AJJP AJYCP AKRSU APSC APW AUDF AVARD CPI (ML) CVC FCI FIR IIM IIT IMDT KNLF MP NDFB NESO NETV NGO NREGS

All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad All Assam Minority Students’ Union All Assam Students’ Union All Bodo Students’ Union Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act Asom Gana Parishad Asom Jatiyotabadi Jubo Parishad Asom Jatiyotabadi Yuva Chatra Parishad All Koch Rabongshi Students’ Union Assam Public Service Commission Assam Public Works Assam United Democratic Front Assam Voluntary Association for Rural Development Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Central Vigilance Commissioner Food Corporation of India First Information Report Indian Institute of Management Indian Institute of Technology Illegal Migration (Determination by Tribunal) (Act) Karbi-Longri National Liberation Force Member of Parliament National Democratic Front of Bodoland North East Students’ Organizations North East Television Non-Governmental Organization National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme

x Questions of Identity in Assam OBC ONGC PCG PIP SULFA ULFA

Other Backward Classes Oil and Natural Gas Commission People’s Consultative Group Prevention of Infiltration from Pakistan (Act) Surrendered ULFA United Liberation Front of Assam

Acknowledgments

In writing this book I have incurred many debts. I am grateful, first, to all

those unnamed people (especially from my old neighborhood of Dispur) whose memories of their experience during the Assam Movement convinced me of the necessity of this kind of reading. I hope some day their stories will become the subject of more intensive study. My parents, Umesh Chandra Dutta and Bela Dutta, whose life together in all its poignancy and sharpness first made me want to write in this area. My brother whose skepticism and astringent humor have lighted these many years. My colleagues from various departments in the University—Political Science, Economics, Geography, History, Linguistics—took interest in my work and offered their very special interpretations of the movement and of migration into the region. I would especially like to mention Sandhya Goswami, Professor in the Department of Political Science, who listened with patience and sympathy as I tried to put ideas into shape. I recall with pleasure the many afternoons I spent in her department talking about Assam over cups of tea. I am also grateful to Professor Jyoti Tamuli who spoke to me about linguistic diversity in the region and Professor Archana Sharma of the Department of Economics and Director of the Women’s Studies Research Centre, Gauhati University, who shared with me her memories of animosities among different groups during the movement. My colleagues from my own department, English—Professor Ranjit Kumar Dev Goswami, Dr Pradipta Borgohain, and Dr Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri—for not only dipping into their memories to recall often very bitter experiences, but for allowing me to quote them at length. I am particularly grateful to Pradipta for telling me about the experiences of his parents, Shrimati Nirupama Borgohain and Shri Homen Borgohain, during the movement and giving me access to their writings.

xii Questions of Identity in Assam My colleague Dr Bibhash Choudhury supplied me with more books than I could use. My friend and colleague, Dr Aparna Bhattacharyya, for always being ready to listen, to make suggestions and for being a willing and perceptive reader of the work as it took shape. Professor Sanjib Baruah’s perceptive writings on Assam and his belief that people other than political scientists should write about Assam and its political, social and cultural fabric have been a tremendous encouragement. Professor Dilip Das and Professor Venkat Rao of the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, invited me to speak on identity issues in Assam. The interest, sympathy and questions of the audience there helped sharpen my view of the problem. I owe a very special debt to long-time friend and school classmate, Tazma Ahmed, who shared many of my experiences and with whom, over years of practicing the old-fashioned habit of writing letters, I came to terms with my mixed identity; whose conviction about the value of the personal experience has been a great support; and who drew on her wide and eclectic reading to respond with appreciation to chapters I sent her. I am grateful to Dr Pramod Nayar of the Department of English, Hyderabad, for reading the fourth and fifth chapters (when they were still one chapter) with his usual sharpness and for generally pushing me to work harder. The staff at the library of the ICHR Regional Centre, Guwahati, where I regularly worked, was always helpful and courteous. I am especially thankful to the reviewer, whose caustic criticism of many aspects of the work helped me to rework chapters, omit what appeared irrelevant portions and iron out general statements wherever I could. I regret that I could not address all the suggestions more closely. I would like to thank Oxford University Press (OUP) for permitting me to use in the Conclusion a portion of my essay “Narrative Agency and Thinking about Conflicts” from their publication Beyond Insurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India (2009), edited by Sanjib Baruah. I would also like to thank the editors of Identities: Local and Global (Pencraft 2003), K.C. Baral and P.C. Kar, and the editor of Edward Said and the Politics of Culture (Bhabani 2008), Bibhash Choudhury, for generously publishing my essays, “Identities in the Wake of Militancy” and

Acknowledgments xiii

“Traveling Theory: Edward Said’s Politics of Location” respectively, and allowing me to use portions from these in various parts of the book. To Sugata Ghosh of SAGE I am grateful for having convinced me that I could write about Assam, though I probably disappointed him by the book I finally wrote. And finally to Rekha Natarajan, also of SAGE, who saw the book through its final stages and gave generously of her friendship, help and advice.

Introduction

A

ssam, one of the most distant and marginal states of the Indian nation, and situated on its northeastern arm, has tenuous historical and geographical links with the rest of the country. Knowledge of Assam and its sister states (many of which were carved out of its territory in a troubled post-independence period) is negligible in other parts of the country. Everything happened here a little late, and the region has always been either absent from national conceptions, or constructed as mysterious, exotic, a land of magic and human sacrifice and tantric practices, or, in the last few years, simply dismissed as violent and corrupt and therefore with little claim to national sympathy or attention. Modern education in the region came late, brought in by the American Baptist missionaries. The first university (Gauhati University) was established only in 1948, the first college (Cotton College) in 1901. Only a small percentage of Assam’s students enter the central civil services, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM). This marginalization is replicated in other areas. The region’s underdevelopment is not the result of uneven fund allocations but of political indifference. Its voice is unheard except when there is recourse to noticeable and explosive violence. And the performance of the disciplines in understanding and representing this complex picture effectively enough, and in centering it in the national imagination, has been inadequate.

Subject Position: Personal and Professional While this book appears to address questions of identity as affected by the issues of migration and hybridity thrown up anew by the Assam Movement—the student-led agitation against illegal immigration from

xvi Questions of Identity in Assam Bangladesh—the marginalization of issues by the disciplines is a necessary subtext. My concern, behind the overt thrust of this book on questions of identity, is specifically with the practice of my own discipline of English studies in the uneven scenario of metropolitan/central universities and state/regional universities. Such a disciplinary practice works against the assumptions (often true) that not much is being “produced” as knowledge in colleges and universities that are far away from the centers of knowledge, and that we have simply moved from being anthropological objects to being postcolonialism’s objects. This statement of the problem has two dimensions—the personal and the professional— and this introductory chapter attempts to place these as determining elements in the argument. The personal is an aspect of the disciplinary subject position; it inflects approaches and attitudes and it spreads into the views and positions assumed and referred to throughout. The professional, disciplinary condition is also a condition of reading in a location—with and against the culture of that discipline—which includes a theoretical framework imported from elsewhere. To explain the rationale for the evocation of the personal, it is necessary to distinguish its deployment from the merely impressionistic. It involves using the personal as a route to a field and a body of knowledge, in connecting through the personal with theoretical issues that are generated out of the conditions of a location. It is an individual experience of those conditions. To explain this within the context of identity questions in Assam: the notion of identity I carry with me is that of the hybrid—dual, mixed, a blend of two communities that have been at each other’s throats and languages for a hundred and fifty years. Examining this hybrid identity in the location where it is experienced, I discover migration to have been at the root of the historical animosity between the two communities, and its continuation into the present a reason for the seepage of practices of violence into social relationships. The nuances of this dual engagement with the location, with its “real” and textual manifestation of Assamese– Bengali relations, have been deciding factors in the concerns of this book and in the choice of texts for substantiation. The two communities—so similar and yet so absorbed and obsessed with being different—living together in the public domain of the society; two individuals from these two communities living together in the private domain of the family: the situation was always ripe for eruptions both in the public and in the private

Introduction xvii

domain. Childhood experience of language use is the starkest memory that I have carried of this hybridity—the natural bilingualism always suspect; one language enforced over another according to the circumstances in which it had to be used, which side of the family, paternal or maternal, was visiting; having to make sure that one did not mix up the grammar and vocabulary of the two languages (this very natural fallout of linguistic contiguity was the commonest occasion for hostility); and recognizing more and more how easily one could perform one’s identity, that hybridity is and must always be a matter of performance, of being or appearing less than one’s own, private self-image. And the specific public expressions of many of these historical differences in politics, culture, and language also meant that one’s individual identity was always a function of the current political crisis. This blend of the private and the public is an aspect of the way identity is imagined in this book in a location that is deeply rent by linguistic and cultural diversities. The professional subject position that is partly a result of this personal experience carried in the mind and into disciplinary practice, comes with certain initial assumptions. The most basic is the existence of postcolonial issues like migration and hybridity in a marginal location that is distinctive in both its colonial history and its contemporary existence. “India as a location” is not specific enough because of the regional variations in colonial experience, the different times and ways in which parts of the country came under colonial rule and the distinctness of locations that received British colonial action. This also has an institutional– academic valence. India presents an interesting case of central–marginal academic relationships that are entrenched in the relative positions of the central universities in the big cities and regional/state institutions, and in assumptions about academic and critical excellence as being synonymous with the big universities, and second-rate, secondary work with the others. In a situation of this kind, it becomes necessary to address the question of empowerment for the institutions left out in the cold. The only way to do this appears to be to use the marginal position as a place of power by entering the discursive practices of postcolonialism through an articulation of a specific location, the past and present experiences of which offer challenges of a special kind. A combination of the personal and the professional runs therefore like a watermark through the pages of this book. The personal history

xviii Questions of Identity in Assam is brought into reading practices through living as hybrid in a location where migration has rendered the components of the hybrid visible and targetable. The elements of the professional open out into something like the following: (a) the application of theory, in relation to which it is possible to speak of the travel of theory, reciprocity, and empowerment; (b) empowerment also in relation to location, because it is by inflecting interpretation with an understanding of the self in that location that empowerment is achieved; (c) receptivity or reception, which involves playing host to the theory and the migrant; and (d) reciprocity as exchange between theory and the object of study, the setting up of a process of mutual influence, each transformed by the other. The concern, therefore, is with the personal witness whose entry into the discipline enlivens it, enlivens the archive or the discourse with the particular narrative of personal identity as the occasion for rethinking the disciplinary location. The personal–professional complex which defines my subject position in this context is also present in the baggage (as the precaution, preparation, premises, tools) that I may carry with me in order to understand, describe, and make the location usable, and eventually bring back as reinforcement to practice the discipline as a contributor and not to inhabit it merely as a consumer. These occasions for writing are made urgent by the way migration and hybridity have influenced the development of the discourse of identity in this particular location. Ramachandra Guha in his “Preface” to India after Gandhi (2007) says that writing about the contemporary is a peculiar challenge because everyone has a stake in it. I discovered this when, during the conversations that I had over this book—and this is a book that has evolved through conversations, through listening to people, tones of voices, animosities, enthusiasms—it became apparent that almost everyone was writing the book with me; everyone had a view, a stake, an involvement, a feeling of participation. It was an experience that increased the challenge of understanding identity and underlined the futility of arriving at a general abstraction, explanation, or solution. Guha’s two conceptions with which he explains the challenge of writing contemporary history—the “critical citizen” and “the historian who is also a citizen” (ibid.: xxv)—describe the involvement and engagement with the ground and its elements that are compelling aspects of observation in contexts of this kind. The possibility of being called into question

Introduction xix

for lack—for not having done, said, or accounted for so many things, for not having looked at a different set of texts that prove these points more emphatically—is always present. In adopting this perspective, however, I would argue that this is an individual’s interpretation of her subject position—as an individual, as hybrid and caught between cultures both biologically and intellectually; as practitioner of the discipline of English studies; and as an engaged participant in the socio-political materialities of this location. This means that the two poles of the process—the complexities surrounding the reading position, and the unique contours of the location itself—are subjects of interest requiring description, articulation, and representation, if the space between them where the encounter takes place is to be of any use for interpretative purposes in the discipline. This is what this book sets out to do.

Reading in the Location Let me offer a scenario of interpretation from my own discipline of English to make this clearer. While teaching novels like The Shadow Lines and Midnight’s Children in the classroom, a challenge is thrown by a student: that when we as readers consciously enter a text, taking with us a certain theoretical and social orientation, what does this move actually amount to? How does a location activate meanings? This is a question that is formulated because of the invitation to read from context inserted into the curriculum, to make an empowering gesture rather than to mechanically apply a remote theory to a novel. It is necessary to observe the connection between an active location and disciplinary empowerment, because the location in each postcolonial case is unique—no two experiences of colonization are the same, even within the same country. The effective articulation of this connection can actually produce that material condition that would ensure a unique perspective and result in empowerment. The difficulties in answering the student’s question are many, because there is no formula for this encounter. However, it seems necessary to pin down what one is taking into the text. Both books invite the application and critique of two central notions of postcolonial theory—“nation” and “migration.” This means being caught up in the problematic of “application”—the rightness of applying a theory to an object of study, the ethics of the process, the fear of doing violence to the object—and all

xx Questions of Identity in Assam of this suggests the imperative of reciprocity in the act of application of a theory. In other words, the reading situation has to involve the response of the theory to the location, but as being affected or influenced by it rather than merely serving as a tool of interpretation. The given location—Assam in the midst of a major and continuing crisis brought about by migration—compelled the rethinking of the relationship of a border state, a peripheral, marginal state, with the central, national formation. This is a location where migration indeed was responsible for spawning separatist movements, and where the internal dynamics generated by migration gave birth to the autonomy movements of many of the larger tribal groups within the state. It is immediately obvious that existing interpretations of migration and nation did not and could not do justice to the location. In other words, the theory that was available did not fit. So, on the one hand, we had in the two novels representations of migration and nation that took the current postmodernist/postcolonial positions for granted—i.e., they demonstrated, through a critique of the “enclosed” national formation, the inadequacy and incompleteness of the national idea as it prevailed in India, and offered as an antidote the postmodern/postcolonial alternative of “DissemiNations” (Bhabha 1994), with its magical, romantic connotations of belonging everywhere, transgressing all borders since these were only states of mind, and for all practical purposes demonstrating the bordered nation idea to be defunct in a world where everybody traveled. Theories of transnationalism and transborder have also been sources for the imagination of borderlessness. The competing conceptions opened out by earlier and current theories of migration and nation therefore showed that the nation was formed as a result of migration and continues its present existence because of it. On the other hand, the situation on the ground in Assam offered a very different take on the two ideas. Three decades ago there had been a mass movement on the issue of illegal migration. That migration still continues, and its effects are now beginning to be visible, with the memory of the agitation against foreigners kept alive by the current nature of migration and renewed efforts by different groups and organizations to draw the attention of the political leadership to the problem. The question of keeping the nation’s borders open has been unthinkable. Within the nation itself, states have been involved in conflicts over the breaching of

Introduction xxi

inter-state borders, and, within many states, tribal autonomy movements are essentially tussles over territorial demarcations for tribal groups. This scenario reveals the challenge that the reader faces, which is the challenge of the location. Taking on this challenge would mean that the reader or interpreter looks at nation and migration in these two texts from her very real experience of nation and migration on the ground. What extension of these theories is likely to emerge from the encounter and the resistance offered from both directions? This brings us to the third point of this encounter—the need to interpret and represent the location itself in order to make it usable or responsive. This is the disciplinary challenge that must be distinguished in the case of English studies from that of other disciplines on at least one fundamental ground. The object of study for disciplines like political science, economics, anthropology, history, psychology, geography, statistics, life sciences, and environment sciences can be and usually is the location itself. Each one of them can indeed study aspects of the location in which they function. More specifically, in the case of a phenomenon like migration, the location contains the object of study. English studies, in contrast, has as its primary object of study the English text that, in most cases, was born elsewhere, so that at least one of its disciplinary problems has to do with how one studies the English text in this location. (It is somewhat easier if the text is one that has been produced in the location itself, in English or in any of the Assamese languages, and lends itself naturally to thematic and formal interpretation here.) This problem is distinct from the exercises undertaken in the form of “Indian response to English literature”—involving the application of Indian aesthetic theory to the reading of the English text. (One such example is the reading of the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman offered in the volume Asian Responses to American Literature [Narasimhaiah 1972]). In order to study the English text in its new location, the preliminary step is to study and represent the location in a way that makes it amenable to the second stage of the interpretative process. The understanding and interpretation of the location itself becomes a corollary to the ethical practice of the discipline in that place—where the discipline responds to that place of functioning but simultaneously defines what to respond to and how. What Edward Said (2001g) describes as a “crisis” that reignites a theory is apparent in these conditions, from which also arises the invitation to articulate that crisis and make it tangible and usable.

xxii Questions of Identity in Assam Practicing any discipline in this region means that one is tacitly acknowledging the compelling presences all around, the study of the ground necessary for the reciprocal process to take place—a process where one does not precede the other, each pole is not finished with individually before the other is scrutinized—a process that has to be simultaneous. Here, of course, one is entering an area of some ambivalence, because this simultaneity is difficult to describe; the two can only be held in balance in the mind, somewhat like the ideal coincidence of the narrator’s firstperson experiential narrative with the experience itself, as suggested by Mr Blackwood to the aspiring writer Psyche Zenobia in Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre tale of sensationalist representation, “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” But it is this process, which, beyond a point, is inaccessible to description, that it is my ambition to demonstrate at work. Subsequently in this book, I speak of only two of the three points of my interpretative complex. The literary text that is the occasion for this activity and for the particular way in which I think about these issues is out of range here. It is at a metatextual level that the dialog takes place between the ground or location and the object one studies in that location. The dialog that is between the text and the location is more specifically a dialog between the conceptual in that text (the idea that one might abstract as being beyond the narrative or story element) and the conceptual that underpins the representation of the location. One may put this in more explicit if simplistic terms, with the help of possible scenarios of reading: how does a reader in a place that has never experienced migration in the modern era read or respond to the issue in the two novels mentioned? (That the novels have other interesting issues which may be picked on by the reader, other areas that draw her attention, is not the test case I need here.) Such a “migration-innocent” reader is likely to borrow the existing theory without question and read migration within its parameters. Such a scenario is also one of a mechanical application of theory, since the ground from which it is embarked upon does not have the crisis that challenges or reignites the theory. Against these possible situations is pitted one where migration is a reality and is already an interpreted, understood, and talked-about issue, when the text with a certain view of migration arrives and brings in its wake as interpretative aid an internationally accepted theory of migration. The encounter/confrontation that takes place in such a situation between the theory or concept and the

Introduction xxiii

location that provides this new experience or perception of migration is the one that is of special interest for this book. The encounter between a deployment of migration theory in the novel (and though I continue to use the term novel, I now look at it as also the vehicle in which the theory travels) and an approach to migration in the location means that the theory that hovers over these exercises is seriously called into question. Once these two kinds of materialities—the reading of migration offered in a fictional text, or its fictional “use,” and the interpretation of it, often with the help of and against particular disciplines, in that location—are activated, the theory of migration is subverted, challenged, overthrown, re-presented with other and different emphases.

The Discipline and the Location The compulsion to interpret and represent the location therefore plays its own important role in disciplinary practice. The representation of the location is the incidental gain in an exercise of this kind, since without it the location is not available for “use.” This instrumental design frames the book. Without this attention to the location, it is impossible to engage in ethical practice, which is a mandatory position given the changed situations of subjects and objects in current disciplinary thinking. Attending to response is imperative in the ethical relationship, and it is such response that is looked for in the knowledge, understanding, and attention to location that is also quite obviously the knowledge, understanding, and attention that one is called upon to offer in the face of the other as the identity narrative negotiates hybridity. It may be argued that these reflections lie behind all postcolonial readings that nuance themselves with an awareness of location. This book, however, is more intent on understanding and revealing this two-directional process. The interpretation and effort to understand Assam, its identity “problems” and the limit of the past three decades—these are all steps in engaging with this process. In that sense and at this level, this is not so much a book about the Assam Movement and the impact of its major elements on the identity narrative, as it is about locations offering potential for disciplinary empowerment, with the movement and its aftermath as example.

xxiv Questions of Identity in Assam In engaging with these issues, I look at contemporary society in the aftermath of the Assam Movement, that is, from the mid-1980s—including the continuing migration, the rise of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), of ethnic separatist movements, of divisions among people, and the “rehabilitation” of the surrendered militants by the state resulting in their entry into society, bringing with them a distinct culture of violence and intimidation. All of these are components of the location in which identity issues have evolved, and against which the discipline is practiced. It involves the reading of contemporary violence and recall of the point from which it may be said to date—the “non-violent” movement whose low-intensity violence was so stealthy, so surreptitious, that we did not notice when it entered and established itself in our collective and individual psyches. The crucial area that violence infected was the relationship of self and other (also encompassing the relationships of disciplines and their objects, the reader and the text, migrants and hosts). And it is this aspect of social exchange that is expressed in the practices stemming from the Assam Movement and in the aggression expressed in the face of the other, who began by being the migrant but who eventually became all those who were different, all who were not the self. All societies have potential situations of violence, especially because difference and sameness are such inalienable aspects of societies and are so often ranged against one another. When I was in school (in Shillong, which was then the capital of Assam, and is now the capital of Meghalaya, one of the states carved out of Assam; a cosmopolitan hill station that threw together people from all over India), a school where students were permitted to speak only in English, groups of girls would huddle together and indulge in the illicit pleasure of speaking in their “mother” tongues— Assamese, Bengali, Khasi, Punjabi, or Hindi. I was never invited into the two possible groups, Assamese and Bengali, not because I was especially loyal to the school’s diktat about linguistic usage, but because neither group thought to include me when they spoke the mother tongue. Many of them were my friends in English, but not my friends in Assamese or Bengali, when the groupings changed because the intimacies were different. Years later, one of them said to me: “We were not sure about what you were. We did not invite you to our homes because we did not think you would come. We did not think you could speak the language.” On my part I had a certain hesitation in using either one of my two languages

Introduction xxv

because I myself was not sure which one I should speak. I was wary of sounding different, of sounding Bengali while speaking Assamese, or Assamese while speaking Bengali. So I spoke English—the language of anonymity and security—and cultivated my hybridity within because there was no outlet for it, no external space where it could be expressed. This is the reality of living in-between prior to its theoretical representation as fashionably plural, ambivalent, and transnational (here naturally a function of the time lapse between childhood experience and adult understanding). It is not always the case that the multiple/hybrid/different sense of identity can be expressed socially, because society builds its securities and stabilities on homogeneity—on groups and clubs based on different kinds of similarities. A club of hybrid or mixed people in such a society would have a murky underground existence and history, shaped against notions of purity/adulteration, belonging/non-belonging/“excess of belongings.” As the social “closing in” of ethnic groups and of the dominant Assamese shows, we are caught up here in the argument of whether hybridity can be allowed a voice or presence, or whether it must be “assimilated”; the overwhelming support seems to be for the latter. Societies which have come into existence under the looming shadows of migration are bound to contain hybridity. But since no society is ever without its minorities and its major community, with the bigger group towering over the smaller ones, the impulse is toward inclusion and homogenization, even as a rhetoric of openness and accommodation is heard all along, providing that waiting period before the angularities have disappeared into a seamless whole. The presence of many “others,” instead of encouraging a society to be more welcoming and more accommodative, seems to make it less so. Identity declarations and identity “crises” are in that sense clearly articulated against fears of homogeneity as well as against fears of adulteration or mixing, or fears of difference. The mixed form is still an exotic form, pleasurable from a distance as a curiosity, as an artifact on the drawing room wall, but it is unwanted in the intimacies of the “Same.” In other words, we are in the midst of the crucial question that marks the problem of difference and otherness. Is the other allowed to remain “other,” to retain difference? Or must difference always be assimilated (the question that has dogged the immigrant and “others” from the rest of India from the earliest days of migration into the region)? In coming to terms

xxvi Questions of Identity in Assam with this vital modern problem that pursues multicultural societies, two parallel strands of thinking become apparent. On the one hand, there is the rhetoric of openness to difference, which implies the harmonious coexistence of many religions, languages, and ways of life. On the other, because a certain “definition” of country or people is inevitable with any form of the nation-state, an exclusive idea—an idea of Americanness, Indianness, Britishness, etc.—is inevitably in circulation. The United States of America is probably the best example of a place where there is not only the “tolerance” of difference but also the marketing of the great American ideal in which all its citizens or its aspiring citizens participate. All those exotic, differently born, and linguistically, biologically, and religiously endowed people are taken and flattened into Americans. A degree of assimilation into basic American “ways,” language, and food habits, and submission to its laws, is taken for granted. Once that has been achieved, it is possible to be entertained by exotica— the artificial forms and modes of being “different,” the performance of the exotic for public edification, for reassuring the minority of the majority community’s generosity and open-mindedness. An exhibition on “Devi: The Great Goddess” that ran at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington from March 28 to September 6, 1999, is an example of such a performance, as is James Clifford’s “living museums” (Clifford 1997: 107–46), where, for a month, Native American groups offer their “traditional” lives for the pleasure of the viewer (lives they may not be living on a daily basis and only recall for this special occasion). Similarly, in Assam, “performances” of the exotic are undertaken by many tribal groups as the only way to preserve endangered and dying forms and practices. The call for assimilation that was made by Hiren Gohain in Assam: A Burning Question (1985) carries this entire matrix of problems. Difference has to be assimilated, and the assumption from the context in which Gohain makes this statement is that the different must be willing to assimilate because, if it retains its difference, it is likely to be perceived as a threat and no identity problem would be finally resolved. This situation actually shows that if there is a majority group which has, by its size, visibility, and influence, ensured that its language, culture, history, and “ways” are those of the state, or are those by which a people are defined, smaller, less powerful groups (contained within the majority community as a result of historical circumstances) which do

Introduction xxvii

not share its ways are expected, at least publicly, to come as close as possible to the majority ideal. This was revealed in the process of working on a departmental project on folk narratives from seven tribal languages of Assam. In collecting folk tales from the different linguistic communities, we discovered that in all cases, an Assamese translation of the tales was available, compiled and translated by prominent members of the communities in an exercise that was an aspiration to inclusion (“look we have the same tales”), an advertisement of contribution to Assamese culture, a declaration of difference, or simply the use of the dominant language to get greater visibility for cultures that felt their marginalization and comparative insignificance acutely. This has been a difficult book to write, because the topical—that latest incident of violence/cruelty—has hovered over every attempt at closing off its “reality” referents. At the same time, each such incident has contributed to the further consolidation of the thesis that violence marks this society to such a degree that it percolates into unimaginable and supposedly inaccessible areas of social being. To throw it out as an alien object or as a scab on a healed wound is a temporary and superficial step that does not arrest the continuation of violence as a mode of everyday behavior. To separate the ULFA’s violence from oneself, from one’s society, is a dangerous psychological detour because it provides that “ready explanation,” that pat response from which one can move on, even as other practices that I have called violent (see Chapter 2 on the Assam Movement) are detached from this convenient, visible manifestation and continue to exist in social, political, and economic practices.

Responses to Violence The response to violence over the years has taken two discernible forms. One has been sympathetic—the “our boys” syndrome, with its approval of many of the activities of the ULFA which were perceived as vigilante efforts, such as the reparation of economic disparities through extortions/ kidnappings/ransoms targeting rich businessmen, owners of cinema halls and similar establishments. The ULFA was seen as functioning as a kind of moral police, keeping order in the towns after dusk. This was especially true in the towns of Upper Assam. My own ambivalent experience is of

xxviii Questions of Identity in Assam walking home at dawn in Dibrugarh in Upper Assam in 1990 (when I taught for a year at Dibrugarh University), having taken a night bus from Guwahati, with the peculiar sensation of streets being kept safe by “our boys.” Hiren Gohain writes of this phenomenon that invited “frothy reports” in the local media: “They built roads where none existed, honoured artists and writers, chastised notorious local thugs and hoods, forced licentious rogues into instant virtue and rectitude, banned wine-drinking among habitual wine-bibbing communities” (Gohain 2007: 1012). The Robin Hood image was popularized by the vernacular press, and even a novel, Sanglot Fenla, was written by a newspaper editor, writer, political commentator, and avowed sympathizer, Parag Das (1993), who was later killed for these very sympathies. The second response—alienation—has grown stronger as the ULFA has cut itself off more and more from society. The turning point in public perception probably came with the murder of Sanjoy Ghose and the withdrawal of sympathy by the people of the island of Majuli where he had based his non-governmental organization (NGO), the Assam Voluntary Association for Rural Development (AVARD). The second strain shows the condemnation and separation quite strongly. It grows out of the predominantly leftist criticism that developed in and around the years of the Assam Movement. Among its strongest articulators has been Hiren Gohain, whose writings at the time of the movement are representative of other similar views. Today we have the almost complete replacement of the first response by the second. The disillusionment and distancing are heard in the voices of all classes of people, and yet ironically this is the very reason why the seepage of the violent mode into everyday lives is generally invisible. More and more, a rhetoric of separation/dissociation has characterized the individual and collective response to the violence of the militant or the insurgent (seen as external to the society, as aberrants), even as the discourse of talks, dialogue, bringing “our boys” (a phrase less often heard these days, and publicly used only by the so-called intermediaries of the always aborted peace talks) back to the fold, the return of the prodigals, etc., continues to circulate with varying degrees of impact. The response of civil society, which has itself been deeply marked by the many aspects of the Assam Movement, has been in the introduction of this significant rupture between itself and this inconvenient product of its historical and political processes, as shown in the concluding chapter in the changed rhetoric of both the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU)

Introduction xxix

and the Asom Sahitya Sabha, the two most important institutions of civil society that were also in the vanguard of the movement. Gyanendra Pandey in Remembering Partition makes the point that the investigation of Partition violence has been aimed (rather) at justifying, or eliding, what is seen in the main as being an illegitimate outbreak of violence, and at making a case about how this goes against the fundamentals of Indian (or Pakistani) tradition and history: how it is to that extent, not our history at all. (Pandey 2001: 3, emphases mine)

Pandey argues that “violence and community constitute one another,” that “in the history of any society, narratives of particular experiences of violence go towards making the ‘community’ and the subject of history” (ibid.: 4). I distinguish my own argument about violence as constitutive of identity, through the response to violence with a reciprocal violence that is now internalized and marks everyday behavior—a phenomenon that seems to be discernible in Assam now. Perhaps it is a matter of phases of response to violence. A community’s or a people’s identity is constituted in the unconscious/subconscious assumption of practices that stem from the violent act. This seems to me valid in the case of Assam, where the episodes of violence have not been historically contained and consigned to a particular moment of madness and aberration; rather, once started, such episodes have not in fact stopped for thirty years now. The dramatic nature of Partition violence, the scale and degree of arson, loot, and rape, has also meant that the episode is easier to designate, to frame as an aberration. It arrives at a point when it is “over” and is thrown into memory’s penseive (to use a felicitous Rowling coinage to describe a vessel where extra thoughts are stored for recovery and examination later). The violence that I speak about is low-scale, sporadically occurring but never stopping, with little surety that it will stop permanently, as is evident in incidents where other groups and individuals have used the militant as a blind or a ruse to engage in acts of violence—thus, the killing and kidnapping are not necessarily over because a militant group comes above ground and enters society. The peculiar dangers of this are manifested in the results of ULFA rehabilitation during the Hiteswar Saikia chief ministership in Assam in the form of the surrendered ULFA (SULFA) militant, which spawned a criminal subculture in and around Guwahati city which continues to grow and prosper to this day.

xxx Questions of Identity in Assam

Rationale This is not, therefore, a book about the Assam Movement, though a chapter is devoted to retrospectives of the movement. By the same token, it is not a book that would fit into the classic social sciences model containing analyses and solutions. It offers “descriptions” with the conviction that there are incidental gains from studying identity through migration and hybridity in a specific location—“Assam of the last three decades.” Such an incidental gain for the discipline is the theoretical revision that it can put to use in reading its texts in this location. It is a particular discipline’s response to a certain material condition, and fits into theory’s materialist critique generated by the urgencies of the different locations within which so many of us try to position ourselves. While, therefore, the study is not directly concerned with engaging in political commentary, it is stirred into articulation by the latest incident of violence by a so-called insurgent group—not just an isolated incident, but the toleration of it that is a social manifestation indicating a deeper malaise in a society. It is against such a backdrop that this book develops its thesis about the kind of questions that attach to the issue of identity in a society or location marked by violence and other significant changes justified and explained by the predominant issue of migration and its attendant hybridities. At the same time, because the arrival and circulation of a corpus of ideas around a concept is one of the most powerful ways in which articulation and discursive frameworks develop, it is of interest to my argument to see how dominant theoretical tropes thrown into a particular location enable interpretation and understanding of that location, and simultaneously strain against their theoretical parameters and conventions. Every discipline, to keep itself going, to remain alive, asks epistemological questions of itself. How does it work? How are its conceptual preferences determined by the site in which it works? In a sense, therefore, the question is really the Saidian one (Said 1991 [1983]) of how theory travels, and how a new site is affected by and in turn affects the theory it receives. Why should the reception of theory in an alien location be worth considering? Given intellectual inheritances and borrowings, the porosity of intellectual borders and the dissemination of ideas, it is inevitable that a given site is not viewed in a theoretically innocent way. As Satya P. Mohanty would put it from his post-positivist realist perspective, in a

Introduction xxxi

very special way, theory is the mediator of our personal experience and shapes and determines identity (Mohanty 1997). At the same time, however, the question of location, brought first into fashionable contention by Homi Bhabha as the liminal, in-between space between cultures that is the textually determined condition of the postcolonial, still bears scrutiny, as it has been kept alive by its representation as the materiality of cultures that is determining for the individual or the disciplinary practice. As Benita Parry’s critique of the textualist bias of poststructuralist thinking indicates (Parry 2004), the area is really always alive as long as there are unexamined locations that function as challenging situations for theoretical deployments. The materially unanchored nature of much postcolonial theory that owes its affiliations to poststructuralist textualism at the cost of material or historical conditions has been contested for some time now by alternative suggestions about different ways of bringing in the historical and the cultural (see Ahmad 1993; Chrisman 1990; Dirlik 1994; Miyoshi 1993, to take just a random selection of such critiques). The northeastern part of India is one such location that stands as an obstacle in the path of any universalizing theory which fails to imagine the peculiar resistances a specific location has to offer. How the location is to be described and how it already stands described is an aspect of the ways in which the theories of migration and hybridity construct identity in this location where migration and hybridity are also ground realities. The first chapter, keeping these issues in mind, addresses disciplinary questions as factors of reciprocity. It uses Edward Said’s idea of the travel of theory to point to the reignition of theory by the resistance of the location. It then goes on to place the exemplary case of the study of migration by different disciplines as a background to the problems of migration that are actually raised by the reality of the ground situation. The subject–object, theory–field configuration that is addressed in Chapter 1, especially the potential of theory for doing violence to its object of study, shifts in Chapter 2 to the violence of interpersonal relationships that is a result of the seepage of violent modes into the perception and treatment by the self of the other. This is apparent in the two kinds of violence, overt and covert, associated with the Assam Movement. Eschewing the tradition of focusing on the migrant as the object of study, the chapter looks at the response of the host society. In Chapter 3, this response is accessed through the memory archive, which

xxxii Questions of Identity in Assam includes several kinds of texts—people’s memories of the movement and their retrospective constructions, literary representations of aspects of the violence of the movement itself and of events in its aftermath, and analyses and evaluations undertaken in the light of contemporary events. The memory text allows access to invisible or unnoticed violence because it enters this domain from the vantage point of contemporary violence. Carrying along the idea of a receiving society allows one to ask what a society receives as a result of certain kinds of events taking place within it because of the presence of the migrant. What appears is a society where events have occurred that are violent in many ways and where a certain mode has entered as a result of the reception of the immigrant. Here, notions of “dealing with”/“living with” the “other” are also compulsions providing occasions for the emergence of violence, where the alien in our midst is held responsible for such emergence and for the debasement of the receiving society. In other words, a society actually receives or plays host to the immigrant, but the presence of the immigrant in the home of the host calls forth the kind of hostile reception that lowers rather than uplifts the character of the host, because in this case the numbers (which hinder assimilation into the host society) mean that the threat perception is stronger than the welcome. This gives birth to resistant strategies that one might broadly categorize as violence. Both Chapters 2 and 3 give an indication of this process by presenting instances of violent acts as connected to the violence embedded in the processes of the movement, using this as a route to understanding the violence of interpersonal relations. Such violence is not just evident in institutions and administrative departments of the state, but is more widely if less recognizably apparent in the impulse to homogenize that is part of identity narratives where the concern with self means that the other is victimized through assimilation, erasure, accommodation. The problem is articulated as migrationgenerated, but stretches to include the potential, much-feared engulfment of a smaller community by a dominant one—a problem that is always around the corner in the situation of multi-ethnicity that prevails in Assam. Following this exploration of the ways in which the Assam Movement reacted with violence to the imminent danger to its identity, Chapters 4 and 5 narrow the focus of the identity narrative to what is

Introduction xxxiii

the fundamental determinant for this book: migration. These chapters examine how the history of movement into the region becomes important in the context of the present. They look back at the several phases when, in one form or another, migration became an issue of identity, with the unassimilated migrant continuing to decide the response of the host society, especially the way it perceived and presented itself. I try to show how identity in this very specific location is distinctly marked by issues of migration and hybridity. These are the two major tropes that provide explanations and account for the singular interpretation of identity that Assam gives to herself, or that others critique. In brief, a discipline’s concern with empowerment (Chapter 1), sought to be achieved in an interpretation of the location in which it functions (Chapters 2 and 3), and the discovery of identity as a function of the reception of the migrant in this location (Chapters 4 and 5)—this is the direction of the argument presented in this book.

Texts In writing about the present that provides the location for interpretations and representations, the texts that I have had to look at, and sometimes even shape (as in the case of people’s memories), have had to be unconventional. The selection determinant has been the range and depth of circulation of some of the texts that are most revelatory of the “reasons,” “sources,” and “explanations” for the neglect, marginality, and resentment elements of the identity narrative. For example, the exchange of letters between Nehru and Assam’s chief minister Gopinath Bordoloi is periodically remembered and recounted at points in Assam’s political life when the sense of alienation is at its most acute. Indeed, the resurrection of this epistolary encounter at significant points in Assam’s political life is a feature that could be an object of study in its own right. In other words, it has been my attempt to catch those elements of Assamese identity and those aspects about the people that are in circulation, that people refer to, speak about, evoke at significant points in the life of the region, remember, reshape, deliberately forget, etc. So my texts have necessarily been people’s contemporary memories of the past (fused into representative accounts because of the refusal of

xxxiv Questions of Identity in Assam many individuals from the three neighborhoods mentioned in Chapter 3 to “remember” or to have their memories recorded), newspaper reports, articles, and documents from the past that have been revived—published or reprinted around the time that is important for this argument, and this includes British accounts. All of these texts offer useful sites for observing the process of identity formation, and allow us to review the past in the light of the present. In other words, the study explores not those texts that are preserved in the archive, but those that are in circulation, or, for that matter, those that have been retrieved from the archive and sent into the public domain. Among these may be included virtually all the late 19th and early 20th century essays, reports, and accounts that I have used. Finally, a large number of texts appear in translation in the book. All translations from the original Assamese into English are mine.

1 The Conditions of Knowledge Location, Migration, and Hybridity The condition of successful knowledge is that one not belong to the society described; in other words, we cannot both live in a society, in the strong sense, and know that society. — Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity (1994: 354)

The Object of Study In his book On Human Diversity, Tzvetan Todorov describes the defamiliarizing effect achieved by the Persians (he is writing on the Persian Letters of Montesquieu) when they describe the French and display a formidable knowledge about French society. They are able to come to this knowledge because they are not blinded by participation in its life. Todorov’s gloss on this valorizes the outsider position in situations of studying societies and individuals: The human apparatus for knowing cannot grasp the subject perfectly because it also constitutes part of it; the ideal separation between knowing and living is only possible in exceptional circumstances, for to know is also to live. Objective knowledge of things “as they are” may be accessible to the ideal and disinterested foreigner; in self-knowledge, both for individuals and groups, the instruments for knowing are contiguous to the object to be known, and perfect lucidity is impossible. (Todorov 1994: 355)

But the present book is about implication in the local, about absorption by and immersion in the conditions of a location. By that token,

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Questions of Identity in Assam

it is unsympathetic to the outsider position as one that is impossible to realize, or is ethically suspect, or theoretically complacent. Such manifestations of convenient and enabling outsideness may be apparent in scholars from one culture studying and evaluating another in ways that the members of that culture are unable to do, or are not sufficiently interested in doing. In studying the possibility of using one’s subject position or location to help inflect one’s reading strategies, such distance would be a serious handicap. The other problem that is immediately apparent in Todorov’s statement, that the “disinterested foreigner” may be able to acquire an “objective knowledge” of things “as they are,” is that this ideal observer is equipped with an alien cognitive apparatus which would filter his/her observations and distance him/her from “things as they are.” In airing these as necessary considerations, I am conscious of the “rights of the object,” of what goes on in the process of “application” of a theoretical apparatus, and therefore of aspects of receptivity and reciprocity. How does the object view itself? What are the crucial concerns of the object? Are these the same as those of the privileged outside viewer? Against the background of such questions, I discover that a fashionable, overwhelming theory sidelines the “real” concerns of the location in favor of the “problems” that it brings with it. So it becomes possible to still go on speaking about the migrant in the case of migration theory, because virtually all the disciplines are “migrant”-focused and show little concern for the receiving society; or to speak of hybridity as the postcolonial hybrid, without considering the conditions of hybridity that might be engendered by migration of the kind that throws two communities like the Assamese and the Bengali together. That is, it becomes possible to brush aside the original, physical condition of hybridity, which is the actual, often unequal mixing of two or more things, in favor of hybridity as an intellectual state. It is possible to view the issue of reception, which is the understructure of this work, in two ways: first, the reception of the theory of migration in this migration-affected location of Assam, where the crisis situation of the Assam Movement centers the problem of migration in specific, reception-related ways; and second, in conjunction with the society that is concerned with the pressure of receiving the migrant. Therefore, this is a book about the location that is characterized by a particular kind of

The Conditions of Knowledge 

3

migration receiving international migration theory as a cognitive tool; and, deeply enmeshed with this, about the reception accorded to the migrant that is compelled upon a society caught in particular historical circumstances and finding an outlet in violence. The identity narrative, set against this background of concerns and closely associated with migration in a society of multiple ethnicities, was thrown up anew by the Assam Movement. The Assam Movement, therefore, is the important crisis in this location, but it is at the same time, under the terms of my argument, also an object of study. Representation and description of it are preliminary exercises before one can study the encounter between the identity narrative in this location that is marked by real migration and real hybridities, and the theoretical issues of migration and hybridity—an approach requiring the setting in motion of two different strings, the theoretical apparatus or concept, and the location where the theory arrives and is deployed to study the migrant who also arrives in the same place. In examining the place and time in which one finds oneself, especially in discipline-specific ways, English studies is ostensibly an unlikely vantage point. However, writing about a defining or determining location is a necessary stage in developing the subject position from which one practices a discipline and develops a critical, questioning relationship to that discipline. It involves the mandatory description, representation, and the most convenient construction of this location, before the object of study is placed within it and the appropriate theory is introduced to its challenges. While in practice these are simultaneous acts, this book is concerned with examining separately the location and the effect it has on the theory that would be used as an interpretative tool. As a preliminary step in this process, the Assam Movement has been selected as a watershed in the recent history of Assam because it succeeded in giving voice to grievances and aspirations that had long been repressed. It is also represented as a critical event that assumed a major role for the people in the making of their own identity. There are other points and events in the past that show evidence of the same desires and self-awareness, most notably the developing relationship with the cultural and political formations of the rest of India and especially of Bengal—the language movement of the 1960s or the agitation for an oil refinery in the state being obvious examples. However, it was with

4 

Questions of Identity in Assam

the Assam Movement that it appeared as if, for the first time in their 20th century history, the initiative had been seized by the Assamese themselves. It looked like a very special modernity moment, with “self-formation” as the fulcrum around which economic, political, and cultural issues ranged themselves. It was not a localized, territorially demarcated, or limited movement (in the way that an incident within it like “Nellie” was). Its geographical spread throughout the Brahmaputra valley and among the Assamese residing outside Assam meant that large numbers of people had stakes in it and had views about the issues it raised. A little more than three decades later, the unique marshaling of people’s power and the emotions that filled the collective space during the movement are no longer accessible. The intervening period has seen the failures and disappointments that came with the non-implementation of important items in the Assam Accord signed with the Government of India, and the failure of the leadership to live up to the trust and confidence that the Assamese had invested in them. When the movement is remembered now, it is framed by this unfinished agenda, so that all those activities that then appeared insignificant and pardonable now appear to have always carried the seeds of future turmoil. The rumblings about neglect and exploitation that had always been heard in the colonial and pre-independence years were replaced by the proactive mode of the movement—a seizing of the moment and a turnaround for a society. But, in retrospect, the Assamese people seem to have seized the moment only to turn from being passively exploited to responding with violence— taking by force, engaging in massive corruption with little concern for the sufferings of the other, and displaying a disturbing degeneration in everyday social interaction.

The Witness and Memory To examine this peculiar turn to “agency,” the only resource appeared to be the memories of people in which these developments are embedded. Identifying people and inviting them to excavate their memories, however, brought new difficulties. Unless one imposed artificial limits, “to get a feel of the impact in Assam” involved just about everyone (except those who were too young, though even some of the children recalled the

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fearful sounds and the torchlight processions of the time). Everyone had a memory and an opinion, and each one was right by the laws of narrative truth. Each felt that his or her memory was the correct one. Selection therefore also entailed problems. Since this is a book about issues that are close to the hearts of people, there is always the very real danger of misrepresentation. That is why the primary filter of this book is the personal. The initiating ground, the initial memories and impressions are mine, as is the longer memory of childhood, youth, and adulthood speckled by these primary elements of my narrative. The story I choose to tell is tacitly my own—a story that begins in hybridity, takes on migration (when did my mother’s people come from Bengal, and the partitioning into East Bengal, East Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which were subsequent additions to childhood queries of a territorial rationale for one’s otherness), and arrives at an adult understanding of hybridity as a condition of life, the occasion as much personal as professional. This story of the Assamese and the other, and its concerns with questions of justice, ethics, and difference, derives from the personal experience of living hybridity. The elements that I find in the Assamese identity narrative are those that push for attention because I take myself into that material—the witness who is then the interpreter. It is useful to reflect here on the way in which the contemporary awakes the memories of witnesses to events of the past, or offers correctives to/ interpretations of the great narratives of a country’s/nation’s history. The most familiar of these exercises has been in studies of the Partition of the subcontinent and its aftermath (Gyan Pandey’s book Remembering Partition [2001] is an excellent example). It is possible to observe this development in Assam in the regular invocation of the Nehru–Bordoloi exchange of letters, offered as evidence of the Center’s neglect of and indifference to the periphery, which is also a contemporary reality. Such re-lived “real” accounts are the important subtexts that spark the archive into “life,” just as, of course, living through an overwhelming period may equally initiate a revision of the past. In Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, for instance, the slave of MS. H. 6 comes to life from Ghosh’s discovery of the “teeming” passports—like concertinas—indicative of modern lives of constant travel. The Assamese novelist Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya’s novel Yaruingam (1984) was significantly rewritten in the period of the Assam Movement. The novel, which is about Naga identity formation and the

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Questions of Identity in Assam

aspiration of the Nagas for a separate and distinct status that in some instances has also had secessionist overtones, shows a dramatic shift of emphasis in the version that was written in the midst of the Assam Movement. During this period, the author “opposed [its] parochial and secessionist tendencies” (M. Sarma 2003: 285). In the English version (rewritten by the author himself), the assimilationist element is made explicit. Madan Sarma, in his paper on the novel’s shifting politics, juxtaposes the Assamese and English versions to show the ideological divergence from one to the other. The protagonist Rishang is made to articulate these new thoughts: he describes the alternative ideal of independence for the Nagas as a “wild and unrealistic dream of separating the Nagas from the rest of India.” And his own conviction now is that “India was one and the sufferings of the Nagas could not be solved in isolation” (Bhattacharyya 1984: 194). The journey into the archive, as these examples show, is always undertaken with some luggage. Edmund Wilson (1953) writes of Jules Michelet that he “went into the Records with Vico and the echoes of July [the July Revolution of 1830] in his head [and] a new past for the first time, seemed to revive for the imagination” (quoted in Steedman 2001: 70). Wilson notably mentions two kinds of components in that luggage— Vico, i.e., a thought apparatus, a theory, a conceptual framework; and the echoes of July, i.e., the contemporary event that sends the witness of that event into the archive. A similar exercise is undertaken in Shahid Amin’s Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (2006), the title of which emphasizes the year of the event, the intervening period, and the year from which retrospection takes place. Similarly, entering the area where migration and hybridity are important identity concerns, I take with me both the conceptual apparatus for ideas of “location,” “migration,” and “hybridity,” and the contemporary record of violence as the spark that sets the memories of the Assam Movement alight. I am that witness who carries an interpretation of violence and its legacy into the written and the memory archive. This personal memory is substantiated and constructed by that of other witnesses whose memories of violence are similar, and these function as the memory archive that is a crucial source for an understanding not only of the movement but of this location where the movement took place, where migration continues to take place and where hybridity is the result. The necessity of mining memory is also brought out in the work of Makiko Kimura, a Japanese researcher studying the Nellie genocide

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through the narratives of individuals who were participants, victims, or witnesses, because this grisly episode is not sufficiently studied and recorded except in such remembrances. The critical difference in this case is that I, as witness, am also part of the process of recovery, because the particular slant is given to these memories by my own remembered experience and its interpretation in the light of contemporary experience/ events. So, the violence of the present—not just the visible, violent incident, but violence in the area of daily exchange among people in institutions, civil society spaces, and families—makes it possible and imperative to excavate these personal memories of the Assam Movement when this unconcern first began to appear. The prior impression also gestures at the innocuous sources behind much of the overt violence, sources that lay in small practices of force during the movement that were so easy to internalize and express in daily activities, in all the institutional spaces where the individual’s interpretation of his/her work involved an exercise of force or the deployment of official machinery “against” other individuals. The study of violence in a place that one is working from, the background against which it appears, or the peculiar conditions to which it owes its origin, entails an examination of the location, which implies both the place where these things happen and the positions on location that are theoretical givens. In the case of this book, violence is a result of the “reality” and the “perception” of migration in “this” place: of its lived condition of hybridity, which was always natural to the place and accepted as such before it began to be pointed out and framed with the arrival of Western modernity and its documentation systems; and of the resulting perceptions that engender violence—the fear of adulteration, cultures in danger of engulfment, of territorial boundaries being breached, lands being occupied by aliens/others/outsiders—and the growing complexity of the identity narrative that feels and sustains these pressures. In other words, armed with a thought apparatus that contains “location,” “migration,” and “hybridity” as theoretical tropes that have distinct historical trajectories, one enters the location where migration and hybridity are real, material conditions. The encounter that takes place between these two sets—the ideas and the phenomena—is enabling for both; the theory enables, through the recognition of sameness and difference, the study of the features of the location; but because it also receives resistance from the different manifestation of its primary tropes—i.e., because it encounters migration, for example, in a form that is different from the one on

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which the theory is based—it is compelled to take on board this difference and shake itself free from its complacencies. The witness and memory are also vital to a perception of identity that acquired special urgency and resonance in the early years of the Assam Movement. The identity issue—articulated, as is usual with such issues, through a reading of the past, and of the relationship with the other, in this case the rest of India—received its impetus through: (a) the question of migration, which by then had assumed monstrous proportions; and (b) the related questions about cultural and social purity, about demographic profile change or adulteration. All of this happened violently and suddenly on an unprecedented scale. A specific manifestation of this was the recovery and republishing, during this time, of a significant body of literary and cultural writings from the 19th and early 20th centuries, from archives like the Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies and similar holdings. These writings included the works of individuals like Lakshminath Bezbaroa and Ambikagiri Roychowdhury, whose role in Assamese self-making as well as their profound understanding of resistance in such self-construction came to be accepted as necessary contributions to writing the identity narrative. Texts from this period of “revival through publishing” also include some of the popular and widely circulated literary–cultural magazines like Mau and Asam Bandhu, and the American Baptist missionary magazine Orunodoi. These periodicals had played important roles in the debates on modernity and Assamese identity, in the evolution of public forums, and in the dissemination of the idea of self-making among their readers. The complexity of all these expressions on the ground would be lost if the theoretical is used as an overarching structure, as an assemblage of universal concepts that is assumed to apply unproblematically in an alien location—a strange location that is fertile for the theory because it offers that very special resistance of its materiality, and because of its strangeness or estrangement from the original location. Identity, as a single individual’s sense of self or a community’s sense of itself as a collective and distinct entity, received a particular push from the urgencies of nationalist anti-colonial movements in different parts of the colonized world. As a result of the fractured worlds created by the colonialists, the primary sense of identity, whether collective or individual, was that of the hybrid—hybrid societies and hybrid individuals peculiarly caught in

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different kinds of liminalities and limbos, torn asunder from traditional societies that were, at the same time, all around them. The colonialists also left defining frameworks of land, territory, borders, and peoples that came out of cognitive systems different from those in operation in the lands they ruled—modernity frames imposed on age-old worldviews that gave the Assamese a palpable numerical and visual sense of the land they lived in. What was, therefore, at stake in this world was a disturbing sense of modernity that made room for the mobility of people, and at the same time put incredible restraints on them; that made migrations inevitable but so also resistance to migration from host societies as well as from the modern political formation we have come to know as the nation-state. It is interesting to note how the presence of the stranger within a society became the occasion for the construction of identities: of identities that were self-constructed, and identities that were assigned by other discursive complexes, very often through the retrieval of the past— “remembered historical narratives to provide continuity and identity” (Nora 1989, in Y. Saikia 2001: 74). Yasmin Saikia invokes Pierre Nora’s work on memory and history in her essay on the way the “Tai-Ahom” used the past to fashion a contemporary identity. “But in the nineteenth century, Nora argues, the nation as the foundation of identity eroded as different kinds of memories of society appeared and supplanted the memory upheld by the state” (Y. Saikia 2001: 74). In Assam, this situation of many narratives at odds with the nationalist and national one is particularly evident. A complicated matrix of many collectivities that simultaneously jostle for theoretical and political space is probably the most notable of its manifestations. Saikia’s metaphor of the landscape is evocative. Besides referring to the territorial aspects of the problem, it also indicates a site where the clear contours of an identifiable, single entity that is the Assamese appear elusive. The interpretive difficulty is indicated by the fact that most exercises in understanding involve the import of theory and its unidirectional imposition. At different stages in this history of interpretations and readings of Assam (and the Northeast), Marxist, modernist, postmodernist/post-frontier frameworks have been set to work, each finding in the place particular elements of its own paradigms. Assam and the Northeast continue to occupy the realm of “object” for

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political and cultural discourses. In most studies of this region, cutting across disciplines, this top–down, subject–object frame is in operation, denying agency to the object. This epistemological problem marks the disciplines which continue to use methods and deploy theories without genuine adaptation to or engagement with the peculiarities of location. In this context, it is perhaps necessary to engage the shift suggested by Habermas—“the paradigm of the knowledge of objects has to be replaced by the paradigm of mutual understanding between subjects capable of speech and action”—a paradigm that acknowledges both the right and the ability of the “subject” (Habermas 1987: 295–96). Attempts to understand location also entail the study of events from the recent past that have not necessarily found their way into official records, and crucial aspects of which are accessible only through the memories of individuals. This is another occasion for considering memory that transforms events, giving them the added dimension that comes from reflection, mulling over, making connections between past and present, and seeing the big, panoramic picture. “In everyday usage, memory tends to be associated with individualized recollection that serves to constitute personal identity within a society” (Featherstone 2005: 171). But the revelations of personal memories are also useful in trying to grasp the meanings of events from the recent past. These usually have implications beyond the personal, especially because the personal recall is influenced by the present and is therefore able to provide a link between the moments of the past and the moments of the present. “As recent work in ethnography, psychology and cultural studies has suggested, memory can also provide a provocative critique of historical practice” (ibid.: 172). The practices of memory “can also be related to wider social and cultural narratives” (ibid.). Yasmin Saikia, in studying the Ahom buranjis or histories, makes a connection between the colonial construction of the Ahom based on the buranjis recovered by colonial historians, and positive memories of Ahom rule generated by “intellectual and political forces” in the aftermath of the Chinese aggression of 1962 and growing feelings of alienation from the rest of India. This connection was achieved by eliding the notion of “the pathetic, indolent Assamese peasant” (Moffatt Mills, quoted in Saikia 2001: 75) introduced by the British for purposes of administration (Saikia 2001: 80). Featherstone refers to the work on memory done by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, who “argue that memory can be conceived as social

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performances ‘of commemoration, of testimony, of confession, of accusation’. These performances, Lambek proposes, should be ‘understood as moral rather than simply technical, intellectual or instrumental’ offering interpretations of historical experience rather than objective evidence” (Featherstone 2005: 172). Such material offers the opportunity to work outside the limits of textual authorities that underpin the traditional practices of European historiography. The research by Shahid Amin in and around Chauri Chaura, studying the event of 1922 as remembered by the people who participated or by their descendents in 1992, is a significant example of such radical rethinking of historiography. Closer home in Assam, we may cite the attempts by Makiko Kimura to retrieve memories of the Nellie massacre from participants, observers, and the relatives of victims. Kimura’s field included Tiwa villages, immigrant Muslim settlements in and around the Nellie area in Morigaon district, some villages inhabited by the dominant Assamese, and local movement leaders. Kimura (2007) has presented her findings in various forums, but the only accessible, published form of some of these ideas so far is the piece rendered in Assamese for the magazine Nivedon. The enthusiastic effort of a young scholar, Uddipan Dutta (2008), to record people’s memories of individual events from the “Robin Hood” phase of the ULFA is another good example of the move to think and work outside limiting and often myopic disciplinary directions. The nature of such findings reveals how inadequate and misleading the officially preserved reports are. The official archive merely records those aspects of an event to which the official in that time and place (the policeman, the administrative officer posted in that place) has access. All those things that people talk about and circulate among themselves, but prefer to keep unofficial, to keep out of the notice of police or administration—this is where a veritable churning of a people’s deepest feelings, opinions, and sympathies takes place, and this is precisely the part that is outside the purview of any written record. Such memories are, by this very token, the most interesting aspect of events, but also the most elusive and difficult to discover and preserve, because these aspects are embedded in memories that are at the mercy of the contemporary, its changing colors and contours, even as the latest shift, the newest event, compels a transformed view of the past, indeed a transformation of the past. Pierre Nora, in the essay mentioned by Saikia, while distinguishing between memory and history, suggests a role for memory that is highly

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influential in the formation of societies and, by extension, the formation of identities in societies: Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.... Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present.... Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic—responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection.... Memory installs remembrance within the sacred.... Memory is blind to all but the group it binds—which is to say ... that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual.... Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative. (Nora 1989: 8–9)

The memories of a people—violent images, violent behavior, indifference, and social apathy—and their contemporary manipulation—the development of a collective memory—makes it possible for violence, for example, to be dissociated from and expanded beyond the individual perspective to the developing image of a society. At the same time, the effort to maintain materialist bearings, supplemented by the attempt to abstract violence from its specificity to a general condition, must appear an anomaly. But the universalist argument that involves the ethical potential of ideas of humanism and universalism is more necessary than ever in the context of multi-ethnic societies. The concepts of universal justice or universal human rights, for example, are the necessary take-off and end points for the pragmatically varied and differentially applied instruments of justice; special provisions work toward the realization of equal rights for all. This is the rationale for the abstraction argument—that violence as a particular social manifestation must be scrutinized. Memories of the Holocaust, memories of Partition, memories of the Nellie massacre—these are rendered more relevant by the graphic recall initiated by contemporary acts of violence, and the general apathy of civil society to these regular performances of the violent.

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Memory and Interpretation Remembering the Assam Movement makes much of what was then everyday practice seem violent. Today when people speak of the movement, it is usually to lament its legacy: the fact that it spawned violence and ethnic clashes and allowed a distinct aggression to seep into society through its modes of dealing with the other—a violent mode that began in the united/unifying aspiration of the movement, to have everyone hold the same view and to enforce it where it was violated. Much of the violence began with the movement’s strategies of protest—the processions, protest marches, picketing, and dharnas, especially when directed at government servants or at friends who were not able to identify with the struggle for Assamese identity. It also spawned a “culture of corruption”—something that may be traced to the subversion of the two arms of the state: the police and the bureaucracy. The emergence of the ULFA in subsequent years added a new dimension through the “culture of extortions.” This had begun with the student movement itself when local business establishments were coerced into paying for refreshments for protestors who were on day-long agitiational programs, but the ULFA reinvented this practice by attaching to it a Robin Hood element, taking money from the rich to give to the poor and undertaking reform measures. This second issue of the ULFA also raises the question of how the civil society space of protest against the political establishment or the government and against unfriendly policies—a space where people in a typical modernist gesture take upon themselves the onus of exerting moral pressure—became politicized and also became the breeding ground for the violence and corruption of the present, because much of this was accepted as legitimate at the time of the movement and in the early years of the ULFA. A third dimension that was added to corruption and violence was the introduction of a “culture of kidnappings,” which collapsed the ideological and the expedient in a neat, rationalizing exercise that suited both the perpetrator and the audience, because in those initial years the person kidnapped would often have been the official of a company or the head of a business establishment that was perceived to be pursuing policies and practices unfriendly to the local people. The coming together of violence and corruption in these legacies is both the symptom and the disease that marks contemporary society; its daily and habitual practice is evident in the effect on both the victim and the

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Questions of Identity in Assam

perpetrator. This is what has translated into the mode that is normal and therefore invisible. Memory is also linked to the construction of many of the crises that function as markers within the identity discourse, and to the project of colonial modernity inscribed in the British documentation methods of mapping, censuses, and (perhaps) museums. Benedict Anderson demonstrates evocatively how such methods are used in conjuring up the national idea in the imagination of a community (Anderson 1999: 163–86). Prior to these interventions, the idea of specific territories for culturally distinct groups was not necessarily an idea that anybody lived by and that had any imaginative existence. The modern museum in Assam has adapted itself to the special needs of a multi-ethnic society. From a colonial institution that preserved pristine exotica, to one that is a reservoir of contemporary ethnicity, the museum has moved center stage to offer people of different ethnic groups the reassurance that their ways of life are on record. This is a place where a member of the Bodo community, for instance, dressed in traditional attire, may go and look at herself, as it were, in a mirror, in a place that displays her dress, musical instruments, traditional occupations, the articles used in daily activities, etc. While such display continues to breathe life into the ethnic divisions that were begun by the British through censuses and mapping exercises, the museum is also a way of communicating to a people that their way of life is special and worth preserving, as well as available for others to see. The accusations usually made about the way museums were used by colonial anthropologists to preserve the primitive, the exotic, and the infantile, are here elided through the deployment of museums as instruments of the modern nation-state to send the message to its own people that they figure in the picture of the nation. The colonial modernity project was responsible for the dissemination of ideas of the modern self—agency, useful knowledge, vernacular education, and female education. This is the point from which the particular shape of Assam’s modern identity crisis may be traced. In the journey of the ideas that came to cluster around the question of identity, the Assam Movement is that significant boiling point. It was responsible for the visibility and emergence of ideas that lay festering from the time that the British “introduced migration and invented hybridity” (i.e., invented the ethnic) through the designation of hills and plains peoples

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and people of various linguistic and racial extractions with the aid of the colonial instrument of the census. From whatever direction this period is viewed, the Assam Movement stands out as an event that demands consideration, almost as a roadblock that has to be negotiated in the process of understanding this location and one’s own place in it.

Disciplinary Questions Every discipline is urged to use its fundamental practices to interpret the ground in which it functions. How has this been true of literary studies— of English studies in particular, steeped as it is in theory—that turbulent enterprise of the interpretation and evaluation of discursivity? The challenge for each discipline is to respond to the urgent questions of the time and place in which it operates. This has been true of other disciplines like economics, political science, history, geography, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, but not so obviously of literary and English studies, because the connection between English studies and its area, especially in the often non-English linguistic and multilingual locations of postcolonialism, has been tenuous at best. There is little likelihood of finding “objects” of study in the same way that other disciplines would be able to. We are, in other words, caught in the working methods of our primary/parent disciplines, and the object of study that we construe is a function of this. What constitutes the object of study is an acutely felt problem because of the way a discipline’s methodology and attitudes are already set when it reaches the point of deployment. As a result, the object disappears into the discipline’s conventions of working, being studied and made visible only within its fixed parameters. This is the reason why the same basic kinds of knowledge about an object or area are produced and reproduced in critical approaches. The complications of such attitudes are most evident in anthropology, where the approach to the object of study was caught up in colonial master–slave, subject–object relationships where the “native” was presumed as primitive, exotic, infantile, or effeminate. The object was obviously frozen in a designated place and studied at the convenience of the researcher. The presumption at work in the research process in the form of a working hypothesis that is also often a tacit value judgment became

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the occasion for the negative comparisons that ran through the discipline in its evaluative, descriptive, or conclusive project for the region. The hypothesis became a given, and the theory assumed a “master–subject” status with regard to its object. As a discipline develops, its deployment of power simply expands, as is evident, for example, in Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) essay “Global Ethnoscapes.” Here, like in Bhabha’s framing and restriction of the concept of the hybrid, the assumption of a transnational “object of study” indicates that the discipline is actually leaving many other objects behind in the heady journey into new territory. Particularly revealing is the statement on the current preoccupations of anthropology: A central challenge for current anthropology is a study of the cosmopolitan cultural forms of the contemporary world.... It seems impossible to study these new cosmopolitanisms fruitfully without analyzing the transnational cultural flows within which they thrive, compete and feed off one another in ways that confound many verities of the human sciences today. One such truth concerns the link between space, stability, and cultural reproduction ... (and therefore the) urgent need to focus on the cultural dynamics of what is called deterritorialization ... (in the case of, among others) ethnic groups, sectarian movements, and political formations, which increasingly operate in ways that transcend specific territorial boundaries and identities. (ibid.: 49)

A claim of this nature, which is so conclusive about its challenges and its necessary practices, brings into focus the gravity and extent of the disconnect between the international articulation of a discipline’s expanding parameters and the place or the situation which is “left behind,” left out in the cold by the discipline’s progress. The transcultural or transnational is still not the “essential human condition.” Groups that are still concerned with carving out actual territorial spaces and boundaries because of historical denials of such territorial identification, communities that see the guarding of beleaguered land boundaries as vitally connected with their survival as components of a larger society, identity movements that are founded on the issue of endangered territory, immigrant influx that threatens a community’s historical links with a land—these are situations that seem to be outside the frame of disciplines that have gone determinedly transnational and that seem to be deeply, passionately, and exclusively concerned with “groups [that] are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially

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bounded” (Appadurai, 1996: 48). As with most studies that look at the mobility of human cultures today, the inevitable focus is on the mobile individual or group, the migrant who crosses and re-crosses borders and neatly fits into the passions and fashions of the disciplines. The stationary group, caught in a time warp, fades into the shadows of scholarship. The other issue that urges consideration emerges from my own discipline of literature. Here, the object of study is broadly conceived in terms of narrative—narrative consciousness, narrative knowledge, narratorial agents, etc. One speaks, therefore, of the “identity narrative,” or even of identity narratives, rather than of “identity,” the conviction about the constructedness of identity being a narrative conviction. Narratives of identity are not given or “available” for access, but are in fact caught in process, their elements inhabiting different kinds of social, cultural, and political sites, which different disciplines uncover and reveal in exclusive, discipline-specific ways. The identity narrative is then a basic assumption in this work, encouraging examination of what feeds into our “self ”— stories, what is taken on, and why. It is not a fully formed, “waiting out there” object, but a shifting, growing, ebbing story, repeated, recalled, buttressed, and elaborated because of specific needs and crises moments in the present of a society. In the case of Assam, it is necessary to observe the development of this narrative at crucial historical moments. For the argument of this book, the constituents of that narrative are closely interlinked with migration and its consequent hybridities. Most disciplines have banked heavily on a borrowed Western frame of reference, with the paradigms of interpretation already in place in the discipline’s Western beginnings. In other words, the institutional history of a discipline is caught up in this early formative period, and only its fully formed avatar arrives in the Indian academy. This is also the reason why theories or concepts are so firmly entrenched, and why Assam and the Northeast as areas of study are so often coerced into ill-fitting disciplinary straitjackets. Sudipta Kaviraj, writing of the study of civil society in India, comments on the “serious mismatch between the language which describes this world and the objects which inhabit it” (Kaviraj 2001: 289). “The language of modern politics,” he says, is astonishingly and misleadingly universal. Wherever we go in the Third World, we meet socialists, liberals . . . centralists. Yet much of the time their actual behavior is quite different from what we are led to expect by

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the long established meanings of these terms in Western political and social thought. (Kaviraj 2001: 289)

Or, as Vivek Dhareshwar puts it with misleading simplicity, “what we say and what we experience have radically diverged from one another” (Dhareshwar 1998: 212). In a very special and complex way, this is also true of English studies in its practice in countries like India, and in further sharpened locations like Assam. This is because it is never possible to adopt wholly or unquestioningly the meanings attaching to theoretical concepts like migration and hybridity, since lived experience attaches new and additional meanings to them. Dipesh Chakrabarty addresses a similar complexity in the form of attempts to label modernity in India as not bourgeois, not capitalist, not liberal (Chakrabarty 2002: xxii). He sees in this “negative labeling of positive phenomena” a problem that has to do with “the very categories of social science and political philosophy with which we think” (ibid.). “Our use of negative labels may be read as an index of the problems of translation that we, academic intellectuals, encounter in describing Indian social acts through the filter of Europeanderived social sciences and political philosophies” (ibid.: xxiii). In his influential book Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty (2008) outlines the urgencies of a new postcolonial project: “To provincialize Europe was precisely to find out how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim any universal validity” (ibid.: xiii). Such resistance to universalism and the search for more situated positions are apparent in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of “antiuniversalist cosmopolitanism.” Appiah offers this concept as an elaboration of the “rooted cosmopolitanism” that undertakes a critique of the “common nature” thesis (“in addressing a society other than one’s own”): “Principles were universal: what was local was their application” (Appiah 2004: 251). This is another dimension of the rupture between theory emerging from one location and being put to use in another. Appiah also urges that cosmopolitan education should help the student to “learn enough about the different to recognize common aims, aspirations, and values, and enough about these common ends to see how variously they are instantiated in the many cultures and their histories” (ibid.: 256).

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Vivek Dhareshwar, in the essay referred to previously, addresses this issue of the disjunct between Western theory and “Indian” (and many other) practices. He offers a possible alternative by “plotting the limits of theoretical knowledge as the West has practiced it from within actionknowledge” (Dhareshwar 1998: 222). In envisaging a scenario of “how to understand the present,” he suggests the following: “our present is the difference between western theories of ourselves (of which our existing theories of ourselves are but an extension) and our metatheory of western theories (of which their theories of our part of the world are but a component)” (ibid.: 212). Such a metatheory involves a distinction between what he calls “action-knowledge,” which is “not knowledge about actions” but “the ability to act in order to know,” “to know what is the right action to perform” (ibid.: 218), and “knowing-about” (ibid.: 219). The difference is between a phenomenon to be explained and a practice to be learned. Dhareshwar’s program, which he develops through the example of the metatheory of moral theories, involves examination of the “domain of western experience” to see how it produced “impoverished and unilluminating reflections on a handful of laws or rules” (ibid.: 226): Hence the act of this construction [of the metatheory] is at the same time a reflexive grasp of our own experiential context. The theory that we produce must not only be cognitively productive for us but it should at the same time say something cognitively interesting about the West too. (ibid.: 226–27)

This is an ambitious program, but it lays down the foundation for the kind of work that a discontent with the conceptual limitations in different disciplines might in fact push their practitioners into. These reflections suggest an interesting paradox for disciplinary practice in non-Western academia, where the Western paradigm is determining, but where local practice/culture might in fact add amazingly new nuances to the terms or subvert them altogether. It is this disciplinary complexity that I seek to negotiate by using two predominantly Western concepts—migration and hybridity—and examining not only their local meanings but the challenges offered to them by a different location. This chapter surveys the positions on migration, which lies at the core of the triad of concepts—location, migration, and hybridity—and examines separately the historical experience of the movement and mixing of

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peoples in the specific location of Assam. Such an exercise, undertaken prior to throwing concepts and local experience together, compels the theory of migration to take into account the “response of the host,” an issue that migration theory has generally interpreted in terms of immigration controls, legal safeguards, or political and economic responses that affect the migrant. Akeel Bilgrami, in “What Is a Muslim?” argues that “the concept of identity occupies the minds of theorists only in the primary stages of inquiry.... As inquiry advances, the absence of strict criteria need no longer be seen as a sign of one’s confusion” (Bilgrami 1995: 199–200). This is another way of suggesting that the real findings set the original theory aside, or revolutionize it out of its initial usages. The question of response raises ethical issues. Theodor Adorno says: “Nothing is more degenerate than the kind of ethics that survives in the shape of collective ideas.... Once the state of human consciousness and the state of social forces of production have abandoned these collective ideas, these ideas acquire repressive and violent qualities” (Adorno 2001: 17). This might be interpreted to mean that, as a result of a process of abstraction, the material content (the context and conditions of emergence) is eliminated and what remains is an idea, theory, or concept that is supposed to be universally applicable. If this is the case, we are then speaking of the ethics of application, a concern that is at stake in this work in the discomfort with a theory designated as universal, when it is completely suitable only in the place of origin and within disciplines that claim universality through their practice and acceptance in the university system throughout the world. Adorno’s work is interpreted by Judith Butler, who notes that “Adorno uses the term violence in relation to ethics in the context of claims about universality” (Butler 2005: 5): Adorno’s critique of abstract universality as violent can be read in relation to Hegel’s critique of the kind of abstract universality characteristic of The Terror.... the problem is not with universality as such but with an operation of universality that fails to be responsive to cultural particularity and fails to undergo a reformulation of itself in response to the social and cultural conditions it includes within its scope of applicability. (ibid.: 6)

The responsibility of each practitioner of a discipline then is to take its theoretical bases through the testing ground of its uniquely defined area

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of functioning. This actually opens the field for the activity of the critical observer and user of the discipline who, while practicing it and applying its theoretical tools, is also equally alive to the challenge offered by the area in which it works. This is the condition that I would like to describe as “reciprocity,” which is not the operation that may take place only at the level of literary interpretation, that is, when the theory is applied to a local literary text. This is the commonly undertaken exercise in most literary-critical practices; for example, using the formalist theory of the modernist or postmodernist periods to read the literary text in a different location and a different time. Reciprocity is, rather, an identification of the basic tropes circulating in a discipline and their deployment in that new area where these tropes must face up to new interpretive challenges. The experience of migration in Assam has been perceived locally as the “large-scale entry of a culturally and linguistically alien people to a land that cannot sustain them.” Against the culture of the discipline, where the locus of theory is the “migrant,” this experience and its history of articulation points away from the migrant to the host society and its violent response to the “outsider” in its midst. This is the area that is worth examining in the light of Assam’s “turn to violence.”

Location and Its Critique Location, migration, and hybridity are three major tropes within the thinking and practices of postcolonialisms. Each one of these terms has a special trajectory, a disciplinary history of evolution, development, and deployment that is part of the weight it carries in contemporary usages. “Location,” for example, from its use by Homi Bhabha in conjunction with the “liminal,” is inextricably tied to the second concept, that is, hybridity. When the location debate became available to us in English and cultural studies through the work of Bhabha (the counter-questions of nativism and negritude—the extremist flip side of local, regional positions—did not have the same attractions within the discipline, drawn as it was to the pluralities and proliferations of postmodernism), thinking on the concept was dominated by the liminal, hybrid, in-between location of the postcolonial individual, like Bhabha or Rushdie. Coming at the area from the poststructuralist debunking of essentialisms and historicity

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and the accompanying valorization of the fractured and the fragmented, the liminal space and condition seemed to be an answer to our prayers for a logical, local disciplinary position. Clubbed with this were specific views on migration (once again, Bhabha’s intervention in this area, especially through the essay “DissemiNation,” was what neatly united the postcolonial condition and the poststructuralist theoretical choice), on international migration/migrants and the diasporic, on transnationalism and ethnicity, and, of course, on hybridity. It then seemed that we were well on our way to being accommodated and lost within a new intellectual imperialism—the embrace of theory, the embrace of the Western academy’s universalization of others. The claims of various locations for attention were ignored, because the only “right” location was the one that set itself up against the colonial condition, and that acknowledged this historical episode (not erased or elided it) by “answering back.” A familiar example of this is Frederic Jameson’s (1986) essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” which sets out to lay down the law for the “Third World” writer who, because of the special historical forces determining his/her contemporary existence, can and should only write national allegories. Aijaz Ahmad’s equally well-known critique of this essay provides a sinewy rebuttal of Jameson’s argument on the grounds of the latter’s inadequate knowledge of the literatures produced in these countries, and the unsatisfactory logic of his theoretical preconditions (Ahmad 1993). The legacy of that time, so different in different parts of the world, seemed quite easily ignored within the facile explanations of theory. Given such homogenizations, with which we were already familiar as subjects of colonialism, we began by having serious feelings of discontent over the description of a particular kind of location as the quintessential postcolonial condition. Location as a liminal, interstitial, or in-between space thus owes its formulation to the critical conditions of postcolonialism described by Bhabha in The Location of Culture. It is “an interstitial passage between fixed identifications” (a description deriving from Bhabha’s own experience of migration and hybridity) that subverts the more innocuous sense of location as a mere site or area where something takes place. The introduction of the idea of “threshold” into the concept of location has meant its employment in two distinct ways: first, as the many distinctions among the various locations of postcolonialism, i.e., the

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carefully calibrated differences among different colonialisms, colonial sites/countries, and colonized territories; and second, within postcolonialism, the sense of location as the interstitial, liminal site where the fixities of the pre and the post are shed. At the same time, the interstitial or liminal site is just one more location that stands beside other material conditions. The liminal in Bhabha’s reading evolves out of the actual migration or displacement of peoples following the dismantling of colonial regimes around the world. Indeed, Bhabha calls for “an awareness of the subject positions—of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation,” all of which are identity locations of significance. He goes on to express the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on these moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These “inbetween” spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal— that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the society itself. (Bhabha 1994: 1–2, emphases added)

Bhabha is here noticeably conscious of place. While many of his essays are exercises in demonstrating textual strategies of identity construction, this initial ground or place from which he embarks on textual exercises is impossible to ignore. He is indeed very obviously assuming a particular location, which is a liminal location for the postcolonial individual, just as he imagines liminality as an intellectual condition. By the same token, Benita Parry’s assumed site is the historicized colonial site (Parry 2004). In its implications as the location that is specified by a particular and specific colonial experience, and also provides a unique position to the critic or thinker who surveys an area with the aid of an intellectual apparatus, this question of location takes on issues of materialist critique—the material bases of theoretical concepts, of the historical, political, or social conditions in which ideas are generated, and therefore, logically, the special impact of location on ideas, concepts, or tropes. Other possible sites may very well take us back to the implication of location as a specific site where an identity crisis, a historical event, takes place that is deeply influential for all fields and purposes without necessarily having anything to do with a particular

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interpretation of a colonial legacy. Indeed, Bhabha’s sense of location as the modern Western nation whose margins are teeming with migrants— exiles, émigrés, the indentured, the interned—who now rewrite the very idea of the Western nation is deeply problematic. This focus, rather than what Parry identifies as Bhabha’s heavily textualist bias or his preference for in-between states, is the point at which the exclusivist nature of his postcolonial project becomes obvious. Reading through “DissemiNation” from a different experience of migration, one discovers that Bhabha has negligible interest in the state of migration in situations other than the one he defines, especially in migrations taking place among ex-colonial nations, nascent nation-states where the questions of dissemination are differently weighted, where, along with a variety of migrants, we are also confronted with unfashionable issues of threats to receiving societies, of resistance offered to the migrant at the border, but often also at the center, of violence emerging out of this undesired contiguity, and of “the other question” provoking unimaginably dark answers. The rhetoric of liminality is misleading because it gives the impression of speaking of all states and minorities: We are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population. The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its self-generation, becomes a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference. (Bhabha 1994: 148)

This sounds innocuous and, at the same time, apparently enabling in other scenarios of application. But to be in this condition is also to be eternally caught up in the grid of “writing back,” in never being able to imagine a scenario that may not require this particular reference point, in not considering enough the scene described by Sartre in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, when the colonizer is banished to the outer circle and the “natives” sit around the fire without having to be conscious of the white man’s now powerless presence (Sartre 1990: 11–12). This scene is not only a revision of the center–margin binary, but might also be interpreted to indicate a world that is “full” or complete without the intrusion of the foreigner/colonizer. Referring to the historical conditions in the dramatic representations of dissemination in the

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opening paragraph of the essay, Bhabha ensures that these remain at the forefront of his argument by repeatedly invoking the Western nation as the paradigmatic modern state formation whose “essentialist identities” are now disturbed by “counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries” (Bhabha 1994: 149). “For the political unity of the nation consists in a continual displacement of the anxiety of its irredeemably plural modern space” (ibid.). Bhabha invokes Freud to understand “how easily the boundary that secures the cohesive limits of the Western nation may imperceptibly turn into a contentious internal liminality providing a place from which to speak both of, and as, the minority, the exilic, the marginal and the emergent” (ibid.). In all these cases, the identities emerging in liminal conditions do so only against the Western other; the only state that it is possible to imagine is that of resisting and countering the colonizer. Therefore, the hybrid identity that is the product of these liminal states is hybrid only because of a troubled presence within it of the West and its colonial legacy. The argument against the narrowing down of the implications of location (even as it broadens it at another level) takes us back to the materialist critique offered by Raymond Williams in his now legendary opposition to the Leavisian climate prevalent in his time at Cambridge. Williams’s theory of cultural materialism is outlined in the third part of Marxism and Literature (1977) as a critique of Cambridge English and its enclosed interest in the literary text. He argues here for a more comprehensive, textual, theoretical and historical analysis. Elsewhere, regarding cultural materialism, he also says that “the very process of restoring produced literature to its conditions of production reveals that conventions have social roots, that they are not simply formal devices of writing” (Williams 1979: 306). In Culture (1981: 33), he writes: “Theoretical constructs derived from empirical studies and their extension or generalization are always likely to presume too much in the transition from local and specific to general concepts.” In keeping alive the material bases of theory, he calls for “a fully social theory of literature” (Williams 1977: 171). Such a “claim of the material” has remained the invisible but critical subtext of theory. In discussions about the way the material intervenes in critical processes, Benita Parry’s has been an influential voice. Parry suggests that the textualist foundations of postcolonial critique, as well as of cultural studies in the so-called linguistic turn in theory, have resulted in the

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“abandonment of historical and social explanation.” This was apparent “in the work of those postcolonial critics who disengaged colonialism from historical capitalism and represented it for study as a cultural event” (Parry 2004: 4). The justifications for localized readings are embedded in many critiques of poststructuralism. Christopher Norris avers that poststructuralism “operates on an abstract, quasi-systematic model of ‘opposition’ and ‘difference’ whereby these terms are deprived of all specific historical or experiential content, and treated, in effect, as linguistic artifacts or products of discursive definition” (Norris 1993: 182). This is the problem that we face when a theory is imported and then applied to interpret a new historical event or experience; its elision of such content makes it appear user-friendly and readily applicable without question or scrutiny. The original experiential, having sunk below and become invisible, does not therefore compel a more scrupulous examination of the theory’s suitability. The other problem—from the other or opposite direction—is one of the experiential itself acquiring a kind of easy transferability. The reality of the European Union, for example, is sought to be posited as a possibility for the Northeast, without serious attention to theories of transculturation or transborder as these would impact in a new location. Either way, the exclusive reliance on a theory, or exclusive reliance on the material without reference to the theoretical, is obviously likely to offer only a limited and incomplete interpretation. Parry’s position on postcolonial critical practice emerges in her sharp critique of Bhabha. She identifies a number of points of disagreement. Her first irritation is with Bhabha’s “taste for in-between states and moments of hybridity,” “evident in his usage of paradoxical and open-ended words— ambivalent, borderlines, boundary, contingent, discontinuity, disjunction, dispersal, dissemination, hybridity, in-between, indeterminate, interstitial, liminal, marginal, negotiation, transitional, transnational” (Parry 2004: 56). A second area of dissatisfaction is apparent in “the implications of rewriting a historical project of invasion, expropriation and exploitation” while “dispens[ing] with the notion of conflict.” The third point of contention is “his disposal of the language model” (ibid.: 57). In her expression of discontent with postcolonialism’s elision of the material, Parry enlists the work of Anne McClintock, who contends that its [postcolonialism’s] singularity “effects a re-centering of global history around the single rubric of European time ... reduces the

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cultures of peoples beyond colonialism to prepositional time [and] signals a reluctance to surrender the privilege of seeing the world in terms of a single and ahistorical abstraction.” (cited in Parry 2004: 57)

Parry also invokes Ella Shohat, who “has observed that by alluding to colonialism as ‘a matter of the past’, the term [‘postcolonial’] shuts out ‘colonialism’s economic, political, and cultural deformative traces in the present’”; and Laura Chrisman, “who notes its metropolitan coinage,” and for whom “‘postcolonial’ occludes or erases the overtly political dynamics contained in the term ‘anti-colonial,’ allowing or implying ‘the interchangeability of material with aesthetic and interpretative processes,’ and liberating those practitioners naming themselves postcolonial ‘from the messy business of political alignment and definition’” (ibid.). Parry also mentions Masao Miyoshi and Arif Dirlik, who “find that the deployment of the postcolonial serves as a license for ignoring the contemporary actuality of global politics within a capitalist world-system” (ibid.). In fact, she expresses hearty appreciation of Arif Dirlik, “Bhabha’s most disobliging critic,” who has “charged him with ‘a reduction of social and political problems to psychological ones,’ and with ‘substituting post-structuralist linguistic manipulation for historical and social explanation’” (ibid.: 59). Robert Young makes the point that should answer Parry: “The investigation of the discursive construction of colonialism does not seek to replace or exclude other forms of analysis such as historical, geographical, economic, military or political” (Young 1995: 163, emphasis added). Young identifies in the work of the critics of colonial discourse analysis “a form of category mistake” (ibid.). Young himself participates in the location debate by looking at the varieties and various locations of colonialism, each fueled differently and therefore producing different effects. This allows him to ask, significantly: “Can there be a general theoretical matrix that is able to provide an all-encompassing framework for the analysis of each singular colonial instance?” (ibid.: 164–65). A position that transcends the polarities of these statements is that provided by Charles Taylor who, writing in the context of a “politics of recognition,” says that “a new understanding of the human social condition imparts a radically new meaning to an old principle” (Taylor 1994: 39). The textualist and the materialist—it would seem that there is no theory, beyond these two influential positions, for the imagining of location.

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Viewing location and theory as both a priori and a posteriori, it seemed that location in any case needed to be distinguished, nuanced, carefully discriminated, and, at the same time, conveniently “constructed,” represented for study, even as the theory that was used naturally selected itself for the operation in that location, but was at the same time critically “placed” under scrutiny so that it would be disabled from functioning as a master-narrative of how things are or should be. The questions that such attitudes to location and theory give rise to are disciplinary, epistemological questions. For example, the two poles, inevitable in the interpretative process in any discipline, lead to questions of reciprocity, of application, of justice and ethics. How does the theory respond to the location, the discipline to the object? And, in each case, the alternative or reciprocal question emerges: how does the location respond to the theory and the object to the discipline—not merely in laying itself open to theoretical/disciplinary operations, but by offering the resistance of its distinctness, of its significant difference from the locations and objects that the theory encountered in its place of origin and that it emerged from. The location from which Bhabha’s theoretical position emerged—a state of being unanchored—determines the alleged textualist bias of his work. Parry’s critique is not significantly different, emerging as it does out of the feeling of being outside of this experience and wanting to insert this other experience into the discourse of location. Parry’s position represents the call of that other location for justice, for notice, for being taken account of, which is the basis of materialist critique. Confronted by these dominant opposing positions, one of course has to ask if there is any point in going over this ground again. But this is an open-ended issue, because the varieties of location preclude closure. As long as the situations on the ground remain mobile and keep changing, with new elements added or subtracted, locations remain alive and continually challenging. A combination of the two positions—the specific historical event and the discourse about it—is a necessary compromise, yielding a reciprocity of perspective that is also the broad rationale adopted in this book. The need to articulate the specifics of a location is felt strongly in the face of the universalist/hegemonic claims made not only by colonialism, but also by its critique, i.e., by theoretical postcolonialism with regard to the object of study. So, just as the Assam Movement and sundry ethnic

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struggles have been the expression of resistance or opposition to nationalist or centrist homogenizing formations like the state and central governments, the idea of location has provided the occasion for questioning and subverting the explanatory designs of theory. Edward Said is a foundational critic for the kind of resistant disciplinary practice that is necessary in this location. He represents a strong moral force in the face of theoretical and disciplinary authority, with his practice of dissent, disavowal, and locational embeddedness. Especially useful is his notion of the travel of theory, with its suggestions about the resistance offered by the location and the transformations effected in a theory as it travels.

Traveling Theory and Location The idea of “traveling theory” that is fundamental to the Saidian project posits the reading of theory as a humane/humanist, moral process. Against theory operating in a transcendent and pristine realm, this is a form of historicization that responds to the space of deployment, taking into account the movement from the private intellectual moment of understanding and knowledge to transmission into the public world and inevitably to justice and liberation. The idea of travel tagged to theory as it always appears in Said’s work carries with it this ethical dimension for all intellectual projects—that theory must “respond.” Writing of the travel of theory, Said focuses primarily on two things— first, the idea that a theory in its application moves out of its original site; and second, that it is transformed, reignited in the new site. The better-known first essay “Traveling Theory” (Said 1991 [1983]) contains what might be called the master-narrative of “traveling theory,” whereby a theory always loses its fire. The “reignition” Said mentions in “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” (Said 2001g) is less often noted, but appears to be the kind of point from which both Dipesh Chakrabarty and Vivek Dhareshwar (cited earlier in this chapter) develop their ideas of critically addressing the edifices of Western thought. What happens to a theory that travels and arrives in a new location, becomes the vital question. How is it perceived and adapted by its hosts? This reignition democratizes the theory. It is a political gesture, a misreading that, as location-conscious

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readers, we compulsively undertake and transform into a gesture of liberation, a declaration of intellectual independence and dissent or, as Said himself calls it in his “reconsideration,” a “transgression.” Said’s imagining of the travel of theory is productively enmeshed in an anomaly—that of being simultaneously mobile and static. In the situation in which readers like us envisage it, it is in the retention of this contradiction that a theory can be most useful. The theory must always travel, be homeless, sit on the margins, never belong. At the same time, it must be anchored, tied to its place of origin, and tied every time to the material conditions of the place where it settles, however briefly. The moment a theory moves out of its parent location, becomes exiled, uprooted, and homeless, it ceases to be “pure,” because access to it from a location different from where it first appeared adulterates, inflects, and adjusts it. In his essay on “The Potentate and the Traveler,” Said uses the analogy of the traveler abandoning fixed positions to speak of “a kind of academic freedom” where there are “other things to think about and enjoy than merely yourself and your domain, and those other things are far more impressive, far more worthy of study and respect than self-adulation and uncritical self-appreciation” (Said 2001d: 404). I interpret Said’s reflections on “traveling theory” as suggesting that readers must know what to do in the face of theoretical authority or despotism. How do we use a theory to enable reading? A theory arrives and is accepted or rejected primarily as a tool to be applied, but rarely, if ever, as a tool that is also submitted to a process of evaluation even as it makes its way in a new world. This might also be linked to Harold Bloom’s theory of misreading that works by deliberate misrepresentations of, and swerves away from, earlier, powerful literary works (Bloom 1973). Said’s particular method of thinking, of intervention, and, in the context of this argument, of “application,” is significant for the reading situation we find ourselves in today. What Said has said of traveling theory provides an enabling and forward-looking clue for the reader whose intellectual apparatus is a complex amalgam consisting of theory coming out of a metropolitan academy and a socio-cultural and historical situation alien to the theory. The concept of traveling theory legitimizes the effective domestication of a “theory,” bringing it home, materializing it, historicizing it.

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In her preface to the “Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida,” Giovanna Borradori observes of the two philosophers whom she interviewed in the wake of 9/11: “Theirs, however, is also the story of what it took them, as philosophers, to expose the frameworks of their thought to the hardest of all tasks, the evaluation of a single historical event” (Borradori 2003: xi–xii). The last phrase—“the evaluation of ...”—works in two ways, using the theory to read the event, but also the event itself radically “evaluating”/revising the theory. This reciprocal gesture is necessary for a theory’s continued relevance and growth.

Location and the Renewal of Theory Said’s idea of “traveling theory,” which implicitly refers to the “effect on” the theory as much as to the “effect of ” the theory, suggests the regular renewal of a theory as it travels through events and worlds, moves into new areas that challenge and provoke and compel it to refashion itself or re-examine its premises. Said maps the journey of the theory in a way that would seem to indicate an increase in force. There is: (a) “a point of origin,” “a set of initial circumstances in which the idea came to birth or entered discourse”; (b) “a distance transversed, a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place where it will come into new prominence” (the example of deconstruction, as a body of ideas, and its travel from its “origins” in the Paris of 1968 to the American academy in the 1980s, illustrates what Said says about the institutionalization of a theory and its consequent loss of force); (c) “a set of conditions ... of acceptance, resistances—which then confronts the transplanted theory or idea, making possible its introduction or toleration, however alien it might appear to be”; and finally (d) “the now full [sic] (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea is to some extent transformed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place” (Said 1991 [1983]: 226–27). The tools of viewing and representation carried by the theory, set beside the poetics and politics of exile and the tropes of travel—exile, displacement, outsideness—are all part of how “traveling theory” must be imagined. While Said’s question was “what happens to a theory?” the

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question “what does a theory do?” may be another way of arriving anew at the same point. This complex of specifically travel-related issues and Said’s resonant rhetoric of exile draws attention to several significant points. These include a central problematic in poststructuralist analysis: the authority factor involved in a theory always giving to itself the outside position of the exiled or displaced, the flip side of which is an aspect of panopticism in the approach to the object. Other aspects include: the politics of location, or how a theory that has come from elsewhere views its area of operation; the issue of resistance from the object—resistance to the theory being a part of the way the theory is anchored; and, finally, the ethical concerns relating to how the subject (the theory in this case) views the object. In all these elements of travel, the significant point seems to be how the theory is loaded as it undertakes its journey, what it carries with it that must make it influential in a new place, how it can be newly effective. These considerations are suggestive of the mediation of experience by a theory about that experience—of the fact that a program or agenda is involved. Migration theory offers a situation where it is possible to see how it meets the challenge of the unfamiliar situation. Generated for the most part in migration situations in America and Europe, the theory enables the study of new situations of migration through comparisons and contrasts, difference and similarity, and, in the difference, it facilitates that fresh look at both the theory and the ground situation. However, while the theory might show how assimilation (one of the models for studying how migrants integrate) takes place in many graded ways, the situation in that location, for its part, because of its specific concern with “the impact” on the host society, might add this issue of the implications for the receiving society to the theory that had arrived with a singleminded focus on the migrant. Said usefully admits that “once an idea gains currency because it is clearly effective and powerful, there is every likelihood that during its peregrinations it will be reduced, codified and institutionalized” (Said 1991 [1983]: 239). He also suggests the other possibility of theory becoming “too inclusive, too ceaselessly active and expanding a habit of mind,” moving up into “a sort of bad infinity” (ibid.). Theory has to be answerable to “the essential unmasterable presence that constitutes a large part of historical and social situations.” Otherwise it would “transfix both its

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users and what it is used on” (Said 1991 [1983]: 241). The dangers of: (a) theoretical overstatement; (b) the unidirectionality of an unquestioning application; (c) the assumption of a masterful view on an area of “use”; and therefore, (d) the loss of a theory’s vitality (as seen in its first use) because of separation from material conditions—the forgetting of these conditions—these are concerns that underlie the distinctly political gesture of “applying” a theory that has arrived from elsewhere. What kind of theory is likely to reignite itself in a new ground, or be reignited by the new ground? What is the nature of the new ground? From Said’s own example, it would appear that a similarity of conditions in the place of emergence and in the place where the theory travels to is a necessary aspect in a theory’s re-energization; not necessarily the same conditions, but similarity at the level of crisis—a time and place of political or social upheaval that demands (not just gently prods) the turmoil within the theory. Said’s Orientalism (1978) describes the condition of a theory that is unlikely to be energized by its “objects of knowledge” because it is in the peculiar situation of having constituted that object in the first place, foreclosing the possibility of a theory encountering the mysterious or the unknown—the situation that a state of traveling always envisages.

Location, Theory, Exchange: The Response of the Object Said also addresses another question: where has the theory traveled? In its journeys from one Western setting to another, in an essential way a theory is still at home. The subject–object dyad implicit in theory and its object, however, may be really said to have traveled when it moves out of the “West” into another zone of crisis. Said’s example is of Fanon’s colonized Algeria. The travel of theory very often involves its movement into a new disciplinary area, raising the problem of how and what one discipline borrows from another. By marking the “central problematic,” which, as is evident from the Fanonian borrowing, is the conceptualization derived from the material conditions, Said reintroduces the important discrimination into the travel of theory—one must remember the material conditions, without which the theory would reach what he calls a state of

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“bad infinity.” But at the same time, one must also be capable of seeing behind the contingent to the conceptual framework that holds it all together in order for the theory to be useful or “applicable.” What does literary criticism borrow from anthropology—to state a problem that is encountered often enough in the form of the complexity of interdisciplinary exchange? The example that comes to mind is the work of Amitav Ghosh. In reading Ghosh, it is impossible to entirely forget his training as an anthropologist. But one is also reminded of the role of anthropology in the history of colonialism, the white subject’s representations of the “native” object. In “practicing” literary criticism, therefore, one would look at the “representation of character” (a literary problem) as a legacy of the “representation of the other” (an anthropological problem). But Ghosh’s particular representation of Egyptian villagers in In an Antique Land involved a perception of otherness at both ends—the Egyptians as objects and subjects and the anthropologist as both subject and object (Ghosh 1992). To elaborate on the issue: the subject–object theory that I may sift out of anthropology in the era of postcolonialism (while reading Ghosh) has to be a very different one from the same complex that I may draw out of the discipline to read a writer like Conrad. We return, in other words, to the transformative abilities of the site; but the theory, or, in this new formulation, the “central problematic,” has to be recognized and pinpointed for the act of transformation to be effective. In order to demonstrate how such a central problematic operates in a new place, Said introduces the notion of transgression (Said 2001g: 439), which is discernible in the “swerve” that is instituted by Frantz Fanon through the “national element.” It is possible to see how such a new element might work within the theory by examining the different ways in which the “theory of nation,” developed in Europe in a scene of small principalities, common languages, and shared histories, traveled to India, for instance. The site that this idea of homogeneity, integrity, and unity landed in was completely alien to it. In the context of the argument of this chapter, the questions to ask are: how did this special site change the idea, and how did the idea in its turn affect the ground? To a country which had never been a “nation” in the “Western” sense of the term, the theory lent certain aspects of unity so that a single modern Indian nation took shape. But at the same time, the idea itself, to be effective in the new site, had to adjust to accommodate hundreds of languages and dialects, and immense divergences in history, geography, culture, and aspirations.

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It had, in other words, to take on board a new element, “unity in diversity,” so that the concept of nation could still be usefully employed. And it is an interesting aspect of the relationship of the site and the theory that the idea of nation continues to encounter newer challenges as the Indian “nation” twists and turns and takes new shapes. This is one example of a theory that is mobile, constantly “at risk” from the constituents of the ground on which it works. It is regularly subjected to rebuttals, is resisted, often by the emergence of new little narratives that contest the master-narrative of nation articulated from the “center” and indeed seek a resistant relationship to the dominant nationalist discourse. Such resistant articulations have emerged often from India’s troubled northeastern states. It is not surprising to find, in a recent special issue of Seminar, several new critiques of the idea of nation as territorially self-contained—the question of borders (between one another and with neighboring countries) being a particularly prickly issue in all these states. In a contribution to this debate on reimagining what “nation” means, Mrinal Miri (philosopher and commentator on the Northeast) warns: “It is inappropriate and potentially dangerous to understand cultural India in terms of the metaphors of ‘mainstream’ and ‘marginality.’” His rationale for such an assertion is the “mutual conversation” that has taken place among them, along with, significantly, “mutual influence.” These “conversations” have brought new light into a particular culture, but “this light has enriched them in their independent being rather than blinded them into walking into the Hindu embrace” (Miri 2005: 57). This is the theory of nation adapting to a multicultural location where issues of “mainstream” and “marginality,” or the center–margin binary, are invariably scrutinized and invariably accommodated. Paralleling the journey that Said traced for the “reification/subject–object” tensions, the theory of nation shows similar changes. Having “made an Indian nation,” it is no longer the idea it was; dislodged from a theoretical onesidedness—a pedestal or vantage point—it has been democratized and made the target of critique. We return, therefore, once again, to the important question: where has the theory traveled? Two important points are evident here. First, a theory emerges in a particular context, especially a critical one—a situation of crisis and existential need. Therefore, it must neither be “dogmatically reduced,” nor “moved up” to a “bad infinity”—alternatives into which it can very easily slip through mechanical overuse. But, second, the theory must always be seen in the

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light of these first conditions. The Hungary of Lukacs (History and Class Consciousness) must be kept in mind when the reification/subject–object complex is sought to be applied. In the Fanonian case of re-use, it is not only the abstraction of the theory that is employed. Rather, it is applied in the knowledge that because the context is different, the subject–object configuration is different. Travel, migration, new location, transformation, estrangement, hybridization—these are the stages that the travel of theory points to. The shift of a theory to a new location, its migration, by rendering it strange and alien, pushes the theory into a special liminality where it carries traces of its old power but is also constrained to take on the new. A number of interesting things happen in this journeying. A reciprocal gesture is inevitable. As theories enter a new location as tools of interpretation, they are in their turn subjected to the gaze of otherness, to estrangement. The object to which the theory is applied makes its own presence felt, and transforms the theory by introducing new, alien/alienating elements into it. The object of study is, therefore, no longer a passive recipient of an interpretative will to power, but has agency. The entanglements of this process, when unraveled, would mean that each pole in the reciprocal process should receive individual and distinct attention for what it is; the theory’s conditions of emergence in the “original” instance are as important as what happens in the later, second or third encounter. In this sense, the application of a theory is seen to be reciprocal: every new location to which a theory moves actually produces new scenarios of application, and simultaneously effects change and subversion of the theory. I use the three tropes in this book to address the issue of reciprocity at the level of a specific theory: migration. From its origins as a theory dealing with certain elements that have become identified as its central concerns, I explore its relocation to a new site where a particular kind of migration occurs, noting in the process how the compelling questions of this new location—the large numbers, the class composition of migrants, the cultural and racial relationships with members of the host society— feed back into the theory, bringing in the new element, the problem of the receiving society. Historically, Assam has viewed the problem of migration in ways that were significantly different from how the rest of India framed it. The beginnings of this disjunct are evident in the founding of the new nationstate following independence. A stirring vision of India was created and

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disseminated by leaders who mediated the departure of the British, seeking a place in the world for the new nation, comparing it by the same standards used by other great nations when it came to that significant fallout of the dismantling of imperialism, migration. The Eurocentric view dominates debates on migration. The rights of migrants of different kinds—refugees, asylum seekers—are safeguarded by the Geneva Convention. As Hannah Arendt says of asylum, it is the only right that had ever figured as a symbol of human rights in the domain of international relations (quoted in Derrida 2001: 6–7). The model for Nehru and other influential mediators of India’s passage into the free modern world was always the European one. The self-perception of the Indian nation-state as comparing well with other, European nations in terms of generosity and hospitality, combined with India’s impressive historical record of hospitality to all who came to conquer, trade, or live (Nehru’s A Discovery of India [1981] is a text that plays on this theme), the traditional view, held from prehistoric times, of the guest as God, and, above all, the generosity felt for the departing British (mediated uniquely by figures like Tagore, Gandhi, and Nehru), the magnanimity that could be afforded in victory—all of this meant that the view on migration or the entry of refugees following Partition had to compare and be equal to the internationally recognized rights of people to migrate. This view, however, came into direct confrontation with the one felt and experienced in Assam, which failed to be enthused by the abstraction because it had already faced the reality of continuous and unabated migration for a hundred years and more when India achieved its independence. Derrida, in the essay On Cosmopolitanism (2001), traces a European history of the idea of refuge. He speaks of “cities of refuge” as possible havens that would be separate from the state and not be determined by its laws. The frame within which even Derrida’s book on cosmopolitanism views the asylum seeker, the refugee, or the migrant is that of “the right of the migrant” from one country to live and work in a new one. This conception of migration, which is an internationally recognized conception, forms the base in resistance to which the Assamese response to immigration from Bangladesh is articulated. Read against the implications of theories that have traveled to new locations, discussed earlier in the context of Said, the theory of migration faces the challenge of having to adopt a new view, adapt, and become newly usable.

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Migration and Hybridity: Identity Issues in the Location How does one study the contemporary, look at memories of an event, use the personal? These are questions that may lead to the study of identity in a location that is marked distinctively by migration and hybridity, especially when one has identified these two major trends, one deriving from the other, and yet must keep these from freezing into any kind of final statement. The many implications of these two terms/tropes for identity mean that this has to be an open-ended exercise, not a conclusive declaration. “Hybridity” has had a colorful career. With its beginnings in the life sciences, the term is today commonly used in the sense of the creation of new, “transcultural” forms in the “contact zone produced by colonialism.” This is the way the concept is described in a popular handbook of postcolonial theory (Ashcroft et al. 2004: 118). Its entry into the handbook itself gives an institutional position to an otherwise vagabond term that roves freely in many sites—linguistic, cultural, political, and racial. After the insertion of ambivalence into hybridity by Homi Bhabha (1994), it has been salutary to go back to Bakhtin’s original use of the word to refer to the idea of polyphony or multivoicedness in a society. “Polyphony” is now crucially injected with this special concept, “ambivalence,” allowing us to wonder how the many voices exist in juxtaposition, abutting on one another, seeping into one another’s spaces, creating islands of liminality, and so on. Robert Young suggests that Bakhtin’s intentional hybrid has been transformed into an active moment of challenge and resistance against a dominant colonial power ... depriving the imposed imperialist culture, not only of the authority that it has for so long imposed politically, often through violence, but even of its own claims to authenticity. (Young 1995: 23)

The idea of hybridity is also visible in concepts like multiculturalism, mestizaje, or racial mixing. In Appiah’s notion of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” the hybridity argument is developed into a concern not so much with the liminal—which works with a selected space between two states of being—as with the sense of keeping one’s roots and yet having an eye to the world, anchored as against floating in limbo.

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Appiah’s discussion of “rooted cosmopolitanism” includes the sharp insight that he states with a phrase from Michael Ignatieff: “Human rights has gone global by going local” (quoted in Appiah 2004: 260), a position that is also described as a kind of median between the “universalist and the antiuniversalist impulses” (ibid.: 258). This view accommodates the question of location within an understanding of multiculturalist, pluralist societies and the intellectual responses called forth by such local variations. As Appiah explains this, we learn from “the extraordinary diversity of human responses to our world . . . the range of what we have in common” (ibid.). The journey of the concept to this point allows me to buttress my thesis about location. One’s location in a culture is what allows that unique vantage point vis-à-vis the world—a reciprocity between two strong subject positions that subverts the subject–object view that has characterized our “applications” of the theoretical to read our selves and our cultures. How are migration and hybridity linked in the identity narrative that is afloat in this location? The Assam Movement, in its articulation of Assamese identity, tacitly chose as a focus for resistance the historical animosity with the Bengali, which was built around fears of linguistic and cultural dominance. This meant that one grand narrative, fashioned to counter another, had little or no room for the identity aspirations of the smaller constituent groups. This, of course, is only one aspect of the ethnic problems that began with the movement. There was very real encroachment on tribal land (its starkest fallout being Nellie), but this did not find separate mention as a distinct problem in the claims of the movement leadership. The two tropes of migration and hybridity, always part of Assam’s history, acquired a new urgency from the late 1970s. As this book tries to show, the theory comes from outside, but some of its conditions are also discernible here, because these are the two dominant issues in identity questions in this particular location. The location debate within postcolonialism is especially interesting in the way it narrows down to a specific liminal experience in postcolonialism, and then expands to consider distinctive locations that offer conditions for postcolonial practices, specifying such practice in terms of a particular colonial legacy. Two positions offer themselves as inevitable in this development—pushing for a materialist critique and for the travel of theory, meaning that every location that challenges a theory deployed to interpret it is worth considering,

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worthy of notice as a separate entity, and not to be interpreted unidirectionally by the theory itself. The projection of the thirty-year, post-Assam Movement period as that very special site that offers a testing ground for the theory, even as it demands the theory’s consideration, takes place against this background. How does one do this? The exercise would involve the selection of those tropes from the theory that also naturally evolve as realities in a location; that is, their manifestations are examined and the location is defined in terms of its particular inflection by these tropes. For example, questions of identity in Assam have been marked by concerns with migration and hybridity for over a century now. Such concerns are manifested in cultural and political statements, and derive from very real material conditions. The postcolonial tropes of migration and hybridity are, therefore, natural theoretical tools to interpret and understand the area. But the moment these begin to be deployed, the location plays its own tricks, offering variations and unique shifts that must compel the tools themselves to adapt or to ask wholly new or different questions. This is, therefore, a book about Assam in the three decades from 1979 to 2007; but, by the same token, it points to a discipline’s encounter with the area or ground where it is practiced. The disciplinary problem that this book tacitly takes on may then be stated in the form of the following question. Does such an encounter take place merely at the level of content or “object of study,” that is, topics of study or research that are Northeast-centric or Assam-centric; or should the encounter mean a complete overhaul of a discipline’s epistemological foundations? How does one move from the “application” of existing theory to a reciprocal process of activating both ends of the interpretative process? The occasion for asking such questions is offered by the circumstances of one’s disciplinary position; it comes out of the discomfort with the view of the theory–practice relationship as merely a relationship of perspectival tool and object of study—hence the attempt to introduce the element of reciprocity. Reciprocity is the one aspect of the application of theory that has both political and ethical dimensions. When a theory is unidirectionally applied, that to which it is applied is merely frozen in place. The unquestionability of the theory makes it difficult to see the object out of its frame. The result is that the same interpretations are reproduced over the years,

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with no increase in understanding—and this situation is not likely to change significantly because of a change of the theory. One authoritarian theory simply replaces another, doing nothing for the object. On the other hand, the consideration of reciprocity, that is, accepting the possibility of theory itself being scrutinized by its object, allows for a fluidity and flexibility in the relationship between the two that not only repositions both but also offers alternative and multiple scenarios of interpretation. Such an approach of reciprocity between the two poles of the interpretation process is part of the debate on location that has largely developed around the two axes of “textuality” and “materiality.” Reciprocity would, therefore, mean the calling into question of the theory by the ground where it is applied—a challenge offered to the theory’s grand/master/ metanarrative status. I use the idea of location, not as a fixed pole or site, but as a mobile, shifting, and changing ground where the occurrence of different events as response, resistance, or initiative is part of the challenge that is presented to the theory. Location is part of my reading exercise, because it points to a specific area within which a theory operates or an interpretive process takes place. Location is also an element in the development of a reading position, a subject position that a discipline ideally demands and receives from its practitioners. In other words, without the intrusion of location as a factor, there is no meaningful disciplinary practice. No matter how well or with how much sophistication one uses concepts or acquaints oneself with the frontiers and advances in one’s discipline, unless its individual practice responds to the call of place, such practice is condemned to remain mechanical. It is with this conviction that I look at my own discipline of English studies/postcolonial studies in the place where it is practiced. Such a situation demands explanation of the tropes and the choice of a particular site as that critical location. Assam, during the movement and its thirty-year wake, is that very special ground which offers peculiar challenges of interpretation and sharpens the use of our interpretive tools. Given the acceptance of a particular location, and with the qualification that it is emphatically not a given (the entity known as “Assam” or the Assamese identity narrative are not givens but are mobile and provisional), but in a process of formation and dissolution as an interpretive site, the description of this location is not a completed affair but needs to be repeated every time it is deployed. It is also a necessary

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aspect of this description that the elements one has selected or that have selected themselves—and these include the theoretical tropes and the material elements—are in process in the work, not necessarily arrived at as conclusive “tools” and concluded “objects.” Both sides—tools and objects—are in flux; hence the term “question” in the title of this book, attesting to fluidity and process. By setting in motion the elements of the two sides, my ambition is to point to the questions that I believe are part of the consideration of identity, setting certain factors of interpretation in motion against the reiteration of the same elements of the identity narrative.

Theory and Location: The Subversion of Migration Theory To address this issue through one of its specifics: how does migration theory as it exists in postcolonial studies face the challenge of this location where migration is a reality, a comprehensive experience affecting all areas of daily living? The answer from the disciplines is rather startling: the theory is most crucially affected in its general and overall theoretical concern with the migrant. The answer from the location is equally loaded: the reality of migration here, in its scale and speed and threatening potential, compels the formulation of an alternative question. What happens to the receiving society? “Migration,” like “hybridity,” is a term that has been applied in the context of the characteristic mobility of the human race. Nations have come into existence as a result of migration. Cultures have expanded and taken on unique features because of it. Writings on the identity of people have usually begun with the question of where the people who are now in a settled state originally came from. And there has always been trade and traffic among peoples. In this broad sense, the term indicates a kind of quintessential condition. However, the postcolonial use of the term has been in the sense of the travel of people from the ex-colonial countries to the country of the erstwhile colonizer; i.e., migration as a result of the unsettlement brought about by colonialism—by education in the language of the colonizer, and by the adoption of styles of dress, behavior, and the new professions brought in by the colonizer. This condition that has been

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described as hybridization has created the kind of situation evoked in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, for example, where the “native,” now educated and dressed to look like the white ruler, discovers how deeply his identity has been affected when he arrives in Paris to be pointed out and framed as an alien. Fanon’s term, “a triple person”—“it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one, but two, three places” (Fanon 1967: 112)—actually refers to a “three-personed individual,” a hybrid identity that involves an uprooting of the colonized individual into a state of limbo, torn from the traditional sources of his original identity but unable to land in a secure new one. This narrowing down of the sense of the term “migration” is articulated by Homi Bhabha in the tacit assumption (in all of his work on issues like identity, otherness, and ambivalence) about the primary condition of the migrant who has been uprooted from his traditional anchors and sent up into orbit, whose location is now liminal, in-between, and for whom this real condition is a metaphor for an intellectual condition of immense breadth and possibility. In his essay “DissemiNations,” Bhabha outlines his understanding and intervention in some detail. He profiles migrants as having scattered and gathered, using his own experience of migration as a starting point: “I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people, that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering” (Bhabha 1994: 139). (This transference from the personal to the larger question is characteristic of theoretical practice, and is as true of Benita Parry as it is of Bhabha here. Parry’s criticism of Bhabha’s textualist bias does not seem to have taken this into account.) As a result of this scattering and “gathering on the ‘edge’ of foreign cultures” (ibid.), the history of the modern Western nation itself has to be rewritten “from the perspective of the nation’s margin and the migrant’s exile” (ibid.). This continues to be a migrant-focused theory, pointing to the inclusion and accommodation of the migrants in the Western nation as it opens its doors to its erstwhile colonies in an act of historical reparation. The history of the modern Western nation is now also the history of these peoples who are on its borders. It is now as much the migrant’s world as it is that of its original citizens. The continuous renewal of the nation, “nation as a temporal process” (ibid.: 142), is a renewal through migration. These several angles through which Bhabha looks at the process of

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migration and at the migrant shows very little acknowledgment of the receiving society, though the new migrant-centered history of the modern Western nation initially appears to be a receiving society concern. This is but another way of celebrating the migrant as she registers her presence in the new society. It is equally salutary to run through the several disciplines that have studied migration. The material condition behind the theory is a useful little subtext to be kept in mind: that most immigration studies have emerged out of the USA, and the questions asked have largely been the result of the state of the field in the American academy. Most of them are interested in three basic questions: Who moves? When do they move? Why do they move? (Brettell and Hollifield 2000: 4). American historian Hasia R. Diner records that a disinterest in theory marks American history and is reflected in the writings on migration, which have by and large concentrated on the movement of individual groups, framed by the same set of questions: Who moves? For how long? Why do some human beings get up and shift residence? Why do others stay put? Why do they migrate when they do? How do they decide where to go? How do they get there? How do they experience on a cultural level the act of leaving one place and relocating elsewhere? (Diner 2000: 29)

These questions reveal that the obsessive focus on the migrant emerges out of America’s own experience of coming into being as a nation. The Puritans moved out of England and other European countries, largely in order to escape religious persecution, and came to a land they thought of as virgin territory that would give them the freedom to live and practice their religion the way they wanted to. The subsequent settling of America by people from all over the world and the development of a multicultural society is also an important aspect of the way America imagined itself into existence as a nation. Literature (among the most representative of national discourses) reflected this experience of relocating in a new land, of a deeply troubled relation to a past they had ostensibly put behind them, and of the experience of forging a nation out of a diversity of cultures and languages. This absorption in a particular kind of migration knowledge or migration experience is possibly the reason why certain questions get asked and certain others remain beyond articulation.

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Anthropologists “want to capture through their ethnography the experience of being an immigrant and the meaning, to the migrants themselves, of the social and cultural changes that result from leaving one context and entering another” (Brettell and Hollifield 2000: 4). Anthropology’s “focus on culture ... has resulted in an emphasis in migration studies on matters of adaptation and culture change, on forms of social organization that are characteristic of both the migration process and the immigrant community, and on questions of identity and ethnicity” (Brettell 2000: 98). In the brief description of sociology that Brettell and Hollifield offer in their introduction (2000: 4–5) is the statement that “sociologists work almost exclusively in the receiving society.” This is qualified, however, with another observation: “the discipline places great emphasis on the process of immigrant incorporation” (ibid.). More specifically, as Heisler claims in her essay on the discipline, the interest is in “what happens to migrants in the receiving societies and what are the economic, social and political consequences of their presence?” (Heisler 2000: 77). Since this is the one discipline that clearly articulates its interest in the receiving society, I will come back to it in a later chapter to look at the various phases through which immigrant integration moves. However, even this perspective is clearly interested in the “migrant in the receiving society,” not in the “receiving society” itself. Other disciplines that study migration are demography, economics, and political science. Demographers “document the pattern and direction of migration flows and the characteristics of migrants (age, sex, occupation, education, and so on). In attempting to answer the three basic questions in migration demographers generally construct predictive models” (Brettell and Hollifield 2000: 5). Economists focus on migrant selectivity; this might take the form: “under what conditions will the most favorable (in human capital terms and for labor market success) migrants be selected?” (ibid.). Political scientists study migration in terms of three broad themes. “One is the role of nation-state in controlling migration flows and hence its borders; a second is the impact of migration on the institutions of sovereignty and citizenship, and the relation between migration on the one hand, and foreign policy and national security, on the other; a third is the question of incorporation” (ibid.: 6).

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The questions in the disciplines begin to clear into something like the following. How, for example, would an economist view the immigrant in the background of his/her contribution to the state economy? Is the same situation available for evaluation to the political scientist, the social scientist, and the anthropologist? What issues in the receiving society draw the attention of these disciplines? And what new questions emerge from this new look at migration through the prism of host/hospitality/ hostility? At what level does a discipline ask the question about hospitality? It is obvious that most disciplines, even when they show a concern with the receiving society, visualize its impact at the instrumental/operational and surface level rather than at the ethical level of how a society is deeply marked, perhaps even scarred, by its reception of, hospitality to, proximity to, and daily encounter with the migrant. The condition that these terms describe is indeed problematic, because it is concerned with the capacity for hospitality, which may be limited by real concerns with space and room. However, the fact remains that a society or a people playing host to an alien presence shows significant changes in its psyche. It is affected by its regular encounters with “others” into displays of brutality, indifference, or violence, which are revealing indicators of social and psychological change. So we have, on the one hand, the nostalgia and loss experienced by the migrant, and, on the other, the experience of the receiving society itself, moving from welcome to indifference to hostility, with the final climactic reaction in violence. With the Assam Movement focusing almost exclusively on the increase in population in Assam as a result of illegal immigration, the discipline that has done the most work on migration in the region is demography. The best known of these works are Homeswar Goswami’s two studies: of “population trends” in the years 1881–1931 (H. Goswami 1985), and of “population growth” between 1951 and 1991 (H. Goswami et al. 2003), the period in which illegal immigration occurred. In both books, the attempt is to establish correct figures against the wild guesses made during the angry years of the movement, and to study the effect of the migrant on the growth of Assam’s population. A similar demographic effort is evident in an article carried in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1980 on “Immigration and Demographic Transformation in Assam, 1891–1981” (Dass 1980). A report produced under the aegis of the Omeo Kumar Das

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Institute of Social Change and Development (OKDISCD) also shows the same focus—“Migration to Assam in the Post-Independence Period” by Mousumi Saikia (1996). A couple of other OKDISCD reports—“Migrant Workers in the Informal Sector of Guwahati City” (N. Baruah 2002) and “The Nepali Community of Assam: Their Assimilation and Contribution to the Assamese Society” (N. Dutta 2002)—look at specific aspects of the migrant. However, at no point in these thirty years has the study of effects looked at the socio-psychological fallout of immigration, or at the results of the preoccupation with the illegal alien and the threat to Assamese society. By making this the point of this book, while showing that this particular emphasis emerges in the light of the urgent concerns about illegal immigration from Bangladesh and migration from the rest of India felt at different times in Assam, I try also to point to the ways in which identity transforms as a result of the feelings for the other evoked by the presence and the “burden” of the migrant. This is especially pertinent because the adoption of “violence towards the other” as a mode means that it is no longer confined only to the migrant other. This leads to the particular thrust on violence in the chapter on the Assam Movement. Violence was part of its avowedly non-violent protest modes, and, because it was camouflaged by its innocuous nature, it entered all the more easily into daily behavior, into everyday exchange among people, deeply scarring subject–object relations. The steps in the process of examining the results of migration and discovering, from the tremendous collective anger that it provoked, that the host society was itself an object of study, demonstrate that without considering this society as living under its threatening shadow, the theorizing on “migration” and, by extension, on “migration affecting identity,” would remain incomplete and flawed. A perception of migration was responsible for the Assam Movement, as well as for its adoption of certain methods that had long-term consequences in the form of violence and corruption. Its discontented fringe, which felt let down by the leadership, refashioned itself into the dreaded militant group, the United Liberation Front of Assam or the ULFA, which perpetrated violence during the decades following the end of the Assam Movement. These are situations that have all developed against the backdrop of actual illegal immigration and its rhetoric. It is in the light of this influence that I look at the Assam Movement in the next chapter.

2 The Assam Movement Thirty Years On What animates contemporary investigations of the memory of the violence of 1947 and beyond is the question of how to live with difference today. —Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity (2002: 143)

Retelling the Story The Assam Movement (1979–85), also variously called the Assam Agitation or the Asom Andolon, saw the participation of tens of thousands of people across this northeastern state of India. It was led with flair and enthusiasm by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), and captured the imagination of the people in a way that no other mass mobilization could have done. But precisely because of its youthful, somewhat immature public face (behind its young leaders were older people, writers, college and university teachers—the mentors) and the romance associated with the image of youth leading in an ideological battle, the divisive and violent potential of many directions taken by the movement that have had unfortunate longterm consequences were ignored. The acknowledgment of the national independence movement as a model, and the ubiquitous photograph of Gandhi hung in students’ union offices, created the impression that this was a peaceful Gandhian movement. These two things functioned to disguise, from the students themselves as perhaps from their mentors, the

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potential for violence that is at the heart of all mass mobilizations. The articulation of the movement as “largely peaceful” and its reiteration as such by participants and by sympathetic observers excused many of the gross violations as small and isolated aberrations. While, quite expectedly, there may be dissatisfaction over my elision of the retaliatory violence of state security organizations and groups, this argument is not so much about finding the right excuse or the right instrumental and structural reasons for the violence resorted to by the people, as it is about the need to look at oneself as the source of violence, to study the brutalization of a society, not only in what it can perpetrate that is violent, but in what it can tolerate and remain unmoved by.1 The romance of students’ movements is irresistible. In recent years, the youth group Otpor in Serbia, with members drawn from the same class background and with no leaders and a complete absence of hierarchy, similarly caught the imagination and was seen as a model for other groups like the Kmara in Georgia and the Pora in Ukraine. In a review in the Guardian of a recent book on “revolutionary youth movements,” Jon Savage (2007) notes the author’s fascination for these three groups, which successfully engineered political changes through focused mobilizations of hundreds of people in their countries. The Otpor, on October 5, 2000, marched to Belgrade and, bursting through police barricades, set the Serbian Parliament building ablaze. This was followed by Milosevic’s admission of defeat. The Kmara in Georgia took to the streets in the runup to the election of November 2003. They succeeded in interrupting the disputed president Shevardnadze as he was speaking in Parliament, and he was unceremoniously taken away. The Pora in Ukraine also took as their point of revolution a disputed election and saw the principal opposition candidate, who had been poisoned in the run-up to the election, declared president. In all three cases, the movements saw the charismatic use of huge public pressure to bring about these changes (ibid.). Youthful mobilizations like these mark a transition point for societies, as the Assam Movement demonstrated so comprehensively. Because of the issues they throw up, the sympathy and support they receive, and their occupation of the public mindscape, they legitimize practices that could be otherwise viewed with skepticism and suspicion. The Assam Movement is that critical occasion for the understanding of contemporary Assam. It is an important factor in the interpretation

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of modern Assam, a period that began with British occupation of the region, and left the troubled legacies of policies of migration, settlement, and land occupation, all of which are today aspects of a developing social and cultural phenomenon. And precisely because of its significance as a historical turning point, the movement succeeded in blinding us to its quietly violent underbelly. Modernity has always come with its attendant identity crises for societies and individuals. The advent of modernity in Assam is associated with the entry of the British in 1826. But it was obviously an “unfinished project” in Assam in more ways than it has been anywhere else, especially if one looks at Assam’s anguish over identity. Assam’s relationship to modernity has been seen in negative terms (as all the things that Bengal had and Assam did not), and has always been migration-related; a streak of animosity has been a part of its self-formation. The other on whom it relied for its business of making identity was always the hated other, the other who made you feel small and mean, less educated, less modern, less skilled, and for whom therefore your dislike and wariness persisted. The way these elements entered the identity narrative at this stage is shown in a later chapter. There have been several other historical points that may be comparable with the Assam Movement as movements for identity having similar components: both the language crises, for instance—the language movement of the 1960s, and the movement for Assamese as a medium of instruction in schools and colleges in 1972. However, these movements did not have the kind of concern with the political, economic, and cultural aspects of the identity crisis that were successfully integrated and articulated during the movement against foreigners. The notable feature of the Assam Movement is this comprehensiveness. It is possible that if it had been more self-reflexive, more aware of its practices, methods, implications, and potential for long-term violence, it might have been viewed as a movement with a modernity aspiration. In what now appears a momentous gesture, the Assam Movement seized the initiative for “selfconstruction.” It seems in retrospect that it deliberately and consciously selected elements of the identity narrative that had marked the Assamese as a race with no drive, no initiative, as apathetic, object more than subject, always letting things happen to them (British accounts regularly used such features to describe the Assamese), and transformed the possible

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future perceptions of the race. However, it is precisely at this point that the comparison with modernity falters. Unlike modernity movements at other times—for instance, at the inception of Western modernity with its strong philosophical understructure; the Bengal Renaissance that was marked by the understanding and support of a great body of intellectuals; or even the beginnings of Assamese modernity in the early years of the 20th century, with a large number of self-conscious individuals articulating modernity aspirations toward agency—the Assam Movement lacked this concerted philosophical and historical consciousness, lacked an intellectual framework that could have enabled its leaders and participants to turn the gaze back inwards and to see the movement and its goals as having far-reaching effects beyond the immediate concerns with the illegal migrant. Caught up in the immediate threat, it missed the larger picture. This chapter is developed around a description of the movement, especially around what is usually lost in the statistics of immigrants and violent incidents regularly trotted out in critical and documentary studies. (Such description, as suggested in the previous chapter, is a necessary step toward disciplinary empowerment.) The chapter focuses not only on the more overt and familiar instance of violence, but on the violence that underlay—the less obvious instance that was characterized by indifference, neglect of the other, a desire to control and order the other. These elements were most visible in the organization of the movement itself, and, because they did not make themselves apparent as directly connected to the presence of undesired aliens or even as targeting the immigrant, are very often missed. This was an undercurrent that lay dormant or silent during the movement, even as horror was expressed at the more overt level where there was no scope for ambiguity—though even this response is distressingly elusive, because the capture of the narrative of condemnation by the national media denied to the Assamese the space or the mode for adequate response. The common accusation is that there was very little overt anger expressed by civil society except in the “usual” quarters, which generally meant the left-leaning intellectual and prominent academics and journalists who stood already condemned in the AASU’s perception of their intellectual remoteness from the fears and aspirations of the ordinary Assamese. In attempting this description of the movement, I have sought out those articulations that take note of such underlying violence. In many cases, it

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has been the retrospective narrative—the lapse of time enabling the necessary division between the statistics (mostly governmental and official) and reflection—that has absorbed and articulated the hidden violence of the movement. My texts for the chapter have been of the kinds that express this—the texts of remembrance, a memory archive, which includes individual memories expressed in conversations; fictional reconstructions of memories of the movement or of episodes in its aftermath; and memories of many of the leading players in the movement, some of who were interviewed in a special issue of the Assamese magazine, Nivedon. I continue my engagement with the idea of reception or the receiving society in this chapter by viewing the movement against foreigners as the response of this host society to the migrant in its midst, and the revival of historical memories and animosities to fuel and flesh out the re-generated anger. The form in which this response is most apparent is the rearticulation of the dominant Assamese identity narrative, based on the revival of a history of identity formation that speaks only to the dominant Assamese. So, even as the movement was ostensibly against illegal migrants from Bangladesh and to a lesser extent from Nepal, the constituents of the narrative and the rhetoric in which it was couched effectively shut out nonAssamese Indians, Assamese Muslims, tea garden people, and the several tribes who could claim to have lived in Assam from “time immemorial.” It is, however, only possible to discover this alienation in the space between the public pronouncements of movement leaders and sometimes the leaders of different tribal communities, and the post-1983 emergence of movements for autonomy. This is a space that is filled with memories of exclusions that were often expressed in a language of dominance and subservience, of the desired and the real, and naturally also the space where the suspicions of the tribal groups about the dominant community find expression. But first, it is necessary to take note of the manifestations of violence in the recent past as a prelude to understanding its pervasiveness, its disturbing “ordinariness,” and its seeming ease of perpetration.

Contemporary Violence On the night of January 5, 2007, there were news reports that seventy people of Bihari origin had been gunned down in various places in Upper Assam by the ULFA. The horrific pictures stayed on the news screens

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for a few days. The viewership of various TV channels, especially the Guwahati-based North East Television (NETV) increased. Central leaders visited the areas where the violence had taken place and where camps had been set up for affected families. The act was condemned by many groups and individuals. And then there was silence. There were subsequent bomb explosions and shootings in several places in Assam, mostly in crowded marketplaces, many of them targeting the Assamese-Bihari community, but not sparing other innocent and vulnerable people. Several months later, Prabal Neog, commander of the dreaded 28th Battalion of the ULFA, was arrested in Tezpur on September 17. The seizing of his diary containing notes on the use of programmable time device switches, frequently used by the ULFA to trigger off explosions, and his own admission during interrogation by the security agencies, finally provided incontrovertible proof that these attacks had been the handiwork of the ULFA. The report of Neog’s arrest and subsequent revelations was carried by the Assam Tribune on Monday, September 24, 2007. The establishment of responsibility makes it all the easier to set aside and forget, especially when the agent is a member of the increasingly marginalized militant outfit that has virtually lost the battle for the imagination and the sympathy of the people of Assam. With the ULFA having acquired a widely recognized notoriety, the pinning of blame on one of its members results in relief, distancing, and forgetting. The incident sinks like so many others in the last thirty years into the depths of the magic pad.2 In the period from January 2007 onwards, when the latest spurt of killings began that specifically targeted the Assamese-Bihari community, the official death toll of civilians up to August 15 was put at 219. On August 17, 2007, NETV reported the brutal killing of fifteen people of Bihari origin, gunned down by the Karbi Longri North Cachar Hills Liberation Front (KLNLF) and the ULFA. A couple, a man and a woman, were taken at gun point to the roadside, pushed to their knees, and shot at point-blank range. The incident took place in the village of Daolamara in Karbi Anglong district, 17 kilometers from the town of Bokakhat. The village contained a mixed population of Karbi, Bihari, Marwari, Asomiya, and tea garden tribals who had lived together for generations in complete peace and harmony. Interviewed after the incident, many of them expressed revulsion at the killing of people who were like members of their family.

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On August 31, 2007, some news channels carried the picture of Dimasa militants, “somewhere in the Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills district,” torturing three persons whom they had kidnapped and for whose release they were demanding a ransom of `150,000,000. The channels focused repeatedly on the victims hung upside down from trees and being beaten. This is an aspect and a side-effect of violence—its perpetuation through reiteration—that has become a common mode for the visual media, marked by an obsession with the bloodiest pictures, the most graphic images of limbs, torsos, and heads strewn randomly over the area of an explosion or a bomb blast. These pictures immunize people to violence, making it increasingly easy to witness it, to accept it as an everyday occurrence, and to go on with life. They also recall the print media’s representation of Nellie in 1983; the absence of television coverage did not mean any let-up in the bombardment of the imagination by pictures of carnage, of the bodies of women, children, and infants, carried in all the major newspapers and in full color by the newsmagazine India Today. The resurrection of the event in a special issue of the magazine commemorating thirty years of “glorious reporting” strengthened, in its own way, this particular impression that seems to be permanently tagged to the external image of Assam (see India Today, December 18, 2006. The incident was listed as one of “the 30 greatest India Today stories”).3 The goriest pictures of violence have become part of the post-insurgency recognition and slotting of the state and its people. The local channels (NETV, DY365, and News Live), while providing prompt coverage of violent incidents in Assam, have shown a proclivity for the gory picture, the most revolting detail, and above all, the exploitation of the visual medium to hold the pictures on the screens, abusing the media’s brief through excessive focus on the same violent scenes. This is true of all television news channels, especially the private ones whose popularity ratings seem to depend on the ability to carry an uglier and more shocking picture than its competitors. This proclivity has been seen in the very recent past in the coverage of the man beaten brutally by the public in Bihar and dragged behind a motor cycle, and in the almost pleasurable focus on the Dimasa militants torturing their victims. This particular coverage may also be expected to confirm the stereotype of the tribal as wild and barbaric. People from the Lalung (Tiwa) community were, after all, believed to be responsible for the most well-known blot

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on Assam’s face, the Nellie massacre; and there are still reports of witch burnings in Bodo villages. The rest of India finds its image of Assam and the Northeast confirmed and consolidated through such pictures. The series of bomb blasts, however, went unreported in the national media, though each incident saw the death of numbers of people. It was only when a particular explosion killed about fifteen people in Guwahati that the Delhi news channel NDTV sent its reporters to cover it. The fact that every time an incident of this nature occurs, it has larger and deeper international political and security implications that should also be discussed and made known, is usually elided; while the channels carry detailed discussions and special programs, SMS polls, and sympathy lists in cases of much smaller significance that occur in the rest of the country. The statistical focus that is at work in studies of the migrant here appears to be active behind callous editorial decisions in these media. The representation of these incidents and the government response to them fuels the “neglect” aspect of the identity narrative. It can and actually has been projected in this way, as is evident in allegations of discrimination and unfair treatment to the region and its people. The manner in which this can be exploited is seen in the ULFA jumping into the fray with its own allegations of the central government’s discriminatory attitude toward Assamese and non-Assamese victims (very often victims of the ULFA’s own violence), especially in the payment of compensation. It thus seeks to introduce a wedge that may not exist in the society itself. The ULFA has used these opportunities to air its separatist rhetoric again and again, calling into question the rights of “outsiders” like Manmohan Singh (the current prime minister of India), Matang Singh, Mani Kumar Subba, and Shiv Sambhu Oja (belonging to the Bihari, Nepali, and tea garden communities, respectively) to represent the people of Assam in the legislative bodies of the state and the nation. The ULFA has also reiterated its favorite themes about colonial occupying forces, the freedom of Assam from India, and the killing of innocent people by security agencies, while ignoring its own record of violence and killing of innocent people. This narrative is regularly released to the media through the ULFA paper, Freedom. On October 26, 2007, during a road blockade, activists of the All Koch Rabongshi Students’ Union (AKRSU) set on fire a bus coming from

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Coochbehar in West Bengal to Lakhimpur in Assam. Twenty-two passengers managed to escape by smashing the windows and the windscreen, sustaining severe burn injuries (Assam Tribune, October 27, 2007). Subsequently, after arrests and police questioning, the perpetrators admitted that they had suddenly taken it into their heads at the end of the day of the blockade that something drastic had to be done, and the incident was the result of this decision (Assam Tribune, November 2, 2007). Set alongside these incidents of militant violence are those more chilling ones perpetrated in individual situations—the young child beaten severely in a town in Upper Assam for petty theft; the growing incidents of rape and murder of young girls and baby girls, the most recently reported case involving a child of three; the abduction and murder of a three-yearold boy. The perpetrator in most cases was found to be a trusted attendant or a family friend or family member. These apparently isolated examples, now seen in the light of the violence of the movement, suggest both a habit of violence and the existence of multiple forms of violence—an ease in the manner in which a violent act is committed, the seepage of a violent mode into society, and above all, the increasing perception in the print and visual media of the saleability of reports on violent incidents. In the status paper presented in Parliament by Home Minister Shivraj Patil in June 2007, 277 violent incidents were reported for Assam (Assam Tribune, August 30, 2007). The official response has been in the form of instructions to the state government to make arrangements for increasing security in sensitive areas, and a revision of the existing militancy strategy. But the dramatic and recognizably condemnable act is accompanied by the quieter and less visible, often unnoticed act that is, for this reason, a more alarming form of violence. On July 20, 2007, the Assamese weekly Sadin carried a report on the small tea garden, a much-feted new occupation among the Assamese youth, projected as an example of “seizing the initiative.” The tea garden was perceived as a solution to employment problems that had assumed alarming proportions in the state and were often seen as stemming directly from illegal immigration and migration from the rest of India. This discomfiting interpretation of “agency” is an aspect of the identity narrative that accompanies the widespread feeling and articulation of “neglect,” seen to be connected with the refusal to address the problem of immigration. “Neglect” is also associated with the citing of security

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reasons for not establishing public sector industries in the state. The agitation for an oil refinery in the state only succeeding in getting as a sop a small refinery, while the major portion of the crude oil went to the Barauni Refinery in Bihar. The preference given to migrants from other states for jobs in the few public sector undertakings based in Assam, while ignoring the claims of the local youth, has also added to such perceptions. Since each one of these is not a recent problem but has a long history, and is therefore embedded in the psyche of the people of the region, it is a strong component of the identity narrative. And it is often the explanation provided for the turn to militancy, to strong-arm methods used to wrest one’s rights from those who were believed to have lesser claims since they were not “sons of the soil.” It is possible to recall here the interpretation of self-employment and self-sufficiency (or swabalambi—an idea borrowed from the Gandhian resort to the charkha or spinning wheel) at the time of the Assam Movement, when young men muscled their way into fish markets, picked up fish, and peddled them door to door in a display of “self-sufficiency.” The legacy of this movement remains in the capture of the fish business in the state by a section of the surrendered militants (SULFA), who forcibly levy a “rogue tax” for every consignment of fish reaching the markets. Who can legitimately be regarded as “sons of the soil,” what are the limits beyond which even “neglect” cannot legitimize actions—these are questions that repeatedly get elided in situations of this kind. The Sadin report is titled “Another Picture of Assam’s Economic Progress” (B. Borgohain 2007). The writer states that, out of the 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 people of tea tribe origin in the state, only about 600,000 to 700,000 are now employed in the tea gardens. The rest live in villages around the gardens. In Dibrugarh and Tinsukia in Upper Assam, most villages have some tea tribal residents; in some cases they form 70 percent to 80 percent of the population. The small tea cultivators have evicted many of these people from their traditional lands, or bought their lands at throwaway prices, and laid out their gardens there. The writer of the article gives two examples of what he finds to be a common phenomenon. The first is the story of a small village behind the Gangabari Tea Estate in Tinsukia district. There is no trace today of this village of 100 families belonging to the tea tribes. Their lands were presumably bought up and they were forced to leave. While a ten-year-old voters’ list proves their existence, only about half of them are still there, working as laborers

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in the small tea garden that has replaced the village. The rest have disappeared. The cases of two other small settlements of tea tribes made up of around 150 families, which have been transformed into tea gardens, are similar. Allegations of dadagiri and goondagiri—two terms from the criminal underground that have a pan-Indian circulation, indicating bullying and the use of force against the weak and the vulnerable—have come up in many such instances of eviction. Worse still, those employed in these new gardens are forced into a kind of bonded labor at daily wages of as little as `25. No labor laws are in force, and the small tea grower runs his garden like a petty fiefdom. Wondering what the long-term consequences of such oppression can be, this writer remembers a couple of incidents from some two years back, when two small tea growers were chased by their workers and brutally killed. Newspaper reports at the time stated that both incidents were the result of the forcible seizure of land belonging to people from the tea tribes. Then there are instances of organizations like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP, the youth wing of the BJP), the Asom Jatiyotabadi Yuva Chatra Parishad (AJYCP), and the AASU “apprehending persons suspected to be illegal migrants”—a disturbing corollary of the concern with immigration (Assam Tribune, July 31, 2007). Such episodes create conditions that have serious potential for erupting into violence, but are also in themselves violent acts, with aggressive young people shoving and herding vulnerable, cowering groups, occasionally employing the stray fist or palm. Or one might record the frustration of young men and women who clear administrative exams to find places in the top fifteen or twenty in the Assam Public Service Commission (APSC) list, but are unable to clear the last hurdle of the interview because of the outrageous cash demands made at that stage. This situation is repeated in the employment scenario in the security services, in admissions to schools and colleges, and in various government departments. The demand for bribes has acquired both visibility and a dubious legitimacy because nobody questions or objects to it; everybody knows of its existence, and it is accepted as “normal.” The graph of violence moves from the explosive, physically violent act to practices of violence between the powerful and the powerless that finally become mind games, where the identification of weakness, vulnerability, and need is a prelude to the display of raw

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power, which could be personal but is most often seen in juxtaposition with the misuse of institutional authority. The aggressive pursuit of personal gain, personal luxuries, and comforts at the cost of everything that might be other-related—this is the scenario that all this violence often hides. The psychological scarring of perpetrators seen in the overt violent act of the militant goes on to infect an entire society. Gandhi’s theory of non-violence involved, among other things, the cleaning of toilets by everyone so that they were left clean for the next user. Besides the implications of such a practice for the scourge of untouchability, it was always an exercise in concern for the other, of knowing the other, whom one held in disgust, from the inside, of feeling the other within one. Such reflection on the other has to be part of the philosophical understructure of ideological movements that are necessarily oppositional. Its discursive circulation, imperative for the prevention of violence, can however take distorted forms, as revealed by the contemporary description of the Assam Movement as “non-violent.” That the sites of violence or the identification of what constitutes violence are areas requiring the overhauling of the very paradigms by which violence is defined is brought home to us in the aggression for the sake of personal advantage, displayed in the flouting of building laws to construct houses in specially protected areas, the overexploitation of ground water, the neglect of drainage by individual house builders, the impunity with which natural water bodies and marshy areas of the city, which serve as its sponges during floods and excessive rains, are being filled in by individuals and state government departments. The most glaring example of such environmental violence is the area around Guwahati city called the Deepor Beel (beel is a local word for a large water body, or lake). Once a place for migratory birds, now the beel is less frequently visited because it has been systematically filled in. Its natural troughs and mounds, so necessary for the sustenance of its unique life forms, have been flattened out by bulldozers and earth movers. Parts of it have been sold off to individuals; recently, and most scandalously, an area close to it was designated as a garbage dump by the city administration. This profile of what might be called “civic violence” touches on the nature of the violence that spreads into the most unexpected areas, especially because it is so difficult to shake off a certain paradigm of violence that obstructs understanding of its varied and innocuous manifestations.

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Every time one sits down to look back on and describe these three decades, one is jolted by a new incident of violence, different from previous incidents only in the locale and in the numbers affected. Every such occasion is also the moment for which one must find an explanation in the past, retrieve the triggers from the realm of the repressed. How does the past explain the brutalization of the last thirty years, the denial and erasure of the other that a society becomes capable of? What is the role of social processes in spawning these agents and situations that nurture violence?

Narratives of the Assam Movement The Assam Movement against foreigners, especially against illegal migrants from the neighboring country of Bangladesh, took place during the years 1979–85. The AASU spearheaded the movement and organized people’s participation on a massive scale, using its units in schools and colleges at different levels of Assam’s administrative divisions. The AASU had a history of successful mobilizations since coming into existence in 1967. It specialized in emotive issues, and it had already successfully led the movement in 1972 for making Assamese the medium of instruction, alongside English, in the colleges of Assam. While the Assam Movement is best known for its primary and most frequently stated aim, the expulsion of illegal foreign nationals, it began with a plan of action that looked at comprehensive economic development for Assam through land reform measures, industrialization, nationalization of private industries, stopping the eviction of poor peasants from the reserved forest areas of Dayang, Kaki, and Mingmon, the control of floods, and government intervention in the procurement and distribution of food grains. It was, however, the emotive issue of cultural and racial identity, disseminated among the people through the AASU’s quite incomparable spread and influence, that began to dominate the movement from the start. This is also the predominant memory that remains of the movement today. Harekrishna Deka writes of the mindset that positioned the movement in this way: A section of the people saw both British rule and the post-Independence period as two different forms of a colonialism imposed on an independent nation. Assamese Jatiyotavad [nationalism] grew out of this feeling

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of being politically independent throughout history. . . . In the 1980s, it became a political assertion by a community that . . . suffered due to the continued influx of migrants from across the national border. (H. Deka 2005: 191)

The other vehicle for spreading ideas about the movement in rural and urban areas was the sympathetic vernacular press. Hiren Gohain mentions that, for about a year before the movement actually began, the Assamese press regularly published reports of the influx of immigrants from Bangladesh. It drew the attention of its readers to the situation in the states of Tripura and Sikkim, where the indigenous people had been overwhelmed by floods of outsiders (Gohain 1985: 26). This chapter offers the argument that the identity narrative as articulated during the movement, and the modes of protest adopted by the leaders, are two of the primary indicators and sources of the violence that is now a marked feature of today’s Assam. That is, violence is not confined to the insurgent or the militant-turned terrorist, but is evident in modes of behavior, in relationships, in business practices, and new value systems in the state. It is useful, therefore, to quickly run through those phases of the movement where these practices and this articulation became discernible. The critical need for this argument at this stage in Assam is addressed to the general feeling that nothing more remains to be said about the Assam Movement, that it has become a given, a fixed point of reference. At least one area where virtually nothing has been said, except for stray articles in the press at the time (Hiren Gohain’s essay on his own public humiliation is one rare example), is the violence that accompanied protest programs—including the protest itself, in its many forms, and the tacit or overt violence associated with these practices of protest. Scholarship on the movement has contented itself with documenting and providing statistics, but offers very little by way of analysis of this area. Another reason for the silence of the social sciences has been the difficulty of finding documented proof of the violence that accompanied these perfectly innocuous gatherings. No first information report (FIR) would be registered, for instance, when the young neighborhood boy caught an older man by the collar, upon the latter’s reluctance to join a protest program. But individual memories (my own and those of my family and friends and of the many people from the three neighborhoods—Dispur, Uzan Bazaar, and Fancy Bazaar—who

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assented to remember in response to my requests) are full of these supposedly insignificant incidents. There is virtually nothing that the movement leaders wrote from which it is possible to infer that they anticipated this kind of low-intensity violence that was so often directed inward at the movement’s own, sometimes unwilling, participants. But in attempting to trace the links of these aspects of the movement with the latest version of the identity narrative—whether this is the result of self-perception or whether this is the way others perceive us—one is faced with the difficulty of giving them concrete shape, and with the urgent need to mine the unorthodox, undocumented source. In speaking of the violence of this time, it is important to address and distinguish the kinds and degrees of violence. There was overt and visible violence, like Nellie; but also stray incidents of killing of the kind described by Rafiqul Hussain, the poet who spoke to one of the interviewers of Nivedon. There was the violence of alienation that has been earmarked for immigrants from the time of Partition in 1947, described by Nirupama Borgohain; and the beating up of a person who “looked like an immigrant,” remembered by Pradipta Borgohain. Above all, there was the violence that was repressed in the modes of protest that organized thousands of people, sometimes willing, sometimes coerced—a violence directed at the target, but often also at its own human components. It would appear that we are dealing with two kinds of violence that marked the movement—the Nellie-like killings, about which there is now very little ambiguity, and which are usually cited by the outside construction, the connections from contemporary incidents back to Nellie being obvious and easily drawn; and the invisible violence of the processes of the movement that sharply affected interpersonal relations over the next three decades, but were not recognized as violent at the time and continue to remain invisible. Such episodes surfaced in the memories of the time called forth by my own reconstructed memories of violence. Homen Borgohain’s article “Asom Andolonor Rajnitiye Bihukou Sporsho Korile” (“The Politics of the Assam Movement Has Also Affected the Festival of Bihu”) (H. Borgohain 2001a) is prescient in its quite rare attempt to examine the social fallout and to look at violence as a denial of the other. In the course of demonstrating how the Bihu was transformed from a predominantly harvest festival strongly grounded in the community into a political weapon, Borgohain writes of its commercialization and describes

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the journey of the rural festival into the towns as a kind of assertion of cultural distinctiveness, a signature. He sees movement leaders as having sidelined/ignored the festival’s all-embracing aspect, bringing about divisions within the community by stressing a narrow cultural identity through the festival (H. Borgohain 2001a: 12). Commenting on the Bihu’s politicization, Borgohain gives the example of the huge Bihu procession that was organized during the festival in 1982. It was led by the Assamese cultural icon Bhupen Hazarika and Hiranya Kumar Bhattacharyya, the police officer who had resigned his job and become an important participant in the movement. The procession wended through the city streets, swelling as it passed different residential localities, and culminated in the Judges’ Field (so called because on one side of it are the residential quarters of the judges of the High Court and, at right angles to them, on its other side is the High Court itself) on the banks of the river Brahmaputra, beside the Mahatma Gandhi Road. There a huge political meeting was held and speeches were delivered on the themes of identity, cultural nationalism, and, of course, on the source of danger, the illegal migrant. Borgohain, who expressed distress over the divisive political use of an integrative cultural festival, also wrote with anguish about both Nellie and Gohpur, the two major incidents of mass killing during the Assam Movement. In an essay titled “Nellier Pisot Dwitiyo Barbarata” (“After Nellie, a Second Act of Barbarism”), he wondered at the sense of power felt by the participants of the movement as they stood over stunned members of the minority community, who not only did not lift a weapon, but did not utter a single word in protest. “Why did the Assamese show their bravery against the helpless and the unarmed ... killing children, women and the elderly? Worse, why was the larger Assamese society silent in the face of this atrocity” (H. Borgohain 2001b: 139). A response of a somewhat different kind is that of B.G. Verghese— different because it is so patently that of an outsider, and is not therefore interested or anguished enough to raise the question that only an insider can ask of herself: “Why/how did we do this to ourselves?” Verghese tells the same story, about the initial import of Bengalis by the British and the continued migration from the region as the “root cause” of the movement (Verghese 1996: 6–7). His comment that, with Partition, “the Northeast found itself boxed into what was geo-politically virtually another country” (ibid.: 37), shows little sense of the emotional impact

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of this geographical isolation, or of the cartographically reinforced idea of the “chicken neck,” the narrow corridor above the territory marked off as Bangladesh that has economic, political, and sometimes simply elemental implications. Verghese makes a general reference to the violence of the years that followed the erosion of the movement’s support base, the “alienation of Bengalis, Muslims, leftists and tribals,” and the declaration of elections: The State was racked with bomb blasts and killings.... Over 1600 bridges and culverts were damaged or destroyed.... the climax came with the ghastly Nellie massacre.... series of eruptions followed in Darrang, and Lakhimpur districts in all of which Muslims, Bengali Hindus and Bodos were the principal victims. (Verghese 1996: 44)

Verghese sums it up as follows: “The tragedy is that the movement divided Assam, stirred communal and linguistic passions, stalled development and undermined social discipline” (ibid.: 46). He does not elaborate on what this undermining of social discipline implies. But he does write about violence—the “familiar cycle of extortion, kidnappings and killings” (ibid.: 63)—in the context of the ULFA and the rise of insurgencies. His reading of Assam enhances the point with which I began the earlier chapter, that the outsider view is troublesome precisely because of its panoptic tendencies, the “big design” with which it sorts out the scene, and its predilection for banking on the quick evaluation and a ready frame of reference. What it claims to gain in objectivity and cognitive clarity, it loses in compassion, without which it is impossible to ask the discomfiting question of oneself. Borgohain’s second question—regarding the silence of Assamese society in the face of violence—continues to reverberate. This is a question only a participant in the state’s processes, a stakeholder in its future, can ask. In the thirty years that have passed since the movement, there have been changes in perception, and the identification with acts of violence has been replaced with revulsion as well as, and perhaps more significantly, detachment. The ambiguity that marked the general response to such acts has in most cases given way to a clearly stated condemnation. The only exceptions are seen in the rhetoric of those who view themselves as mediators for militant groups like the ULFA. Because of the nature of

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the roles they have assumed or been given, such persons continue to shy away from unambiguously condemning current atrocities, very often citing instrumental reasons. The government’s response is cited most often as the rationale for such acts of violence.

Naturalization of Violence The incidents of overt violence are symptoms of a deeper problem in society. This problem is the “naturalization of violence,” the ordinariness to which it has been reduced because anybody is capable of it, anybody can perpetrate it. It is because of this assumption that I look at the hidden violence of the protests as the route through which violence became ordinary. It is here that the several issues of immigrant influx, a people in danger of engulfment during a lifetime,4 and evidence of official apathy come together in a violent collective outburst, or in the legitimization of individual acts of violence, which is what we really discover in the various programs of protest during the movement. This ordinariness also makes it easier to spread—“you have to do your bit”—and so much easier to internalize, because it is not recognizable in common language use as violent, and therefore it is easy to sustain within. In the period that followed the movement, this violence became increasingly visible in the daily exchange among people as they engaged in economic, social, and political activities. As we tried to guard our borders, our homes, and our language from the “evil presence and influence of the alien,” we practiced various forms of violence that were legitimized by the mode of thinking that we learned from the encounter with the other. And without warning, the other became everyone who threatened my little world. This is the interpretation that seems most logical in looking at the effects of migration in a receiving society like Assam. This is the way in which a mode becomes internalized, one’s self becomes the primary unit of concern, and, from guarding my country and society from external threat, I come to the point of guarding only my own private home. What we note today as widespread corruption at every level of educational, administrative, and political structures is a function of violence in this wider sense, because for the sake of self I am willing to do violence to the other, to deny

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the other, to be indifferent to her pain, to watch as she is maimed and killed and go on with my life.5 Another aspect of the response to violence has to do with how it is rendered easily explicable. Roger V. Gould, writing on collective violence, notes that “violent social confrontation attracts attention in proportion to their scale and severity, making it easy to disregard those conflicts that remain limited to a few persons or never escalate to violence at all” (Gould 1999: 357). It would appear that a significant body of research on violence relates primarily to physical violence—a disciplinary manifestation of the same syndrome that is visible in other discourses like the media or lay conversation. In a neat classification that appeared in an early essay in 1970, Allen D. Grimshaw noted that “psychoanalysts look for violence-proneness as a characteristic of the individual personality; psychologists attend to the dynamics of the individual’s interaction with his environment; social psychologists search for an explanation for social violence in the acting out of prejudice” (Grimshaw 1970: 9).6 In this characterization of disciplinary differences, it is the social psychologist who mines the area that is closest to what emerges out of the experience of the Assam Movement. By concentrating on the prejudices and discriminatory practices that are responsible for the more overt forms of violence, i.e., in examining violence and finding prejudice as one of its reasons, it may be possible to account for violent episodes in a society. However, this still does not address the way an individual or a collectivity is scarred and marked by engaging in an act of violence. In other words, we still need a mode of thinking that concentrates on the effects of violence on those who perpetrate it, because it is only in this recognition that we can find the causes for why a society turns violent. By this logic, “the attribution of stereotypes” or “the accompanying use of social epithet” (ibid.: 12) are certainly violent usages, but they are also symptoms. Brubaker and Laitin (1998) write about the nuances and gradings of violence, necessary in studying what finally constitutes violence beyond its immediately visible and melodramatic expressions: “violence is itself an ambiguous and elastic concept shading over from the direct use of force to cause bodily harm through the compelling or inducing of actions by direct threat of such force to partly or fully metaphorical notions of cultural or symbolic violence” (ibid.: 427, emphases added).

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Johan Galting (1990), discussing a “phenomenology of violence,” finds a “violence strata”: At the bottom is the steady flow through time of cultural violence.... In the next stratum the rhythms of structural violence are located (penetration, segmentation, marginalization, fragmentation).... And at the top, visible to the unguided eye ... is the stratum of direct violence with the whole record of direct cruelty perpetrated by human beings against each other and against other forms of life and nature in general. (ibid.: 294–95)

“Cultural violence” refers to “those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence—exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics)— that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence” (ibid.: 291). Faced with innumerable episodes of direct violence, the search for those cultural underpinnings becomes urgent. The fear of the guest within, the alien, the illegal immigrant who threatens culture, society, economy, geography (the geographical impact is most apparent in the situation of migrant living that we know as the chars, where land reclaimed from the river is permanently settled by migrants), in a situation where the assimilation process has meant that the language and culture of the indigenous Assamese now have new custodians— this has to be the flip side of the assimilation argument, that a new way of being Assamese may not be welcome in a scenario where the old way is threatened and sought to be guarded. This scenario therefore also provides legitimacy for the directly violent act. Confronted with two kinds of violence—the direct violence, springing from the structural framing of the target, that brings bloodshed and destruction of property, a violence that is easy to understand, explain, and “legitimize” through cultural factors; and the hidden violence that enters the psyche unnoticed because it is not recognized as violence— it is imperative to clarify that the second is not only a step toward the first, a preparation or a preliminary act, nor is it simply its effect. It has a life of its own that is discerned only subsequent to the overtly violent phase. The case of Nellie is exemplary. The Nellie massacre was seen as a genocidal event, and therefore, in a way, was easy to slot and periodize, to place in a past whose mistakes we would like to learn from. It

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spawned a discourse of naturalization in the form of explanations of how to live with it, or, more specifically, how to live with it through distancing and rejection. Occupying a large space in the Assamese psyche, it rendered obscure the subtle violence of the so-called peaceful and nonviolent movement with its “largely peaceful” protest actions. It invited impatience at an “insignificant aspect” (this was the reaction of several of my interlocutors, whose fading memories of the protests they had participated in enabled this position), when there were bigger things to be discussed like the non-implementation of the Assam Accord and the continuing immigrant influx. This is a classic situation in which to observe the ironical twist of historical memory as it trivializes and brushes aside the source of discomfiture within the self, and finds its target in the easily identified external agent or in the “abnormal deviance” of an incident like Nellie. Against this impulse, it is necessary to reveal innocuous acts and statements that suggest an inner violence and anger at the other. After the widely condemned killing of the mother of an ULFA member in a security operation comprising the police and two SULFA men,7 two spokesmen, one for the People’s Consultative Group (PCG) and the other for the AJYCP, came out with the view that no legal defense should be made available to the men involved in the killing. They urged lawyers not to offer their services to the perpetrators. The immediate choice of an undemocratic and unconstitutional route of punishment is a dangerous symptom of social immaturity that does not speak for the health of a society or of a mature approach to the problems that beset it. Clearly evident here is the new form that violence assumes when a society has absorbed anger and hatred of the other to such an extent that it becomes visible in the most ordinary articulations where the other figures. In this context, it may also be noted that the retrospective text is an indicator of another aspect of violence. The “long-held” anger is demonstrated in an essay like “Our Land, Their Living Space” by a prominent journalist and erstwhile editor of the Guwahati-based, widely circulated English daily Sentinel (Bezbaruah 2006). This essay is marked by a verbal violence, revulsion, and intolerance that seem to stem from a hatred of the other, expressed most clearly in the author’s call to economically squeeze out the immigrant by not employing him/her, by making it impossible to earn a living. This “solution” is periodically

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trotted out by individuals, and is among the most unfortunate indicators of social change; those who offer it conveniently elide the glaring evidence of its subversion by its most vocal supporters. Many would remember that during the movement, the loudest and angriest voices raised were of those who had sent their children out of the state so that they would not lose an academic year. These were the same students who protested safely on the lawns of India Gate in New Delhi, and who were among the sharpest detractors of non-participation in protests in the state.

Protest Programs and Violence The organizational grid of the protest programs was provided by the neighborhood. The neighborhood was particularly successful as the site of mobilization because the penalty for opposition was so often administered in a neighborhood—ostracization, deliberate snubbing, and debarring from neighborhood social functions. Borgohain, in his essay on Bihu referred to earlier, comments in passing on the developing fissures within families, e.g., husbands who were anti-movement, wives who were activists, and children who were alienated from their parents. This was especially noticeable in the government housing campus for the employees of the Dispur secretariat, which provided an interesting case of the neighborhood-centered nature of the protest programs that is both frightening and fascinating in equal measure. The men and women who were government employees were commanded to attend office by government directive under threat of losing their jobs. Their children and wives (in cases where only the husband or father worked) would expect them to flout the official directive and protest against the government by taking part in the programs. Refusal would be construed as a personal affront or slight to the enthusiastic, often self-designated leader who failed to organize his own family into the movement. Uzan Bazaar, an old residential locality in the heart of Guwahati, offers another example of the pressure brought to bear on individuals by the neighbors among whom they had lived for at least three generations. The breaking of old friendships, the alienation resulting from ideological differences, the boycotting of families perceived to be unsympathetic to the popular discourse of the movement, and the pressure on tenants to

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leave—these were common features of the neighborhood in the time of the movement. A third exemplary case is Fancy Bazaar, the commercial hub of the city inhabited primarily by Marwari business families. Here, an entire community was victimized by its own success and virtually insulated, as friends from the Assamese community ceased to visit. Student leaders identified it as an easy source of “donations,” a practice whose long shadow is visible in the extortions that became a characteristic of militant groups like ULFA and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB). One of the significant results of isolating a community through presumptions about its lack of sympathy for the cause and suspicions about its loyalty to Assam (also seen in a town like Dibrugarh, which had a sizeable Bengali and Marwari population) was a sharper ghettoization of the community, and the emergence of an acknowledged sense of distance and “closing in,” in a society that had been marked by an easy coexistence of many culturally distinct groups. The movement’s programs involved bandhs (strikes), processions, rallies, picketing, dharnas, and courting arrest—all of these generally classed as modes of non-violent protest. The so-called peaceful bandh involved, from the beginning, the forcible closure of shops and other business establishments, educational institutions, and government offices. Ensuring its success entailed surveillance to pin down the odd objector or aberrant, pelting stones at the offending shop, or, in the case of government employees, pelting stones at the individual’s house, intimidating, and shouting slogans, usually on the theme of “betrayal of the motherland.” Once again, the neighborhood, where such surveillance could be maintained most effectively, came into the picture. The bandh also came to have long-term consequences as it became adopted as the most popular form of protest for all sections of society—students, political parties, employees, transport organizations, and, of course, militants. For a while, it was a much-feared event, since the group calling the bandh would take recourse to every one of the measures just mentioned to make sure there were no violations. In the case of bandhs called by students, political parties, and militants, their cadres would be stationed around a particular area, keeping watch on inhabitants. These events could often turn violent. Today, the bandh is the quickest resort of all groups who wish to protest any action perceived as unjust, violative of individual rights, or

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simply opposed to their group’s agenda. The bandhs called by the ULFA in times of national celebration or to protest government apathy over talks are successful because of the explosive violence and killings that the group has shown itself capable of, and that frequently mark these days. Processions could be equally intimidating, especially when they took the form of slogan-shouting groups walking through a neighborhood, urging, and sometimes summoning, people to come out of their homes and join; or when torchlight processions wended their way through small streets, or large crowds marched to the sounds of cymbal, drum, and trumpet. Here too, the assumption was that support was total, so that any show of reluctance to participate was likely to be received with verbal and physical violence. Rallies and picketing too involved coercive actions to compel participation. The first bandh of the movement—a twelve-hour, all-Assam affair— took place on June 8, 1979, to protest the inclusion of the names of illegal foreigners in the voters’ list. The spark, as is well known, came with the discovery of inflated rolls on the occasion of a by-election to the Lok Sabha in the Mangaldoi constituency of Lower Assam. All by-elections were canceled on August 22, 1979, with the fall of the Janata government at the Center. The first episode of mass picketing took place on September 6 and 7 in front of the offices of district commissioners, sub-divisional officers, and block development officers. The protesters demanded the detection and deportation of foreigners. From September 12 to 14, picketing took place before the offices of corporations, banks, and post offices. Monirul Hussain, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Assam Movement and whose book is informative on these aspects, writes of clashes between protestors and non-Assamese employees of the Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) at its office in Nazira. Hussain mentions cases of intimidation (M. Hussain 1993: 110). He also usefully records the dates of the first occurrence of many of the protest actions: a mass rally on October 6, 1979, in Guwahati when 100,000 people participated; the “drive-out-foreigners campaign” on October 9; and from October 12 to 18, a week-long program of actions that included satyagraha and courting arrest. This last program saw massive participation and many people have memories of it. It included huge crowds comprising students (boys and girls), women, and some men, who gathered in and around Pan

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Bazaar, DC’s court, the High Court, and on the roads around Dighalipukhuri, an area where several educational institutions and their hostels are located. My personal memory of the event is of very large numbers of people, my college classmates and I included, walking in ordered files. I also remember blazing sunlight and many young people fainting in the heat. The memory includes the somewhat unpleasant experience, for some of us, of being reprimanded by several of the women for thoughtlessly wearing saris and not mekhela sadors (the traditional attire of Assamese women), and of being told that anybody could see that we had no sympathy for the cause. We were too young to debate the issue, but in retrospect the situation that compelled such an expression is a point to pause upon. The episode is caught up in questions of assimilation, its degree and nature, the treatment of difference in all identity movements, and, of course, questions of verbal violence. This week-long program demonstrated the consolidation of an extremely efficient organizational network as well as spontaneous mass participation. Though episodes of intimidation and coercion were also quite common, accounts of these are only available today in personal reminiscences. Many people received phone calls, were called out by friends, or were summoned by young emissaries. Others were “collected” as neighborhood groups made their way to buses organized by the leaders. The next few months saw frequent protest programs. The durations of bandhs got longer—a thirty-six-hour bandh was held from December 3 to 4; picketing hours went round the clock—December 5 to 8. On December 8, 1979, examinations were postponed and all educational institutions were closed indefinitely. A new program, the round-the-clock gherao around the residences of candidates for the forthcoming elections, was carried out till December 10, which was the last date for the filing of nomination papers. The gherao saw, for the first time, many boys and girls staying out whole nights with parental permission—they were permitted this transgression for the defense of the land. Elections were postponed, except in the Bengali-dominated Barak valley. Another significant program was the oil blockade which began on December 27, 1979, stopping the flow of crude oil to the Barauni Refinery in Bihar. Police first fired tear-gas shells to disperse the picketers, and then fired bullets which killed four people. An official of the ONGC was killed by the irate mob. The oil blockade seemed to have the effect that

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none of the other programs had had. As a result, the perception gained ground that, because the stopping of crude oil affected all of India directly, the central government had sat up and begun to take notice that something serious was going on in this much-neglected, almost invisible corner of the country. The mass rallies and satyagrahas continued, and other products of the region, including jute, bamboo, and plywood, were also prevented from being taken out of the state. It is possible to see a change in the modes of protest as the movement dragged on and the hopes of an early settlement receded. Toward the later part of 1980, the bandhs increased in both frequency and duration. There were programs of non-cooperation with the government, which often came to mean the prevention of government officials from attending office. There were also frequent blackouts, people’s curfews, and social boycotts. All this signified a growing aggression, the creation of conditions for greater hostility in neighborhoods, the lowering of toleration levels, and great individual and collective anger at minor violations of designated programs. Most of these programs, as noted earlier, were neighborhood-centric, since the neighborhood was the unit that was easiest to manage. Often the most enthusiastic policing was done by adolescent boys and girls who suddenly felt empowered against authority, whether this was parental, adult, or state authority. This nascent violence began to be apparent in the slackening of parental control and the breakdown of traditional social hierarchies, which were replaced by a hierarchy of force, so often evident in the young boy shoving an elderly person, frequently of a different community, on a deserted street or sometimes stalking a person quietly but menacingly. The involvement of so many young and very young boys and girls, some in their mid-teens (this was, after all, the year when all schools and colleges were closed) has been one of the movement’s most disturbing aspects. The alternative education these youth imbibed through active engagement in protest, “refining” and honing modes of intimidation, came to the surface once again when so many of them, unable to switch back to the life of ordinary students when the educational institutions reopened, hurriedly went through the motions of finishing school and college and then went out into society to take up careers that were a direct fallout of the movement. The careers that were spawned by the movement included militancy, extortion, kidnappings and ransom, and the capture of the land and coal business, construction contracts, and the supply of anything for which

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there was a demand. All such ventures could be conducted through strong-arm tactics, but none involved any form of production—one of the reasons for the economic downslide of the state. The youth also became power brokers, or the criminal arms of political parties, or simply joined the ULFA, which in those early days seemed an attractive alternative to more conventional employment as it combined “social responsibility” with earning plenty of easy money. This debasement of the young was missed in the euphoria of mass mobilization, but it has had longterm consequences in the form of the violent turn taken by society, and in the refuge in militancy taken by many young people for whom resuming the normal life of students seemed virtually impossible after the freedom from authority of that one lost academic year. This key aspect of the movement, one that seems to have been given scant attention by commentators—the participation of young adolescents and the subsequent scarring of an entire generation—has to be viewed in terms of its after-effects, the turn to militancy, and the criminalization of a whole society. Unfortunately, it received little attention at the time from the movement leadership and their mentors, who were carried away by the euphoria of a mass following that cut across the generations and that especially captured the imagination of the young. Mahatma Gandhi, who in this as in so many other aspects of the organization of a mass movement, is an exemplary figure, reflects on the issue of disciplining the much larger numbers—a whole country—who were his enthusiastic followers. He writes particularly on the training of volunteers, who he saw as playing an important role in keeping the gatherings of people in order: Our volunteers for me are, and should be our non-violent army, irresistible and invincible. Therefore I would expect every adult person to undergo a practical volunteer training for at least three months.... The first thing, therefore, is to prepare a textbook giving in minute detail the course of instruction to be imparted to candidate volunteers and then begin the work of instruction not in cities but in villages.... Whilst I note the marvelous mass awakening that has taken place, I am painfully conscious of the fact that a far greater and a far more solid awakening has to take place before we can confidently say that swaraj is ours for the asking. Any extraneous event may put power into our hands. I would not call that swaraj of the people. (M.K. Gandhi 1976: 386–87)

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Gandhi here stresses that only adults are to be volunteers, that they require training, and that the mass awakening has to be transformed into a different, more “solid” awakening, which he links to swaraj. Swaraj is primarily rule over the self before it becomes self-rule in the political domain. This is the aspect of large movements that was ignored or not considered important enough by the Assam Movement leadership. Paying lip service to Gandhi by describing the movement as non-violent and Gandhian was always the easy option, compared to expending serious thought on the many aspects and implications of awakening the enormous energies of people, and especially the youth, and then not having a structure in place to absorb these energies or channelize them in useful and constructive directions. The end result was and is there for everyone to see. Not only did the leadership flounder when they came to power; hundreds of their youthful adherents simply turned to violence of different grades and kinds in their career choices. If they had learnt nothing else out of the experience of the movement, they certainly took away with them a sense of the power of intimidation, and of the vulnerability of institutions and individuals in the face of a show of brutal force. In the context of such violence, absence of dialog, coercion, and lack of control over its workers, it is obvious that any mass movement requires this preliminary planning as much as it requires the vision of something larger than the immediate gain. Otherwise it could very well face the accusation that part of its agenda was to unleash violence against the aberrants through agents that the leaders could conveniently admit were beyond their control. “Violence studies are about two problems: the use of violence and the legitimation of that use” (Galting 1990: 291). This was one of the easiest justifications that came to be offered for incidents like Nellie. As the Japanese researcher Makiko Kimura (2007) has shown through her interviews with various people involved in the Nellie incident, it was very easy for the local leaders and members of the AASU to shift the blame on to the Lalung villagers, who, according to them, were “justified” in perpetrating violence because their lands had been encroached upon. More immediately, girls from their community were kidnapped by the immigrant Muslim villagers—an interpretation that was virtually rejected by the tribal group. Though it would appear from the scale of these programs that all of Assam was involved, the “awakening” merely took place in the Brahmaputra

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valley in Upper and Lower Assam. Assam’s many “others” (Myron Weiner [1988] eloquently describes the coexistence of many tribal peoples as a “mosaic” in his Sons of the Soil, a book that was popular reading at the time) found themselves out in the cold largely because of the dominant Assamese vision of the movement. Monirul Hussain offers a picture of the movement’s class and caste base: High caste Asamiya Hindus composed of Brahmins, Ganaks, Kayasthas and Kalitas provided the core support base.... Both socially and culturally they are the dominant group in Assam.... Besides, the dominant majority of the Asamiya middle class, businessmen, contractors and small capitalists belong to these caste groups. They dominate the state administration, police, professions, educational institutions and the powerful regional press and media.... They supported, strengthened and defended the movement very strongly. (M. Hussain 1993: 128)

This is an important ingredient for understanding the manner in which the movement was managed, organized, and sustained, as well as an indicator of the forces that were unleashed during it and in its wake. Hussain also mentions the harassment and humiliation faced by several eminent individuals: Hiren Gohain was among the most prominent of these, but another important victim was Nirupama Borgohain (ibid.: 133). Hussain would like to infer from these two cases that most victims were of the left. But, as the memories I tracked reveal, social boycott and ostracization were more widespread than this and touched anyone who failed to participate in programs or whose sympathies were suspect. And when suspicious sympathies were conjoined with a different linguistic and cultural affiliation, the humiliation was compounded and frequently led to physical assault. Hussain mentions a term that he says was used for the leftists—Bangalir dalal (ibid.: 140)—“agent of the Bengali.” But its use was more common than he suggests, an aspect of the verbal violence that many of us heard and remember having been applied indiscriminately, hurled in anger so often by that newly empowered neighborhood boy sent out to call and gather people for the designated program of the day. The widely acknowledged incidents of violence are easy to recall and process, and are also recorded in contemporary writings on the movement. These include the violence in north Kamrup in January 1980 when neo-Assamese Muslims and Bengali Hindus were killed; the

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bomb blast in Jorhat in April 1981 which killed the commissioner, E.S. Parthasarathy; and the most dreadful of them all, the Nellie massacre on the night of February 18, 1983, an orchestrated, systematic genocide of immigrants, the actual numbers varying, according to different accounts, from 1,200 to 1,700. Similar pogroms took place in Gohpur and Chaulkhowachapori. One looks in vain for self-scrutiny as the movement took these unfortunate directions. In a memorandum to the prime minister of India dated February 2, 1980, appears a brief description of the movement that shows little awareness of the difficulties of carrying out programs of protest involving so many people. The memorandum reiterates a commitment to non-violence without elaboration or thought on how this would be done. The document bolsters the self-image of the movement with quotations (see below) that suit the presentation of its profile: We are committed to pursue the cause of the present movement with [a] sense of deep conviction on the principles of non violence, democracy and secularism. The people of Assam spontaneously responded to our call with a sense of discipline; solidarity with the movement is evident in every phase. Determination to maintain peace and harmony is written on the face of everybody participating in the movement. (quoted in Trivedi 1995, 2: 630)

This was the most popular view of the movement, self-generated and therefore less objectively or impartially visible. It was also the commonest view in circulation, and it is significant that at this time the apparently peaceful nature of the movement also drew the attention of the national media, who added their bit to the narrative of the “peaceful Assamese”—a favorite self-conception that was illustrated with reference to the centuriesold amity and harmony among Assam’s Hindus and Muslims, its tribals and non-tribals. This was a conception that was fleshed out by many of the contributors to the identity narrative, and that has undergone such drastic transformation in the last three decades. In the light of declarations such as the one just quoted, it is important to acknowledge the implicit violence in the modes of action adopted to protest various actions of the government. This is because it was in the conduct of many of these exercises that the first glimpses of violence and its many overt and hidden forms appeared. At the same time, it was

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perhaps complacency over the fact that, at this point in the movement, there was less overt violence, which led to the leadership’s reluctance to confront the incipient signs of violence in the day-to-day interactions between those who volunteered to organize and those who were to be co-opted as participants. The only concession made was through a rhetoric of alienation in a reference to “conspirators”—“anti-Assam politicians and bureaucrats who were trying to frustrate the movement and its peaceful character” (Trivedi 1995, 2: 630). A hint of discomfort is heard here in the mention of conspirators, an attempt to find a sufficiently distanced cause for the violent incidents that were being perpetrated on the fringes of the movement. However, the violence that accompanied the movement at different stages was quickly isolated, either by being made the handiwork of external agents or by being shown as the result of extreme provocation by non-sympathizers. The “principles” mentioned in the memorandum quoted earlier have become part of the linguistic arsenal of resistance movements in a democracy, but are not necessarily always an aid to the expansion of ideas. The convenience and usability of the terms, the ease with which it is possible to pay lip service to Gandhi, have ensured that even the new situation of use does not compel the rethinking and renewing of the implications of those concepts. The way a certain preconception has developed in our understanding of these terms is evident in the two quotations from national dailies which the memorandum brings in to support its argument for the non-violent nature of the movement. The memorandum quotes from an editorial in the Illustrated Weekly of India (no dates given): I see no violence, no buses being burnt. What strikes me most about the Assamese people is a certain element of softness, and certain element of gentleness.... If Gandhiji could not keep his people under control, student leaders are trying to keep everybody under control. (ibid.)

This is naïve not only because of the commentator’s reliance on what he could see, but also because of what he was capable of seeing. The reference to arson, one of the most visible forms of mass violence, is a reflection of the prism through which the national media has always viewed India’s northeast, by using familiar and easily accessible models,

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in this case of violence, to certify the region’s non-violent character. The limitations of journalistic observation are evident in the reliance on the visible and the immediately apparent, and on the interpretation of the moment—on instant understanding drawn from the obvious. Many of the reports on the movement by members of the national print media suffered from this inability to look beyond the obvious. This tendency is probably responsible for the polarization of journalistic reporting on the movement between the early romanticization and the post-1983 vilification. The signs of the violence that came from Nellie onwards should have already been apparent. Some of the most grisly photographs of human dismemberment were published in the report on the incident in India Today (March 15, 1983). One of the interested observers was the journalist Shekhar Gupta, then reporting for India Today, who produced a book on the movement that was prophetic in its study of the fractures in the state (Gupta 1984), but who presumably never went back to the subject. India Today reproduced one of those pictures from Nellie in the special issue on India mentioned earlier (December 18, 2006, p. 162). Much of the “rest of India’s” interest in the Assam Movement had been momentary. A sign of this lies in the fact that there has always been great interest in statistics, but very little by way of reflection on the long-term effects, which are not always only political. The Gandhi reference in the Illustrated Weekly’s certificate is a convenient excuse that ignores Gandhi’s acceptance of responsibility for aberrations and the deep reflection he brought to the issue of non-violence. The students’ memorandum took its second quote from K.N. Malik, writing in the Times of India (no date given): A remarkable feature of the movement launched by the students’ union and supported by all sections of society is the spontaneity and discipline displayed by the people. Only such sections of people observe a bandh or participate in the non-cooperation movement as are asked to by the AASU. (Trivedi 1995, 2: 638)

(It may be noted here that the phrase “asked to” disguises coercive methods.) Senior and respected journalists like Arun Shourie and Kuldip Nayar were frequent visitors to the state during this period, creating the illusion that the rest of India was with the students, that the problem was visible on the national radar. These “pats on the back” from the national media

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were used by the students as surrogate articulations that were convenient blinds to the realities on the ground, which, because of their own complete engagement, could and should have been apparent to them. The complexity of these self-descriptions comes from two sources that are part of this memorandum. The first is the superficial mining of the “Gandhi/non-violence” thought corpus that has so easily slipped into political discourse and is now available for deployment as a “packaged” political philosophy. The other issue brought to the fore by this document has wider ramifications with regard to the observation and representation of events of this kind. The journalist who comes to look, record, and then report is like the outside observer, bringing in his/her baggage the frame of interpretation that s/he will use. Therefore, “buses being burnt” is the paradigm against which s/he judges violence. And the inference about softness and gentleness is not really as complimentary as the memorandum makes it out to be. Rather, this image is an extension of the “placid Assamese” that has always been such a convenient construct, and one that has been behind the “neglect” and “exploitation” motifs that are both components of the narrative and of the reality. Against these claims and certificates is the government record of violence. P.C. Sethi’s statement in the Lok Sabha comes at a later date, March 14, 1983, following the carnage at Nellie on February 18. As home minister, Sethi’s report presumably had the weight of government machinery behind it; by that token, it is worth a glance. It is also necessary to take account of it here because the rationalization of state violence must also be hidden in its particular representation of the movement as violent. These two competing descriptions of the movement, with their very distinct and different motivations, reveal how perceptions and constructions work to legitimize certain interpretations and become fulcrums for future courses of action. Like the students’ memorandum, the home minister’s speech is a fabric sewn from different kinds of texts. The passage of time is significant. Around this time, following the announcement of elections, there was an increase in violence. The home minister’s presentation of the movement not only refers to actual incidents of violence, but also puts on record violent articulations in the form of slogans that were printed and circulated as leaflets or shouted verbally during processions and protest marches. Some of the slogans show deep fractures in the inclusive narrative that was

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heard at the start in 1980. Many of the separatist sentiments that are today ULFA buzzwords are heard here, and are clear indications of the mindset of the agitators at this stage of the movement: “We shall form our country with blood of martyrs.” “Bloody Indians go back.” “India has no right to rule Assam.” “Assam region should think of an independent United State of Assam after separating from India” (Trivedi 1995, 2: 643). There were many such leaflets advocating violence. The themes of separatism and alienation of later insurgent discourse are already heard here. Sethi also notes that despite the AASU and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP) distancing themselves from episodes of violence, “there has never been any strong denouncement and condemnation” (ibid.). He states that immediately after the announcement of elections in 1983, seven pamphlets addressed to the agitationists were found in circulation containing a program to stop the elections. Among these, the one most indicative of the new violent turn was “issued by the so called ‘Death Squad’ under the caption ‘Satarka Vani’ (‘words of warning’), which threatened government employees with dire consequences for being loyal to government” (ibid.). Threats included the “assassination of employees, their sons and daughters, rape of wives and grown up daughters. The employees have been warned that their conduct is under close watch” (ibid.: 644). Sethi cites state government reports of “gherao, kidnapping, assault, arson and disruption of communication links by arson of road bridges, and sabotage of railway tracks,” and also provides figures between January and February 1983: “1344 deaths, 611 assaults, 564 arsons, 11 cases of mischief, 12 intimidations, 5 kidnappings . . . 111 cases of explosions and 1500 missing persons” (ibid.). Another aspect of the movement that comes under Sethi’s scanner is the role of the local press in sustaining the momentum of the movement, and in circulating inflammatory statements and suggestions to its wide readership. He places before the Lok Sabha the case of a local newspaper carrying quotations from Hitler and Mussolini, respectively, as incitements to violence: “The very first essential for success is perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.” “There is a violence that liberates and a violence that enslaves. There is a violence that is moral and a violence that is immoral” (ibid.: 645). In his speech, Sethi invited members to draw their own conclusions about “what inspires the agitators” (ibid.).

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It is possible to view this speech in three distinct and equally viable ways. At one level, since it relies on actual records, it is a picture of the time. The same impression is also available from other kinds of writings on the movement as well as in people’s memories (discussed later). At another level, it is a project of marginalization of this troublesome corner of the country, and a justification for the unleashing of state violence through the deployment of the state’s security apparatus in the region. At a third level, the speech represents the “rest of India’s” narrative about Assam, which one still hears thirty years down the line, describing the region as among the most corrupt and violent. All of this is also in tune with the counter-insurgency narrative about the region that is one of the most important ways through which the identity narrative receives its inputs. The above positions emanating from opposed formations reveal, quite predictably, two extreme positions on violence—one denying it, the other classing everything under the same category of violence: deaths, assaults, and “mischief.”

Interpretations and Retrospection Sanjoy Hazarika, in the course of writing about migration, makes several observations about the movement, acknowledging some of the violence: “Marches, protests, pickets and dharnas were the order of the day. Some events were supported by government officers, who defied orders and courted arrest, demanding the ouster of the aliens. If it was not zenophobia, then it was patriotism of a very jingoistic quality” (S. Hazarika 2000: 64–65). The violence was simmering beneath the surface of these acts, and Hazarika’s reference to jingoism recalls the aggression that seemed to mark everyone who defied some norm or the other to participate, in whose mind was the conviction that an entire way of life was endangered. Even more revealing is Hazarika’s mention of the founding principles of the movement: One of these was that the means adopted for the struggle had to be nonviolent, Gandhian style satyagrahas. Virtually every ethnic group of the state, student associations from other states, government officers, business people, lawyers, journalists, artistes and other creative groups, as well as

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professionals joined the protests in those first few years before the momentum slowed as its popularity slipped. (S. Hazarika 2000: 65)

This bifurcation of the period of the movement into a phase when it was popular, non-violent, and peaceful, followed by one when it became less popular, alienated many of its supporters, and was marked by violence, has been the most convenient way to interpret it and to account for its changing character over the six years that it lasted. Such a critical commonplace has also made it possible to ignore what I have called the movement’s invisible violence, or to not recognize it as violent, because the period of violence has been easily available for one to condemn and dissociate oneself from. It is this very resort to such a bifurcation that is revealed in the recognition that “there was always an extreme fringe, which did not believe in peaceful protests and used force to secure financial gain for themselves and terrorize the prosperous business community” (ibid.: 66). Such admissions about the violence of the movement are unsatisfactory and frustrating, because the other kind that has had such a debilitating effect on the psyche of individual and society is all the more easily brushed off. Hazarika mentions three terms that were on the lips of every participant—detection, deletion, and deportation. He characterizes them as “pat” and “glib” and “impossible to implement” (ibid.: 65). What he does not draw attention to is the violence of each of these acts—a violence directed at the hated alien, but equally corrosive for the host society that had evolved these as solutions that often took the form of “action” by citizens, the element of forcible eviction echoing through each of the terms. The rhetoric of violence that was in use during the movement left its echoes in the language that people used even after the period of agitation was over. This rhetoric is one of the sharpest indicators of the erosion of self–other relationships. Crimes of the kind just mentioned are brutalizing for the perpetrators. The scars on a society’s psyche will begin to show up at some point, as they did in the case of Assam, spiraling up into a three-decade-long period of people against people, of the easy turn to different forms of violence, of insurgencies turning into terrorism, of a “casual, laid-back society” getting criminalized, of violence practiced by different arms of the state, especially the police and the frequently-called-out army, and the subtle but insidious violence of the administration. In fact, the principles

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on which the bureaucracy rested, which had made it such an efficient and faceless colonial institution, were seriously undermined during the movement.8 Moreover, this is the moment to which it is possible to trace the large-scale subversion of social and moral values that has erupted in corruption today, and in the ease with which every administrative office, every official duty, can be set aside for personal gain. It was almost as if the movement acted as a kind of release valve for an institution that had frozen in time, and the catharsis was too much to handle. Sanjib Baruah (1999) offers a survey of the movement in a chapter of his book on subnationalism. His periodization of the movement into five phases clinically systematizes the six-year-period; further, Baruah’s primary disciplinary location in political science ensures that he sees the entire period in terms of elections, the resistance to them, the rise and fall of short-term governments—the political frame is predominant in Baruah’s assessment. The title he gives the first phase, “Festival of Protest” (from June 1979 to November 1980), sums up the mood with which the movement began—“festive and mostly peaceful protest actions, but with some reports of ethnic violence” (ibid.: 125). The festive mood was the way the masses, including women and children, participated in the movement, many with a momentary or short-term enthusiasm that quickly faded from memory. Baruah titles the second phase of the movement (between December 1980 and January 1983) “Confrontation,” and marks it as a period of increasing violence. This phase included the killing of E.S. Parthasarathy, a civil servant, in a bomb attack; the imposition of president’s rule; the cleansing of the administration and the police of movement-friendly officers; and the entry of paramilitary forces in a configuration of citizens versus military muscle (ibid.: 128–30). But it is in the third phase, around the elections of 1983, that Baruah sees what he calls “the Breakdown of Order.” Around 3,000 people were killed, and new ethnic divisions emerged along which people became polarized and killings took place (ibid.: 130–35). Baruah evokes some of these events to provide a picture that is fleshed out in current ethnic divides: “Tiwa versus Bengali Muslims, Bodo versus Bengali Hindus and Muslims, Bodo versus Assamese Hindus, Mising versus Bengali Hindus and Muslims, Muslims versus Hindus, and Assamese Hindus and Muslims versus Muslims of Bengali descent” (ibid.: 132).

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Looking at the immediate fallout of the movement, Baruah identifies two areas. First, it had “the paradoxical effect of strengthening the argument for giving more legal protection to those suspected of being ‘illegal aliens’” (S. Baruah 1999: 141). In this context, he mentions the passing of the Illegal Migration (Determination by Tribunal) Act (IMDT Act) by a Parliament where Assam was virtually unrepresented, whereby the onus for proving someone an alien was placed on the accuser. The second fallout was the Assam Accord. “The other side of the opposition to illegal immigration ... is the acceptance of the immigrants whose stay in Assam is seen as legal. This is no mean achievement considering the scope of the demographic transformation of this land frontier” (ibid.: 142). In an early essay written just after the signing of the Assam Accord (S. Baruah 1994), Baruah had expressed the commonly held belief among scholars that the Assam Movement’s most obvious achievement was the centering of the immigration issue. But he had added, as a kind of direction for a solution, that the focus should be on stopping influx rather than on deportation, an understanding enshrined in the Geneva Convention of 1951 (further refined in 1964 at New York to include cases after 1951). The irony is that a movement of such apparent significance for collective life should now be, for many, a mere blank. As I discovered in conversations with people from three neighborhoods of Guwahati, for each one of those who were willing and able to retrospect meaningfully and retrieve dominant impressions, rhetoric, and actions from the time, there were others whose participation was most aggressive but for whom the movement left no lasting impact. “I don’t remember now” was a common refrain. This is especially true of the large majority of women who were among the movement’s most visible and shrill supporters, but who now appear in hindsight to have followed the leaders without question, allowing sentiment to overrule thought. They seem to have been able to blank out those events and resume life as if that episode had never occurred. This desire to erase, the ability to forget, has the same source as the newly articulated wish at this time in Assam’s life to reject the militant or insurgent, condemning them as sources of violence that has nothing to do with one’s daily living. The discomfiting questions are therefore best not asked, or are best accommodated within controllable parameters of dealing with the past.

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Women, adolescents, students—these groups were the building blocks of the movement, keeping it visible, not because they understood the implications in all their complexity, but because the leadership was able to communicate to its followers a simplified version of its aim. The simplification of the grand narrative, its delivery in assimilable form, is part of the responsibility of a leadership in mobilizations of this scale. But this simplification is also the reason easy transgressions, violations, and violence could take place, because that simple message does not come with any underpinning, with an equally accessible moral interpretation (in the way Gandhi invested the idea of swaraj with a political and moral weight). The movement had one single narrative for its mass following, which went something like this: “Assam was being overrun by illegal immigrants from Bangladesh who were taking away jobs, affecting the economy, occupying land belonging legitimately to the indigenous Assamese and the people had now to get them evicted.” Monirul Hussain, who calls this the ideology that the leaders got across to the people with the help of the press, says that they “popularized the idea that the Asamiyas were facing a serious threat to their identity in the wake of continuous illegal immigration” (M. Hussain 1993: 166). The spare, uncluttered idea was easy to get across. There was no moral struggle involved in the formulation of this message, and therefore nothing of the kind reached the people. The simplification of the aim also meant that once the crisis period was over, nothing remained. Today, when we are again speaking of immigrant influx, with the AJYCP making a demand for inner line permits for Assam (like the other states of the region), with students and the government in Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh pushing suspected immigrants across state borders into Assam, and with the rhetoric of threat and engulfment once again floating up into the perceptual domain—how much of the past is recalled, and how?

Dissent The mass movement, because of the profile of its participants, because numbers are more important for it than the ability of these participants to reflect over the rightness or wrongness of the actions demanded of them, needs its conscientious objectors, its critics and dissenters, who,

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in the resistance itself, can articulate the other side of the story and offer a critique of the ideology that drives it. Without such stated differences expressed in the form of debates, discussions, and exchanges, no movement can have long-term social, political, and intellectual effects. The pedagogic duty of encouraging dissent (as Edward Said would have insisted), disagreements, and conversations is something that was crucially missed by the ideologues who stood behind the students. I remember that questions and queries were never heard, or were only responded to with suspicion and abuse. The commonest response was an aggressive declamation. In Homen Borgohain’s reading of this intellectual evasion, “the agitators answer logic and argument with a display of power and the raising of the bogeys of fear. This is the current movement’s biggest weakness. Democracy means discussion and debate; fascism, force and cacophony” (Borgohain 1997: 167). My classmates and seniors in college never actually conversed; they agreed among one another, and drowned questions and dissent. Among the many startling associations was one made by a senior in college—that Assam would be like another Vietnam, and eventually the guerilla resistance to neo-colonialism was repeated in the ideology of the ULFA. The failure to hear, discuss, and understand the undercurrents in such comparisons is behind the collective amnesia that has been the revelation of the present. The intellectual response indicates what a democratic people’s movement should have: the space for debate and other opinions; knowledge of history and the ability to disseminate such knowledge among its followers (the selection involved in this process is important and indicative); a strong, thinking leadership; and knowledge of other such movements and the willingness/ability to learn from their successes and failures. Amartya Sen in The Argumentative Indian links the vibrant democratic practices in India, not with the internalization of Western democratic norms, but with the country’s existing “argumentative tradition,” which seems to provide a fertile soil where democracy makes its home. He cites examples from the Upanishadic “arguing combat” (A. Sen 2005: 7), “argumentative encounters” that “frequently crossed the barriers of class and caste” (ibid.: 10), and the Bhakti and Sufi “exponents” of “heretical points of views” who “came from the working class” (such as Kabir, Dadu, Ravidas, Sena—weaver, cotton carder, shoe maker, barber) (ibid.: 11). Despite the inclusive and all-embracing aspects of Sen’s argument,

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the crucial question that this position evokes is whether all of India really shared in these great traditions; did it partake of them in the same way, and did they have the same kinds of legacies everywhere. The two major commentators on Assamese society invoked in this chapter are Hiren Gohain and Homen Borgohain. The one is an academic, columnist, scholar, and keen observer of Assamese society and politics; the other a reputed author of several highly acclaimed novels, a respected editor and columnist, and, equally with the former, a perceptive observer of the contemporary in Assam. In their writings, from those early years of the movement to the years following it, it is possible to see not only a contemporary record, a register of events and their implications, but also a necessary critique that was sadly ignored and often sought to be silenced by violent assaults in the first case and by print media boycott in the second. Their writings are, however, important for another reason. They are, in their own ways, additions to the identity narrative, because they provide that unique field for debate and thought from which the identity narrative selects its constituents. By drawing attention to these aspects of the movement, they are also commenting on the new ingredients and pushing them into visibility. Homen Borgohain, in an essay written around that time that reflects on ignorance and knowledge in relation to the movement, rues the fact that “those of us who practice, cultivate and strengthen Assamese literary culture by writing and making a living out of it are considered enemies of the Assamese language” (H. Borgohain 1997: 167). He was writing in the context of the threat to the language perceived by the movement. Borgohain claimed that the “linguistic identity of the Assamese people has been strengthened by lakhs of new speakers of the language” (ibid.). This is an example of the counter-narrative that the movement threw up by its exclusions, by its literal and dogmatic emphasis on “mass movement,” forgetting that any such movement needed its intellectuals as ideologues and pathfinders, and as mediators between past and present. In retrospect, the marginalization of the intelligentsia and the preference for a more strident ideological guidance was probably responsible for the particular kinds of long-term effects in violence that we see in Assam. This was one of the many little factors that the movement ignored, with its leadership caught in the heady euphoria of mass adulation. And yet, heard here is the inclusive narrative that may

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have salved ethnic feelings of being left out of the majority design of Assamese nationalism. An aspect of the movement that Homen Borgohain mentions is a new communalization. He points this out in an article in the Kolkata-based Bengali newspaper Aajkal, titled “Asom Andolonay Samprodayik Sangharshar Bheti Prastut Kori Aase” (“The Assam Movement Is Preparing the Ground for Communal Clashes”) (H. Borgohain 1982). Borgohain at this time had been ostracized by the local newspapers, which refused to publish him, compelling him to take up the job of Guwahati correspondent for Aajkal. He observed that the presence of the Asom Jatiyotabadi Jubo Parishad (AJJP) was a dangerous sign of the narrowing vision of the Assam Movement. The failures of the movement were pushing its participants toward plans of retaliation. He noted that the AJJP, in its meeting on April 11, 1982, had declared in its resolution that its members would forcibly evict suspected immigrants (bideshis) from the land they were occupying (H. Borgohain 2001c: 14). Twenty-five years later, Isfaqul Rahman remembers the communalization of the movement from another source: In the movement to push back foreigners one of the primary directions was that of Hindu fundamentalism. At one point a BJP-RSS sentiment entered the movement and an anti-Muslim feeling emerged. Muslims were equated with foreigners. As a result the people of Assam were divided into a majority and minorities. (Rahman 2007: 25–29)

This statement implicitly refers to a segment of the identity narrative— that Assam was never communal, its Muslims and Hindus had lived together peacefully for centuries, that the idea of majorities and minorities was an import into the region. This is a part of the narrative that is undergoing crucial changes. Hiren Gohain often warned of another danger: the alienation of the tribals. In an address to a meeting organized by the United Students Front on April 8, 1984, titled “Asomiya Jatir Atmaniyantranar Adhikar” (“The Right of the Assamese to Self-Determination”), he said that “an extreme form of nationalist sentiment in Assam had been responsible for an attitude of indifference to the art and craft of the tribal groups, as well as irritation over the enthusiasm of these groups for their own language and culture” (Gohain 1988: 29). He expressed reservations over the use

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of the terms “tribal” and “non-tribal,” and sought to address the natural fear of minority communities of homogenization into a universalist vision of culture: “The majority community has to convincingly demonstrate that they have no intention to erase their distinctiveness or destroy them” (Gohain 1988: 30). In a prophetic statement, Gohain claimed that unless the tribal communities were treated with concern and their aspirations were recognized, “we will be responsible for pushing them towards a divisive and exclusive mindset. Some of their leaders might also take advantage of it. How can we show the same attitude towards the minorities that we have resented on the part of the centre?” (ibid.). “All communities in Assam have experienced neglect and indifference from the centre. This has been one of the factors uniting us” (ibid.: 31). In an article in the Economic and Political Weekly on the rise of the ULFA, Gohain (2007) returns to this question of neglect by the Center. He identifies the areas where such neglect is most apparent: in the Planning Commission, which is highly centralized and “calculated to ensure regional parity in development”; in decision-making bodies where there are few members from the Northeast; in metropolitan universities where the young Assamese who went out to study are “treated like backwoodsmen”; in “the parliamentary system [which] did not provide remedies as Congress MPs from the state learnt to hold their peace,” and where the protocol of Parliament ensured that younger members of parliament (MPs) received little time to make their points, while old stalwarts held forth interminably. Gohain’s conviction at this point in time was that the Assam Movement “was deflected from this larger issue (of real central neglect) by the more contentious and immediate question of foreign infiltration.” While making this criticism of what he saw as a kind of intellectual bankruptcy among the leadership, Gohain states that they “had no well thought-out plans to develop the natural and human resources of the state through a new constitutional arrangement, though federalism was much debated” (ibid.: 1014, emphasis added). Returning to the movement once again through the prism of the ULFA, Gohain offers a quick but perceptive summary that recalls not just the movement’s chauvinistic character, its angry cries of secessionism and the murder of “outsiders,” but raises a point that has perhaps not been made often enough or widely enough. This has to do with the role of the upper class not only in “mobiliz[ing] the disaffected rural masses by raising an alarm on

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the threat to Assamese identity by ‘foreigners’” (Gohain 2007: 1012), but in using the blind rage of the people to “foment a suffocating chauvinist and fascist atmosphere, enough to intimidate and silence dissenting voices” (ibid.: 1014). In another article, “Asom Andolonor Samadhan” (“Solution to the Assam Movement”), which was originally written in Sanket (June 1, 1984), Hiren Gohain mentions the public insults and systematic programs of humiliation directed at him. This essay is strangely, but perhaps predictably, not so interesting for the solutions it offers as for the picture of post-movement Assam that he provides: “for five years the Assamese people have had their lives laid waste.... A catastrophic cyclone came and spoilt hundreds of lives, destroyed age-old inter community relationships, sowed the seeds of poisonous barbs and thorns for the future” (Gohain 1984: 40). This concern with seeds sown for the future, the impact on society, with side-effects and after-effects, finds expression in the article referred to previously where Gohain poses the question: “How have they [the ULFA] emerged out of a background that reportedly resounded with the noise and bustle of a massive and militant, but non-violent movement?” (Gohain 2007: 1012). At the same time, it is disturbing to note Gohain’s dismissal of the movement as merely “turbulent,” because this puts a certain complexion not only on the many recorded incidents of violence but also on the continuous, low-scale, low-intensity violent acts that marked the daily conduct of the movement—the kind of violence of which his own public humiliation and manhandling must be seen as a component. An act of this kind, which was widely condemned at the time and continues to evoke revulsion, in retrospect has to be examined for its relation to a violence that is more insidious and therefore more damaging for a people. It repeatedly calls to mind the picture that was visible in many of the neighborhoods—of older people being roughed up by young “patriots” who believed their elders did not sufficiently understand or appreciate the great cause for which they were fighting, of the many physically violent attacks on individuals perceived as dissenters or even enemies of the cause. The damage to self that is so troubling in such cases lies precisely in the overturning, through such acts of infringement, of traditional values like respect for elders, for teachers, and for parents—signaling the loss of respect for the other that is embedded in a traditional gesture like

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the “namaskar,” and of the distaste for lifting one’s hand in anger against the defenseless, the unarmed, and the vulnerable. The profile of the agitator actually became a stereotype—the college or university student who had so easily transformed into the aggressive defender of the land and of identity. It is this group that is addressed in a series of articles that originally appeared as editorials in the vernacular newspaper Agradoot, under the title “Let Our New Generation Build a New Society on the Basis of Reason.” The essays were published as a book in 1991, another retrospective text (K. Deka 1991). In his foreword to the book, renowned historian H.K. Barpujari draws attention to the author’s concern with the expectation of progress, and the frustration of these expectations because the youth in whom such hopes were pinned, instead of returning to educational institutions, either became political leaders or practiced strong-arm tactics honed during the movement, virtually behaving like a parallel government (ibid.: 6). The author, Kanaksen Deka, refers in his articles to some of the changes that have occurred in the behavior of the youth of Assam. He singles out specifically an increasing degeneration, a feared ruin of character, and growing disrespect for teachers, guardians, and elders—generally an erosion of traditional values (ibid.: 130–31). These are the features that were most noticeable in the period of the movement and immediately after, and that continue as a legacy of the movement in some form or other to this day. The particular retrospection offered by Deka’s essays immediately in the aftermath of the movement is useful for the argument of this chapter, because it matches its implicit concern for self-scrutiny.

Discursive Representation How did the movement represent itself? What was the nature of the rhetoric it employed in order to bring together into a neat formulation the issues it identified as its source? Prafulla Mahanta, the AASU president at the time of the movement and subsequently chief minister of the state, in a letter to the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, dated Guwahati, January 18, 1980, writes of “unabated infiltration from the neighboring countries, particularly Bangladesh and Nepal” (quoted in N. Hazarika 2001). “The problem,” Mahanta says, “exists from the days of independence.”

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“The very existence of the indigenous population is threatened. We are determined to preserve our identity, our culture and heritage. The Constitution of India certainly guarantees each Indian nationality to do so” (N. Hazarika 2001: 78). This letter is reproduced verbatim in an essay on the movement by Assamese political scientist Niru Hazarika (ibid.: 68–80). The following extracts are worth examining for the letter’s clear declaration of alignment with the national formation: We cannot remain silent spectators when [the] sovereignty of India is attacked. We cherish our Indian Constitution. Our constitution clearly defines who is an Indian and who is not.... We are now firm to free Assam and India from the grip of foreign nationals.... We firmly believe that this problem of foreign nationals is a national problem and we strongly condemn the communal forces who are trying to discredit the movement. (ibid.: 79–80)

The issue of immigration and the willingness to be bound by the Constitution of India are also evident in the memorandum of February 2, 1980, referred to earlier. Mahanta’s rhetoric, which is obviously the result of discussions with his mentors and friends of that time, is revealing for several reasons. He draws attention to the long-standing nature of the problem, originating from independence. He refers to the danger to the indigenous population through recourse to the binary of foreigner and indigenous. The cultural threat is clearly stated as being a local one, while the political threat to sovereignty is seen as a national threat. Mahanta repeats the phrase “our Constitution” several times. Since we are examining the identity narrative from as many varieties of sources as possible, it is of special interest that Mahanta’s letter in fact makes available to the Center a capsule of the elements of that narrative. First, Assam is seen as a distinct cultural entity, but one that is unambiguously part of India. This reveals the strain between the regional and the central that one notices way back at the time of the independence movement—a dialectic that is very much a component of the identity narrative (see Chapter 3). Second, it is a region that is under threat from immigrants. The fear of being swamped had

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been expressed from the time the British brought in and settled Bengalis from East Bengal in various parts of Assam. Finally, a significant aspect of the letter, which presents the Assamese as fighting “India’s battle,” is the expression of the desire to be part of the mainstream that has historically been met with indifference. This indifference has been a major feeder into the “neglect” and “resentment” strains of the identity narrative. It is also worth noting that Hiren Gohain, while denying to the Assam Movement the status of a “genuine national movement in the Marxist sense,” admits that “it certainly derives its strength from unresolved national issues.” He puts this view in perspective by reminding us that there have been earlier movements in Assam on “national issues like boundaries of the state, the official language policy and regional underdevelopment (for example, the Oil Refinery Movement)” (Gohain 1985: 29). The fact that these have not been perceived as national issues except when it has been a case of resource utilization (oil, tea, jute, plywood), or has provided fuel for political battles, has been one of the major grievances of the state. This is part of the general feeling of frustration at not having been able to get across to the mainstream the gravity of the problems that the entire region faces. The paucity of writings on the movement by its leadership makes every piece that is available so much the more interesting. This is especially true of the dissertation written by Prafulla Mahanta as part of the requirement for the Master’s degree in Law that he pursued at Gauhati University. Mahanta’s letter, cited previously, is quite unambiguous that the struggle is against the influx of illegal immigrants or foreigners. Yet the linguistic ambivalence that exists in the vernacular over the words bohiragato, which is a term embracing all outsiders, and bideshi, which translates as “foreigner,” has had some influence in the way the problem got positioned in the Assamese psyche. Monirul Hussain comments on the manner in which the use of the term changed (M. Hussain 1993: 101–03). The Center’s perceived historical lack of sensitivity with regard to Assam’s problems of illegal immigration had led to an overwhelming feeling of neglect and resentment. As a result, the facility with which people from other parts of India came to Assam and did well in business and in the administrative services was generally viewed with disfavor, especially as it appeared that they were getting the jobs and opportunities that the

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locals should have been given. Against the backdrop of this resentment, the line between “all outsiders” (the bohiragato) and the illegally residing foreigner (bideshi) was blurred. The swelling population was seen as the result of illegal immigration certainly, but also of the residence in Assam of people from the rest of India. This was the invisible side of the problem of influx, and the constitutional right of the citizen to move and settle anywhere in the country was for a while forgotten in the heady emotionalism that marked the early phases of the movement. In his dissertation, while commenting on the “Application of Citizenship Laws in Assam,” Mahanta writes that “the rapid increase in the population of Assam is due to the influx of migrants from outside the state and also due to infiltration across the international borders.” He warns that unless restrictive measures of the kind operating in states like Jammu and Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Mizoram are put in place in Assam, “the people of Assam will lose their identity and shall have to kneel down before a colony of advanced Indian states or have to reconcile to the fate of being annexed by a neighboring state through covert or overt invasion” (Mahanta 1986: 78–79). Mahanta’s reference here is to the inner line permit, required to enter some of the sensitive northeastern states. The rhetoric of this statement, which clearly oversteps the scholarly intention of the dissertation to study the citizenship laws of the Indian nation-state (with special reference to Assam), is marked by emotional estrangement from the rest of India. Also audible in its bleak prognostications is an echo of a fear that is currently being articulated about the nexus between the ULFA, many of whose leaders are now based in Bangladesh, and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which is believed to have a presence in that country and a hand in its increasing Islamization. Mahanta hints at the possible designs of either body to include this region into the territory of Bangladesh, or at the very least to convert it into a Muslim-majority region. The other part of Mahanta’s “prophecy” has now taken a new turn as, in the hands of new mediators and makers, the identity discourse of the Assamese announces its alignment with the Indian nation in clear and definite terms (see the Conclusion to this book). Mahanta continues to combine the scholarly and the polemical as he declares a separation between the idealistic student leadership and the corrupt and callous politicians and administrators: “Police and revenue

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officials have played nefarious roles in accommodating these foreigners in order to earn vote banks for the party in power” (Mahanta 1986: 79).9 He briefly mentions the question of public responsibility along with that of “revenue officials, politicians, administrators,” but only in the context of having allowed the problem of illegal migrants to assume such huge proportions as to threaten the very survival of the Assamese race (ibid.). In studies of revolutions in the colonial world, it is generally recognized by historians and theorists that the achievement of freedom from the colonial power is not the end of revolution. Marxist thinkers argue for a concept of “permanent revolution,” on the premise that the achievement of independence is not the end but the starting point for a complete overhaul in society and culture (for the Marxist, such an overhaul is directed to the realization of socialist goals). Nkrumah (1973), for instance, expands the program for the post-independence phase to areas and groups that have remained outside the charmed circle that benefited from the profits of colonialism: Class divisions in modern African society became blurred to some extent during the pre-independence period, when it seemed there was national unity and all classes joined forces to eject the colonial power. ... the African bourgeoisie, the class which thrived under colonialism, is the same class which is benefiting under the post-independence, neo-colonial period. Its basic interest lies in preserving capitalist, social and economic structures. ... in Africa, the bourgeoisie as a whole cannot be seen in isolation from imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism.... It is only peasantry and proletariat working together who are able to subscribe to policies of all-out socialism.... It is the task of the African urban proletariat to win the peasantry to revolution by taking the revolution to the countryside. (ibid.: 489–99, quoted in Parry 2004: 84)

Thomas Sankara argues that the masses’ perception of the “victory of our people over the forces of foreign oppression and exploitation” disguised what was in effect “a change in the forms of domination and exploitation,” with “the petty bourgeoisie and the backward forces of traditional society” now having become the players. In order to prevent this, it was necessary for the revolution to continue its work by undertaking to “transform all social and economic and cultural relations in society” (in Parry 2004: 84).

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In what is almost an echo of Gandhi, Samora Machel states that “to ‘Africanize’ colonialist and capitalist power would be to negate the meaning of our struggle” (in Parry 2004: 85). Gandhi recognized the need to abrogate the colonizer’s methods. He wrote in Young India, December 19, 1929: “If independence means a change from white military rule to a brown we need hardly make a fuss. At any rate, the masses then do not count. They will be subject to the same spoliation as now, if not even worse” (M.K. Gandhi 1929). The same sentiment is endorsed in Hind Swaraj: “You want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger, that is to say, you would make India English.... This is not the Swaraj that I want” (M.K. Gandhi 1966a). Such statements suggest the importance of getting the articulation of the problem right, of not replicating the oppressive systems of power in a newly liberated nation, and of scrupulously guarding against the temptations of such power. They also point to the importance of mediating the colonial period and its history for the future, through articulating opposition to it with enough ammunition to counter the threat of its continuance. Hence the necessity of an ideological and conceptual framework that helps in this process of mediation, in taking the new nation into the future. The Marxist solution to this is the establishment of a relationship between the political party and the people: “The leaders themselves spoke of the ‘spontaneity’ of the movement.... This assertion was a stimulus, a tonic, an element of unification in depth.... It gave the masses a ‘theoretical’ consciousness of being creators of historical and institutional values, of being founders of a state” (Antonio Gramsci, quoted in Parry 2004: 85). This is in fact an argument for a conceptual apparatus that arms a society and a people for the future, and one that gives it responsibility for its own daily practices and the institutions that it creates and lives by. Amilcar Cabral has “repeatedly pointed to an ideological deficiency as the greatest weakness of liberation movements” (ibid.). While examining the Assam Movement and its legacy, this is the area that must be of primary concern. What was its ideological justification? What was the thought apparatus that sustained it? Was it able to understand the profundity of non-violent resistance and communicate to its adherents its knowledge and use of these modes? Most importantly, perhaps, did it succeed in subjecting its own practices to a sharp and critical scrutiny? What was its vision for the future, as a movement? Was it

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merely political power? And, in the aftermath of the movement, beyond replacing one unpopular government by its own, did it bring about any significant shift in the practice and use of political power and its administrative vehicles? These questions of modernity are shaped against the tacit reference to Gandhi in this book. Listen to the following: Thanks to the hypocritical distinctions of high and low and to the fear of subsequent caste tyranny, we have ... turned our back on truth and embraced falsehood.... I wish that Indians who join this movement also resort to satyagraha against their caste and their family and against evil wherever they find it. (M.K. Gandhi, Indian Opinion, January 30, 1909, cited in R. Gandhi 2006: 136–37)

This is a representative position in Gandhi’s vision for modern India. The onus it places on the self, on turning within to scrutinize the sources of social and individual evil, is a moment of recognition that is also a moment of modernity, when the practice of shifting responsibility to external causes is rejected in favor of self-responsibility. In contrast, the contemporary Assamese discourse of self in the public domain is almost wholly based on locating the source of problems outside or in the other, ignoring the need to revamp narratives of society and individual, thus allowing for a perpetuation of these evils. As a result, the Assamese identity discourse is strangely stagnant. The search for external causes at the cost of self-scrutiny is responsible for the divisions that have rent this society, and for the violence that is its most marked feature.

Notes 1. The significant political and social roles played by students in the Northeast in the recent past, especially following the example set by the AASU in the Assam Movement that saw students spearheading movements for autonomy among all the tribal groups as well in several other northeastern states, has encouraged the study of this remarkable phenomenon. Among the works that have variously examined the issue, shown student unrest in its historical perspective and documented the situations that have spawned these movements are those written or edited by Sheela Bora (1992), Apurba Baruah (2002), and A.C. Sinha (1995).

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2. The “magic pad” is a thick pad with a square of thin tracing paper on which it is possible write. Writing on the paper disappears when the paper is lifted off the tablet. Freud (1961) had suggested that nothing that is written actually disappears. It only sinks into the pad and remains there. This is a reference to the unconscious and its retention of past incidents that might make a comeback in moments of trauma. 3. The media’s role in violence can be positive when its reporting results in swift administrative action, but on the flip side, its excessive emphases on the horror, its detailed pictures and its callous questioning of the relatives of victims can and often does result in retaliatory violence and therefore in the perpetuation of the situation of violence. Its enabling role is counterbalanced by its inflammatory role. 4. This is a fear that is not given adequate consideration. The fear that in my own lifetime I stand witness to these processes by which I become minoritized, or I am mute spectator to territorial occupation as politicians engage in their own games of vote bank politics and personal deals. Or in that excessively predictable response, the center appears not to bother, acting or not acting almost by a kind of historical logic that the Assamese would trace to the callousness of Nehru in the case of both immigration (when he threatened to cut off central funds if Assam did not give space to refugees from East Pakistan) and what is known as the Chinese Aggression of 1962 (when at the news of Chinese troops entering into the region he virtually wrote the region off). 5. Much has always been made by the media in their coverage of Mumbai of quick return to normalcy in the aftermath of bomb blasts, riots, communal clashes and death of people on suburban trains as a result of explosions. The form in which this is delivered to the viewer is “the spirit of Mumbai” that makes people resume their daily lives soon after (often the day after) the incident. This was most loudly proclaimed during the serial blasts on the trains of Mumbai when many people lost their lives. The romanticization of the compulsion of the daily wager, of the demands of daily living for ordinary individuals who cannot afford the time to mourn a dead family member because there are other mouths to feed at home, under the rubric of the indomitable spirit of Mumbai, is a symptom of the lack of serious analysis of violence and its after-effects in public discourse. 6. In fact the report prepared by Hugh D. Graham and Ted R. Gurr (1969) studies violence as a feature of American society. This follows the violence of the 1960s and looks at prejudices and discriminatory practices that fuel violent clashes. 7. This has been a feature of such operations after a section of the ULFA militants came overground and became the surrendered militants who could offer their special skills and familiarity with the group to find ULFA hideouts or identify militants—a kind of fee paid for the indulgence of a political establishment which habitually looked the

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other way as the surrendered militants applied their strong arm methods to set themselves up in business or make a life for themselves, and society absorbed not only them but the practices they brought with themselves. 8. Most commentators note this. See, for instance, both Sanjib Baruah (1999) and Sanjoy Hazarika (2000). 9. Awareness of political corruption at this point is ironically forgotten very soon after, as Mahanta like his fellow student leaders succumbed to the logic of political machinations and corruption as they in their turn became the party in power. But it is interesting to note that scholarship in (and about) the region has regularly taken recourse to the polemical—evident in many of the works mentioned in this book and clearly demonstrating the perhaps inevitable “involvement” of the witness-scholar. The different polemical engagement of the outside scholar like Verghese is also worth noting.

3 Memories and Violence Remembering the Assam Movement If nationals are bound together, it is ... by language, law, and literature, and if they share an experience of events, it is not in propria persona, but through their shared exposure to narratives of these events: in folktale and novel and movie, in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television, in the national histories taught in modern national schools.... Modern political communities, that is, are bound together through representations in which the community itself is an actor; and what binds each of us to the community—and thus to each other—is our participation, through our national identity, in that action. Our modern solidarity derives from stories in which we participate through synecdoche. —Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (2004: 245)

In this chapter, I look at the memory text where a reconstruction of

the last thirty years takes place—narratives that remember the violence of the Assam Movement and make social and historical connections. The significance of narrative as both a method and an object of study is evident. In studies of the contemporary, especially of a present that is the aftermath of an overwhelming event, the recourse to memory and the personal retrospection as a source are natural correlates of the narrative method. The narrative reconstruction embodies memories of a time past that are nevertheless alive in the characteristics of the present. While some

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of the elements are examined in their historical development, especially the issue of the migration of Bengali speakers from the abutting areas of Bengal dating from the time of the British (in the context of identity construction examined in the following chapters), the usual method of research, going down into the depths, is eschewed in favor of the surfaces. I have tried to hear the story that has floated up from the depths, from the causes and contexts, to inhabit the public imagination. This methodological preference needs its rationale. The origins of a problem or the sources of a certain visible manifestation have their own importance, but concentration on these has made analysis repetitive and clogged by the same issues. On the other hand, it is in the narrative of identity, which is the surface manifestation of several kinds of causes and historical incidents, that many of the results have come to rest. It is this narrative that is most easily available for study, even as it is at the same time the most elusive. It is both palpable and intangible, right there at the top of one’s consciousness and yet deeply embedded in the realms of memory. The memory text also points to a hypothesis of what Assam is in the present—a description of what we have become and made of ourselves, and how much of this is primarily owing to the energies unleashed by the movement. This chapter offers another angle on the dominant image of violence—of Assam as a violent society where corruption, bribery, and the culture of self-aggrandizement are aspects of violence. In order to access this memory archive, the question asked of individual “informants”—a term which is used here to describe individuals and written texts—was not “what is your opinion of the Assam Movement?” but “what are your memories of the Assam Movement?”—an invitation to narrate in the light of the present. This question, it seemed, would sidestep the universalist evaluation and instead enable the revelations of individual memory—“this is what happened to me”; would evoke not the grand “finality” claims of explanations, assessments, and judgment, but the grainy, gritty retrospectives that are anchored materially to the daily ebb and flow of a social movement, to its blood, sweat, and dust, its aspirations and its failures, its injustices and its calls to a collective conscience, its wisdom and its ignorance, recalled by the compulsions of the present. Such “raw” material, as yet untouched by disciplinary organization, is accessible only in the memories of a people and of individuals whose hopes and disappointments mark the movement and its three-decade-long aftermath.

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This particular component of the argument, because of its reliance on the personal, seems to require constant justification. It is the aporia where the participant and the “committed and engaged observer” (this contradiction is deliberate and refers to the anguish and understanding that restrains a person from participation) produce their reflections on the hidden, invisible aspects of an event that are not covered by the official record or by the proliferation of interpretations. Agamben’s evocation of the testimony of the Muselmann is a useful aid to understanding what is involved in bearing personal witness: “we may say that to bear witness, is to place oneself ... outside both the archive and the corpus of what has already been said” (Agamben 1999: 161). Agamben claims that “the witness’ gesture is also that of the poet”; “the poetic word is the one that is always situated in the position of a remnant and that can, therefore, bear witness” (ibid.). He uses the figure of the Muselmann and the testimony that this figure brings as a survivor of the concentration camp—“I was a Muselmann”—to give a voice to that “non-language,” “that has no place in the libraries of what has been said or in the archive of statements” (ibid.: 162). This testimony that is unspeakable, that no one wishes to speak about (there was only the experience and the sanctioned description) amidst the rhetoric about the movement—“peaceful, non-violent, disciplined”—is only recoverable as memory, because that lapse of time is the necessary period for the understanding that is a precondition for speech. As the testimonies of the ten Muselmanner (ibid.: 166–71) show, speech/testimony/the act of bearing witness is only possible afterwards—“I was a Muselmann.” However, the processing that the dredging of memories requires, and the anguish which ensures that the event stays in the memory and is so processed, meant that the relevant texts would be few. Many in the three neighborhoods of Dispur, Uzan Bazaar, and Fancy Bazaar insisted that they did not remember, or that they would not like to be quoted. They refused to make the connection to the present violence, seeing only the non-solution of the problem of foreigners and pointing to the resulting continuation of immigrant influx. For most, it had been an unthinking participation. They did not see the coercion, the collecting of donations, or the pressure brought to bear on neighbors as forms of violence. And for many, the relief of resuming ordinary lives was too overwhelming to be darkened by self-scrutiny.

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The paradigm of non-violence within which the Assam Movement placed itself and was placed, prevented thinking outside the frame. The Gandhian concept of non-violence came with its own baggage, an authoritative description of a protest mode, an already-thought-out strategy that did not require further understanding from its users. The term itself had come to stand for all the implications of the actual act. So the hidden violence, the understanding of certain acts as violent, emerges only in very special retrospective accounts. The retrospective–analytic texts are also especially relevant because they show how society has received the ideas spawned by the Assam Movement, how it has reacted to them, how they have entered into the public mind. It is possible, through these texts, to catch in the net various facets of the past, to take account of elements that have been newly generated and have entered the narrative of identity. And while migration and hybridity are the primary propellants of the identity narrative, they may very often be operative at the level of what Hayden White (1973) calls the understructure, the metahistorical on whose foundations other surface manifestations may be visible. So when an individual narrative speaks about violence or corruption or terror, these elements are viewed here as the surface manifestations, the symptoms of deeper changes brought about by the realities of migration and its accompanying hybridities.

Conversations Personal memories (some of it emerging in the form of creative literature) drawing on actual participation, victimization, and ostracization are such narrative sources, and even as many people who participated pleaded a kind of relieved amnesia, there are many others who continue to feel overwhelmed by the implications of the movement in presentday Assam. With this in mind, the present section draws on individual memories of covert and overt violence and looks at the connections and analyses made by remembrance. It must be admitted that these remembrances take the shapes and emphases that they do because of the questions asked by the interlocutor and her own memories of violence. The question about what was remembered was asked in the three neighborhoods mentioned earlier.1

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On May 9, 2007, Pradipta Borgohain, a contemporary, a professional colleague, and a resident of Uzan Bazaar, consented to look back on the Assam Movement. We slipped easily into shared remembrances of a time and a place, college and homes. We lived in the heart of the city, in an old neighborhood. But our family and others like us were estranged particularly by the mass character of the movement that made every gathering of people indistinguishable from the mob.... Mindless mobs everywhere. Processions ... carrying torches in the evenings, beating brass cymbals and marching through neighborhoods. I remember that this always unnerved us.

A vague sense of fear at the slogans that were shouted, the huge numbers, and the collective fervor are actually remembered by many from those areas of the city where such processions were taken out. By filling in all hours of the day with some program or the other, the movement leaders perhaps sought to carry people along in a vast wave of emotion, occupying the mental spaces of deliberation and reflection with thoughtless activity: The leaders of the movement were interested in keeping their followers mindless. There were few debates. But there were many occasions when leaders stood up and loudly declaimed on the threat to Assamese identity, on the need to come together and fight and drive out the outsider, whipping up a kind of mass hysteria that had dangerous spill-over potential. One such leader (the name is unimportant, the declaration is not) said: “We have to forget about democracy and human rights at least for two years. We can bring these back when the goal is achieved.”   The mass gathering of people also had another interesting side to it. It played on togetherness, used catchy slogans, and its metaphors of distinctiveness were the women dressed in rich traditional attire. It seemed no more than a picnic to many, sponsored very often by business houses that donated at the behest of the leaders. The end of a day’s program brought the anticipation of the next and the successful imposition of collective will trickled down to the individual, giving him or her a sense of tremendous power.

The social pressure enforced by the dynamics of the neighborhood induced personal alienation from the locality for many residents, even as leaders used the momentum of the initial days to increase their reach and

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influence. Many were haunted by doubts about whether there was any realization about the implications of their modes of administering the movement—the empowering of callow youth to carry out their plans, organize people, and maintain surveillance on the activities of individuals for signs of disloyalty to the cause; the loss of an educational year for students who were the movement’s foot soldiers; the frustration of hundreds of young students for whom the hoary goal of securing cultural, political, and social exclusiveness paled before the stark reality of careers in ruins, wasted hours, enforced leisure, arrested lives. Mass mobilization, mass involvement, large numbers of supporters— these were the movement’s visible manifestations. No dissent was tolerated. There was no pretence at democracy. The irony of invoking Gandhi all the time to do un-Gandhian things! Only negative goals; the invocation of terms like “colonial rule” and “occupying forces”—terms that slipped easily into the narrative understructure of identity. And a fear of introspection!

The elements remembered here are aspects of present-day society, which lives in the long shadow of the movement. Many of these terms are used regularly by separatist forces in the region. They are also sources of the tacit violence that went unnoticed at the time. Just as the neighborhood was a useful unit of organization, colleges were the nurseries of the movement. They became vital barometers of youth sentiment, sites for innocuous acts of violence, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, places where debate and dissent were most easily silenced, as young college students either went unthinkingly into protest programs, overwhelmingly convinced of the rightness of what was happening, or were alienated and sidelined because of affiliation to some minority group. I remember one incident vividly: it was in front of our college. Several young students were kicking a man—a beggar—who they chose to identify as an illegal immigrant from the tattered lungi he was wearing. This was merely a “fragile form of life,” no more. I felt sick to my guts. I could not believe that my own classmates were doing this to a fellow human being. A girl standing nearby said: “They come armed, but we don’t.” Otherness was so easy to categorize—no doubts, no probing, no revulsion at

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one’s own debasement through such an act. And the police were merely spectators! It was the start of the rot in the police force which was increasingly rendered impotent, its basic duties hijacked. This was equally true of the bureaucracy—severely compromised through their support to the movement against the call of loyalty that is expected of a government officer. And those who did their duties were manhandled and humiliated by boys and girls who could very well have been their children—the children of friends and fellow officers—and ostracized. There were splits in families because of support or opposition to the movement—ruptures that continue to this day.

Such hostility, aggression, and willingness to compromise, and the gradual destruction of institutions—these are some of the legacies of the movement. It is possible to see, in the lack of responsibility and accountability noted by many of those who remember this time, a failure of civil society, the easy rejection of the norms of interpersonal exchange, the abandoning of debate and discussion. Another significant shift, given the current obsession with making money by any means available, must be seen as beginning with the exercise of muscle power by student leaders in the innocuous situations of collecting donations for the movement. This habit was subsequently carried forward in the wake of the movement by the student leader turned politician to get permits to buy buses; intimidation was used as a method to set up businesses or make careers in “supply and contract.” No work culture could grow out of a perception of the susceptibility of institutions and individuals to the use of force. The result was virtually a society of middlemen—brokers, “dalals,” contractors—who made it difficult for the development of industry or production.   And above all, the violence! There was intimidation and threats. The apparent orderliness of the agitation was an enforced order that always had potential for violence. The bureaucrat like the police turned a blind eye, failing in the timely intervention necessary to quell potentially violent actions by the agitators. A dangerous clarity about right and wrong made leaders and their followers unequivocal about opponents (if you accepted 1971 as the cut-off year to send back immigrants then you were not a good Assamese. If you accepted 1951 then you were). And of course, the smudging of “outsider” definitions and boundaries.

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That is perhaps the reason why so many refused to remember, refused to consider issues of this nature. It was as if a shroud had been pulled over the past. Those who did remember, however, did so in this way, reflecting on the state of Assam today. Such a narrative is representative of an alternative often heard among intellectuals, containing strains of critique of many of the negative constituents of contemporary identity. It was repeated by other witnesses, and is worth salvaging. Its analysis of the movement, in ways that seek to explain the last thirty years, is an important if small component of contemporary discourse about violence in Assam. Neeta Barua (name changed on request) was in Shillong in the neighboring state of Meghalaya at the time of the movement. But she remembers friends and relatives telling her about the popularity of the movement, its clarion call of “Aah Oi! Ulai aah!” (“Come on! Come out!”) In response, women left their household chores half done and went out of their houses to join the processions. This was the romantic image of popular protest that developed in sites that were safely distanced from the heart of the movement within Assam, in places like New Delhi and Shillong, where the occasional protestor relived moments of “patriotic” action. Barua also related the incident of her mother and grandmother going around to business establishments in Shillong and collecting donations, which were then sent to fund the various activities of the movement. The flip side of this was the experience of the residents of Fancy Bazaar, who were threatened into giving donations by bands of youths. Supriya Gohain (name changed) lived in the residential quarters of the new state capital, Dispur, which housed people who had recently shifted from Shillong and faced the new experience of being thrown together in such close proximity. Gohain also remembers the rousing calls to join processions passing through the narrow lanes of Dispur, and the sight of often disheveled women, called out in the middle of work, and young boys and girls joining in steady streams and swelling the processions. She remembers the pressure to join, and the concerted and collective humiliation directed at those who remained inside and their subsequent ostracization. These reminiscences recalled one of the intriguing aspects of the movement: women were among its most enthusiastic supporters. Several of its contradictions came from their involvement. Many of these women

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in Guwahati, for example, were the wives, sisters, and mothers of government servants who mandatorily attended office. They came out of their homes, took part in processions and protest marches and dharnas, and saw to it that other, more reluctant women did the same. When the movement came to an end, they returned to their homes and resumed their lives as if that episode had never been.2 The women who were then living in the government housing complex at Dispur (they are now scattered irretrievably, with husbands having retired and children having grown up and left home) today claim that they were and are merely housewives and mothers; that they do not remember what they did, though they did participate in “processions and dharnas.” Ranjit Kumar Dev Goswami, academic and cultural critic, is one individual whose memories have been crucial to this study. His analysis of those memories have meant that what started as a conversation on the Assam Movement became, over many days during May and June 2007, a wide-ranging discussion on Assam, its history and formation, the response of the disciplines to the various elements of the issue of identity, and the respective merits of the two possible methodologies I had before me—a study of the depths (the archival), and a study of the surfaces (narrative). We had this conversation over three or four meetings, each time a new beginning. Every time, the one impression that seemed to bother him was finally phrased in the form of a question: “How is it that suddenly you don’t like me and I don’t like you?” He recalled the following incident three times. Goswami wrote a letter to the editor of one of the local newspapers, appealing to the agitated people to remain calm and refrain from violence. He was a young lecturer at Cotton College during those days, and lived as a tenant in the heart of the city in the old residential neighborhood of Uzan Bazaar. Hate mail poured in, accusing him of being an “enemy of the land,” and a “stooge” of the state and central governments. A neighbor hinted broadly that it would be better for everyone’s safety, including his own, if he moved out of the area. “There was never any question of healthy criticism or difference of opinion. You were either for or against them, a sentiment articulated grandly as ‘for or against Assam.’” It was a clear choice. He remembered in this context the call given by a prominent individual in a popular newspaper of those times, Nilachal, for social boycott of those persons who were perceived to be against the movement. And he wryly recalled his own experiences, at

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social gatherings, on public transport, and on the street, of being shunned by persons he had known closely. He also remembered fear as a predominant feeling—the shiver down the spine at the eerily echoing call, “Aah Oi! Ulai aah!” especially in the dusk, the call to emerge from homes and participate in processions and marches, or that unique recreation of the sounds of battle, the invitation to one and all to sound any instrument, drum, pipe, or whistle, that they could find at hand. He spoke of the extreme trepidation with which one individual plucked a hollow reed from the roadside and blew on that. Interestingly, he also chose to remember in this connection another incident of fear from his childhood in Nowgong, a town some three hours’ drive from Guwahati, where the Bengali–Assamese, Hindu–Muslim divide is unique and yet representative. There were rows of huts behind our house separated only by a patch of land. Bengalis lived in them. Many of them had little shops. One of those shops sold flutes. And I would go across to buy them. One day all those huts were set on fire. Nothing remained, not even the people. This was during the language movement of the 60s.

We spoke about fear and memories; the current atrocities presented the occasion for recalling past atrocities, dredging up historical memories, the barbarisms associated with the Burmese invasion, the dreaded “Maan”3 sweeping over the land, killing, raping, and looting. In fact, Goswami chose to remember what he called the prehistory of the movement—little indicators that were part of the journey that this society undertook to the year 1979 when the movement began. One visually powerful image was that of long queues of Bihari and other nonAssamese people at post offices sending money orders back home to their states, feeding the perception that wealth was going out of Assam (just as the oil pipelines took most of Assam’s crude oil out to be refined). The other influential images were of a particular dress style (the green lungi) favored by the immigrant becoming progressively more visible as the numbers of immigrants increased, and of the hoardings carrying messages in Bengali in immigrant-dominant areas in many districts. Among Goswami’s significant observations was the absence of an intellectual framework for the movement. To my question: what did the movement leaders read in their preparation to lead a movement of this

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magnitude? his caustic rejoinder was: “Nothing.” This is one of the most disturbing subtexts of the movement. One prominent student leader, who went on to become a minister in the government that was formed following the resounding victory of the movement leadership in the state elections after the signing of the Assam Accord, said rather proudly that he and the eight others incarcerated with him in the Guwahati Jail read their course books in jail, since all of them were going to be taking one kind of examination or another. They were, after all, students who had interrupted their studies to lead the people, and they were serious about getting their degrees. Beyond that, it would appear that the book they found emotionally satisfying, because it matched what they perceived as their own unique concern, was Myron Weiner’s Sons of the Soil. The relevant chapter on migration in Assam was available in an Assamese translation. Many of my seniors in college spoke admiringly of this book as providing a true picture of Assam’s migration-related crisis. The other texts where they found evidence for the rightness and timeliness of the movement were census records and the two pieces that are mentioned by most writers on the movement—Mullan’s 1931 census report, and the comments of Election Commissioner S.L. Shakhder in a meeting of electoral officers on October 24, 1978, in Ooty. Mullan used words like “conquest,” “attack,” “invaded,” and “operations” to indicate the force of the migrant hordes before whom district after district in Assam was falling. He also suggested that if this trend continued, Sibsagar might very well be the only district where the Assamese would feel at home. Shakhder observed: “I would like to refer to the alarming situation in some states, especially in the North Eastern region, wherefrom reports are coming regarding large-scale inclusion of foreign nationals in the electoral rolls.” He spoke of a 34.98 percent increase between 1961 and 1971, and predicted that, at that rate of growth, the 1991 census would show a 100 percent growth over the 1961 figures. (Both commentators are quoted in M. Hussain [1993: 102, 206].) A different set of memories emerged from people who would have been in school during that time, and who had vivid visual impressions of things happening around them. Asha, my former student and now a colleague, remembers “hanging around with a radio” (her own half-ironic description), initially happy at not having to attend school, but increasingly frustrated at having nothing to do, as all educational institutions

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remained shut for the year—a loss from which the state has never really recovered. This was the start of the exodus of bright, young people to institutions outside the state, and eventually into professions and a life elsewhere. This exodus is one among the reasons that have to be taken into account in interpreting the continued backwardness of the state and the continuing feelings of neglect and resentment. Asha’s family lived in the third distinctive neighborhood mentioned earlier, Fancy Bazaar. They were among the earliest migrants from Rajasthan to Assam, with branches of the family also located in Murshidabad. They were not technically Marwaris, though the distinction would be meaningless in a place where all traders and businessmen were identified by the ubiquitous term “Marwari.” Initially our family was positive about the movement and its aim of sending back illegal migrants, possibly, I now think, because of their experience and bitter memories of the partition of Bengal. This residual memory of partition has continued to affect their attitude to the Bangladeshi migrant, and has ensured that the migrant has not been able to make inroads into that particular area of the city—most of the labor employed there being still Bihari. But a gradual irritation set in especially because of the “donations,” which began as polite requests but very soon became intimidating demands with references made to their outsider status in Assam.   My father’s “novelties shop,” the only one of its kind at that time, and doing good business, became a victim of this regular “donation,” sporadically shut in order to avoid the unpleasantness that came with a refusal, and in the long run losing customers. This happened to many shops in Fancy Bazaar. On the other hand the stigma associated with donations remained and when ten years later, as student members of a local Shakespeare Society, we went to collect donations to put up a play, we were refused by most people and rudely shown the door.

What do you remember of the protests? The torch light processions, sometimes silent, sometimes shouting slogans ... Joi Aai Asom! As kids we thought it was fun and we wondered then at the tension displayed by the adults.   My father and uncles as well as my grandfather’s brother had many Assamese friends. They did not change their attitudes in any noticeable way. But their visits became less frequent.

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  My grandfather came home one day with blood on his clothes and face, having been roughed up on the street.

The experience in this neighborhood was different from the other two. The sense of having become a different kind of target—a regular source of larger and larger donations, and the butt of newer hostilities—resulted in the ghettoization of the community and the neighborhood, a ghettoization that continues into the present. One of the facets of the movement that emerges from these reminiscences is the involvement of very large numbers of people. All social, political, or revolutionary movements engage the mass of people. Successfully capturing the imagination of a people depends on the capacity to mobilize and convince them about the validity of the aim, and the commonality of the aspiration. But the mobilization of large numbers invites questions of discipline, the problem of keeping order. This is something that was addressed by Gandhi in his concern with the exact regulation of crowds—those who came to hear him and other leaders at political meetings, those who took part in satyagrahas and protest sit-ins, those who took out processions, or those who waited to meet, touch, and felicitate leaders passing through railway stations on their way to political meetings. Gandhi’s article in Young India on these issues was titled “Democracy versus Mobocracy” (1966c). In an essay on the management of the masses mobilized at various stages of the struggle for independence, from the period of the Swadeshi movement, through Non-cooperation, to the anti-Partition agitation, Ranajit Guha (1997: 78) draws attention to the element of “coercion” that “had already established itself as a means of mobilization for Swadeshi quite early in the campaign.” The discussion on the first phase, when methods of dealing with non-participants came to be coercive and violent, is especially pertinent to the way the masses behaved in the Assam Movement. While the general impression of the protests were that they were peaceful, the methods employed to involve people often showed distinct coercive traits, and frequently degenerated to threats and actual acts of violence. Since the knowledge of the past—a sense of the historical—is seen to be so important for the conduct of mass movements, it is particularly necessary to remember here this aspect of the Swadeshi movement, whose physical and social coercion caused the withdrawal of Tagore from

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the early Swadeshi struggle. It is also necessary to recall the significant steps taken by Gandhi to rectify and prevent the possibility of coercive steps during mass mobilizations. Guha draws on a dossier compiled in 1909 by the Director of Criminal Intelligence, to show that there were two kinds of coercion: “physical coercion aimed at the destruction of imported goods as well as intimidation and assault of those who bought, sold or otherwise patronized such imports or cooperated with the administration as active opponents of the movement”; and “social coercion—which directly addressed the mind,” and “came in the form of caste sanctions which meant, in effect, withdrawal of ritual services, refusal of inter-dining, boycott of wedding receptions and funeral ceremonies, and other pressures amounting to partial or total ostracism of those considered guilty of deviation from Swadeshi norms” (Ranajit Guha 1997: 79). Guha refers to the stand taken by Tagore, who withdrew from the Swadeshi agitation because of the use of such coercive methods (Tagore wrote about these methods in an essay titled “Sadupay,” quoted in ibid.). “Swadeshi with its emphasis on self-help, self-cultivation and self-improvement, was less of a struggle for power than a social reform movement of an exceptionally lofty character” (ibid.). Such a reading of this stage of the independence struggle is unique for its conception and understanding of the revolution and of mobilization in terms of social reform. It keeps in view the wider and longer-term effects of such mobilization in an unequal society. Also important is the awareness of existing caste- and religion-based ills that are harnessed in the coercive approach to difference. Such awareness indicates a very necessary evaluation of society, beyond just a reaction to an external impetus. The comparison with the Assam Movement is one I would draw in order to point to the lack of such an assessment of society, in favor of a political approach adopted on the basis of a more superficial assessment of an immediate problem. The other aspect of the national movement to which Guha draws attention is the concern expressed by Gandhi and Tagore over the tendency to violence inherent in the very methods used to mobilize the masses. The issue of popular consent, that must be the rationale behind great mass movements, is one that is ambiguously articulated, at best—the dividing lines between coercion and consent are not always visible in the

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resultant “voluntary” participation. According to Guha, Tagore “focused on this question without any nice legalistic distinctions between physical and mental coercion to influence his notion of violence” (Ranajit Guha 1997: 89). Such conflation is an important aspect of moral understanding, because the effect in terms of violence is the same in both cases— both involve coercion and an attempt to impose one’s will over others. Gandhi’s struggle to find the right expression for the fine distinction he tried to effect between “social as distinguished from political boycott” is an example of the kind of serious reflection that must necessarily go into the sensitive business of mass mobilization, dealing as it does with thousands of people, along with recognition of the dangers of enthusiasm transforming into violence. Gandhi articulates this distinction in his usual idiom of self-examination: Boycott is of two kinds, civil and uncivil. The former has its roots in love, the latter in hatred. In fact, hatred is another name for uncivil boycott.... The underlying idea in civil boycott is that of refraining from accepting any services from or having any social association with the person concerned. The idea behind the other form is to inflict punishment and pain. (M.K. Gandhi 1966e)

Gandhi characterizes the various instances of social boycott—“denial of medical care, of access to wells and ponds, and of customary services such as those of the village barber and washerman” (Ranajit Guha 1997: 92)— as “inhumanly tantamount in the moral code to an attempt to murder,” a “species of barbarism” and “unpardonable violence” (M.K. Gandhi 1966d: 83, 367). Political boycott, on the other hand, “means refusing to accept water or food at such a person’s place and entering into no marriage connection with his family.” This did not amount to punishing the person concerned: “we want, rather, to express our own grief by refusing to associate with him” (M.K. Gandhi 1966e). The line dividing these two positions is so thin that it must appear almost like hair splitting. As Guha comments, in practice the “thin line of morality separating the two ideas was smudged again and again” (Ranajit Guha 1997: 93). But Gandhi never ceased to condemn such confusion, and never ceased to try and explain the nuances distinguishing social from political boycott. Recalling this aspect of the nationalist movement is a way of understanding the issue of mass mobilization and the accompanying pressure

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on the unconvinced or the unwilling/unable. It appears in retrospect to be something that should have been a matter of concern to the leadership of the Assam Movement. The setting up of the “dominant Assamese” narrative as the master-narrative of Assamese identity meant that a degree of coercion was taken for granted in the conduct of various mass protest programs. The procession or protest march was a particularly sensitive sphere where the leadership’s control and management of its crowds of followers faced the biggest challenges. A particularly telling example was the enforcement of a proper attire, specifically the mekhela sador, on women and girls. Individuals who for some reason failed to conform faced the deployment of methods like verbal abuse, charges of being outsiders, or direct orders from older women or, in extreme cases, from their contemporaries, both male and female. The tacit license to overturn old and traditional codes of social exchange, particularly the interactions with elders, became the foundation for the movement’s programs. This license found expression in the responsibility given to, or often voluntarily assumed, by young boys and girls to observe and report on aberrations during the day’s action. Very often, the worst victims of such surveillance turned out to be bureaucrats who attended office, or college and university teachers who came into the closest contact with student protestors because of the nature of their jobs. The current culture of violence and corruption, stemming from this period, points also to a crisis of leadership—an absence of vision and understanding of the responsibility that the unleashing of emotive and societal forces entails for the movement’s leadership. A more thoughtful and historically conscious leadership would perhaps have recognized that running a large-scale movement of this kind necessitates a blueprint for the future, not only consisting in a list of demands, but implying the overhauling of old and dated institutions. Such a blueprint would include a program for a continuing mobilization and harnessing of people’s power for the integration of a multi-ethnic society, and for engaging in regular self-examination. The adulation of the masses instead blinded the leadership to everything except the possibility of building on it and using it as a vehicle to ride to political power. It then degenerated into assuming the same old corrupt political practices (or worse, in some cases, as the habit of extortions was transformed into the new habit of corruption). The historical memory of Gandhi is the

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inevitable example that one draws on—Gandhi who, along with being a shrewd political strategist and a moral experimenter, was also a serious philosopher. Akeel Bilgrami in an essay titled “Gandhi the Philosopher” shows this further dimension that was the base on which Gandhi’s political understanding rested. Bilgrami points to Gandhi’s conception of the satyagrahi as moral exemplar: “the satyagrahi has not eschewed violence until he has removed criticism from his lips and heart and mind.... When one chooses for oneself one sets an example to everyone.” But, “because no principle is generated, the conviction and confidence in one’s own opinions does not arrogate, it puts us in no position to be critical of others because there is no generality in their truth” (Bilgrami 2003: 4162). This inner wrestling was also seen in Gandhi’s projection of his innovative protest methods as transcendent efforts—efforts of moral understanding and transformation of the self. Gandhi elevated these practices beyond the purely political aims of the national movement, identifying the basis of political acts in a deeper philosophical realm and establishing a distinction between the principle and the individual act. Bilgrami’s particular example in the essay is the very special conception of nonviolence, that Gandhi had: If exemplars replace principles, then it cannot any longer be the business of morals to put in the position of moralizing against others in forms of behaviour (criticism) that have in them the potential to generate other psychological attitudes (resentment, hostility) which underlie interpersonal violence. (ibid.: 4163)

Bilgrami’s argument, when he interprets Gandhi’s notion of truth as a function of experience, sounds similar to Dhareshwar’s presentation of “action-knowledge”: “It is not propositions purporting to describe the world of which truth is predicated, it is only our own moral experience which is capable of being true” (ibid.: 4164). These moral gains came out of a political movement for independence from foreign rule—and from turning within for the sources of moral strength as well as for the sources of weakness that had to be corrected. It is this gesture of Gandhi’s that transformed the movement and fashioned its participants, the satyagrahis, into soldiers in a great battle for truth, for self-knowledge and self-rule. And it is the absence of a similar understanding and capacity

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to transform a widely popular socio-political movement into a movement that was also against the problems and evils of a society and its institutions, that caused the Assam Movement to lose its way, and lead to a pedestrian present where the resentments and consciousness of neglect articulated then are reiterated, but without the vital transformations brought about by an engaged and truly effective historical memory. The question of modernity comes up frequently in assessments of insurgency problems in the underdeveloped areas of a nation-state. But it usually remains at the level of “development” questions—modernization of industry, agriculture, tourism, etc. The element of agency, which is among modernity’s most fundamental questions, remains invisible. This was a question addressed with flair and imagination by Gandhi, who placed the onus for all actions on the self, as apparent in his “selforiented” methods of protest and non-violent action—swaraj, swadeshi, satyagraha—in each of which the process of political transformation was a logical outcome of moral self-transformation. What is unstated in the recognition of violence related to insurgency and counter-insurgency and the abuse of democratic rights, however, is the spread of undemocratic, coercive, and violent modes into the daily lives and psyches of ordinary citizens—the internalization of the prevalent and pervasive violence. Whether this comes from insurgency or counter-insurgency is immaterial. The mode is common. The kidnapping of Dr P.C. Ram, FCI executive director of the region, and his subsequent death during a police encounter was big news for a while. The incident was in the headlines during the year 2007. The ULFA acknowledged its role in the kidnapping, and civil society felt relieved that it was the same old villain again—recognizable and therefore comfortably outside of one’s own sphere. Before this incident had fallen off the media map, another gruesome incident took over. Another kidnapping. Another death. But this time, the perpetrators were not the convenient ULFA. This time the victim was a young man who had apparently amassed immense wealth through dubious means. His killers were an assorted group, comprising one surrendered militant (belonging to the SULFA) and a number of disgruntled young men with vague grievances against the victim and accusations about unfulfilled promises, etc. It was, however, the modus operandi of the group that proves the point about the seepage of the violent mode much beyond its initial perpetrators. The

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group took the victim, securely tied up with rope, through the gates of the army camp at Narengi on the outskirts of the city of Guwahati (entry to the camp is possible only if one has the right pass), to an official quarter which was presumably unoccupied, killed the man there, and threw the body in a neighboring field, where it was later detected. The incident was widely reported in the local electronic and print media. Research into such issues and incidents, quite appropriately, usually follows the “origins” mode—where, how, and why it happened or began—a reflection at the micro level of the method of evaluation deployed in the context of a larger event like the movement. But the equally important question of what happened after the process is over is a necessary stage in the study of social movements. The next section explores texts which were written in the aftermath of violent incidents, containing memories of the various phases of the movement, in an effort to find further substance for this study of the after-effects of broad-based social movements.

Literary Traces One of the areas where the effect on society is visible is the creative literature that came in the aftermath of the movement or, in some instances, after one of its phases. This literature has been sensitive to the pervasive violence, the coercion, the intolerance in the face of difference, as my random selection of stories shows. Writers have been compassionate interpreters, bypassing immediate events and the local incident to focus on the larger questions of human behavior and social change, the injustice of human beings killing one another, the horror of being able to watch another person humiliated and often brutally abused. The short story has been the literary form that has most quickly manifested the effects of the violence. The stories presented here show, above all, an uncanny sense of what happens in the shadow of violence. The compassion expressed in these stories gives one a further interpretation of the many levels at which the often unnoticed aspects of a movement leave traces. The most compelling reflections on the writing of literature in the wake of horror, bloodshed, and cruelty have emerged out of the Holocaust, particularly in the writings of thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, and

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Blanchot. Adorno’s (2003 [1981]: 281) comment in “Cultural Criticism and Society,” that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” has often been misinterpreted to suggest that literature cannot be written at all after such events. As the reception of this comment shows, the extreme interpretation seems to have emerged out of a conviction that aesthetic conventions are not adequate to the representation of the reality of horror. Irving Howe speculates, following Adorno, that the representation of a horrible event could serve to domesticate it, or could engage the recipient in “voyeuristic sadomasochism.” Or the Holocaust could be a “secular equivalent ... of that which ... could not be gazed at or named directly” (Howe 2003 [1988]: 288–90). While the violence that surrounded the Assam Movement, or that came in its wake, is in no way comparable to the scale or effect of the Holocaust, the question of whether literature can indeed encapsulate and project horror and violence within its modes is raised and given resonance by such reflections. The literature that came in the aftermath of the Assam Movement has this characteristic, that it does not always overtly represent a violent or horrifying incident. The poems of Nilamoni Phukon, written against the backdrop of several violent incidents that he had heard of or witnessed, do not touch upon the realities at all. Instead, they represent the emotional and social effects of such events, effects that are often manifested in aesthetic innovations called forth by these conditions. The stories selected here for discussion embody different kinds of responses. However, the common sense of anguish at the emergence of inhumanity, at the ease with which it became possible to take life, and at the same time the keen sense of the evil and the bloodshed as symptoms, as universally condemnable acts and not just local questions of right and wrong—all this points to a shared feeling of debasement. The first of these stories is titled “Dhumuhar Paasot” (“After the Storm”), composed in 1984 by Bipul Khataniar. Like the other stories, this too does not make its locale explicit, though the image of the Nellie massacre would not be too far in the background at the time of its writing. It makes use of many of the songs and topical jingles that were popular at the time to string together its tale of different kinds of ideologies and purposes. A sense of fear is communicated through the character of Gethukai (kai is a familiar term for elder brother, diminutive of kakai or the more respectful kakaideu), the nervous companion of the fugitive rebel as they

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walk in the eerie light of the stars, haunted by the fear of the ghost of the miya. Miya is a term used for the immigrant Muslim from Bangladesh, distinguishing the immigrant from the indigenous Assamese Muslim. The term, and the stereotype it calls up, captures the liminal status of this group and its peculiar resistances and aspirations to assimilation. It also foreshadows the narration of the massacre of miyas that included Kamaal (a friend of the rebel–narrator) and the thirty-odd children whom this idealistic young man had taken under his wing to start a small primary school. The narrator remembers his visit to the school on August 15, the day India commemorates her independence. Kamaal had hoisted the Indian flag and asked him to speak to his students: “Tell them about Gandhi, about Nehru, about our own Tarun Ram and Gopinath and our Bahadur Gaonburah” (Khataniar 1999: 147). This is an inclusive pantheon of heroes that embraces the nation, the state of Assam, and the village in one composite identity, and points to immigrant assimilation, especially in the form of a clearly articulated patriotism. As the two men walk on, the narrator remembers: The village began from where the school was situated. But now those buildings are not there, consumed by fire. The trees have been chopped for firewood. The banana plantains have been slashed down. But who can uproot the plantains. Young shoots are again raising their heads. (ibid.: 149)

Kamaal’s voice floats into the rebel’s mind, arresting him—Kamaal’s voice reciting lines from his favorite poet, a ghostly presence looming over the narrator. The writer sends the duo on a nocturnal visit to the house of an old friend, Manoj, who refuses to be recruited into the cause. Here they meet Manoj’s old mother and a little girl who turns out to be Kamaal’s sister, saved from the massacre by Manoj. Weaving in and out of the story are those familiar, resounding calls to awake, rise, and defend the motherland, conveniently distorted from the original to suit the new occasion: “Come! Come on out O conscious citizens! / Come out and chase the Bongal away. / If we lose our lives while chasing the Bongal from our land / Then so be it!” (ibid.: 149).

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The old mother’s recounting of events and the violence is telling. One thousand people getting together to kill one man. “Even here, in our place the whole lot got together and buried Dhaneswar Nath alive. At the end he wanted to see his son. Those vultures did not even grant him this last wish” (Khataniar 1999: 154). Dhaneswar’s fault, as she remembers, was that he would not join the village people in hunting down the miyas. As the narrator drowses off, he hears the voices of the sentries, the people’s force guarding the village, and the original lines of that distorted song: “Come! Come on out O conscious citizens! / Come on out O you who carry the light! / If we lose our lives while killing this Ravan in Ram’s land / So be it!” (ibid.: 155). All of this is used as a prelude to the memories of Manoj, who now carries the scars of the collective struggle and of his own personal fight for justice: I was there with them till the very end. But I did not have the temperament to kill human beings. I did not do anything even as the two villages of Rupjaan were razed to the ground.... They killed Kamaal. Burned down his school, burnt alive his thirty little children. And still I did nothing....   Kamaal’s little sister evaded the killers and arrived at our house. She fell before me, grabbed my legs and would not let go.... And then they came! Not one, not two, the entire gang. They wanted another sacrifice for the tears of Mother Lakshmi, Mother Assam.... I did not have the courage to sacrifice her. For this unmanly weakness, I became a traitor.... Somebody hit me on the head with a machete. A blow from another weapon also fell on her forehead. After that they set fire to our house. (ibid.: 157)

Manoj speaks of the way the ideals of a movement get distorted, and of the emergence of suspicion, fear, and distrust. The author stresses the importance of “democratic organization” through the character of Manoj, and makes him remember the effect of fissures between Hindus and Muslims, tribals and non-tribals, in the sufferings of innocent people (ibid.: 159). Manoj is made to express anguish at the frittering away of the ideals and goals of the movement, the ease with which institutions degenerated, and the illusions that made it possible to think about an “independent Assam” (ibid.: 161)—a significant comment on the resistance discourse

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in Assam that continues to be heard in the separatist aspirations of the ULFA. This is a compelling story for several reasons. It contains many of the themes that became part of the critique of those years. The references to the left are also indicative of the fact that much of the serious criticism, analysis, and evaluation of the long-term effects of the movement in that time came from intellectuals with leftist leanings. The terms of the critique are worth pausing over: the growth of the separatist insurgency that became the ULFA; the use of violence against the vulnerable and the defenseless; the crucial reference to the Nellie episode of February 18, 1983—crucial because of its virtual erasure from public discourse and its blanking out by successive state governments. This erasure became evident in the case of the Japanese researcher who was allowed to study in the area and record people’s memories of the killings, but was prevented through a state government order from making a scholarly presentation of her findings. An aspect of the critique was also the conviction, among the few who discussed and condemned this move in private forums, that the public discussion of Nellie, the acknowledgment of it as an atrocity that was a disgrace to any civilized society, and the understanding of the processes that culminate in such events, were lessons that needed to be learned for the future. The easy perpetration of violent acts against defenseless people, which is a reality of the present, would have stood condemned in such a public expression of shame and revulsion. That this condemnation would have happened is evident in the ULFA’s sudden denials that it is behind many recent acts of violence and killings, after it had complacently accepted its complicity in these episodes. The general revulsion and publicly expressed anger and disgust among all sections of people seem to have appeared as a threat to its self-appointed role as the visionary of a free Assam. “Dhumuhar Paasot” also has a character who speaks of large numbers of people attacking single individuals who may have expressed a different point of view, of divisions among people who had traditionally lived and died together, and of the significant growth of the tribal–non-tribal divide, which was a precursor of the ethnic unrest and movements for ethnic self-recognition. There is also a pervasive sense of sorrow in the story for a people having brought these violent methods into their own lives, for the degeneration of self that finds expression in the ability to take life. This impression of the effects of the

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movement on social existence was a preview of the state of society today, with violence and the violent mindset having spread into unimaginable nooks and crannies of individual and collective lives and behavior. The second story is called “Rajniti Nubuja Manuh” (“People Who Do Not Understand Politics”) by Purabi Bormudoi (2005). This story develops around the themes of death and loss, and the inexplicable killing of people by those among whom they had lived for generations. It also dwells on the equally inexplicable coming together of the survivors in common grief and sorrow, the fact of death and loss looming larger than the divisions that had brought about death. Faced with the death of her husband, the new mother Malati wonders, “Why did this happen?” Malati did not understand. Nor does her mother-in-law. Nor had Bhadreswar, her husband. And all these people in the relief camp, broken by sorrow and pain and hopelessness, did they understand politics? “They who burnt our houses, whose houses we burnt in turn, they who shed the blood of our people and whose blood we in turn shed, was this because they understood politics or because they did not understand it?” (ibid.: 89). The gratuitousness of violence and bloodshed is at the heart of this short story. Simultaneously, the impersonality of death is made evident through the evasiveness about the perpetrators of violence: who killed is not as important, finally, as the fact of the killing. The original syntax that carries this impersonality does not translate well. But it is important to record this emphatic focus on the violence itself. Bhadreswar was not found. Aniram’s father and son were both killed. Holi’s brother died.... Biren Narzary’s sister’s husband was chopped into five pieces. Both of Basumatary’s sons went. Several Boro-Kachari villages were burnt to the ground. In this way every bit of news came to Malati’s ears.... All of them were known to her ... very few unknown people. (ibid.: 91)

These facts are put into the mouth of a character whose artless repetition, “I am only a woman. I don’t understand anything,” is part of the author’s ironic reflection on the way women become objects, victims, and only incidental commentators, but whose direct impressions of violence address the questions that the oppositional politics of a movement does not notice.

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Malati worries about the adverse publicity received by the village and the community in newspapers that regularly print photographs of bloodshed and deaths: The whole world has come to know of us. What have they really come to know? Do they know how we lived together, how we shared in one another’s joys and sorrows? And do they know how we have now come to redden our hands with one another’s blood? ...   Whose enemies are we? Who are our enemies? How will I again stand before Renu? How tell her that my husband cut her husband with the long machete into many pieces? I can’t tell her. I was never their enemy. They were never my enemies. (Bormudoi 2005: 91–92)

After a period in a relief camp, they return to their village. The mother of the woman whose husband was killed by Malati’s husband comes out to welcome them back, welcome them to the house that she has cleaned up for them. Renu, the young widow, stands to one side, like another Malati, waiting to welcome them too. “You’re back sister-in-law?” “Yes I’m back.” “Your goats are safely tied up in our house. The black one escaped.”

As the author says: “These two ignorant women, who did not understand politics, approached one another. Malati handed her infant to Renu. And the two women burst into tears at the same moment” (ibid.: 93). The fact of post-Assam Movement ethnic discontent is one of the realities that marks the current state of society in Assam. This second story refers to the violence and the conflicts associated with the Bodo ethnic struggle—and it refuses the consolations of assigning blame or distancing itself. In another story on the Assam Movement, “Celebration” by eminent writer and social commentator Nirupama Borgohain, there is a similar emphasis on sisterhood among women. The two women in the story, the one who comes to sell fish and the Bengali housewife who buys it, are bound by a common grief at having lost sons. Who is on which side becomes immaterial. The killing, the grief, and loss are universally felt experiences and presented as such (N. Borgohain 2004). This story also

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has the advantage of the creative work that it can use suggestion to some effect and is not bound by the imperatives of logical analysis, disciplinary limitations, or a polemical position. So its suggestion that the women, who are usually followers in such movements, who swell the numbers and are seemingly easily led, are not in reality passive participants in the common cause, is a corrective that the interpretation of the movement requires. This is especially significant in the face of the “memories wiped clean” that I encountered in trying to make conversation with women who had been enthusiastic in their support of the movement. As the creative literature of this period seems to be sensitive to the state of society produced in the wake of the violence, it is useful to note both the form and the nature of these representations. “Apaharan” (“Kidnap”), first published on July 16, 1991, in the Assamese magazine Prantik, is a short story that almost takes the form of an essay on the state of society. Arati Das, the author, uses the backdrop of an incident of kidnapping—a common feature in the modes of operation of most insurgent groups— to reflect on the violent turn of contemporary society. The narrative component is thin, but the occasion it offers to write an essay on violence is its own justification. Wondering at the lack of support from government and society in cases such as the kidnapping of Mr Shastri and the helplessness of his wife, the author observes an inexplicable fear and dread among people; as if nobody is free to speak their minds, no one is willing to work unitedly towards anything. Everyone seems to be experiencing a terrifying uncertainty about the progress of their society. There are obstacles in finding solutions to all problems. Violence cannot be countered by violence. And yet the government too cannot hold back and ignore the safety of helpless, unarmed, innocent people.... The militants on one side and the government on the other seem to be competing over their own conveniences, their own petty victories.... Innocent people lose their lives.... So many people will be weeping endlessly for their lost loved ones. It appears that these are ordinary everyday happenings. Kidnappings, political killings, threats— as if one will have to learn to live amidst these nightmarish conditions.... Our beautiful, peaceful society has been destroyed. We have become each other’s enemies. Suspicion has entered every layer of society.... In the history of the world, nobody has been able to achieve anything good through violence. However great the intention, the violent have not succeeded. (A. Das 1991: 75)

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The story also incidentally describes the feelings of hurt expressed by non-Assamese residents who have spent entire lifetimes living in harmony with the local population. The writer moves on to another theme: people no longer have any faith in protests, processions, and agitations. Apolitical movements and groups become political in the end. The leaders begin to seek their own ends, begin to dream of fulfilling their own private ambitions. The ways to peace and order seem to be no longer visible (A. Das 1991: 76). Why did they opt for this path of violence? When they kill so heartlessly, so brutally don’t their very souls shiver?...   Here, listen. Don’t discuss the organization in this manner.... The danger might touch your own life. Those who criticize them are considered by them to be their enemies....   Everyone is concerned with saving only his own skin. No one wants complications. None have the desire ... or the willingness to work together to solve the problem. If this is the condition of this society, then its end is imminent. O you sleeping masses, when will you awake? (ibid.: 76, 78)

In a short story ironically titled “Prem Gatha” (“A Tale of Love”), another writer, Manoroma Das Medhi, mourns the fact that nobody writes tales of love and compassion any more. “Only tales of guns and bombs, greed for money, and misery!” (Das Medhi 2005: 69). The protagonist, Satyajit Bora, decides to write such a tale. Satyajit Bora made a decision. He would try to reignite those heavenly sensations. This would be his way of declaring a jihad against the current state of society. What a wonderful idea! People have forgotten love, compassion. Have their hearts turned to stone? This won’t do! Satyajit Bora would compose such a tale that all those gentler emotions would come alive again. (ibid.)

But this story is about the impossibility of such an undertaking. As the tale of the young maid Koli unfolds, it is interrupted by the news of a neighbor’s son who has been taken away by people in army fatigues. This ambiguity itself is significant—the difference between the army uniform and the preferred jungle fatigues of the militant is negligible, as is the difference in their respective modes of operation, in common

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perception—both work through the unexplained hustling away of people, especially young men, who might never be seen again. The next interruption takes the form of speculation among the gathering crowd at the house over a possible demand for ransom. Satyajit Bora’s tale of love is arrested at the sentence: “She stumbled and fell flat.” And in the life outside, a bomb has been found on the railway tracks near the village. A dead body has been found too. Later in the story, Satyajit’s friend Ahmed tells him of another incident— the killing of more people, a family: father, mother, son, grandson, altogether seven people! As Satyajit returns from a trip to the market, he finds that the newspaper boy has left a whole week’s newspapers. In each one, the front page carries the names of places from his own locality—Palpara, Milanpur, Bongaon— inscribed in blood. And with these place names, the names of the dead. His story remains frozen on that last sentence. One day the newspaper carries three more names: Mahesh Das (60), Arun Das (28), Koli Das (47). The Koli of his story? The heroine of his tale of love? So Koli did rise from her fall. She did love. And she was loved. But she could not finally rise from that pool of blood! (Das Medhi 2005: 81)

The final story I refer to here is one titled “Atmasamarpan” (“Surrender”) by Anuradha Sarma Pujari (2003). In this tale of frustration and brutality, the author examines the psyche of the returned militant and his easy recourse to violent words and action. The entry of a mode, the internalization of a habit of violence, is here told as an individual’s story, but suggests violent modes that have seeped into society and into interpersonal exchange, finding expression in encounters with different kinds of others and in varying situations of crisis. In “Surrender,” the violence and the resulting angst are sparked off by the declaration by the little daughter that she would like to join her dead grandfather in heaven. The man slaps her. And his wife calls him “Animal!” The rest of the story is the man’s attempt to come to terms with this appellation, first heard from the lips of a woman clasping the bullet ridden body of her husband. “Animal! You are not humans. You are all animals.... You have killed an honest man because he could not give you money.” He had jumped on

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the woman and tried to strangle her. When one of his companions pulled him away, he could still hear her voice following him: “Animals! Cowards!” Now hearing the same word uttered by his wife, he again becomes that animal, going after her in a mad rage....   Slowly Dipak returned to normal.... What had he done? Was he trying to take out an unexplained anger from the past on Sandhya? An old rage he thought he had lost, old grievances—these were still with him. Who was he always angry with now? Who had he been angry with then?... That woman’s husband had been his last victim. What had Sandhya done that he had punished her? Sandhya his classmate, his refuge!...   Dipak sometimes felt like strangling and killing Santanu; Sandhya too. Sometimes he wished he could crush all the people around him under the wheels of his motorcycle. (Sarma Pujari 2003: 38, 39, 41, emphases mine)

The surrendered militant finally owns up to a crime he did not commit, in an act, as he tells his wife, of penance. And the story ends with his death at the hands of two unknown assailants. This is a familiar story in today’s Assam. It points increasingly to the idea that violence at the individual level is a repetition of the social, political, ideologically driven act of violence. Surrender and the adoption of a peaceful way of life are no guarantee of freedom from the ghosts of the past, whether these appear in the form of personal traumas, a habit of violent response difficult to shed, or the bullet from an unknown assailant.

Returning to Violence In 2007, an issue of the magazine Nivedon focused exclusively on the Assam Movement, speaking to its leaders and commentators, its ideologues and mentors, its critics and its detractors. Making a now familiar connection, the editor Arindam Barkataki suggests that many of our common problems in Assam today may be traced to the mistakes of the Assam Movement, whether it is the erosion of educational norms, indiscipline in daily life, the rise of separatist and divisive tendencies among the tribal groups, or even the creation of violent situations that compel others to adopt anti-Assamese stands (Barkataki 2007: 1). In keeping with this view, he invites his contributors to look back and retrieve aspects

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of the movement that they think are significant in the light of the contemporary state of Assam. Predictably, the most anguished recall is of the more direct and visible versions of violence. The two writers who recall such violence do so in very different ways. However, both speak of the effect of the violence on them and, by extension, on their poetry. They speak of the anguish that the many horrifying instances of individual and collective violence of the time evoked in them. The questions embedded in their memories of these experiences are: What were the policy changes instituted to deal with violence? How were the state’s military and paramilitary forces deployed? It is possible to find the usual whipping boys—the IMDT Act that came into existence to deal with the question of illegal immigration, but placed the onus of proving illegality on the accuser; the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) through which the security forces were vested with extraordinary powers to deal summarily with suspected enemies of the state, and whose victims were often innocent individuals, shot because of a mistake in the perception of threat. The larger questions that were sparked off by the experience of those times—what impact did immigration have on territory, economy, culture, and politics—have quick and pat answers that push other levels of impact out of the range of critical consideration. Nilamoni Phukon and Rafiqul Hussain both speak about the pain of writing poetry against the backdrop of human barbarity. Phukon observes that the episodes of violence—he names the worst: the carnage of Nellie, the horrors of Gohpur—were “igniting factors” or “points of beginning” for poems. The fact that he does not mention any of the incidents by name in the poems written under the influence of those times does not at all mean that they are not in his mind. He does not offer an analysis of the movement, but remembers the violence at its most graphic: The reality that I was familiar with, I saw a different picture of that reality.... I saw the monstrosity of murder.... I thought I would go to Nellie.... But I didn’t go. Seven people were shot dead near my home. I didn’t go there either. (Phukon 2007: 50)

The impact of all this, he says, is felt in the poems, though their immediate reference points are kept beyond the easy grasp of the reader.

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In the six parts of the poem “Aru Tetiya Agyan Hoi Porisilu” (“And Then I Fell Unconscious”), Phukon (2006: 177–82) presents images of horror. Pictures of the Nellie massacre carried by the Telegraph, his wife’s recounting of the finding of the headless body of a young woman in the river Dhansiri—these events are the occasions for the collective impression that the poet presents. The representation of waking from that sudden faint and finding himself weeping (stanza 1); the grotesquerie of eyes carried around in one’s hand reduced to the ordinariness of carrying around two docile pigeons (stanza 2); the image of the hungry old woman for whom water has become stone, food has become poison, who can no longer see, hear, speak, think, eat, or sleep (stanza 3); the man vomiting blood, lying in the gutter, with the flesh falling off from one side of his face—and still the boots smash his teeth, kick his private parts (stanza 4); the man rising up from the fires of the funeral pyre (stanza 5), reflecting on the awesomeness and yet the ordinariness of things (stanza 6) (ibid.)—all of this suggests the way violence never remains confined in the place or the time in which it is perpetrated. In his interview, Phukon specifically mentions the poem “Kouno Nai Eyat—Shishu, Naari, Briddha” (“No One Is Here—Child, Woman, the Old”) (ibid.: 226–27), composed after the Nellie genocide. Here, he speaks of the dead as “people of my blood” (stanza 3). But it is the impersonality of the killing that is presented with horror and dread: “Once again they have become killers of their own” (stanza 1). This transforms into the anonymous revulsion of the lines that follow: “The fires of violence, counter-violence and hatred / Burn through the endless night / Jackals and dogs fight and pull / At the entrails of this land” (stanza 2). This is followed by the dread at what he sees as a form of cannibalization, the ability to kill one’s own: “Walking through the streets in the mask of a human / Black shadows / Awful, that monster’s consumption / Of its own child” (stanza 5) (ibid.). The scrupulous attention of the poet to the effects of violence on the human being, his horror at what human beings can do to one another—these are aids to understanding that the erasure of the act of violence, the denial of it after it has been perpetrated, is no guarantee of its exorcism from the self, or of freedom from the danger of violent modes taking root in the recesses of private or collective selves. Rafiqul Hussain, the other poet who was asked to retrospect on the movement, also did this by recalling how one of his poems took shape

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against this backdrop (R. Hussain 2007). His little vignettes of violence appear small and localized, but they speak of the spirit of the movement as it appeared to so many, and as they remembered it especially in the climate of violence in present-day Assam. The first of Hussain’s snapshots is of his father, who was in the police force, thrashing the mendicant Kabira because his little son had followed him and stayed away from home for two days. The second is of the “pure patriot” standing before the adda at a teashop, calling it a “communist adda.” This image offers a clue to the overall contempt for conversation, discussion, and dialog; the only sense in which dialog was understood at this time was “dialog with the Center,” or “talks,” which became a part of the lexicon of the leaders and the people even as internal dialogue disappeared from society.4 The demonization implicit in the designation “communist adda” was a rationale for this incapacity of the movement to initiate vigorous discussion within and among its participants. Such incapacity must be seen as the cause of the many acts of coercion, which have begun to be acknowledged more and more as characterizing that period. Hussain describes that encounter: the older friend, a kind of “friend, philosopher, and guide,” is grabbed by the collar, thrown to the ground, and, in one fluid gesture, his right hand is chopped off. There is no sign of emotion, as if it was the easiest and the most natural thing in the world to do; he is threatened with similar treatment to the left hand if he is heard to oppose or criticize them. Hussain’s third snapshot is of being accosted by a group of drunken youth while escorting a fellow Communist Party of India (MarxistLeninist) (CPI [ML]) worker, who had a charge of murder hanging over his head, to a safe spot. The group surrounded them, shouting slogans: “Sons of bitches! Traitors to the motherland! Enemies of the motherland! Communist stooges!” and threatening elimination: “You will all be killed today, one by one!” The quiet reply, for once, unmans them enough to spare him. Hussain uses these examples to offer his own interpretation of the movement: I still remember the oppression of the communists. On the one hand extreme, blind patriotism, behind the urge to chase out the foreigners; on the other the series of killings of Bangladeshis, and in 1983, Indira Gandhi’s oppressive Hitlerite Fascism, and after that the emergence of the ULFA. (R. Hussain 2007: 56)

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Like many others, Hussain too remembers the humiliation meted out to Hiren Gohain on the central Panbazar street, an area of bookshops and music shops frequented by young college students. He sees this episode in conjunction with the humiliation and death threats faced by many other poets, playwrights, novelists, singers, painters, and cinema artists—a sign of the suppression of the intellectual core of a society, visibly manifested in the shallow gains of the movement and in what we now recognize as a kind of “thinning” of a society, a loss of resonance. Nirupama Borgohain, another contributor to the same issue of Nivedon, expresses her distress over the fact that, after making loud claims about a non-violent, peaceful, and democratic movement, a Gandhian movement, the leaders turned a blind eye to the many incidents of violence, murder, and torture directed at anyone believed or suspected to be an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant (N. Borgohain 2007: 30). She recounts several personal experiences of the sufferings meted out to ordinary people, to those who had lived in Assam for many generations. She too, like so many others, traces the alienation of the tribals to this time. Above all, she expresses her anguish at the fact that a movement that had stirred up an entire people did not produce a great novel, or thought-provoking essays. This touched a chord in the minds of many who remembered the movement, not only for the violence it engendered, but for the absence of serious reflection on the forces released by it, on the issues it had raked up and brought to public notice, and even on the all-important subject of a modern Assamese identity, which, for all practical purposes, it was in their hands to fashion and mould as they thought appropriate. Violence in this society has taken many forms. The emergence of militant violence is only the most visible. The activities of the ULFA in these years—its transformation from a self-perceived revolutionary group to a terrorist outfit with international terror links and a capacity to perpetrate acts of violence and bloodshed like kidnappings, extortions, the setting off of explosions in crowded market places—must be seen as the source of much of the violence of the present. The modes practiced by the ULFA have been plowed back into society. And the “rehabilitated” terrorist who has internalized such modes is the vehicle for the introduction of such modes into society. Contemporary responses to recent events certainly point to the awakening of a society to the violence in its midst. But they also indicate a

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sneaking comfort in the possibility of alienating oneself from such overt manifestations. In an article titled “ULFA Should Read the Writing on the Wall,” published in the June 25, 2007 issue of the Assamese newsmagazine Sadin, the writer Rupam Barua reports on the public anger against the ULFA for its indiscriminate and ruthless killings of innocent people—women, children, the elderly, the distressed—through bomb blasts in public places. Barua views this anger, expressed most evocatively through the slogan “Come on! Come out! And chase the ULFA out!” as something unique in the recent history of Assam, when many such incidents have taken place, but organized and public demonstration of anger by the young and the old alike has not been seen. Those who protested the violence shouted slogans—“ULFA Beware!” and “Hang Paresh and Arabinda!” (referring to ULFA leaders Paresh Barua and Arabinda Rajkhowa)—and warned all sympathizers, supporters, and mediators: “Brokers of the ULFA beware!” Barua sees these slogans as evidence of a new public awareness of the larger evils of insurgency, of the possible behind-the-scenes role of the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI,5 and the dangers of divisions among the various Indian communities living in Assam. All these themes are the subject of a further set of slogans that the crowd either shouted or carried on placards: “We want peace not killings!” “Let insurgency die!” “ISI murdabad!” (“Down with the ISI!”) “ISI agent ULFA Beware!” The attention-drawing placards indicated the united participation of various communities in the demonstration: “Asomiya,” “Bongali,” “Bihari,” “Marwari.” This represents an interesting shift in social perception. It points to a society identifying and distancing itself from the source of evil or violence as a way of dealing with a serious internal sore. It compares with the way Partition violence was interpreted and accommodated through its interpretation as something alien to the communities involved, an aberration. In a similar way, this incident of protest in Assam involves rejecting something seen as evil or repulsive, as an aberration, rather than as a society’s or a people’s natural way of being. Assam Public Works (APW), a group that has been taking an anti-ULFA position in its demand for redress for the anguish of the families of ULFA victims, works on a similar tacit assumption that the evil can be distanced and thrown out. It offers a strong counter-discourse to groups like the PCG, consisting of “mediators,” which has been demanding that talks take

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place on the terms set by the ULFA, especially on the issue of sovereignty that is the terrorist group’s primary rationale. The PCG exhibits a clear sentiment of sympathy for families of ULFA members perceived to have been victimized by the counter-insurgency policy of the state. A murky example of such victimization is the “secret killings,” carried out particularly during the tenure of the Prafulla Mahanta-led Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government. These two diametrically opposed discourses reveal how easy it is to fudge the ethical issues embedded in the hatred that is part of the understructure of such articulations; how a single-minded focus on the self can obliterate the presence of the other as victim. This is evident in the way both groups see only the sorrow and pain of the object of their programs, remaining immune or oblivious to the pain on the other side. An instance of such limited application of the norms of justice and compassion is seen in the interview of Mamoni Raisom Goswami (Goswami 2005: 288–99) conducted by Sanjoy Hazarika and Geeti Sen. In the interview, the well-known author and PCG mediator expressed her sorrow at the plight of the children of ULFA cadres, but was unable to adequately express similar anguish over the deaths of fifteen children in an explosion set off by the ULFA in a school playground at a place called Dhemaji. Goswami’s response does not so much suggest callousness as the compulsion, resulting from a specific affiliation, to consistently express it through word and action while steering clear of the suspicion of sympathy for the other side. It is possible to see this attitude as paralleling the position of “sympathy for the Maoist cause” taken by Maoist sympathizers through 2009–10 in the face of extreme brutality directed at innocent and defenseless men, women, and children by the rebels. While this kind of violence and the response to it form one aspect of the picture of Assamese society that prevails today, a determinedly positive outlook might mean a tilt to the opposite side, ignoring the violence altogether and focusing on the “good things” happening in the region. An article in the Assam Tribune (Monday, July 16, 2007) by Prasanta J. Baruah, titled “A Vibrant North East,” gathers together a cluster of such “good things” and attempts to give “a true picture of the ground reality.” Baruah cites the inflow of tourists drawn to the region by its cultural uniqueness, “high-rise buildings,” “new luxurious foreign cars,” and “outlets” of “leading marketing chains and manufacturers.” The clinching

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sign of economic progress is that “hundreds of Assamese families today go out every night for dinner at a favorite hotel.” These signs prove that “the North East thrives in spite of the obstacles placed before it.” The writer clearly misses the point of the picture that he approvingly presents of social development, and is able to suggest without any hint of irony that “there is an undercurrent of economic rejuvenation in most parts of Assam and the sister states today ... due to the generous allocation of funds being made available by the Union Government.” Baruah chooses to ignore the link he himself unwittingly makes between the funds and the luxury cars, etc., and offers, as a kind of sop, arguments about the monitoring mechanism and the rural development projects of the World Bank, which, by his own admission, flounder in the face of lack of “total accountability of fund utilization.” Likewise, the small-scale growing of tea and small- and medium-scale industries are mentioned as behind-the-scenes activities and enterprises, fading in the face of the “glowing,” “vibrant” picture that is best represented for him by the superficialities of an urban lifestyle, the partakers in which most commonly include surrendered militants, members of various mafias, corrupt officials, and politicians, whose obscene wealth is very often accumulated by siphoning off those “generous allocations” made by the union government. In the context of this argument, the callous concentration on individual economic advancement is also a form of violence, which allows money to be taken away from relief and rehabilitation programs for flood-affected people every year, and from allocations for health for the rural and urban poor; which can buy permission to build that newest high-rise building at the cost of depleted water levels and the drying up of shallower wells in poorer localities—the list goes on. The measurement of economic progress by the fact that everyone in the city has a car or a three-storied house, or eats out at expensive restaurants, is the kind of interpretation that is worth noting only because it reveals so much of what has been happening in Assam in the last thirty years—the development of a mindset, a spiritual bankruptcy, a growing superficiality that cannot be corrected by any number of shopping malls and designer outlets, and that is a manifestation of a society progressively turning against itself. This brings into focus an aspect of Assam today that must be seen as another form of violence: the undermining of the bureaucracy, and

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the developing nexus between administrators, politicians, and the militant/terrorist/insurgent. The two familiar terms used to describe Assam, which have acquired a kind of easy currency, are “violent” and “corrupt.” Violence and corruption are features of all kinds of societies and need not necessarily be located only in migration-affected ones. But the callousness, the determination to get ahead of all those thought to be traditional economic and cultural rivals and competitors, which has been a fallout of migration into the region, makes Assam a unique case. It is equally a feature worth noting that, in the thirty-year aftermath of the movement that centered the issue of illegal immigration and internal migration from other parts of India as the source of Assam’s problems with underdevelopment, violence toward the other, of which corruption at many levels is a part, became a component of identity and seeped into the identity narrative. Corruption has been both individual and systemic. The Corruption Perception Index for 2001 published by Transparency International, an NGO based in Berlin, ranked India at seventy-two out of ninety-one countries (CVC 2001: 5). Polls undertaken by various organizations— e.g., the well-known India Today–ORG poll, which receives a fair amount of media coverage, and television channels that conduct their own polls to support news reports of scams, large-scale government department corruption, and the individual acceptance of bribes—have at different times listed Assam among the more corrupt states. Corruption is commonly understood as “the use of public office for private gain.” This is the World Bank definition incorporated in The Citizens’ Guide (ibid.: 7). The Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, defines bribery as: (a) “public servant taking gratification other than legal remuneration in respect of an official act”; (b) “public servant obtaining valuable thing without consideration from person concerned in proceeding or business transacted by such civil servant”; and (c) “criminal misconduct” (ibid.). The Guide also mentions the sectors where the citizen is likely to face corruption: “the local rationing department, police, municipal authorities, or educational institutions like schools and colleges” (ibid.). Corruption is seen as threatening national security when the hawala route is used by militants, as much as by politicians, businessmen, and bureaucrats, to get money from abroad in defense and other international transactions. It is anti-poor, because food meant to be distributed

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through the public distribution system to those below the poverty line gets diverted to the black market—meaning that out of about `150,000,000 given by the government as relief to the poor, about `50,000,000 “land[s] in the pockets of corrupt shopkeepers and their godfathers in politics and bureaucracy.” It is anti-development and life-threatening when “corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, resulting in spurious drugs flooding the market, may mean the death of many innocent people.” And today, more and more, with terrorism having become a regular feature of our lives, the smuggling in of RDX by militants or terrorists with the help of corrupt people in the government may mean the loss of hundreds of innocent lives (CVC 2001: 9). The Guide identifies the strong sentiment that surrounds the idea of the family in India as one of the major reasons for large-scale corruption. Caste and nepotism are the basis for the distribution of patronage, along with a developing tribalism of the corrupt, and the feeling that a person in office must earn enough during his lifetime to ensure the financial security of several generations of his family. Consumerism and the desire for an ostentatious lifestyle are temptations toward corruption. Corruption is also facilitated by the increasing tolerance of dubious methods of acquiring wealth, and, indeed, the perception of wealth so acquired as a measure of power. Social practices like dowry, or the desire for the best possible education of children, set up a competitive cycle of corrupt practices. All of these factors, according to the Guide, ensure the social acceptance of corruption (ibid: 11). The Guide suggests that a “vicious cycle of corruption is launched where a society tolerates amassing of wealth and does not question how that wealth is accumulated” (ibid.). The Guide, which was the initiative of a proactive Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC) N. Vittal, goes on to cite C. Rajagopalachari, one of the stalwarts of the independence movement, on “national character,” and the “improvement of individual character” which goes to uplift national character and thereby contributes to national prosperity (ibid.: 21). Assam shows an aggravated form of all these practices (it is perhaps inevitable that there is no Assam-specific study of this degeneration). The manner in which corruption is described shows how intimately it is a function of self–other relations. Every other day, there are reports in the print media, particularly in the vernacular press, about scams, bribery, the

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siphoning off of public funds, unpaid pensions, non-payment of salaries to government schoolteachers, doctors misusing the public health service in rural areas—the list could go on. But merely to say that Assam shares in an all-India phenomenon would be banal and obvious. It is more important to see how the modes of corruption are closely enmeshed in the erosion of self–other relationships; to note that violence is an expression of this erosion; and to examine the specific fallout of such violence in a distinctive society and in unique circumstances. Rukmini Bhaya Nair writes about the British legacy of bureaucratic indifference, internalized at both individual and institutional levels and manifested in institutional callousness and indifference to misery and suffering. She explains “the high levels of corruption, graft and violence said to characterize postcolonial societies” through “the bureaucratic manufacture, on paper, of the attitudinal substance [I have] called indifference” (Nair 2002: xxx). Nair sees indifference as “the essence of terror, inhumanity, antimemory” (ibid.: xxxi), manifested often as “apathy, stoicism, escapism, fundamentalism” (ibid.: 251). She supports her argument with telling examples from recent incidents of human tragedies—specifically the Dabwali disaster (reported in the Times of India, December 26, 1995), in which 400 persons, mostly children, died during a school annual day function. The official reaction to the disaster was this callous indifference (ibid.: 250). In Assam, the phenomenon of corruption is discernible in the bureaucratic practices that it shares with the rest of the country—the inexorable link between bribery and the job that needs to be done; the common experience cited by anyone who has come up against the state administration that, without the payment of a bribe at every stage of the bureaucratic hierarchy, no file will move, no work will get done, legitimate dues will not be disbursed, and so on. Yet corruption in Assam is also traceable to the erosion of the bureaucracy during the movement: the subversion of what was traditionally conceived as its duty, and its willingness to employ its considerable reach in support of the goals of the movement. The capture of the minds of individuals across professions by the frightening specter of migration has to be viewed in this context of a tentacular spread of corruption—the urge to do the best for oneself quickly before the opportunity is lost or is taken by the migrant (without, however, allowing this to become a justification). The salary received by a government

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employee would seem to be merely to entice him into the workplace, to ensure his/her physical presence. For him to perform the duties associated with his position, he has to be paid by the individual “supplicant.” This is the scenario in offices, educational institutions, in public sector undertakings—the misuse or abuse of the power that comes with the position, the exercise of power over the powerless and the vulnerable. But the situation is also equally in operation in the public domain, in the social acceptance of corrupt practices, the circulation of money among private operators, contractors, politicians, and bureaucrats, and the nexus between many of these and the militant turned terrorist who has the money to tempt these morally vulnerable sections of society into the trap of violence and corruption, ensuring that they actively aid and abet the operation or conveniently turn away while the terror strike is carried out. A particularly contemptible aspect of such corruption is evident in the case of relief to victims of terrorist violence or the annual floods, when the funds allocated for relief in the face of human misery are casually siphoned off into personal coffers. Another example is the case of the midday meal scheme for schools, where the subsidized food grains are sold off for personal profit. The specter of the other is one of the reasons that might be offered for this overwhelmingly detailed and varied degeneration into violence. The next chapter looks at the way the questions surrounding identity are produced in a climate of violence by the changing perceptions of the migrant other.

Notes 1. These memories are represented from notes taken during conversations, and are reproduced here with the permission of the speakers. I am indebted to the example offered by the conversational mode through which the memory archive is activated in Urvashi Butalia’s book on memories of Partition, The Other Side of Silence. 2. A few years ago, in what came to be known as the Barnali Deb incident, a young girl was raped and murdered on the premises of a prominent travel network in the city. On this occasion, women, who were the movement’s most vocal protestors, did not make the demand that a history of women’s activism would presumably have taught them—not merely that the perpetrators be punished (over the judicial verdict of “guilty” there was

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intense jubilation), but that all such public places where women and young girls were vulnerable and unsafe should be secured against similar incidents in the future. 3. Maan is the popular Assamese term for the Burmese who invaded Assam periodically during the late 18th and early 19th centuries until they were finally evicted following the Treaty of Yandabo signed between the Burmese and the British in 1826. The Burmese have been associated in the popular imagination with unparalleled atrocities committed on the people of the region. 4. Other connotations of adda are evoked by Amitav Ghosh in The Shadow Lines (2001). Here, adda is represented as an occasion for freewheeling conversations on anything under the sun, any topic that is of interest to any one of the individuals gathered—a democratic, inclusive process that has never been shaken, even by the more degraded versions of it as a method of wasting time. It also reminds one of the idea of “loafing” that is central to the great democratic experiment of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1986). “I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass” (ibid.: 28). Here, loafing and idling are ways to attend, to listen to every thing before one, without any other calls upon one’s attention. 5. Sanjoy Hazarika’s book Strangers of the Mist (1994: 171–75) reported on the ULFA establishing links with the ISI for training and arms.

4 Identity Questions Narrating Past and Present It is the story that outlives the sound of war drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets our people apart from their neighbours. —Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (1988: 124)

Identities and Migration The last thirty years have been a period of interpretations, of questions of development and underdevelopment, of continuing large-scale migration, of “marginalization by the center,” of majority–minority questions in an ethnically diverse community, and the inclusion of migration and hybridity as the dominant tropes in the imagination of identity. It might be assumed that hybridity is a direct result of the contiguity of communities brought about by migration. But this has not always been the case, because the argument for closing in, for maintaining racial purity or exclusivity, has also been the result of the way the migrant has been perceived, and of the changing perception of the migrant over the last century. The identity problem here, as in many postcolonial nations where the structure and the imaginative model of the nation-state have been the

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result of colonialism, lies in the effort to integrate many ethnicities into the homogeneities of the nation-state. This raises identity issues that take different shapes over the years because of the deployment of historical memory, the reading of the past in specific convenient or expedient ways in a particular present, and the impact of the results on identity questions. In Assam, because British policies involved the insertion into the region of communities belonging to other regions and, more importantly, to other linguistic and culturally distinct groupings, the question of migration has been part of the imagination of an “identity always in crisis.” That is, the formulation or articulation of identity has always been in resistance, beleaguered, under threat either from the universalist and homogenizing design of the nation-state, or from influx from Bengal/ East Pakistan/Bangladesh. The biggest and most interesting manifestation of the identity crisis in Assam has been the shadow boxing among the two large linguistic and cultural groups, so similar and yet so determinedly different—the Bengalis and the Assamese. The language controversy is part of this uncomfortable relationship, traceable both to the introduction of Bengali as the official and educational language under the British, and to the impact of the Bengal Renaissance (the intellectuals of Assam in those years were mostly educated in Calcutta and developed great cultural empathy with the Bengalis). The major dimension of the perception of threat to the community has therefore been not so much the religious as the linguistic and traditional–cultural dimension. The religious dimension of the identity question, Assamese against Bengali Muslims, is a secondary aspect of cultural distinctiveness. It is only in the face of the rapid and large-scale influx of Muslims from Bangladesh in recent years that the numbers began to make a difference in religious terms. The perception of the local, indigenous, Assamese Muslim, who has been an integral component of Assamese society, has gradually come to be affected by the presence of an “in-your-face” religious fundamentalism that is of recent origin. All of this adds significance to the experience of the last thirty years and the emergence of a sharp consciousness of identity, now remembered and recalled in the light of the violence of the present. This is a critical situation that feeds into the modernity dimension of the identity question, framed as the confrontation of a certain kind of ancient society with the new; the past and the present, tradition and modernity, are simultaneously present in the narrative.

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The question of agency has to do with not accepting passively the identity that is thrust on a people, with taking responsibility for one’s self-image and its fashioning. These aspects of the modernity problem are seen, for instance, in one form in Charles Taylor’s (1994) thesis about modern identity and “the politics of recognition.” The phrase is borrowed by Prasenjit Biswas in his exploration of the identity question in northeast India: “Recognition comes from an Other or from the State”; “the desire for recognition [is] the root cause of assertion of identities by ethnic, linguistic and religious groups within NEI [NorthEast India]” (Biswas 2005: 93). Biswas sees recognition as “a recognition of dominance by the other,” while the “politics of recognition ... brings together identities in a mutual reciprocity” (ibid.). Biswas’s distinction between “recognition” and the “politics of recognition” manifests the peculiar push and pull that characterizes the imagination of identity in the region, as a function of both Center–state relations and intra-state, inter-community tussles. Apurba Baruah, also writing on the same problem, places it within the broad framework of movements for identity: “The movements of various communities to assert and protect their, what is commonly called, ‘ethnic’ identity, are the most significant aspects of the contemporary socio-political reality of India’s North East” (A. Baruah 2005: 17). This reference to the ethnic brings up the legacy of colonialism and its policies with regard to migrants and tribal communities, and the resultant geographical and demographic structuring. Migration and hybridity questions, which feed into identity issues here in Assam, are functions of this colonial legacy. The policy of land settlement through the Line System was adopted in 1920. Amalendu Guha, whose detailed and impressively referenced Planter Raj to Swaraj (2006) has been a source book for many scholars, discusses this step in the context of the British policy on immigration and the local response to such settlement. Under the Line System, “a line was drawn in the districts under pressure [from immigrants] in order to settle immigrants in segregated areas, specified for their exclusive settlement” (A. Guha 2006: 167). “A conference of district officers held at Shillong in 1928 decided that the number of lines should be reduced, simplified and straightened ... with the objective of allocating considerable blocks of land community-wise” (ibid.: 168). This implied greater administrative control over the process. However, the

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drawing of lines within villages or the complete exclusion of immigrants from certain villages, ostensibly to protect the Assamese and aboriginal inhabitants, meant the implementation of a process of racial segregation (A. Guha 2006: 169) that must be held responsible for the divisive nature of the Assamese identity narrative today. As the positions on migration in different disciplines reveal, the focus for most disciplines has been the migrant. It is in the context of this presence that a host society addresses questions of identity. It is possible to trace the development of identity questions in Assam from the time the first migrations took place to the current situation when migration continues unabated. In this trajectory undertaken by migration and the migrant, if one were to use the descriptions prevailing within migration studies, the migrant has moved from the assimilationist phase to the transborder phase, progressively and differently affecting questions of identity in the host society. In the first phase, absorption in the host culture means that the host society is also able to see itself as benign, generous, and welcoming, as the perfect host who is willing to contain and include. This is evident in early versions of the narrative, where the conception of the Assamese is inclusive, covering within its ambit all the groups living in Assam at the time (see, for instance, the discussion of Roychowdhury in the next chapter). As the numbers grow, the assimilation is less, and perceptions of threat enter, bringing about what has so often been identified as a “siege mentality,” a community that is beleaguered, cornered, endangered, fighting with its back to the wall. In the transborder model, the migrant no longer feels the need to assimilate, and instead retains ties with the home country, either in the form of relations or an ideology, as is evident in the case of new immigrants. Indeed, this has taken a peculiar direction in Assam. With the assertion and retention of an original identity by the migrant, an overt Islamization has begun to manifest itself. This has resulted in the response in violence—the new image of the Assamese as aggressive, violent, and inhospitable. In its own way, the Assam Movement made a statement about identity. In its articulation, and even in its inability to articulate, it captured several issues about identity crises in Assam that had their genesis in the region’s distinctive colonial history, marked by the conflictual relationship with Bengal and Bengalis that was fomented and sustained by the

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British. The movement was also a watershed in identity articulation, because several themes in Assam’s identity narrative came to a head with the recognition of the other as a threatening presence in the society (the result of migration on an unprecedented scale from neighboring Bangladesh), and with the seizing of the moment by the student-led people. In the aftermath of the movement, D.P. Barooah, ideologue of the movement, a mentor to the student leadership, and a former vicechancellor of Gauhati University, was asked whether, in hindsight, he thought the Assam Movement had been successful and worth the effort. He replied that the movement had brought about a “new awakening” in Assam that was responsible for a renewed awareness about identity (Barooah 2007: 38). The movement, by the manner in which it formulated the problem, asked a question that is the flip side of the migration issue—what is the predicament of the receiving society? How is it affected by the entry, the daily presence, and the economic activity of a people who are easily positioned as the industrious other to the lackadaisical, laid-back, casual Assamese? This formulation also raises issues that go against the grain of internationally acclaimed theories of host nations, of Derridean hospitality, and ideas about the romanticized, postcolonial–postmodern migrant and hybrid who relishes her beleaguered position “on the edge of ‘foreign’ cultures,” as Bhabha memorably puts it (1994: 139). Logically, therefore, unfashionable, uncomfortable questions are raised anew: about the right of host nations to protest the entry of immigrants, to guard their cultural distinctiveness, to insist on assimilation—the shadowy other side of the multiculturalist, multi-ethnic master-narrative of inclusiveness that represses these issues in its articulation. These questions in the location of Assam (and other states of India’s northeast) are rendered especially urgent by the numbers, frequency, and rapidity of the immigrant influx, and the quite extraordinary geographical spread achieved within short spans of time. Because the Assam Movement’s immediate sparking point was the discovery of the abnormally inflated electoral rolls for a by-election in the Mangaldoi constituency, its major battle cry was obviously against the sudden presence of foreigners in various electoral districts and constituencies—the readiest and most evident indicator of the rise in immigrant population.

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The situation posed a challenge to disciplines that must get their legitimacy from the locations in which they operate. Economics, political science, history, anthropology, statistics, geography, biology—all of these disciplines stood challenged by the need to respond, interpret, and position intellectually the ominous new presence in society. The Assam Movement, by defining migration as its primary target and ideological battleground, invited a retrospection of history—carefully selected and presented. At the same time it also, perhaps unwittingly, ventilated issues that were not elements in its primary narrative. Such questions began to raise their heads only after the dust had settled on the pages of the Assam Accord. How had the movement been responsible for the brutalization of a society, for the emergence of violence as a way of life, for the denial of the other that made such violence possible? What were its failures—beyond the failure of the Assam Accord to stem the flow of immigrants, how did we fail to guard ourselves from our own demonization? Where did we go wrong that we failed our society and ourselves? How did we become a society that is today identified by two unattractive features—the disease of corruption and the looming specter of violence? At one level, the identification of migration as the single most important issue in the identity crisis of Assam is the simplest step one can take in analysis. But at the same time, it is also the one issue that has complex ramifications. The nature and timings of these identifications have been part of the way they have entered the identity narrative. Assamese intellectual Hiren Gohain wrote an article in 1979 titled “Marxbaad aru Jatisamasya” (“Marxism and the Problem of the Nation”) (see Gohain 1983 [1979]), where he suggested that in Assam the problem of identity/ people/nation/race had taken two forms: first, illegal migration into Assam; and second, the use of minority languages in the schools of Assam (ibid.: 224). In this context, Gohain alludes to a 1972 article he had written for the magazine Frontier, “Roots of Xenophobia in Assam,” where he had said that as a result of the peculiar form of progress under India’s chosen economic philosophy, Assam’s economic progress has been retarded and the Assamese people have been economically and culturally weakened. Consequently, a

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deep suspicion and doubt about the outsider [bohiragato] has taken possession of the Assamese middle class mind. (Gohain 1983 [1979]: 191)

Gohain follows this up with an exemplary statement of the peculiar bind in which Assam was caught: The reason for a stunted nationalism is the indifference by the Centre to economic claims even as it shows sympathy for its cultural aspirations. The frustration, anger and discontent of the Assamese have been made even more complex by the suspicion and anger of the tribal towards the Assamese on the grounds that the Assamese have exploited and suppressed them both economically and culturally. (ibid.: 191–92)

Competing Narratives The preceding quotation provides a cameo of the issues that constitute the identity narrative as it is taking shape now in Assam. These issues include the accusations of central indifference and neglect,1 economic exploitation, and the growing dissatisfaction of tribal groups at the hijacking of the Assamese identity narrative by the dominant Assamese. The quotation also draws attention to the two narratives that are in contention, in a relationship that we recognize as the inevitable subversion of every master-narrative by little ones, and the spawning of many little narratives by a master-narrative. The Assamese little narrative is pitted against the nationalist master-narrative, the tribal little narrative against the Assamese master-narrative, a little narrative of a tribal component against the tribal grand narrative, and so on, as other components of each tribal group, which are often multiple groupings, bring in their own perceptions of these relativized relationships. Above all, Gohain’s observation that the Center has responded differently to cultural and economic aspirations is a point that helps explain why cultural stereotypes float around in the narrative, exploited by those who are described by it and perpetuated by others for whom it is a convenient and easy handle to grasp a complex and intricate mosaic. Regarding the two questions raised by Gohain, we are faced with the problem of the theoretical apparatus that different critics have called upon for their analyses, and the unique interpretation that has been the

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result. In Gohain’s Marxist analysis, there is an unabashed recalling of the Soviet example in solving the problem of migration: “When there were fears that such migration may economically suppress and deprive the local inhabitants, then it was seen that the Communist Party in Russia banned migration.” Gohain also recalls Stalin’s comment at the Fourth Conference of the Central Committee that, for the welfare of its own people, it might become necessary “to regulate, and where required, stop migration” (Gohain 1983: 224). On the second question about the medium of instruction, Gohain offers another Soviet example: the Communist Party’s belief in safeguarding the rights of minorities, and the real experience of the discontent over the imposition of a majority language among a minority group (ibid.: 226–27). The violence of all identity movements has cultural, political, economic, and demographic explanations. As the guarding and preservation of national and ethnic history, icons, culture, cuisine, and dress become urgent, the search for repositories of these traditional features and their perceived violation call forth violence in the form of forced adherence to a particular behavioral or dress code. As other groups in the region become conscious of their identity and feel the need to assert their distinctiveness, the burqa is seen more and more, as is the Bodo dokhona. This obsession with a dress code, often selected as the most evident marker of “culture,” has frightening possibilities of fundamentalization. The imposition of any item of dress, or its banning (such as the banning of the Islamic head scarf or hijab and the Sikh turban in schools in France), is an act of violence that is seldom recognized as such by the imposing authority. It also has overtones of sexism, with women usually becoming the objects of such imposition and often being coerced into submission to such codes. As the national movement for independence showed, education for women, and changes in their dress styles to a more comfortable Western-style blouse and buckled shoe with the sari, were not enough to prevent women from continuing to be repositories of tradition and the educated guardians of the sacred home space where Western influences were kept at arm’s length. In Assam, the festival of Bihu has been the occasion for the display of the traditional mekhela sador. But its imposition as a cultural marker has the same fearful overtones. Samujjal Bhattacharyya, AASU advisor and North East Students’ Organization (NESO) president, while

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addressing an open session of the golden jubilee celebration of Sadou Udalguri Rongali Bihu Sanmilan on April 19, 2007, declared: “In recent times, anti-culture weeds have affected the floral garden of rich Assamese culture and we must uproot all such weeds.” He also urged the youth “to come forward to protect the essence of Bihu taking all indigenous ethnic groups of the state into confidence.” Worth noting here is the dangerous association made by the appointed speaker, Ismail Hussain, a lecturer of Assam Engineering College, between loyalty to a culture and dress. He “criticised the fashion culture of jeans and churidars among the Assamese boys and girls particularly during festive occasions like Bihu” (Assam Tribune, April 23, 2007). This reminds one of the insistence on the adoption of the mekhela sador as proof of loyalty to Assamese culture during the Assam Movement. (No such imposition was made on the boys.) It is difficult to identify an agent for this diktat during the movement because, as with so many identity issues that slip insidiously into a narrative, this one too did not come from a single, identifiable source. Rather, it was declared and implemented by the self-appointed leaders of protesting groups, especially those carrying out dharnas and strikes or taking part in processions. Violence has usually been seen in this sense of the enforcement of a norm, the will to homogenize, to reduce difference to what Foucault calls “the Logic of the Same.” Amartya Sen, in his book Identity and Violence (2006), insists on the recognition that identities are multiple. Any single individual carries several such identities within her, denying one for the sake of a more relevant alternative in a given situation, and switching them around according to immediate need and convenience. Sen argues that violence is done when this multiplicity is denied or forcibly erased for the sake of a single identity. Violence is a result of such flattening methods. On the other hand, violence might also be the result of the continuation of otherness, when the other is not sought to be included or assimilated but is condemned to live with her otherness. The retention of such otherness then legitimates the hatred and alienation that is directed at the other. The difference between these two identity conceptions is worth noting: while the first does violence through homogenization or forcing the other to be like oneself, the second keeps the other as other in order to legitimize violence. The fallout of this is that the self is now made violent because of her “legitimate” hatred of the other, and is capable of unleashing this violence even when the particular other is not

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involved. This is an aspect of identity that is revealed in migration situations which show assimilationist and transborder phases. The hostility that the migrant faces in the new society discourages assimilation, sending her into the security of the societies of earlier migrants. The growth in numbers of this unassimilated section of the society usually results in violence from the threatened host. The receiving or the rejection of the migrant—neither of these is an easy position to adopt for a people with a carefully cultivated tradition of hospitality (part of the grand narrative of Indianness). Receiving can mean erasure, but rejection is culturally and socially taboo.

Migration Models To understand the phenomenon of changing elements in the identity narrative as the character of migration changes, it is necessary to examine the ways in which the society that receives the migrant has perceived and narrated the phenomenon. But migration theory has shown an obsessive concern with the migrant and not enough with the host. The common concerns have been with how the migrant views herself; how she views the society and the people she is among; the nature of interactions/transactions between the migrant and the host; and how the migrant views, remembers, and stores in her mind the land she has left behind. The question of how the host views the migrant is lost in the pile of structural and legal frames that are part of the interpretation of the reception of the migrant. This is apparent in the models of migration available across disciplines. All of these are modes of incorporation of the migrant, and indicate the many and varied pressures and compulsions at work in the ways migrants enter and join a new society. The assimilation model was developed at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, to be challenged and revised subsequently by Portes and Rumbaut (1990) and Portes (1997). The model raises several questions. Its US focus is obvious in its investigation of a complex process of incorporation, and the outcomes for various groups according to contexts of reception that vary with reference to US government policy; labor market reception—neutral, positive, or discriminatory; and an already existing ethnic community which the migrant might join, and which might be working class or entrepreneurial.

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The issue of a profession that is already available for the migrant to enter is extended in studies of “ethnic entrepreneurship,” the “ethnic enclave economy,” and “ethnic niche” models, and of the roles these conditions play in facilitating or delaying the process of incorporation. The ethnic entrepreneur model (associated with the work of Ivan Light [1979, 1984]) shows how “the very experience of immigration produces a reactive solidarity,” and how the “sociocultural and demographic features of a group (e.g. entrepreneurial heritage, values, and attitudes), a multiplex of social networks and underemployed and disadvantaged coethnic workers, manifest themselves as ethnic resources that provide advantages to the group” (Heisler 2000: 81). Work on the second-generation migrant, especially in the discipline of sociology, helped in the evolution of the ethnic enclave economy model (principally by Alejandro Portes between 1980 and 1990). This model recognized the existence of a primary labor market with good jobs, decent wages, and secure employment, and a secondary labor market with unskilled jobs, poor wages, and insecure employment. The ethnic enclave economy model assumed the spatial concentration of the group, either in terms of clustered networks of businesses, or in its use en masse as cheap labor. In a region like Assam, these features have been visible over the last hundred years of sporadic and varied migration of people. The movement of people from another part of the country into the region and into particular established and traditional businesses is exemplified by the Marwari community of traders and businessmen. This group represents one of the many migrations that mark this part of India but that has not had the same troubled history that is the major feature of the migration of the Bengali—first the “superior” Bengali Hindu whitecollar workers, and subsequently the Bengali Muslim farmer. “An ethnic enclave economy is characterized by the spatial concentration of the immigrant group” and “sectoral spatialization” (Heisler 2000: 82). This can take place through social networks or social relationships; the utility of such networks might depend on criteria like schooling, professional qualification, or the language proficiency with which the migrant is already equipped. “Ethnic niches emerge when an ethnic group is able to colonize a particular sector of employment in such a way that group members have privileged access to new job openings, while restricting the access of outsiders” (ibid.).

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Ethnic entrepreneurship, ethnic enclaves, and ethnic niches are different models of incorporation that also “attest to the extraordinary diversity of contemporary immigration and the structural differentiation and flexibility of American society” (Heisler 2000: 83). While some of these models, or some features of these models, explain the situation of the migrant in the new society, the gulf between models evolved in the USA and their applicability in regions where a specific and different migration situation prevails is still wide. And one is faced once again with the inability of any theory that has a certain condition of emergence to be equally or similarly useful in a new location. The nature of the migration that is an assumption in this book and that is a reality in this region is very different from the general situations that are tacitly at work in the evolution of these theoretical parameters, or in the deployment of criteria that are taken for granted. In the description of the situation of migration in Assam given by Prafulla Mahanta in his dissertation, it is possible to see some of the characteristics of these models: The present infiltrators get mixed up with the immigrants who have come in lakhs earlier to this state from the areas now in Pakistan and were having common habits with the new infiltrators. Further, there is constant communication between people on both sides of the Indo-Pak border ... [because of ] ties of religion, relationship, language, customs and habits and common economic interest.... People coming from the other side ... can easily cross the border and become unidentifiable. (Mahanta 1986: 83)2

The blending of migrants into an existing community, on the one hand, and the retention of connections with relations and friends in the home country, on the other, are the reason for what is frequently cited as a “threat to the internal law and order situation” and the “the security of the state” (ibid.). As with other texts that study migration, the discipline within which a study like this is undertaken determines the focus and the areas that interest the researcher. Mahanta’s legal studies decide his focus; and this is certainly an aspect of the problem that demands immediate and specific attention in this location. But the concerted, interdisciplinary effort that this postcolonial phenomenon demands has not yet

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been directed at it. Disciplines have been caught within their own frames and interests and have tended to limit their studies to aspects sanctioned by the traditions of disciplinary practice. Those who migrate from the neighboring country into Assam are from the poorest and most deprived section of the population. Therefore, illiteracy, non-existent language skills in the host society, and lack of professional skills mark members of this group. Their entry is invisible and easy to achieve, often through the payment of a small bribe at the border, but more often through slipping in through breaks in the fence, or at unfenced and unmanned stretches, or simply swimming across where rivers break the border. The prior existence in the destination of communities from the same regions allows them to slip into the country unnoticed. Their physical appearance, skin color, etc., ensure that they remain unnoticed as individuals. It is only in terms of their growing numbers that they begin to become visible. It is a noticeable feature of migrationrelated problems in the region that the increase of hostility in the host society is in direct proportion to the increase in numbers. Migrants enter the service sector to perform menial jobs—a distinctive characteristic of migration in developing countries—working most often as domestic help or as unskilled construction workers. These are jobs that have very few local takers in Assam because of the Assamese self-image of a people who never worked for a living, since the land always had enough for everyone. Over time, the other area that the migrant seeped into was the agricultural sector, initially achieving an impressive record of annual cultivation in the sand banks of the Brahmaputra, which the migrants reclaimed as agricultural land, and then gradually spreading all over the state as vegetable growers, chicken farmers, and fishermen who supplied a significant proportion of the needs of the state. It is, therefore, a futile exercise to examine the record of this particular migration in terms of a theory that was specially evolved to understand and explain migration into a wealthy, first-world country from regions of tremendous economic and educational diversity. The cases of migrants from India and Mexico into the USA, for instance, would be easily distinguishable on the basis of the three criteria mentioned earlier—schooling, professional qualifications, and language proficiency. What we have in Assam, instead, is migration from a poor, underdeveloped country into a developing country whose reputation for

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phenomenal economic growth often hides the fact that this growth is disparate, and that it still has regions which lie outside the magic circle of nationally televised prosperity. So the poor from Bangladesh migrate into the abutting regions of a neighboring country, regions which are not significantly better off and which therefore are often unable to support the new pressures on land, economy, and infrastructure. How the host views the migrant is now a question that has to be separated into several strands. The host’s perception of the migrant develops through stages of welcome, then indifference, then the perception of threat, and finally outright hostility. One aspect of the thinking on the assimilation model, especially the assumption that assimilation is the essential outcome of “all the incidental collision, conflict and fusions of peoples and cultures” resulting from migration (Park 1928: 128) is the recognition that it cannot explain the “resurgence of ethnicity” and the persistence of racial inequality and conflict. This is particularly evident in the changing behavior of the migrant over the last thirty years in Assam, the growth in political awareness, the emergence of minority political groups, the visual and vocal assertion of cultural difference by the migrant, and the increasing willingness to be visible, to be out in the open. All of this is, in fact, more easily explained by the “transborder” model, which takes into account the retention and sometimes the establishment of new ideological links with the home society, and the sense of power that emerges as a result of support from this source. However, this model is useful for the present argument only insofar as it offers indicators for the processes of change and for the practices and strategies of reception evolved by the host society. Within the discipline of sociology, in fact, one aspect of such processes has been studied in the focus on the process of interaction between host society institutions and structures and the characteristics of newcomers, which naturally involves a study of the host society. However, such studies usually focus on structural and instrumental elements, and do not take into account the processes of psychological and behavioral change brought about by daily interaction with an other who becomes the object of dislike, fear, and, ultimately, violence—processes that distort the host more than they affect the understanding of the migrant. The model of “transnationalism” formulated by anthropologists has roots in earlier work on return migration that emphasized links with the

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homeland. Transnationalism evolved the notion that emigration did not necessarily mean definitive departure, but also that return is not definitive return. The questions that this model is interested in—such as policy in home and receiving countries and dual nationality to encourage both a presence abroad and attachment to home—indicate that it is unaware or unconcerned with illegal and invisible migration, when migrants disappear anonymously into the host society, often into local communities of earlier migrants from the same region who may have come to be accepted as citizens through existing laws in the receiving country and through the all-important compulsions of vote bank politics. Many of these issues became urgent concerns in Assam in the last decade, following the renewed visibility that illegal migration received as a result of the targeting of people of Bihari origin by militants (who were suspected to be in league with the Pakistani security agency ISI). In many instances, it was these Bihari migrants whom the Bangladeshi migrants replaced in their traditional labor-based and service professions. Continued migration into the region has thrown up for the disciplines the problems of “managing continued immigration ... the perception of ‘demographic disaster’ ... the dangers of the conflation between ‘Bangladeshis’ and the descendents of earlier settlers” (S. Baruah 2007: 46). These are predictably receiving-society concerns, and indicate how deeply and widely affected a society that receives the migrant can be. At the same time, this particular positioning of the “impact on the receiving society” manages to keep its sights firmly on the visible economic, political, and demographic problems. Because of these emphases, such approaches ignore or fail to see how a people and a society are brutalized and psychologically scarred by the “unbearable pressure” of hosting the immigrant. Among the popular books on the immigration problem of the northeastern region is Sanjoy Hazarika’s Rites of Passage (2000), which seeks to “differentiate between refugee flows and migratory movements”; “view the disasters that overtake societies when these basic problems are ignored or not understood adequately”; and “tell the stories of both those who move and those who stay behind” (ibid.: 5). In this plan for his book, Hazarika’s emphasis is on the migrant. The aspects that might pass as characterizing the “reception of the migrant,” or the response of the receiving society, are the legal avenues he cites as being available to prevent

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entry of the immigrant (the Prevention of Infiltration from Pakistan [PIP] Act of 1964); or to expel her (the Immigrants [Expulsion from Assam] Act of 1950); or the initiative of the host society itself to detect and forcibly push back foreigners or report their presence to the security agencies. Migrants’ exploitation in the economy or in the peculiar form of vote bank politics are other aspects that might be classed as “the response of the host society.”

Hospitality Responses of this nature bring us to the larger question of hospitality implicit in the reception of migrants by a host society. Hospitality is not merely a matter of the laws or policies that define the arrival and reception of the migrant. Beyond these faceless and impersonal structures is the society itself, made up of individuals whose capacity for offering hospitality is at stake. When Derrida writes of “absolute hospitality,” he understands that it requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner ..., but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. (Derrida 2000: 25)

Hospitality of this kind is underscored by norms of unquestioning acceptance and welcome, norms that speak particularly to cultures like those in India where the guest is equated with God (atithi devo bhava). There is no question of asking for identification; “He” is the beloved who might come in any guise, and therefore, by implication, in the guise of all guests. It is necessary to address and negotiate the ethical issues at stake here, because this is an area of thinking on migration and on the duty of the host society that stands like a conscience keeper in the face of the “problem” of immigration, which is usually the frame for recognizing this major characteristic of the globalized world. For instance, the situation that is implicit in Derrida’s unconditional hospitality is one where immigration is visible to the structures and institutions of the state, where names are registered, where there might be a tacit privileging of the wealthy, west

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European “people like us” over the poor immigrant from an Asian or African country, where the “absolute, unknown, anonymous other” is inevitably this poor, underprivileged, and certainly deeply “unenlightened” immigrant. The absolute other is tacitly that person, entity, or people whose difference from me and mine, from my most deeply held convictions and beliefs, from my politics and my ways of living, uplifts me in the reception I am able and willing to offer. This acceptance offers me the profound satisfaction of a consciously ethical act. Such a fulfillment is similar to what I have pointed to as the generosity aspect of the identity narrative in the early phase of Bengali migration into Assam. Derrida goes on to elaborate this idea of the reception of an unknown and unnamed other: Is it more just or loving to question or not to question? to call by the name or without the name? to give or to learn a name already given? Does one give hospitality to a subject? to an identifiable subject? to a subject identifiable by name? to a legal subject? Or is hospitality rendered, is it given to the other before they are identified, even before they are (posited as or supposed to be) a subject, legal subject and subject nameable by their family name, etc.? (Derrida 2000: 29)

A gulf stretches endlessly between the ethical issue framed and articulated like this, and the real conditions of immigrant influx around the world—and not only in the direction that seems most visible to the West, i.e., from poor country to rich country. At a more legal and political level, the obligations to immigrants and refugees are placed as the collective moral obligations of the citizens of one country to the citizens of others. Michael Dummett, who writes about these concerns, refers to the moral frame—the fact that we are dealing with fellow human beings—which includes the question of the defense of the human rights of immigrants and refugees. He sees these considerations as necessary premises for evaluating national sovereignty and security concerns, and claims that “the system of nation-states virtually guarantees universal national selfishness” (Dummett 2001: 48). While examining the respective merits of controlled borders and open borders, Dummett suggests that the right of a state not to be submerged, i.e., to put in place controls and regulatory practices to keep a watch on both legal and illegal entry, is only a “residual right” (ibid.: 51).

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The exceptions that he cites are worth noting, because it is in the arguments for smaller states that are in danger of submergence, and which therefore may legitimately resist immigration, that suggestions emerge about the conditions of immigrant influx characteristic of countries that have lived through a colonial experience and colonial policies of settlement. Colonial governments encouraged immigration for economic reasons as the British did in Malaya and Fiji; the annexing power has encouraged its people to move into the annexed territories in order to make their populations more uniform with that of the general domain; and, in many cases, precisely in order to weaken or obliterate the local culture, as the Soviet Union did in the Baltic states, as Indonesia did in East Timor and as China is doing in Tibet. (Dummett 2001: 51)

While discussing these situations, Dummett arrives at the distinction between rapid and slow influx. This point is of special interest here, because the response of society that is noticeable in Assam is precisely because of the shift from a gradual influx to the sudden arrival of waves of migrants: Any country has the right to limit immigration if its indigenous population is in serious danger of being rapidly overwhelmed. The word “rapidly” is essential here. A gradual influx of people of a distinct culture is little threat to the native culture, since the immigrants will in large part assimilate the manners of their new home. They will not wholly assimilate the indigenous culture, but will contribute new elements to it. That is almost always an invigorating effect, however. The new cultural elements will be generally adopted if they are found to be compatible; it is they that will be assimilated. (ibid.: 52)

Further, he says: If they are not found to be capable of assimilation into the national culture, they will remain proper to a minority, which will be no threat to the life of the majority. In no case will a gradual influx of a people of a distinct culture threaten a native culture, even if over the very long run, the influx amounts to quite large numbers. The danger of submergence only occurs when the immigrants arrive in a short time in such large numbers that they see no need to assimilate. (ibid.)

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This distinctness of migration situations is important. The linguistic culture of the migrant is, in the case of Assam, already a matter of some resentment, and can be traced from the time of British rule when the migration of Bengali speakers began. The imposition of the language of the migrant on the local people meant that, with one gesture of government policy, education, administration, and litigation began to be conducted in the alien language. This move produced a generation of people educated in the Bengali language, and crucially sympathetic to the culture of Bengal. The paradigm for thinking about international migrants is Westcentric, generally studying immigration into developed countries. Since migration scholarship and the reception of the migrant takes place on the same site, models of different kinds of migration inevitably focus on the migrant and observe how she becomes a part of the new society. In a recent article carried in the Hindu (January 18, 2007) on “The Great Immigration Debate in Britain,” Hasan Suroor writes about the growing concern in the UK over the influx of immigrants from Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. Fears of being “swamped” are expressed regularly by Britons, 70 to 80 percent of whom regard immigration as a problem. In fact, the “Polish plumber” is the new “catchall term of abuse” for immigrants from the former communist bloc. Suroor informs us that these new immigrants “are the target of an unmistakably xenophobic campaign accusing them of taking away local jobs; driving down wages; causing demographic imbalance in areas where they are concentrated; putting intolerable strains on already creaking public services; and threatening the British way of life” (ibid.). The strains of a violent response to the other may be heard clearly here—an impression that is further consolidated by the virulence expressed by the right-wing group Migrationwatch UK, which rejects government claims about migration boosting the British economy. The dissemination of its ideas achieved by the group is a further aspect of why opinions that are hostile to the migrant are so quick and so easy to develop. A second element in this rise of “chauvinism” is “the rise of the British National Party whose one-point agenda is to throw out immigrants” (Suroor 2007). Another set of statements that add to the anti-immigration

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sentiment come from the Labour and Tory politicians who claim that “their constituents have ‘genuine concerns’ about the effect immigration is having on jobs, wages, housing and community cohesion” (Suroor 2007). This is an example of the host society actually coming out with violence in the face of immigration. The political and economic arguments by which the immigrant is usually positively viewed—that immigration is good for the economy or that the immigrant is a useful new addition to the voters’ list—overshadow the hostility of society expressed through paranoia, resentment, rightist alignments, and the evolution of hated stereotypes. Such hostility may very well take the form of overt violence or a more concerted campaign against the poor immigrant. Above all, the emergence of these responses is a sign of anger that might then find an outlet in violence, or in what a recent study of the effect of immigration on the host society by Robert Putnam (reported by Madeline Bunting in the Guardian, reprinted in the Hindu of June 19, 2007) called a “hunkering down,” a closing in of a society upon itself. Interestingly, Putnam’s study is concerned with the effects on the hosts, an approach that develops out of the author’s concept of “social capital,” which he defines as “social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness” (Putnam 2007: 137). Bunting reports that Putnam found a “negative link between ethnic diversity and social capital,” and, even more ominously, that “diversity leads not so much to bad race relations as to everyone becoming more isolated and less trustful”: Mr. Putnam calls it “hunkering down” as people withdraw from all kinds of connectedness in their community. And what follows is a long list of negative consequences, which include less confidence in local government and the media, lower voting registration (though higher participation in protest), less volunteering, fewer close friends, lower rates of happiness and perceived quality of life and more time spent watching television. (Bunting 2007)

The details of Robert Putnam’s approach and findings may be specific to American society and its particular intra-social relationships. However, the focus on the host society, not only in politico-economic or demographic terms but in psycho-social terms, is in itself a cognitive

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mode that is encouraging in a scenario where the singular thrust on the “migrant” drowns out everything else. Putnam claims that in the short or medium run ... immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital.... In the medium to long run ... successful immigrant societies create new forms of social solidarity and dampen the negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities. (Putnam 2007: 138)

But Putnam’s argument does not in fact take note of the repeated challenges faced by the host society because of the shifting processes of incorporation and assimilation of the migrant. His impressive sample size of 30,000 is still caught within the migration scenario of the United States. Putnam’s interest in the psyche of the host society is not generally common in migration scholarship, which continues to be fascinated by the angst and deprivations of the migrant. Etienne Balibar, in an essay titled “What Is a Border?” that manifests this “migrant” obsession, writes about “one of the most odious aspects of the question of refugees and migration ... the question of ‘international zones’ or ‘transit zones’ in ports and airports” (Balibar 2002: 83). Such zones are rightly condemned for their segregation and inhuman treatment of the other. Balibar sees this as “an illustration of the state of generalized violence which now forms the backdrop both to so-called economic migration, and to the flows of refugees” (ibid.). While essays of this kind record the undeniable necessity of viewing immigration as a human problem that demands serious moral attention, the exclusive focus on the immigrant has meant that the human dimensions of the problem for receiving societies have virtually disappeared from the disciplinary radar. Therefore, the inability of these paradigms to imagine or consider invisible migration of the kind that occurs through the borders of India and Bangladesh, or to take into account the linguistic animosities that have developed over the last 150 years, is hardly surprising. That this is a firmly entrenched idea is apparent even in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s fascination for the migrant’s remembrance in his essay “Memories of Displacement” (Chakrabarty 2002). As he says, his “aim is to understand the relation between memory and identity” (ibid.: 115). Chakrabarty bases his argument on the collection of essays written by a group of Hindu Bengali refugees in Calcutta, titled Chere Asha Gram (The Village Left Behind) (ibid.: 116).

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Identity in the Host Society The development of corrupt and cruel practices for the most efficient exploitation, is one of the ways in which migration impacts a society that is yet to evolve sophisticated and calibrated methods of migrant registration, records of entry, movement within the host country, and settlements in specific areas, to say nothing of the manipulation, by the receiving society, of the memory of migration in the formation of its identity. At this point, it is necessary to explain what I mean by “identity in the host society” fashioned as a result of receiving the migrant. As an example, I refer the reader to the recent turn in Assamese society with the entry of what might be called an “ULFA-generated worldview.” The entry or seepage of practices of militancy into social and economic practices has affected modes of social exchange, and a denial of otherness has sprung from this exchange. The ULFA began by cultivating a Robin Hood image, and identified its most significant area of operation as the economy. Using its impressively diverse coercive powers, it took from the rich businessman who also happened to be an outsider, or it kidnapped people who worked for companies like Tata Tea. Along with this, through its program of sovereignty for Assam, it arrogated to itself the right to decide for a people whether they would remain marginal or would successfully displace and replace the Center. It is interesting to observe the issue that these manifestations indicate. The economic expressions of militancy are both effects of, and result in, the terror and violence that are so much a part of the ULFA’s modus operandi. Extortion in all its forms is one such expression, and includes the excessive demands made by clerks in offices for doing jobs that are part of their regular duties, as well as the more dramatic demands for cash at gun point or through a ransom claim. Large numbers of surrendered militants (or what came to be known as SULFA, or surrendered ULFA) have brought with them their perverted education in the economics of extortion, and have effected a discernible shift in the methodology of doing business, and of dealing with opposition, with business rivals, or with difference—the use of brute force, threatening with guns and death, the forcible occupation of houses or lands. Such groups are not involved in industry or production, or in anything else that is even remotely

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developmental; rather, they conduct businesses of “contracts and supply,” two terms that have entered the linguistic stock of every individual in the state. “Contracts and supply” have become the favored activities of unemployed youths or aspiring politicians. Each of these activities involves methods that are peculiarly neglectful of the other, concerned purely with the self. Further, they are ways of being that have entered mainstream society in a slow, insidious, but inexorable fashion. These activities are a vital part of our reality today, part of our self-perceptions, ingredients in our identity narratives that might be expressed in the value system implied by the article “A Vibrant North East” by Prasanta Baruah (2007) cited in Chapter 3. The influence on economic practices is the fallout of violence entering into society as a result of organized social mobilization against an alien/foreign presence. While such violence might be viewed as a kind of influence remote from the real source, something more immediate may be apparent in the way a society’s view of itself is affected by the daily interaction with the migrant, or even by her mere presence; or in how its representation in the public view or in the eyes of the rest of India gets manipulated by an interpretation and representation of the migrant. Once again, the specific situation in Assam provides the ready example. The illegal immigrants who have entered in such large numbers from Bangladesh are for the most part Muslim. But Assam has its own community of indigenous Muslims who trace their origins back to the first Mughal incursions, who are intimately involved in Assamese society, partaking in its cultural and social customs, participating in all the tensions and turmoil of its self-formation, living in harmony with predominantly Hindu communities, and sharing a famous shrine—the Poa Mecca at Hajo, some kilometers outside the city of Guwahati—as a common place for offering prayers. Traditionally, the Hindu and the Muslim in Assam have not felt any serious need to carry their religious affiliations at the forefront of their consciousnesses, because neither felt threatened by the other or discomfited by the other’s presence. With the entry of the Muslim from East Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh, a different way of being Muslim became visible, because this was a group distinguished not only by language and attire but by a more overtly patriarchal/hierarchical internal organization. The hostility that this intrusion generated seeped into the gaze directed

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at “all Muslims.” The new religious stereotype not only provokes awareness of the Hindu–Muslim binary and qualifies the age-old togetherness between the Assamese Hindu, casual about her religious distinction, and the equally liberal, laid-back Assamese Muslim, but also sends the indigenous Muslim into a state of siege.3 One of my students who happens to be an indigenous Muslim discussed this as a source of great frustration for herself and for her community—that after years of autonomous existence, they were now being assigned an identity with which they could not in fact keep pace. To now have to constantly prove Assameseness, to have to declare distinctness from the immigrant, to be compelled to assert an identity that had been taken for granted—these were her particular grievances about the situation in which the Assamese Muslims found themselves. She was especially worked up over the effect on the position of women. The strong patriarchal hold evident in the society of the immigrant Muslim was, among other things, compelled by the economically disadvantaged position in which they often found themselves. It was imperative that women be kept within the community under strict controls, which were imposed by the husband, supported by other men and even the women, and, above all, by the religious head or mullah in the community masjid. Women submitted to the worst injustices, but remained where they were kept. This situation has been responsible for the currency given to a renewed image of the obedient, submissive, passive woman that is at odds with the respectable position that women were believed to traditionally occupy in Assamese society. There are two conflicting premises at work here. The presence of the migrant in large numbers has been generative of hostility, so that the most natural response has been the “othering” and, specifically, the “demonizing” of the migrant. This is seen in the assigning of stereotypical labels like “thief ” and “dacoit,” drawn from localized incidents, to the entire community. The migrant is also accused of conspiring to drive out the Bihari laborer from his age-old professions, and of being part of the design of the ISI to change the demography of the region in revenge for the creation of Bangladesh. While the last feature is also part of the security assessments of the region, the use of these ascriptions to profile an entire religious minority is an indication of the direction that migration-related identity problems have taken in Assam. Yet the potential for a situation of this kind is also available because of the presence, in

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the host society, of a community that technically shares in the religion of the immigrant, even if the local culture of that religion may be perceived differently. At the same time, the growing internationalization of Islam has meant that, alongside local practice, a more universal mode of practicing the faith has become available, even as a more universal conception has homogenized the perception of its practitioners by those external to the community. The communal situation in Assam, it is worth noting, was never a matter of concern in the way it has been in the rest of post-independence India. Researchers on migration in this region would find it more logical that the rivalry in Assam is not between Hindus and Muslims, but between the speakers of the two major languages in colonial Assam—the Bengalis and the Assamese (Dasgupta 2001: 344). But the understanding of communalism and secularism has always been based on those locations where episodes resulting from communal imbalance, like riots or other conflicts, have occurred on a regular basis, so that not enough attention has been paid to this exemplary history of communal harmony. The quick adoption of the “Muslim stereotype” in the wake of the arrival of the Bangladeshi migrant has been the result of this cognitive convenience. But such stereotyping is also a part of the complex way in which the unwanted presence of the migrant in a society releases emotions that subvert or destroy the host’s habitual ways of living.

Historical Perspective on Migration in Assam In examining questions of identity through the migration prism, it is necessary to take into account the nature of the society that has shown different kinds of responses at different times in the last 150 years. The early settlers or migrants from Bengal were invited into Assam, settled in the region through British policies, and given the jobs of clerks in the government. They also entered as teachers, lawyers, railway officers, etc., at a time when the pressure of population was minimal and land was in plenty. This was a time when the interactions of Assamese society with Bengali language and culture were troubled, but still leavened by a degree of accommodation. This relationship was a result of the nature of jobs available, the levels at which the migrant entered, and the kinds of relationship s/he was able to have with the new society.

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In this early phase, the components of the identity narrative included ideas of distinction from the Bengali in all possible ways, even as warm and friendly relations existed at individual levels. Early writings lament the loss of Assam’s distinctiveness when juxtaposed with the Bengali. A fear of cultural engulfment was felt and expressed by intellectuals who were at the same time the most avid consumers of that culture. The dominant nature of the migrant meant that a peculiar relationship developed with the host society. The latter expressed resentment at the migrant’s perceived or avowed superiority, but, more significantly, in the light of the distaste and revulsion that the more recent migrant evokes, an “equality” was also expressed in what Amalendu Guha discovers to be a “conflict of interests between immigrant Bengali babus and the indigenous dangariyas for administrative jobs” (A. Guha 2006: 19).4 Anindita Dasgupta, in her research on the Sylheti migrant, quotes one of her informants who remembers her father calling for a moorha (cane stool) for an Assamese visitor who had come to him for some work: “Give him a moorha on the verandah to sit on” (Dasgupta 2001: 350). Dasgupta’s work is important because she insists on the necessity of understanding the refugee in this part of the world outside the epistemological grid within which the Punjabi Partition refugee has been studied. Like most work on migration, this one too is migrant-focused. However, Dasgupta’s approach includes distinguishing among the kinds, classes, and economic backgrounds of the migrant. Her profile of the “Sylheti bhodralok,” who is “conclusively different from the refugee stereotype thrown up by studies focused on Partition along the western Indo-Pak border,” characterizes these migrants as a “small British-educated urbanized class ... who were not pauperized or victims of colonial violence” (ibid.: 357). This profile not only provides a picture of the kind of migrant who would be most resented and feared, but also shows the importance of understanding the migrant in order to understand the receiving society. “The ‘valley-jealousy’ formerly limited to the job-seeking middle classes was slowly transformed into a cult of aggressive and defensive linguistic nationalism” (ibid.: 350). It is this response of the receiving society that the present chapter demonstrates as feeding the identity narrative with elements like neglect and marginalization, elements that are also the rationale for eventual violence. The host society responded with this ambivalent discourse, most evident in the two pieces on the “Bongal” discussed in Chapter 5.

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At the same time, the very idea of playing host evokes among the Assamese notions of generosity, welcome, and a fresh look at themselves as a proud race. Distinctiveness, a unique history different and separate from the rest of India, a mosaic of cultures—these are the elements that are articulated as a result of the presence of this other, from whom it was necessary and possible to make such distinctions. As the trajectory of migration changed, and the profile of the migrant changed with it, the narrative of siege, always playing around in the subterrain, began to be heard more often and began to acquire larger proportions. The movement from assimilation/incorporation to ideas of transcultural relations at the religious, ideological levels, the shift from including the migrant in the “generous” self-image of the Assamese, which included ideas of a people who were laid-back, who were not rapacious, who were satisfied with the little they had (unlike, for example, the Marwari trader or the Bengali white-collar worker), to the entry of the element of “fear”—this is a remarkable route taken by the narrative of identity. Fear, threat perceptions, and hostility became the dominant fulcrums of the migration issue, with the entry of religion as a factor and the new, significantly oppositional profile for the post-Partition migrant. All the stereotypes that developed with this fresh wave of migrants who did not easily assimilate—Muslim; men clad in lungi and fez with a distinctive style of wearing facial hair; women surrounded by many children; people who entered at the lowest rung of the labor market and performed the jobs and tasks that members of the host society refused to take on—have been repeatedly reinforced since the transformation of East Pakistan into Bangladesh in 1971. The individual relationships that had been marked by generosity and warmth, and had fed these elements into the discourse, transformed into the impression of anonymous, faceless numbers. This shift, from being able to put a face to the migrant to a predominant impression of facelessness, is possibly also the reason for the easy turn to violence. This is the point of tracing this particular kind of link between the nature of the migrant and the levels at which s/he enters society, the response of the host society in warmth and hospitality or in violence, and the determination of the identity of the host society as a function of that response. By this token, the study of the migrant is important, but emphatically only by demonstrating something about the host society and fuelling the identity narrative.

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Most scholars on immigration into Assam in the last 150 years identify the same periods and phases and the same sets of migrants. Alaka Sarma (1999), in her work Immigration and Assam Politics, writes of two significant phases of immigration into Assam during the period of British rule—from 1826 to 1905, and again from 1905 to 1947. “In the first phase ... mainly three classes of people migrated—Tea Plantation labourers, ‘Amolas’ (office employees from Sylhet, Dacca, Mymensingh, Rampur and other districts of Bengal) and merchants and tradesmen from Rajasthan and Bengal” (ibid.: 4–5). “In the second phase ... Muslim peasants from East Bengal ... started settling in rural areas of Assam.” Simultaneously, “Bengali Hindu immigrants continued to pour into towns” (ibid.: 5). Sarma gives detailed statistics and census reports in support of these claims. Immigration, according to her, “gathered momentum during the first half of 1941–1951” and “during the Muslim League ministry in Assam up to 1946.” Between 1948 and 1949, “hundreds of Muslim immigrants traveled by the hill section railway from Badarpur to Lumding” (ibid.: 28). Sarma cites the 1951 census report which describes the settlers as “land hungry,” and speaks of the migrants’ efforts to appease this hunger by encroaching on “government reserves” and, most significantly, on “lands belonging to the local people” (ibid.: 29). The marshalling of numbers and percentages from the census reports to support the claim about the presence of migrants has been a common enough feature in the writings on these issues. However, beyond establishing the fact of immigration, which is beyond dispute, such statistical approaches have not significantly helped the study of either the migrant or the host. In a book that covers the crucial years for demographic studies, viz., 1881–1931, titled Population Trends in the Brahmaputra Valley (1881– 1931): A Study in Historical Demography, the author Homeswar Goswami (1985) tracks three waves of migrants into Assam. The first stream, up to about 1937, comprised tea garden laborers drawn from several backward tribes of India. The second wave comprised mostly landless farmers from the overpopulated districts of eastern Bengal. These groups started settling in the vast wastelands of the valley from the beginning of the 20th century till Partition, when Bengal was divided into East Pakistan and West Bengal. The third wave was made up of immigrants from the Surma Valley. This is a clinical record of a systematic settling of Assam’s sparsely populated territories that initially went unnoticed, but then began

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to occupy the consciousness of people, gradually taking the form of a dangerous bogey. Goswami wrote a second book in collaboration with two other authors, a companion volume that looks at population growth through migration in the period 1951–91 (Goswami et al. 2003). Amalendu Guha writes of the “decline of the indigenous population of the Valley” (of the Brahmaputra) by about 7.7 percent, and the corresponding increase in the non-indigenous population. But he also adds that, besides immigration, there was also inter-district migration (A. Guha 2006: 31). “As a result of ... these population movements ... and epidemic havoc ... two major demographic changes took place during the years 1874–1905: (i) a shift in the ethnic composition of the population and (ii) a change in its spatial distribution over the districts” (ibid.: 31–32).

Multicultural/Ethnic Diversity Of the groups of people who migrated from outside the region, the largest and most problematic migration was obviously that of the Bengali. This is the most noticeable fact in the 19th century. Amalendu Guha makes the somewhat contentious claim that “social change in Assam was, more or less, modeled on the immigrant Bengali caste-Hindu society of the time” (A. Guha 2006: 56). This is a statement whose truth claim, which points to a necessary other whose demonization provides the Assamese with an existentialist rationale, may be the very reason for its rejection from the identity narrative. Guha then suggests that an understanding of the “processes of westernization and sanskritization” in this society and the “intricacies of multiform relationships between the two dominant linguistic groups competing for jobs and positions of influence [are] essential for comprehending the struggle for self government that unfolded in course of the next half-century” (ibid.). Guha is speaking here of the early phase of an extremely complicated relationship—“the constant shadow of a Bengali-Assamese conflict”—that he sees as being influential even for the growth of a double-track nationalism: “pan-Indian nationalism at the all-India level” and “little nationalism at the linguistic-regional level” (ibid.). This refrain of a duality with regard to the national idea is discernible in many turn-of-the-century statements, when the idea of a

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greater India (mahajati) accompanies the idea of a distinctive Assamese entity (jati). But while the greater Indian nationalism and the smaller regional variations are still part of the Assamese narrative, the question of the Bengali other refuses to leave the mindscape. The Assam Movement, predominantly an articulation of middle-class, dominant-group identity, because of this special thrust on the migrant, spawned several minority narratives—pertinently, one called the “Amra Bangali.” While the grand narrative of the movement that developed at the time was all-inclusive, the memories of individuals reveal the selective persecution of Bengalis among teachers and government servants—the groups of professionals who came into closest contact with the protestors. The movement’s primary aim, to identify and deport “foreigners,” which meant the Bangladeshi, had as its refrain the cultural threat from this large, alien population. Now, since “communalism” (and its ambivalent “redeeming” alternative, secularism), especially Hindu–Muslim communalism, figures so largely in both the liberal and the Hindutva versions of the pan-Indian political discourse (which is scandalously unaware of counter-discourses, especially those emanating from the Northeast), the most easily available way to read this incursion of large numbers of Muslim immigrants was to see in it the conceptually familiar terms of Hindu–Muslim animosity.5 What disappeared into this convenient and perhaps too readily understood choice of interpretative frame was the historical resentment of the Assamese against the privileged Bengali, who first came in under the patronage of the British in large enough numbers to be threatening. The general ignorance of the pan-Indian discourse on this particular front meant that its multi-dimensional possibilities could not be envisaged, beyond the superficially descriptive. The point that was missed was that the cultural threat was from large numbers of Bengalis—that the sheer numbers would prevent assimilation. This emergence of the old bogey was what broke open in violence—the feared other once again rearing its head after earlier generations had been accommodated, however uncomfortably (one of the manifestations of this earlier process of accommodation was the language movement of the 1960s). Among the elements of illegal immigration that cause maximum anguish is encroachment on land belonging to the sattras, the traditional centers of the Sankardev sect and part of the sacred geography of Assam.

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The continuing influx and neglect by the central and state governments of the ever-increasing problem have contributed to the anguish. In an answer to a question raised in the state assembly on the issue of the occupation of sattra land, Bhumidhar Barman, the Assam Accord implementation minister at the time, claimed that according to the government’s own reports, in nine of the districts there was no such occupation, and in a couple of cases the sattradhikar (head of the sattra) had either handed over land to 150 families belonging to a religious minority, or had given permission to families to live on these lands against payment of an annual rent (Assam Tribune, August 8, 2007). In a similar display of callousness that must breed its own brand of paranoia at the receiving end, Union Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Yadav in 2007 expressed helplessness over the question of immigrants benefiting from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), then being implemented in seven districts of Assam, as they were enrolled in the voters’ list. He expressed equal inability to deport the illegal entrant back to Bangladesh, since that country refused to accept these immigrants as its citizens. In a typical political gesture of passing the buck, the minister dismissed the magnitude of the problem as BJP propaganda. The minister’s submissions were made at an interaction with the media in Guwahati through a teleconference organized by his ministry (Assam Tribune, August 9, 2007). These utterances on the part of those who might be expected to use the powers vested in them through the electoral process and the constitution, are not likely to endear the immigrant to those who bear the brunt of the influx and who are compelled to play host against their will. Statements like these contribute to the way the migration process appears in public perception, and perhaps account for the single-minded obsession, even in studies of the problem, with the establishment of statistics—an effort to prove again and again a reality that is obvious. This is an example of the stand-off between the ruling establishment, which does not see the problem because of its own compulsions, and the people, who can see only this problem, and who see it all around them in different forms intruding into different spheres and levels of everyday life. Such situations indicate the directions from which the idea of “neglect” enters so strongly into the narrative. The ubiquitously cited Mullan’s report on the 1931 census (a muchfavored statement during the Assam Movement and quoted by most

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scholars) is one of those signs that mark this journey of the Bengali bogey, especially because of the way it has been used. Mullan wrote: Probably the most important event in the province during the last 25 years, likely to alter permanently the whole structure of the Assamese culture and civilization, has been the invasion of a vast horde of land-hungry Bengali immigrants, mostly Muslims from the districts of eastern Bengal and in particular from Mymensingh. (cited in S. Baruah 1999: 57)

Mullan predicted the complete marginalization of the Assamese people and their reduction to minority status (ibid.). One of the results of this dominating presence was the urgent question: Asomiya koun? Who is an Assamese?/Who are the Assamese? These two senses of the phrase echo through the scholarship that has accumulated on this subject.6 The first indicates an attempt to establish who would qualify as “Assamese.” This implies the establishment and demarcation of identity among all those who live in the territory of Assam. This is also a question that is usually generated in situations of crisis, where such establishment of identity becomes necessary because a constitutional guarantee and acknowledgment accompanies it. It was raised at the time of the Assam Accord, when it seemed imperative to decide who, among the people who claimed to be Assamese, were actually so. More specifically, this question has been related to the issue of illegal immigrants, many of whose names had entered the electoral rolls. The other version of the question—who are the Assamese—has larger and more wide-ranging implications. It relates to the history of a people and the development of a composite Assamese identity over time. It is the kind of question that is resorted to and sought to be answered when the first question raises the issue of identities within the community in times of crises. The Assam Movement was a crisis that compelled the identity question to be raised and addressed in both these senses. The movement must be credited with ventilating many of the repressed elements of the identity narrative, and especially the place of the tribes within it, despite the general trend of eliding this problem under “the greater Assamese identity.” It achieved this through its adherence to the composite ideal with an enthusiasm and force that can only be described as chauvinist, and which therefore contained the assumption that the tribals were part of a seamless Assameseness. The other related area that the movement

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brought to the surface was the place of long-resident communities for whom Assamese was not the first language. By denying these entities a distinctness and separateness from the “dominant Assamese” ideal, the movement has also been held responsible for the rise of several autonomy demands. It centered the question of multi-ethnic societies and the problems of integration of disparate elements. It thus made it possible to address, through the criticism of the movement’s many lapses, the issues of ethics and justice in a complex multicultural/multi-ethnic society. “Who are the Assamese?” is a question that gained its rationale from the perception of danger to culture and community, felt against the influx of a people who seemed to be reaping all the benefits available under the colonial government. This issue of who the people of Assam really are has to be seen in the context in which it was evoked. B.M. Das’ (1987) The People of Assam: Origin and Composition is an anthropologist’s account of all the tribes living in Assam, their Mongoloid origin, and their languages belonging to three linguistic groups—Tibeto-Burman, Tai, and Austro-Asiatic (see also S. Sen 1999). Das speaks of what are in effect the early migrations from the east into the region, and also refers to Brahmin migrations from the west in the 13th, 14th, and 16th centuries. A linguistic take on this issue of multiple sources of language weights this story more specifically. Dipankar Moral, in his essay “North-East India as a Linguistic Area” (1997), shows in some detail how “all the language families have influenced each other.” He speaks of the linguistic division into three language families: Indo-European (Assamese belongs to this group); Sino-Tibetan (to which belong the languages of the various tribal groups, like Boro, Karbi, Garo, Mising, Rabha, Dimasa, Kachari, Tiwa, and Deuri and Tai), the original language of the Ahoms; and the Austric (Khasi, spoken in Meghalaya, belongs to this group). Moral gives a picture of linguistic hybridity brought about by the close proximity in which these languages exist (ibid.: 52). Such proximity has led to the creation of pidgins like Nagamese (Naga + Assamese) and Arunachalese (where the source language is Assamese); the use of Assamese as lingua franca among many speech communities; and the nature of Asamiya itself, with “its roots in the Apabhramsa dialects developed from Magadhi prakrit of the Eastern group of Sanskritic languages” (ibid.: 43–44). All of these manifestations of hybrid conditions of language use are the result of

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many different linguistic communities thrown together, living through generations in close proximity, compelling linguistic and cultural traffic. In his PhD dissertation on the Assamese language written in 1941, Banikanta Kakati (1995) offers a more comprehensive picture of such traffic. In the chapter on “Assamese Vocabulary,” he writes about AustroAsiatic (specifically Khasi), Tibeto-Burman (Bodo), and Thai or Ahom influences on the Assamese language, especially in the origins of many Assamese words. He provides a select list of words that have their roots in Khasi (ibid.: 27–28), Kol, or Munda (ibid.: 30–32), Malayan (ibid.: 34– 41), Bodo (ibid.: 43–48), and Tai or Ahom (ibid.: 47–48), and the names of places and rivers (ibid.: 48–52). This is the condition for the growth of all languages. At one level, there is nothing especially significant in one language carrying elements from so many sources. As is so well known, English itself is a language that has continued its growth through the incorporation of words from languages that are current in all the places where it is spoken. What is unique in the case of the northeastern region is the linguistic dimension of identity crises, especially when research of this kind establishes that the languages that mix with one another here are emphatically not the ones that mix in other parts of the country. The Sanskrit basis of the Assamese language is balanced by elements that owe their origins to the region’s historical associations with Southeast Asia. These particular kinds of hybridities are turned around in the process of aggressively announcing difference from the rest of the country, from whose point of view the people and the region itself continue to inhabit the realms of the exotic, the barbaric, and the alien. Of course, the sudden spurt in the publication of works on Assamese language, history, and culture in the last three decades—works that are part of the identitybuilding project—suggest the kind of questions that must be considered in the formation of a collective identity. Hybridity in the postcolonial sense emerges in the encounter with the West, as if it is only when a culture comes into contact with European ways of thinking that a people are uprooted from fixities and made mobile, estranged from their deepest sources of selfhood and set adrift. But similar hybridities come to birth when any two languages and cultures mix and borrow from each other; though even here, as with English and the cultures it influenced, the balance is usually tilted on the side of the more dominant of the two languages. Such dominance may have come about through

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the existence of a written form, a long tradition of literature, or a larger number of speakers. All situations of hybridity provide evidence of this unevenness in the ratio in which at least two different and distinct cultures and ways coexist. Many writers on the subject of the Assamese identity return to the point about the composition of the region’s unique linguistic and racial multiplicity as a function of early migration. Written against the backdrop of a popular movement against immigration, this theme feeds the identity narrative with curiously ambivalent but at the same time perfectly logical elements. It positions the Assamese as a people who have historically welcomed outsiders, who have indeed come into existence through migration, and whose attempt to evict foreigners is the result of an intolerable set of circumstances. In his essay “The Assamese Mind,” well-known Assamese writer Harekrishna Deka (2005) refers to what he calls a “peculiar conundrum” that marks Assamese identity formation—a pull toward the rest of India and a push away from it; in the ethnic fusion of races, an identification with the Aryan along with a gaze directed eastwards. The rest of India participates and contributes to this conundrum: “On the one hand, the nation-state accepts that they have a language, a geographical location, a culture and a literature that contributes to the multicultural ethos of the nation.” Further, “India’s cultural investment here has been very old, continuous and durable.” On the other hand, “past history written in the form of buranjis shows that the region’s political link with the rest of India was tenuous” (ibid.: 189). Deka indeed does his bit to project the multicultural and hybrid nature of the Assamese people. He speaks of waves of migration—of the Aryans from the Indo-Gangetic plain, and the Tibeto-Burmans over and through the low hills of the Patkai range in the east; of mixed physical features—the “mixture of the racial characteristics of both the Aryan and Mongoloid races, with traces of the Dravidian and Austric people as well” (Deka 2005: 190); of the evolution of the Assamese language from multiple and divergent sources. He recalls the contribution of the Ahoms in integrating the Assamese people under a common political umbrella, and puts together a set of elements that occupy a significant place in the identity narrative. The Ahoms themselves assimilated very well, becoming Hinduized in the process: “They offered a heroic

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resistance to the Mughals” (the story of the battle of Saraighat is known to every Assamese). The “unified resistance against an alien power led to the consciousness of an identity,” and to “the birth of a kind of ... local nationalism.” Deka, like other readers of the past who mine the same areas, periods, and issues, explains the present partially through this interpretation of a sense of independence that dates from the past, and partially attributes to it the emergence of “Assamese jatiyotabad” or sense of being a nation (“partially,” because he also pinpoints economic backwardness and the burden of migrants as responsible for a resistant nationalism) (Deka 2005: 191, 199). Deka’s essay is a useful compendium of many of the traits and components that make up the identity narrative, even to the extent of collating the several historical grievances which appear in similar writings by others. He refers to the “neglect syndrome” and to an “accumulation of discontent,” both of which he traces to economic backwardness, a dismal human development record, and above all “the influx of illegal migrants [that] has been steadily changing Assam’s demographic profile,” but that is consistently ignored by national leaders (Deka 2005: 199). Deka traces this feeling of grievance to a number of historical realities. First, Nehru’s failure “to appreciate Assam’s anxiety,” his insensitivity “to Assam’s difficulty in accommodating a large number of refugees from East Pakistan,” and his threat “to cut off financial aid” from the Center in the event of Assam’s continued recalcitrance on the question of accepting refugees. Second, the interference by national leaders in the state’s administration through attempts “to ‘plant’ men of their choice in the bureaucracy, including the chief secretary.” Third, “the first public sector refinery was taken to Barauni in Bihar,” and, after a local agitation, a tiny compensatory refinery was set up in Guwahati. Fourth, “the biggest wound was inflicted when China invaded India in 1962 and reached the foothills of Assam.” Prime Minister Nehru in a radio broadcast “almost bade adieu to Assam” (ibid.: 199–201). Nehru is the ghost who haunts this area of the narrative. Many of these elements that have entered the identity narrative are audible in the conversations of people because they are part of a knowledge that is inherited through families and through society, a kind of folk knowledge that can be readily dredged up from individual and collective memories when the occasion demands.

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Two major strands are identifiable in Deka’s representation of what he calls “the Assamese mind.” On the one hand, there is a feeling of distinctness and separation because of a past that is interpreted as proudly resistant to incursions from the western border. But there is also a sense of wounded pride, and the overwhelming feeling of neglect that is heard even today has a history in these episodes in the Center–state relationship in post-independence India. The second strand of the narrative comes from this cluster of events that are held in the historical memory of a people. There is possibly some rationale in seeing them as components of the “Assamese mind.” At the same time, as writer after writer repeats these elements in attempts to account for Assam’s peculiarly divided sense of self, it is necessary to understand the reiteration itself as important not only to the developing identity narrative but to its sustenance in the consciousness of a people.

Narrating Neglect In attempting to understand these iterations, and to identify the narrative by which a people and a society live or negotiate their relations with others—a narrative that is so pervasive, and yet so nebulous and difficult to actually pin down to any single or specific source (obviously it does not appear fully formed in any single utterance or cultural form)—it is imperative to find a method of study that will legitimize the object itself by asking why such a narrative is important. Does it really “exist,” or is it always in process, though silent, until it is deployed? In addressing these questions about the developing narrative of the Assamese, one discovers that it is impossible to access it in any overarching form. It is only available through its manifestations in small, individual narratives that play with some aspects of it. In the Debojit episode—or the narrative representation of it by Samujjal Bhattacharyya and Tapan Gogoi, and the narrative interpretation under which it appears in this book—we have an example of a “narrative of what happened,” but the episode itself is inseparable from its narration (see the Conclusion to this book for more on this). From this methodological tangle, it is evident that the “event” is inaccessible except through its narrative existence in the consciousness of a people, or of an individual who may mediate it in this particular way

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to a people. The repetition/reiteration of the narrative is also the process of change through which it takes on fresh components as it adapts and comes closer to the imagination of those who begin to depend on it as another articulation of identity. At the same time, however, this narrative, as “object of study,” is inaccessible in a most intriguing way. It enjoins the critic/observer to constitute it in the process of studying it, adding to the problem of “assumption” of the slant already borne by the object, or “transcending” it. Implicit in this recognition of narrative are three key areas of narrative theory: the story–discourse debate that hinges on the difficulty of pinning down that first version or ur-narrative, because the only access we have to it is through its little manifestations, not in neat chronological development; the relations between narrative and psychoanalysis, the most useful element of which is the model offered by the talking cure—the retelling of a story with components being added or erased, until the best story coincides with the patient being cured; and finally, in a logical sequence to these two aspects, the distinction between narrating (the telling of the story by a narrator) and narrativizing (the story telling itself). Here, the story “telling itself ” commonly has greater weight, because it points to the way things “really are” rather than to an identifiable manipulator of a narrative. However, its critique shows how all narratives, including the ones that pretend to be telling themselves, have narratorial agents. The “neglect narrative” displays all three positions. There is no single, overarching narrative that carries all its components. Rather, the narrative of neglect emerges from an amalgamation of the little narratives that feed into it. It has grown in strength and become discernible through reiteration, through the insertion of selected elements, and through the emergence of a new story whose reiteration could also indicate a shift in the story, a story that is therapeutic, a better story to live by. Third, the “neglect narrative” as we live it has erased its agents in becoming more convincing for a people. Any alternative would also have to be able to narrativize itself, and not merely be narrated, in order to be convincing as a story to live by. At the same time, it is as well to point out that recognizing agency in a narrative’s fashioning is the necessary first step to deliberately and selectively participating in the fashioning of that “good” narrative. The constant repetition helps to keep the story in view, helps place the narrative at the forefront of the Assamese’s consciousness of themselves.

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Noting this does not entail a judgment, but it might be worth observing that the reiteration is in some measure responsible for these two strands resisting change in Assam’s perception of her place in the political and economic map of India. The neglect component of the narrative that has traces of hurt, alienation, tantrum, etc., is naturally linked to this ambivalent relationship with the rest of India, and is in fact a result of it. The feeling of neglect in the Northeast has been the result of dissatisfaction with the ruling mindset at the Center—with the Center’s inadequate understanding of center–periphery relationships; with the limp and short-sighted policies that have most commonly been perceived as the “exploitation” of northeastern states for their rich natural resources of tea, oil, and timber; and with the “indifference” to the region’s problems of intra-state and international borders. Jairam Ramesh views government policies toward the Northeast as structured by four different paradigms succeeding one another from the 1950s onwards. The first of these is the “culture paradigm”—“that the Northeast is a phenomenally diverse mosaic of cultures which have to be preserved and enriched” (Ramesh 2005: 17). Next, the “security paradigm”—which sees “the Northeast ... as a strategically significant region ... in a geopolitical sense of India’s role in East Asia and Southeast Asia” (ibid.: 18). This is followed by the “politics paradigm”—“the diverse tribal cultures and diverse sub-nationalities required participation in ‘mainstream’ democratic process ... new states began to be formed” (ibid.). And finally, the “development paradigm”— “that if we build schools, bridges, internet centres, IITs and refineries, the people will be happy” (ibid.). Over the years, these approaches have merely fed the complex of problems around the issue of border: border transgressions, territorial integrity, and intra-state dissensions. The development of a narrative about itself constituted from these elements is manifested in what is most immediately discernible as the “narrative of neglect,” encapsulating aspirations, dejections, despair, frustrations, and anger. Its circulation and regular enrichment from the realm of collective and individual articulations has given this narrative a status that puts it virtually beyond the reach of critical scrutiny. New narremes (or little narrative elements), sparked off by fresh events or political decisions, are unquestioningly added to it, without necessarily calling the narrative into question. Apparent in the functioning of this narrative is the manner in which, like all narrative or discursive representation,

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it has come to stand in for the “real”—the situation of “conflict” or the “problem of the northeast” is subsumed under this influential narrativization. As Hayden White (1981) would put it, the telling of the story by an identifiable agent is transformed into the story telling itself. Such narrativization has been enabling in the articulation of the “problems of the northeast”; addressing the perception is as important as addressing the reality of individual problems. It has also been obstructive, because it has frozen into the form and shape of “knowledge,” making it extremely difficult to look beyond its cognitive framework. This narrative has gained in maturity in the last three decades, which saw the situation in Assam coming to a boil as a result of the neglect of political, economic, and social issues over the entire post-independence period. It shows the way we have represented ourselves, our history, and our identity. That is, the role played by narrative, by the story of self, is a form of self-projection manifested in the discursive climate of the region—the perpetuation of the problem through attachment to a particular story.

Inequalities A frustrating aspect of many of the constructs that have proliferated in the recent past is the refusal to imagine Assamese identity in multiple terms. Another is the unwillingness to acknowledge the repetition at the local level of the same center–periphery dynamics. While the tribal groups are always mentioned in the preliminary build-up to the idea of Assameseness, the imbalance of attention in such a formulation is apparent in the scant notice paid subsequently to the issue. As the ground is surveyed, the question that repeatedly asks itself is: how do we simultaneously achieve integration and difference? This is a question that also addresses the peculiar reality of being an integral part of a national formation while being diverse and fractured in ways that demand repeated articulations of inclusiveness and distinctiveness. One is reminded of what Radhakrishnan calls “unequal mediation,” referring to “a relationship of unevenness and asymmetry” among “the many selves that constitute one’s identity” (Radhakrishnan 2004: 314–15). In situations of hybridized and plural identities, where the tribal partakes in the Assamese identity narrative

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but has only a small and token place in its considerations, this unevenness is evident in the fact that the conception of Assamese identity assumes that the tribal participates in and takes on elements of the dominant Assamese narrative; the reverse is hardly ever true. Examples of this inequality are visible in public representations of the Assamese. The most commonly recognized cultural markers are the pat or muga (silk) mekhela sador, the jaapi, the sorai, or the red and white gamosa; all of these are taken from the dominant Assamese community. The traditional Bodo attire for women, the dokhona, for example, has not so far been recognized as a representative cultural marker for the entire Assamese community. One of my students noted that when the floats of the various states go in procession down Rajpath during the Republic Day parade in New Delhi on January 26, one knows Assam from the Bihu dance that forms part of the ensemble on the float. But it is always the Bihu as celebrated by the dominant Assamese in their traditional muga mekhela sador, notwithstanding the fact that the tribal communities also have very distinct ways of celebrating the Bihu with their own Bihu dances and songs, and in their own very distinctive traditional clothes. A memorandum for a separate state gives the example of a Bodo cultural group which had won the first prize at a national competition held at Hyderabad and was selected for being sent to Moscow as part of the Festival of India. But the group was dropped by the Assam government in favor of an “Assamese” Bihu cultural group (P.S. Datta 1993: 309, Document 8). In imagining the concept of a modern Assamese identity, the term “Assamese” is contested and deeply troubling because, as with all inclusive terminologies, it privileges one section of a people at the cost of others: the term renders the others invisible. A society that is made up of so many different groups and communities, all with distinct languages and cultures, is bound to have as its major problem this subsumption under a unitary term. The compulsions of nationalism cannot accommodate these many elements unless it releases itself from the majoritarian thesis. Assam’s troubled past—several of the northeastern states were carved out of its original territory—remains a trace in the current problems with nomenclature, language policy, majority/minority, and tribal/non-tribal issues. Many of these imbalances became evident in the autonomy demands made by several tribal groups in the crucial aftermath of the Assam Movement. The memoranda submitted by these groups all through the 1980s

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repeated the same grievances, about the chauvinism of the Assamese community, the injustices of the language movement, and the attempts to “Assamize” them through linguistic dominance and erase their distinct cultural identities. “The present agitation in Assam in the name of foreign nationals has threatened the linguistic minority communities including the tribal people of these two hill districts (Karbi-Anglong and North Cachar Hills),” and “made no secret of their intention and determination to destroy the language, culture and tradition of the minorities as well as the tribals in Assam” (Memorandum demanding an autonomous state comprising Karbi-Anglong and North Cachar Hills in Assam, under the provision of Article 244[A] of the Constitution of India; see P.S. Datta [1993, I: 50, Document 2]). This document also expresses fears of what would happen to the tribals once the leaders of the students’ union come to power in the state, and mentions the “step-motherly treatment of the Assam Administration” (ibid.: 51). There are also references to the steps taken by the universities of Gauhati and Dibrugarh to have Assamese as the sole medium of instruction with effect from 1982, and to the decision of the Board of Secondary Education of the state to impose Assamese as a compulsory subject in all non-Assamese schools (whereas the tribals would like to educate their children in Hindi and English) (ibid.: 53). This is a commonly heard resentment in many of these documents, perhaps finding its ultimate expression in the suggestion made by the Bodos that since they were the original rulers of Assam, and their language was “the most aboriginal and widespread,” why should the Assamese people not read, speak, and accept Bodo as a link language? (P.S. Datta 1993, II: 284, Document 8). This memorandum for a separate state submitted by the All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) to the president and the home minister on November 10, 1987, articulates not only the grievances common to most of the tribal communities of Assam, but gives shape to a narrative of identity that must also form part of the grand narrative of Assamese identity. In a section titled “The Attitude of the Assamese People,” the memorandum claims that “the Assamese people have never accepted the tribals as part and parcel of Assamese community and society in [the] real sense.” Doubt is expressed that there ever has been anything like a “Greater Assamese Nationality” (ibid.: 287). The document describes the attitude of the Assamese as anti-tribal, expansionist (referring to the “policy of expansionism and imperialism to capture and dominate all corners of Assam including the tribal areas”), and politically

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intolerant (they “cannot tolerate the existence of tribal communities and other democratic organizations who oppose the policies of Assamisation and Assimilation”) (P.S. Datta 1993: 287–88). The major issue on which autonomy demands rest is, of course, land. The document lists forty-five tribal belts and blocks, but points out that non-tribal and non-indigenous encroachers have illegally occupied lands in these areas and have also got land pattas in connivance with government officials (ibid.: 294–96). A collection of essays written during 1953–63 by Bolairam Senapati (2000), an intellectual of the Tiwa or Lalung tribe of Assam, allows glimpses of the many facets of the relationship that a minority community may have with a majority. These essays showcase a situation where the narrative spreads internally into the “dominant community–minority community” site. In an era that preceded the violent turn of present-day conflicts, Senapati contributed to the predominant discourse in the tribal–nontribal relationship. In an essay titled “Obstacles in the Relationship of Tribals and Non Tribals,” he speaks of the “indifferent attitude” of nontribals toward tribals. Drawing on the imperialist policy of divide and rule, he refers to political attempts to divide tribals from one another, pushing the entire tribal fraternity toward destruction. He urges tribal leaders to appreciate this situation and to take immediate interventionist steps (ibid.: 39). In Senapati, the grievance against the majority community is addressed very differently from how it would be addressed today. For example, one of the other essays in the volume is titled “The Contribution of the Tiwas to the Formation of the Assamese Race.” This is an invitation to the Tiwa community to feel good and comfortable about its relationship with the majority—to feel that the majority should be able to accommodate them as a way out of potential conflict situations. On the other hand, a comment from “the other side” could very well add fuel to the paranoiac element of the discourse. Praphulladatta Goswami in Folklore and Culture of North-Eastern India (1983) adopts the position that “the Indian way of life has touched communities all over the country.” Goswami speaks of cultural synthesis and admits that “there are differences but there is a large common ground where the Brahman and the so-called tribal meet” (ibid.: 1). This position echoes the integrative nationalist sentiment and is inimical to the desire of the ethnic community for a distinctive identity.

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However, the fact that the sentiment of neglect expressed by the ethnic communities of the region with regard to their relationship with the dominant Assamese community is felt equally by the dominant Assamese when faced with the larger entity of “India,” is apparent in the early strains of the narrative of marginalization heard in the short essays by Jnananath Bora (1938), such as “Kamrup aru Bharatvarsha” (“Kamrup and India”) and “Asom Desh Bharatborshar Bhitarat Thakiba Kiyo” (“Why Should Assam Remain within India”). Bora says: The Assamese have always lived in a distinct country with its own distinct administration and never seen Assam as a part of India.... India’s history is not our history ... our people consider themselves to be outside India. Like Burma, Afghanistan or Thailand, Assam has always been a neighboring country of India. (quoted in Misra 2001: 33)

Echoes of this sentiment are heard in a statement like the following from Sadin (an Assamese weekly): “The government of India policy in this region is to destroy the struggles of the indigenous peoples of the area.” With regard to military mobilization against militant groups like the ULFA, there are “efforts to destroy the Assamese nation” (quoted in S. Baruah 1999: 164). Such polarization and discomfort over homogenization, foundational to the narrative of neglect, are reflected in other readings. A collection edited by B.C. Bhuyan (1992) contains essays titled “Nationalist and Subnationalist,” “Integration in the North East,” “Problems and Prospects of National Integration in the North East,” and “Economic Integration.” The dominant obsession is registered in these rather obvious linguistic preferences in the titles. Udayon Misra’s book on the Naga and Assamese subnationalist movements is revealingly titled The Periphery Strikes Back (2000)—a title that is virtually repeated in a later essay, “The Margins Strike Back: Echoes of Sovereignty and the Indian State” (Misra 2005). Misra’s work also recalls some of the favorite signposts of the neglect narrative: the exchange of letters between Gopinath Bardoloi and Jawaharlal Nehru over refugee influx, Nehru’s “defense reasons” for not setting up a refinery in Assam, and his virtual abandonment of the entire region to Chinese forces during the 1962 Chinese aggression (ibid.: 271). In an earlier work, Misra has also offered a historical perspective on the development of the idea of the Assamese (Misra 1988).

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The fears that accompany the narrative of neglect, especially in conjunction with the indifference of the Center to illegal immigration, are manifested at several levels: the social (demographic change and therefore a profile change of communities); the political (a minority group’s demands going unrepresented); the economic (the cornering of limited job opportunities, the exploitation of resources); or the cultural (fears of traditional distinctiveness or identity being lost, music, dance, the arts getting adulterated, cuisine tempered, weaving cultures transformed). The threat perception therefore involves one community being besieged by another community that, by its proximity or its intrusion, may engulf the former. It involves the fear of the influx of migrants—both the threat of international migrants from across the Bangladesh border, but also what, at the time of the Assam Movement, was articulated as the threat posed by people from other parts of India. This is a fear that has been manifested most recently in the attacks on people of Bihari origin, but is also evident in the hostility expressed toward outsiders or intruders in several northeastern states, or in the strict border control achieved by inner line permits. At the psycho-social level, all of this has meant a suspicion of the other; the assumption of the rhetoric of neglect, marginality, and distance; the dissemination and use of narratives of discontent; and the desire for exclusive homelands expressed through calls for autonomy or secession. All these examples of critique and emotive expression are founded on the assumption of exclusivity—the “homeland thesis”—most recently brought to our attention by the Dimasa–Karbi conflict in Karbi Anglong. The conception of homeland that is generally assumed is the traditional one of a well-marked territory that coincides with social and cultural boundaries. Surprisingly, even when faced with crises of huge proportions—the taking of life and the torching of homes and property— the crisis situation does not seem to have radicalized thinking, which is still trapped in the binarism of homeland/loss of homeland, without the ability to imagine the in-between. However it is not only the tribals (of both the hills and the plains) who express their resentment at being expected to sink their cultural distinctness in the embrace of a pan-Assamese identity. There have been movements for separate administrative units and autonomous regions in the Cachar region since 1954, when a memorandum was submitted

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by the Cachar States Reorganisation Committee, Silchar, pressing for a new, centrally administered province with autonomous districts and states, to be called Purbachal, based on the plan for the same made by J.K. Choudhury in 1948 (P.S. Datta 1993, III: Document 1). A demand for union territory status for Cachar was submitted to the prime minister in 1972 (ibid.: Document 3). These movements have been attended by the same rhetoric of resentment at being treated shabbily by the Assam state government, and the mention of incidents like the “Bangal Kheda” (Chasing Out the Bengalis) movement of 1955, the language riots of 1960, and the torture and harassment of Bengali students in 1971 (ibid.: 430). This shows how similar these attempts to resist dominant Assamese chauvinism, especially linguistic chauvinism, have been. The tortuous paths traced by the identity narrative make it necessary to consider the question that is implicit throughout: Who are the Assamese? The following chapter looks at various ways in which this question has been asked.

Notes 1. In the most recent instance, a section of the print media focused on the passage of ten years since the submission of the Shukla Commission Report (1997) on the development of Assam. The report included special recommendations for the development of air, river, and road communication networks in the region, none of which have been implemented. 2. Mahanta’s thesis has to be acknowledged, because it represents the position of the leadership of the Assam Movement. Mahanta was the president of AASU, the student body that led the six-year-long struggle. He subsequently became chief minister in the AGP government that came to power in the elections following the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985. 3. A meeting of “leading intellectuals,” held at Guwahati city’s Paltan Bazar Srimanta Kristi Bikash Samiti Naamghar on April 10, 2007, while expressing concern over the recent influx of immigrants in the poorly fenced Indo-Bangladesh border in Dhubri district, threw up a discourse about “unity of the Hindus of the State” as the only way to cure the “influx-related affliction” (Assam Tribune, April 13, 2007). 4. Hidden in such innocuous employment situations is also the Hindu–Muslim dimension of this 150-year-old migration problem. The babu was usually a Hindu Bengali,

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and his place in the Hindu-majority Assamese society was different from that of the Muslim migrant, who was usually a peasant and had another set of hopes from the new land. This difference only surfaces as communalization with the entry of rightist sentiments into the society. 5. This process has been fueled by the sharpening contours of the Pakistan/Islamic/ISI bogey. Interestingly, this link has only recently made inroads into the interpretation of the separatist discourse of the ULFA, with its bases in Bangladesh, the visible Islamization of that country, and the ULFA’s newly discovered ISI links. 6. Attempts to understand/give shape to who or what the Assamese are, are evident in books like The Assamese by Audrey Cantlie (1984), who spent a decade (1940–50) in Assam. Cantlie went on to do fieldwork in one Assamese village and in some of the sattras during 1969–71. The difficulties of attempting to understand an entire people through a micro study of one village are apparent throughout the work. Another popular book that also wrote of Assamese village life and made the connection between the river Brahmaputra and Assamese identity is Hem Barua’s The Red River and the Blue Hill (1954). Sanjoy Hazarika offers sketches of Assamese life in Strangers of the Mist (1994), where he suggests that the socio-religious institution of the naamghar (prayer hall-cum-community center) and the teachings of Sankardev continue to shape Assam’s rural social structure (ibid.: 43). This is a common enough view, discussed in much greater detail by Hiren Gohain in his book on the impact of the Mahapurushia tradition on Assamese life (1997). All three notably use “Assamese rural life” as a metonym for the much larger and complex category of the Assamese.

5 Framing the Question Who Are the Assamese? Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others. —Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition (1994: 25)

Several questions arise out of the texts referred to in the previous chap-

ter, questions that demand engagement: what is it that gets selected as the target of resistance in a narrative of self? Which element of the past gets highlighted, and how does such framing help to read both past and present? The urgent need in looking back is to examine how we came to be the way we are, instead of once again offering the same narrative about marginalization as weakness and want. How does one connect the idea of marginalization with strength? Through these questions, we also come back to the central problem of identity: who are the Assamese? What are the circumstances that compel such a question to remain at the forefront of a people’s consciousness? Why is it asked, and what different situations elicit this question and the varied attempts to answer it, to make a claim about identity as this or that, as neo-Assamese, indigenous Assamese, Assamese tribal, char-chaporir manuh (“people of the char,” a term that is in circulation both among the indigenous Assamese and among this unique diasporic community living on the sand banks of the Brahmaputra), tea garden Assamese, and so on? What drives this process in individual instances, among persons who

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are variously hybridized because of the close proximity of so many varied peoples? I might, for instance, describe myself as Assamese or Bengali depending on the situation or the recipient of the information, or the place where I was making this revelation. But I might also now increasingly wish to describe myself laboriously, despite the impatience of the hearer, as hybrid, refusing an affinity with either one or the other community, instead electing to contain both and claim both as my inheritance. This choice is as much the result of experiential angst about inclusion and exclusion as it is about disciplinary interest in questions of mixed or hybrid identity, which is itself a fashionable intellectual condition. How has identity been studied in Assam? Has it been studied through a theoretical apparatus or through self-reflexivity, through the perceptions of others or through one’s own perceptions of oneself? Instances of self-perception are available in the writing of lives, in the form of biographies and autobiographies from the 19th century onwards. Gunabhiram Barua’s biography (1971) of Anandaram Dhekial Phukan is an important example of the former genre, and Lakshminath Bezbaroa’s Mor Jivan Sowaran and Padmanath Gohain Barua’s Mor Sowarani are only two among several instances of the latter. There have been documented perceptions by others in the 150-year history that one looks at for the particular sense of the identity narrative available to us. Instances include the accounts of the British administrator, whose contribution to such construction is unique because of the many strategies of colonial governance that are enmeshed in it. There is also the view that was adopted by the Bengalis, whose position as cultural and linguistic other was bolstered by the British strategy of constructing them as the inverted image of the Assamese, when they brought the Bengalis in as essential and efficient cogs of the British administrative machine, more employable than the Assamese. This aspect of the formation of the identity narrative—from these other-perceptions—continues to this day in the perception of the regions of the Northeast prevailing in the “rest of India” (some scholars use the term “mainstream India,” or the “Indian mainland”). In recent years, such perceptions have been brought to our notice, for instance, in the form of the Delhi Police issuing a booklet of instructions for northeast Indian students on how they should conduct themselves in the capital. This prescription of a code of behavior is founded on the assumption that northeast Indians are an

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alienated and not easily assimilated people who are different from people in the rest of India. No such booklet is apparently available for students from any other part of India. It is possible that such stereotyping emerges because of the Northeast being lumped together as a region even when there are eight constituent states, each distinctive and different in size, human development indicators (therefore requiring differential policy attention), ethnic composition, and, of course, language and worldview. At the same time, it is possible to discern a tendency among viewers, and sometimes the viewed, to take refuge in popular stereotypes like “the simple and peaceful tribal,” and also the “well-heeled Westernized tribal” with a certain bohemian lifestyle and “strange” food preferences, even as the prism of violence begins to be used more frequently for viewing the region. The complexity of this issue, to a great extent, is also due to its being enmeshed in the politics of equality–difference and the related issues of justice and liberty in a democracy, questions that are unlikely to be finally settled in a multicultural and multi-ethnic society. Charles Taylor writes in his essay “The Politics of Recognition” that a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. (Taylor 1994: 25)

Assam and the Northeast are exemplary cases of such other-construction. The manner in which the process works may be seen in the cognitive frames that are in use, especially the “insurgency frame” and the “corruption frame” always referred to in media reports, in discussions of regional problems, and in assessments made at different junctures by scholars from the rest of India about Assam and the Northeast. All of this may be demonstrated step by step from the other-perceptions directed at the people of the northeastern region of India and Assam, and part of this chapter does indeed set out to do that. However, what is of interest in Taylor’s analysis is the deliberate emphasis on “real damage, real distortion” coming out of a “demeaning picture”—suggesting the power of a narrative construct to do damage at the real, material level.

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This is demonstrated in the translation of the unidimensional, monochromatic images or “pictures” of the corrupt or the insurgent individual into the very real problems of insurgency and corruption, the designation acting almost as a consolidation of behavior. Stephen Hacking also makes a similar point about identity consolidation through “dynamic nominalism”—“people came to fit the categories that the colonial authorities fashioned for them” (quoted in Chakrabarty 2002: 86). On the other hand, in The Intimate Enemy, Ashis Nandy (1983) describes the strategies of disguise through which the “native” goes on with his/her way of life behind the stereotype. Taylor gives a further dimension to the other-formation of identity through an interpretation of Bakhtinian dialogicality: “We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us” (1994: 32–33). Taylor’s significant others include parents, friends, and others whose opinions matter to us. The two steps he identifies are true of both the individual and the social sphere. Other extensions of these aspects of identity formation become apparent when Taylor, drawing on Rousseau’s writings on equality/ esteem in a potentially good society, writes of “the balanced reciprocity that underpins equality” (ibid.: 47). “A perfectly balanced reciprocity takes the sting out of our dependence on opinion and makes it compatible with liberty.... In contrast, in a system of hierarchical honor, we are in competition; one person’s glory must be another’s shame, or at least obscurity” (ibid.: 48). Like the equality–difference debate within feminism, Taylor also speaks of the conflict implicit in the two modes, both based on the principle of equal respect which demands that in the first case, “we treat people in a difference-blind fashion”; in the second, that we “recognize and even foster particularity.” The first position reproaches the second for violating the principle of non-discrimination, while the second reproaches the first for forcing people into a homogeneous mold, a mold that is never neutral but belongs to a particular hegemonic culture (ibid.: 43). So who are the Assamese? Using much the same raw material, the following answer has been attempted by Kanaksen Deka, littérateur, journalist, and Sahitya Sabha president (2005–07)—a capacity in which he has contributed to renewing the Sabha’s social and civic role, by articulation, in very much the same way that the AASU has: “Till a few centuries back

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there was nothing like the Assamese. There were instead Bodo, Dimasa, Karbi, Koch, Ahom, Tiwa, Mising, Sonowal, Moran, Motok, Chutiya, Bamun, Sudir, Kayastha, Kalita etc.” (K. Deka 2005: 33). “It was only with the advent of the British that the earlier term ‘Aham’ (often used to refer to the Ahom kingdom) became Assam” (ibid.). Similarly, with regard to language, along with the many tribal languages there existed the dialects known as Kamrupi, Goalparia, and Darangi. The standardization process, as a result of which the Sibsagar dialect came to be recognized as the Assamese language, was also due to the proselytizing efforts of the American Baptist missionaries (ibid.: 33). From the time the British arrived, almost all the inhabitants of Assam came to be known as Assamese. In the list of communities, Deka now includes “Bongali, Rajasthani, Bihari, Sikh, and Mymensinghia” (ibid.: 34). Deka makes a second point about identity formation that is of interest. He speaks of fascist tendencies that alienated many who were in the process of becoming Assamese. This suggests assumptions about identity as an ongoing process, a position that is somewhat at odds with the much more popular narrative of identity as something that has been guarded by a people since time immemorial. But particularly in a region that has been marked in the modern era by many and varied waves of migration, this is an enabling, inclusive, and especially practical viewpoint. However, the all too facile use among critics of the term fascist to represent the admittedly often narrow views on identity is disturbing. In the post independence era, the idea found place in many minds that Assam was only for Assamese speakers and all non-Assamese were second class citizens. As a result of this divisive mindset people of all communities and tribes started turning their gaze to the past in search of distinctive identities for themselves. (ibid.)

Deka ends by urging the acceptance of historical realities—the relationships that have grown with the Gangetic plain, the land of the Shans, with China, with the Arab world, and with Bengal. As others writing on the issue have also noted, all of these relationships have been part of the formative process of Assamese identity, a uniquely plural identity that needs to be nurtured rather than destroyed by any single way of being Assamese. Another interesting area of scholarship directed at imagining a composite Assamese identity is that of Sankardev studies. In fact, two kinds

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of trends are visible that are important for the present argument. The recruiting of Sankardev to prove the long existence of the composite discourse is evident in ordinary conversations on the subject. Moreover, it is important to understand the way a conception about Sankardev and his teachings on society, philosophy, and culture pervades Assamese society at many levels, forming a body of inherited knowledge that is in circulation. This is a necessary step to see how and why such “conversations” are important (see Hiren Gohain’s Asomiya Jatiya Jibonat Mahapurushia Parampara [1997]). But such conceptions are also available in scholarship that has accumulated around this important medieval thinker and social reformer. An example is the work of Birendra Nath Datta, a folklorist and culture critic, whose book on the Goalpara region—an area with a complex border identity—provides a useful account of a unique cultural formation, as well as contributing to, and at the same time militating against, a homogenous idea of the Assamese. In an essay on “Sankardeva and the Tribals of North-East India,” Datta (1996) places his reading of the inclusive nature of Sankardev’s thought and pronouncements against another of those little nuggets that are so important to the making of the identity narrative. He says of Assam that there were “no irrational caste prejudices, no Hindu-Muslim discord” (ibid.: 205). This comment, it must be kept in mind, is indicative of that which was destroyed by the last wave of migration post-1971, an event that also underlies the violence that has erupted in so many spheres of life. Datta quotes lines from Sankardev that are on the lips of many who live here—a kind of magic charm about inclusiveness and cultural variety—and translates them to show the medieval saint’s “knowledge of the ethno-social background of the region”: The Kiratas, the Kacharis, the Khasis, the Garos, the Miris (Misings), the Yavanas, the Kankas, the Govalas, the Asamas (Ahoms), the Malukas, the Rajakas, the Turukas, the Kuvachas, the Mechas, the Candalas, and all others become pure in the company of the servants [devotees] of Krsna. (ibid.: 207)

This unity in the devotion to a popular deity indicates both an acknowledgment of difference and an erasure of it in purity—the commonality of worship making these differences immaterial.

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This, however, is the peculiar problem with the ideal of an inclusive collective identity, and it remains unresolved in most statements on the recognition of Assam’s many ethnic and linguistic groupings. Datta’s work is part of the 20th century attempt to recruit “usable” figures from the past to substantiate various aspects of self-conception, or to retrieve events that demonstrate glory, unity, resistance, according to the “need” felt at crucial moments in the life of the people. This has been, in general, an aspect of the larger enterprise of Sankardev studies. While on the subject of Sankardev, it is necessary to look at how this revered spiritual and cultural figure can be and has been invoked in the agency aspect of the identity narrative—or that strain of the narrative that is evidently an exercise in self-making. The contemporary scholarship on Sankardev provides a counter-narrative to the notion of the sessility of backward cultures—the reluctance of the people of such cultures to move out of the safety and security of their own land. This scholarship revolves round Sankardev’s long travels in regions in the rest of India, his twelve years spent in Orissa, all of which goes to disprove the sessility thesis and speaks instead of the external being brought in and disseminated by Sankardev in the region. An example of such scholarly exchange is available in a delicious little dispute over the interpretation of a verse by the poet-saint, a dispute that takes place against the background of the already established narrative of travel that is read as a part of his life. Most scholars would have it that the disputed verse contains a reference to Kabir, another great medieval poetsaint of the Bhakti movement, who was based in Banaras. They claim that Sankardev had read Kabir, and is here referring to the popularity of Kabir’s dohas (couplets) in Banaras, which he was visiting at the time. The reference to Kabir would be in keeping with the established belief that Sankardev was a widely traveled man. Countering this reading is one offered by Ranjit Kumar Dev Goswami, who argues that the reference is actually to Sankardev’s own poetry, i.e., the word is kabir, which is the possessive of kabi, poet. The line is then interpreted to mean that the poet Sankardev’s songs are sung by all in Banaras. This interpretation inaugurates a completely new direction in the approach to the place that Assam must have had in that time, and attributes to Sankardev this unique transformation of Assam’s “object” status. The verse itself goes something like this: “Orissa Varanasi thawe

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thawe / Kabir geet shista shawe gawe” (“In Orissa and Banaras / Everyone sings Kabir songs”) (or the poet’s [Sankardev’s] songs, depending on the interpretation). This dispute, and his own interpretation of the verse, is recounted by Ranjit Kumar Dev Goswami in his editorial to the special issue on Sankardev studies of the literary/cultural magazine Katha Guwahati (Dev Goswami 2005: 2). It is, in fact, useful to see contemporary reconstructions of the identity narrative, as well as attempts to find more and more examples to support and consolidate aspects of it, in this sense of an ideological “use” of the past. It is also salutary to remember that many of these attempts have been made in the last three decades, or what is widely perceived as a critical period for Assamese society. Anthony Giddens wrote in 1992 that “the self is for everyone a reflexive project—a more or less continuous interrogation of past, present and future” (Giddens 1992: 30). In the context of this book, this makes sense if one looks at the way a present moment, the crisis of the present, demands a remembering of the past so that one can go on from there into the future armed with the results of this retrieval. Almost all the studies on Assamese identity not only display how this happens, but in fact participate in the exercise themselves by taking up the narrative at a significant point and placing it at the intersection of past, present, and future. At the same time, the thesis of the reflexive self (also offered by Ulrich Beck et al. [1994] and Manuel Castells [1997]) has been imagined against the background of Western modernity. The all-important position it assigns to agency does not seriously consider those situations of collective identity where the ties to land, to tradition, culture, and history are regularly returned to as factors whose unchanging existence over time bestows uniqueness on a people. This claim might seem like a return to the old idea of the nation as resulting from the sharing of certain fixities. But the postcolonial nation-building project in the ex-colony often has manifestations that directly contradict the fashionable postcolonial project of jettisoning borders and attachment to land in favor of travel, migration, living in the liminal or the third space, etc. The ex-colony throws up instances of ethnic aspiration to visibility, aspirations that in fact link ethnic identity to ancient rights to land. Struggles for autonomy by several tribal groups in Assam are based on the demand that certain areas of the region where they were in a majority

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and where they had lived from ancient times should be demarcated and handed over to them. Eschewing the rhetoric of openness, borderlessness, transnationalism, and “post-frontier,” much of it heard in discussions on India’s “Look East” policy, there is renewed talk of inner line permits for Assam, along the same lines as some of the other northeastern states where such policies already exist. This demand is heard in the face of a threat of illegal immigrants, in a scenario where the rise of new political groupings like the Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF)—a group that purports to and is largely perceived to represent the rights of minorities—creates the impression of a more favorable condition for the immigrant. In an essay that appeared in the British Journal of Sociology—“The Reflexive Self and Culture: A Critique”—Matthew Adams (2003) speaks of modern selves as “no longer bound to fixed culturally given identity positions,” and as “fac[ing] the burden and the liberation of constructing their own identities.” This is the case especially if one were to go with the views of the “reflexivists” exemplified by Giddens, cited earlier. On the other hand, Adams mentions the work of J. Alexander (1995, 1996) who writes on culture as a realm of experience that may constrain reflexive thinking (Adams 2003: 227). Even if we consider “traditions, customs, beliefs and expectations” as having become “adaptable, bendable, ‘plastic’ resources” (M. O’Brien quoted in Adams 2003: 230), that is, if we begin to think about them as equally constructed elements, there is a sense of continuity with the traditional, agreed upon by the participants in such an experience, that gives these elements a role in identity formation. Thus, in many of the ethnic groups in Assam and in the neighboring states, certain traditional institutions, which are no longer in operation, have been revived alongside the ethnic identity movements. To take an example, the Tiwa or Lalung (a plains and hill tribe of Assam) in the area of Morigaon have rebuilt the mostly defunct boys’ dormitory, not any more as a regularly functioning institution but as a distinctive cultural marker that clearly demarcates them from the majority Assamese community. The retrieval of these institutions, or of traditional skills associated especially with a particular tribe, has been a way of countering the assimilation processes at work in majority–minority relationships. On the one hand, this might appear to be clinching evidence for the reflexivity argument. But then, this has always been the nature of the cultural—a

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human construct, the result of human intervention, which is then accepted as given, “handed down” from “time immemorial” and profoundly affecting identity. As these complex situations reveal, we have an ambivalent scenario on offer. Moments of self-reflexivity—those points when a community has sought to “take charge of ” its identity in the characteristically modern sense of self-fashioning—are in turn replaced by “other”-constructions, when agency seems to have slipped out of its hands, perhaps because of the very constituents of the identity narrative. As remarked throughout this book, the element of neglect is very strong in the narrative; indeed, ideas of “neglect,” “resentment,” and “grievances” circulate so freely and frequently that, even as one recognizes that this is the way this identity is constructed, one also sees in it a gesture of transferring agency to the object of the resentment, which, most often in the uneven Center–state relationship within the Indian federal structure, is the powerful central government. Assigning blame to an external agent (in Assam’s case, to the colonial British government and, by extension, to the Bengali migrant in pre-independence Assam) might be seen as an important component of a narrative that binds a people, having its rationale in the way these others perceive and represent a people. One might also refer to Sanjib Baruah’s interpretation of India’s counter-insurgency discourse about the Northeast as a new process of identity making through a “politics of race” (Baruah 2005a). In a recent study of insurgency in northeast India, the authors use the prism of violence to address questions of how people in this region view their world and themselves. This has proved to be an interesting direction, because it focuses on the closing in of traditional social spaces, a contraction of the world that is considered their own. The authors ask a number of interesting questions: “How deeply [has] the pollution of violence penetrated the sensibilities of the Assamese people?” Is there anything “in their subjective world” that gives “clues about their orientation towards extremism?” What is “the extent to which the prevalence of the culture of violence has influenced their perception of the world they are surrounded by”? (Roy et al. 2007: 176). These are the new questions to which the location, scarred so viciously by violence, demands answers. The authors use a largely rural sample for their questions on lack of mobility (compelled by scarce opportunities and growing populations),

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degrees of satisfaction with modern amenities, the sources of discontent, the growing materialism of people, and shifts in values from the traditional to the modern. They arrive at what they call a “centrality of self-concerns” (Roy et al. 2007: 179), which is visible in the erosion of interpersonal relationships. Earlier, “people listened and respected what others in their immediate environment had to say about their social conduct,” but this is no longer true, according to the respondents in the study. “The loss of concern for others, in terms of both what they say about a person’s social behavior and about the need to reconcile” one’s own good with the good of others, has meant a “severe contraction of his social universe” (ibid.: 180–81). This contraction of the social universe, the shrinking of the world about which one is concerned, is one of the major sources of violence. As the writers of this work claim, the self-concern is founded on a perception of others as enemies, as competitors for scarce resources, etc. “The stiffness of competition” ensures that others outside that immediate world are treated as “enemies.” The flip side of this growing closure of one’s world is likely to result in divisiveness and “distrust of persons from other communities” (ibid.: 183). The situation that this book describes may be seen as the direct result of the many-sided complications of migration that face the host community. In a compilation of articles written for a newspaper column between May 31 and July 6, 2005, titled Asomiya Koun?, the author, Chandan Sarma (2006) puts together for his readership the elements that constitute the identity narrative of the Assamese. He begins with the historical development of the idea from the time of the Ahom rulers, and the unification of people under an umbrella concept of Assamese identity. Sarma writes that what he calls the “we-feeling” emerged from a predominantly antiBengali sentiment that developed out of British policies of favoring the Bengali language and Bengali clerks. This is an idea that has been reiterated so often by so many thinkers on the issue that it has come to acquire the status of a given that is virtually beyond critical scrutiny. Concepts and ideas that have reached this point of status quo constitute the problematic issue that we seek to address by looking at them anew through Said’s prism of traveling theory. This favorite whipping boy of the thinking on identity in Assam is difficult to dislodge, because the issue is still volatile, having both a historical and a contemporary life. The immigrations from Bangladesh have brought the history of Assamese–Bengali

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animosity back to life. And the issue again gets a new direction from the interventions of new mediators with newer agendas, and therefore with a different understanding of the region and its troubled modern history (see the Conclusion for more on this point). The notion of an identity that goes back to “time immemorial,” with its associations of antiquity and dignity, of being cultured and civilized from a time that cannot be captured by human memory, accompanied by a conviction that it was always like this, means that the threat perception to this dearly held idea has been very strong. Further, knowledge of identity as process remains hidden or subsumed in writings on the topic. Here, one might remark on the way the individual or a people carry the “unchanged/unchanging” identity idea with them, the stability of which is necessary to a sense of self. Every new expression, which may mean the addition of a new nuance, actually appears as an expression of that hallowed, untouched, almost sacred sense of self. However, the notion of an identity-in-process is the specific area of the critic or observer of the scene. It is in such critiques that it should be possible to discern the changes, shifts, and new nuances in identity formation. This close watch on identity as it develops is apparent in the work of Sanjib Baruah, who has noted several markers in the journey of this idea—for instance, the shift that counter-insurgency discourse has brought about in the way the identity of the northeasterner is viewed. Also discernible is the shift resulting from the entry of immigrants into Assam, and the quite unrelated exit of indigenous Assamese out of Assam to other states and countries. The immigrant community now becomes the repository of a cultural, political identity as Assamese, filling in the spaces vacated by the emigrating Assamese. Does this “critical” view appear in the work of other writers—the “selfexamination,” the noting of self-technologies? It is important to observe that, for the first position, i.e., for the people whose identity is at stake, the acknowledgment of change in identity or self-conception as a result of external factors would mean an acknowledgment of impurity or adulteration. So, while the articulation of the threat is very much a part of “self-consciousness,” it is also an inalienable part of the “purity” notion, and actually feeds into it. Thus, every new threat is an occasion for articulating the idea of an old, stable, and unchanged selfhood; every item of historical recovery provides an occasion for emphasizing this sense. The

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schizophrenic self is not an acknowledgment made by the performer of this selfhood. The knowledge of break or rupture is alien to a necessarily seamless sense of collective identity from “time immemorial.” Akeel Bilgrami, in his essay titled “What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity,” claims that the concept of identity is negotiable, and that “local contexts of study determine our individuation of cultural phenomena” (1995: 198). He recalls a personal experience of declaring, “I am a Muslim,” while trying to get a house on rent in a predominantly lower-middle-class Hindu area in Delhi that was hostile to Muslims, even though in his everyday life he is not a practicing Muslim. For Bilgrami, a study of the kind in which he engages in this essay is a way of asking why such questions are of interest, why they get asked repeatedly and are answered differently every time, and what kind of social and cultural phenomena are tracked by such questions (ibid.: 200). In other words, the very fact that such a question is asked is worthy of attention. The books and essays that deal with the question of Assamese identity were published at several crucial stages in recent history, or at least represent issues that were provoked into visibility by the historical junctures in which these works were written. And each time, identity questions have been asked at such critical moments, called into articulation by phenomena like large-scale immigration, the clash of indigenous peoples with “outsiders” and the consequent fear of erasure.

Colonial Constructs What has been the construct of identity in operation in this location? A people’s identity or a national identity is usually founded on a unity thesis: shared language, common geographical territory, common history, culture, religion, etc. The preference for unity and homogeneity has been visible at the birth of nations and in the early stages of anti-colonial movements. But as Benedict Anderson (1999 [1983]) has shown, the imagination of a shared past, present, and future is as constitutive of a community and a nation as the very real things that unify. Anderson also provides examples of how certain external factors—such as the colonial institutions of the census, the map, and the museum—may be responsible

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for the circulation of ideas about a people or a nation that are essential to the formation of identity. Identity questions are caught in a curious limbo between the modernity impulse that came with the British, resulting in the introduction of “technologies of the self” or practices “working on the self,” and the persistence/continuance of ideas about self, country, community that have preBritish origins. An example of the modernity impulse might be Dhekial Phukan’s careful construction of an image—dress, look, etc.—as part of a subtle resistance, most famously exploited by Gandhi. Modernity had a clear trajectory in the West from the Protestant Reformation or the Enlightenment in Europe, where inwardness, doubt, and self-scrutiny became methods of correcting the self. However, in India/Assam, the superimposition of Western modernity over existing, indigenous ideas of novelty, newness, self-making, introduced a peculiarly schizophrenic element into the way the self (individual or social) is viewed. The identity narrative has many feeder locations and agents. It is possible to focus on several strands and see the way they feed into a grand story of a people that we repeat and live by even today. Many of these sources are clearly discernible in the 19th century, when what is called Assamese modernity, or alternatively the “Assamese Renaissance,” becomes apparent. The American Baptist missionary narrative about the people whom they came to work among and convert, British administrative records and descriptive accounts, British historical accounts, especially that of Edward Gait, and the articles and memoranda written by educated Assamese like Anandaram Dhekial Phukan and Gunabhiram Barua, are the most easily accessible sources. This does not mean that there were no other sources of the narrative. But these pieces are a good starting point in order to identify elements of this narrative. Gait’s history of Assam, first published in 1905, makes a number of significant points. While referring to the difficulty of “governing Assam as an appanage of the unwieldy province of Bengal,” he says the following: “It [Assam] was remote and difficult of access, and few LieutenantGovernors ever visited it. The local conditions were altogether different from those which prevailed in Bengal.” Gait also refers to Assam as “this out-of-the-way tract” (Gait 1984 [1905]: 336). Gait’s history is still a text that is readily available and frequently referred to in a list of histories of Assam. Its contribution to the Assamese discourse about self is not

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inconsiderable, bolstering many of the claims of successful resistance to incursions from the west. The reference to such resistance has been part of the “exclusivity” and “difference” elements of the narrative. The missionary archive is a small component of the “English in India” archive, and has been incorporated and accommodated within a general discourse of Orientalist critique. Such critique, in its ready formulations about the knowledge/power nexus of the British imperialist project and the “unmasking” of this nexus by the alert postcolonial critic, has in fact ignored the variations in the colonial project, its locations of departure and arrival, and the many and varied sites in which it has worked and adapted its initial designs. Two basic aspects demand attention with regard to the missionary archive that pertains to Assam: first, the necessary but seldom-made distinction between the British and the American Baptist missionaries; and second, the late arrival of the British in Assam, and the circumstances of that arrival—the Burmese invasion of Assam. The advent of the British in Assam coincided with the Yandaboo Treaty signed between the British and the Burmese in 1826. The second fact has meant something for the reception of the British in Assam and the contemporary memory of that arrival. These are the circumstances against which “Indological knowledge and its role in colonial India” as a field of study must be viewed. And these are also reasons we might advance for an interpretation of colonial history that is obviously at odds with the mainstream view, resulting in scholarship that has begun to take a kind of pleasure in the general ignorance among Orientalism’s critics about this particular location on the colonial map. Gauri Viswanathan’s strange neglect, in her book Masks of Conquest (1989), of missionary activity in a region where it has been so influential, is an example of such oversight. For a race and a people marginalized first by the colonial administration and subsequently by the national government at the Center, this archive has been a valuable source for asserting Assameseness. The perception has always been at work, in the background of the identity narrative, that the American Baptist missionaries were helping the Assamese to find themselves through their language and to consolidate it against the British-imposed Bengali (Assam was under the Bengal Presidency from 1826 to 1873). Some of these efforts are evident from letters written by and to the missionaries who were especially active in this exercise, and

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whose names are inscribed in the battle for linguistic recognition. The Reverend Nathan Brown (having himself written a grammar and a dictionary of the Assamese language) states the following in a letter to his fellow missionary Miles Bronson: The spoken Assamese is in fact peculiar for its stability and uniformity— while the Bengali has been changing as Mr. Robinson informs us, the language of Assam remains the same that it has been for some centuries. It never came from Bengal. It has much greater affinities, particularly in pronunciation, with the branches of the Sanskrit than with the Bengali. It is a more easy, flowing and agreeable language and not less copious; and is fully entitled, notwithstanding the statements of Mr. Robinson to the contrary, to be considered as the vernacular language of the people. (Document I in Downs 1994: 113–14)

The reference in the letter is to William Robinson of the Gowhatti Government Seminary, the author of A Descriptive Account of Asam (1975 [1841]). Robinson is the villain in the language issue, having written a paper titled “Some Remarks in Defence of the Use of Bengali in the Government Schools of Assam” (Document C in Downs 1994: 96–101). The paper was forwarded by Miles Bronson to his fellow missionaries, and elicited significant responses. Bronson in turn wrote to Mills: As advocates for giving the Assamese their own mother tongue we have been watching with interest the further results of your report. But as we cannot learn that anything has been done in connection with the forthcoming scheme of vernacular education to secure to the Assamese this boon; and as we believe that on the decision of this very question hangs the only hope of popularizing and rendering successful the present educational scheme of government here, we have felt it our duty to make the facts bearing on this subject more fully known. (Document D in Downs 1994: 101–02)

The impact that the activities of the missionaries was beginning to have is apparent in the editorial comment that came as a response to Bronson’s letter to the editor of the Calcutta paper Friend of India (May 25, 1855): The Assamese is not a mere provincial speech like the Wiltshire patois in England, or Breton patois in France, or the Chittagong or Sylhet patois

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in Bengal; it is a written and printed language. It is the language through which the people receive their impressions whether for good or for evil. It is the language which religious teachers of Hinduism have found the most appropriate for influencing the popular mind, and confirming the power of superstition. It is the language which the missionaries of evangelical truth found it necessary to employ, if they would counteract that superstition and gain a hold on the popular feeling; and it must be the language through which the elements of knowledge are communicated. (Document L in Downs 1994: 119)

These intentions, expressed by the missionaries through their translations and educational and publishing efforts, may be viewed as a strong riposte to the British policy of settling/inserting people from the rest of India into the empty spaces of a richly endowed land. The details of the situation against which the missionaries’ effort was launched constitute an important part of the continuing Assamese self-perception of Assam’s relatively peripheral status—geographically, historically, politically, and even in the imagination. That historical situation includes the “discovery” of the Assamese language as a dialect of Bengali, the imposition of Bengali as the official and educational language of Assam, and the casual attitude of the British to the education of the Assamese. Assamese students had to go to Calcutta for higher education. Further, of the 983 students who matriculated from Calcutta University in 1872, only four were from schools in the Brahmaputra valley. College education began in Assam only in 1892, with the setting up of the Murarichand College in Sylhet, and Cotton College in Gauhati (now Guwahati) in 1901. The provincial administration was not prepared to build up educational infrastructure in Assam, because it could recruit Bengal’s surplus educated personnel to staff its offices at a minimum cost. This policy saw the entry of the educated Bengali into Assam’s administration, courts, and schools. Thus, because of the internal dynamics between Assamese and Bengali for which the British administration was responsible, the American Baptist has always been seen as championing the cause of Assamese against the Bengali and against unfriendly and exploitative British policies. They are credited with the introduction of modern knowledge through the Assamese language, the setting up of Assamese schools, the printing of primers, grammars, and dictionaries in the Mission Press, and, above all, the establishment of the Assamese journal Orunodoi as a vehicle for the dissemination of “useful knowledge” and as a platform for the views

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of “native intellectuals” like Dhekial Phukan and Gunabhiram Barua. Current identity aspirations have made this history a rich treasure house of sources. The return to many of the elements of this “alternative missionary story” has consolidated the resistance strain of the identity narrative. On the other hand, the British lack of sympathy for Assamese fears about linguistic and cultural erasure is clearly heard in a response like that of Henry Cotton, Chief Commissioner of Assam to a petition from Manik Chandra Barua submitted on March 28, 1899, for the establishment of a college in Assam. Cotton wrote: I am not anxious to give any encouragement to the feeling of provincialism which I find to be unfortunately too rife in the Assam valley districts and rather impress upon the educated Assamese of the present generation that they cannot be independent of Bengal in their language or association. They are as dependent on Bengal as Welshmen are dependent on the English. And I attribute the slowness of its progress in large measure to the unwise feeling by the Assamese among themselves of a policy of national exclusiveness. (quoted in M. Deka 1996: 43)

The British position on the Assamese language seems irrevocable at this time. They quickly moved on from the cultural–linguistic to the visible– physical, and, while the census referred to the language in use in the region, this was unconnected to the debate on the imposition of the Bengali language and the merits and demerits of the Assamese. In contrast, therefore, to the educational and linguistic thrust of the missionary writings on Assam, British administrative reports are more intent on producing a comprehensive (and convenient) picture of the region and its people. The Report on the Province of Assam (1984 [1853]) of A.J. Moffatt Mills carries, in Appendix A on the statistics of Assam, information which clearly lays out in tabular form the total area under “Assam Proper”—area under cultivation, net revenue, population, number of inhabitants in each square mile of total area, and amount of taxation on each individual. This report provides information that is of immense value to the administration, but it also gives, at the same time, a sense of the territory of Assam—a sense that was unavailable before the British undertook their detailed exercise of statistically producing the land. The report contains information on each of the six districts under an agent of the governor-general. In Item 121 of the report, in a reference

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to the administration of criminal justice, is a criticism of the neglect of Clause 6, Section II of the Assam Criminal Code, which authorizes “the taking of evidence viva voce, and the recording of the substance either in English or in Bengalee.... The rule should be made imperative, and the examination should be recorded in English by Europeans, and in Bengalee by the Native Judges” (Mills 1984 [1853]: 35). This mandatory use of Bengali has been among the most troublesome aspects of colonial policy, creating a situation of uneven cultural exchange that has scarred Assamese–Bengali relations for more than a century. In Appendix B of Mills’s report appears the letter written by LieutenantColonel F. Jenkins, Agent to the Governor-General, Northeast Frontier, where Jenkins traces the state of the land before the British arrived. He describes the Assamese as he found them: The Assamese had very few wants: they lived principally upon rice, and were clothed in their own silks and cotton, and none of them had ever been traders, nor are they now, nor had they any other than domestic manufactures.... The trade of the Province was consequently confined to the sale of such articles as would procure for them the salt of Bengal.... The whole traffic of the country has consequently fallen into the hands of Kyals [variation of Kyah or kayah, a contemporary term for the Marwari trader] and Bengallees, and in the manner it has been managed, the Assamese have had to pay maximum prices and received only minimum profits. (Jenkins quoted in Mills 1984 [1853]: 59)

Jenkins’s letter contains a reference to migration: “The great quantity of available spare land appears to be a very sensible evil as inducing to idle habits of migration.” The reference is to internal migration—the temptation to move on and cultivate wherever they wished to, a habit that must have been anathema to the tidy British mind. Spare land had to become inhabited or duly allocated, not left unattended. Jenkins refers to other areas where an old way or practice had to be replaced by a better, newer one because of the devastation left in the wake of the Burmese invasion: “When, therefore, we assumed the charge of Assam, nothing could possibly be more unpromising than the state of the country” (ibid.: 58). He mentions the poor communication of the province with surrounding regions: Assam was cut off from the beneficial effects of “free intercourse opened out with our old Provinces” by “the marauding hill tribes from

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the hills surrounding it on three sides” (Mills 1984 [1853]: 59). It is in the context of such an interpretation of what the British found—the easy, laid-back attitude of the Assamese in matters of agriculture and trade, and these special factors of isolation, of a population reduced by the war, and of empty spaces—that one must see the multi-pronged administrative effort that encouraged migration from outside, settled vacant land, laid out plantations, surveyed and mapped the territory, and recorded the number and types of people, replacing a particular way of life with a completely different one—a process that is popularly perceived as “modernization.” Mills’s report is significant as a documentary source of many of the stereotypes about the Assamese that flowed into circulation and found a resting place in the identity narrative. One of these was kaneeah—a designation given by the British, but using a word borrowed from the local language, which acquired wider application beyond the immediate reference. Kanee was the local word for opium. The use of opium by the Assamese, especially the poorer among them, its cultivation, and policies to deal with the problem are all discussed in a memorandum by Lieutenant-Colonel Matthie contained as Appendix D in Mills’s report: “aiding in the cultivation and preparation of kanee gives the Assamese a relish for it, and the practice itself has created a large number of kaneeahs, or confirmed opium-eaters” (Mills 1984 [1853]: 75). The innocuous word entered the language initially to describe the idler, the one who did no work but smoked his or her opium, and ended up as a racial description. Against the background of everything that the British found in Assam—or did not find because in their understanding the region came into their hands as a land marked by lack—they conflated land and people in a rationalizing exercise that explained and justified their policies of encouraging migration, transforming an economy based on subsistence, family-based agriculture into a plantation economy, bringing in educated Bengalis to take up clerical jobs in the administration, and imposing the Bengali language as the language of the courts and the government schools. The chairman, managing director, and four other directors of the Assam Company sent a joint memorandum to the Governor-General Lord Dalhousie (contained as Appendix E in the report), urging the necessity and facilitation of migration because of the “dearth of population.” The memorandum requests improvement of communication, and speaks of

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“uninhabited jungles” that are slowly being transformed into cultivated areas (Mills 1984 [1853]: 78–81). The picture that emerges is of a land that had been reduced to a shambles by the “natives,” but was now slowly taking “civilized” shape. One of the most important of the many representations made to Mills was that by the American Baptist missionary A.H. Danforth. Danforth wrote of the disadvantages under which the Assamese people lived, their exploitation in their own land by outsiders, and their own deep apathy, which made them passively accept this state of affairs. Danforth made this into a case for the infusion of new principles and new ideas through education in the vernacular. While this is another aspect of the issues clustering around identity, Danforth’s particular presentation of the state of affairs in Assam is interesting. He writes: Assam, though a rich and beautiful valley, is greatly in want of population, and its resources lie undeveloped. The Ryots are satisfied to cultivate merely enough for their own use, and what little trade there is, is carried on almost entirely by the Bengallees and kayahs. The want of an enterprising and impulsive spirit is everywhere seen, and until this monotony is broken up by drawing the attention of the natives to the advantages of commerce, and the blessings which honest industry is certain to secure, little can be hoped from the Province. I think I speak advisedly when I say that the taxes are almost the only motive that now moves the great mass of the people to put forth a single effort beyond what is required for the actual necessities of life. To find an antidote for this death like inertia, the means for arousing the slumbering energies of a people who have the natural ability for greatly improving their own condition, developing the resources of the country and adding materially to its revenue, is a question alike interesting to the statesman and the philanthropist. (quoted in Mills 1984 [1853]: 89, emphases mine)

Danforth’s assessment is worthy of notice for several reasons. In it, he manages to activate the two strains of the identity narrative that are significant for later constructs. The first of these is a certain “character of the people” that retards their development. But Danforth also invokes a number of very real exploitative situations in his assessment. While these may have changed over the years, they have left behind the reality of exploitation itself, not only as political and economic moves in the present, but as a scar in the dark underbelly of the identity narrative that

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periodically reminds us of its existence through the elements of neglect, exploitation, and indifference. The American Baptist, unlike the British administrator, actually speaks of “natural ability,” since finding a rationale for colonial policies was not on the missionary agenda (though finding one for education certainly was). Many of the accounts of the region, usually produced for administrative purposes by officers of the government, contain this tacit rationale. They invariably begin with a description of the boundaries, the geographical aspect of the land, conjured up as a linguistic supplement to the maps and surveys that were already available. John M’Cosh’s Topography of Assam (1986 [1879]) is a report submitted to the medical board which begins with an account of “Boundaries.” This is a description of the extent of the land, the flatness of the topography, the valley of the river Brahmaputra surrounded on all sides, except where it abuts on Bengal, by hills where the various hill tribes lived. Pemberton’s Report on the Eastern Frontier of British India (2000 [1835]) contains a twenty-five-page account that, besides providing the mandatory description of people, land, and crops, also has a description of all the commercial routes leading to surrounding areas. The most detailed and among the best known of these accounts is W.W. Hunter’s A Statistical Account of Assam in two volumes (1986 [1879]), which describes the province of Assam as constituted under a chief commissionership. In the preface, Hunter describes the entire province, before going on to offer detailed accounts of the eleven districts into which the area is now divided. He provides latitude and longitude demarcations for each of the districts, obviously taken from a map of the province. The prefatory comments themselves are revealing of the way these early land accounts held up a visual picture, giving the people of these regions the first concrete pictorial impression of the land they lived in, the people they lived with and among, and a sense of who they were. As Hunter says in the preface, the province consists of two river valleys with a lofty hill tract between. On the north, the Brahmaputra valley covers an area of 20,683 square miles, or one half of the whole Province, and gives the name of its former dominant race, the Ahams, to Assam. From its southern edge rises the hill country, a wild broken region of 14,447 square miles inhabited by non-Aryan tribes. To the south of these intervening mountains, again, lies the smaller valley

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of the Barak and Surma, extending over 6,668 square miles. The whole is divided for administrative purposes into eleven Districts with an aggregate population of 4,132,019 persons and an area of 41,798 square miles, yielding an average of 99 inhabitants to the square mile. (Hunter 1986 [1879], I: 1)

The details in this account run to boundaries, vegetation, forests, river traffic, area under rice cultivation, roads and means of communication, climate and population for all the districts. The census of 1871–72 (ibid.: 25–39) classifies the population according to sex, age, religion, and “ethnical” divisions, and gives details of all these classifications. Brief accounts of a preliminary history are also given, and there is a reference to the Ahom “dynasty.” Early historical accounts were also provided in the various issues of the Assamese journal Orunodoi, published by the American Baptist missionaries as part of their educative project. The Imperial Gazetteer of India (1909: 27) presents an Assam that is an “unending panorama of scenic beauty ... enormous wastes ... and vast impenetrable jungles.” These comprehensive, collative accounts serve the very useful purpose of giving to a people a detailed self-description that is an indispensable aid in imagining themselves. At the same time, it is important to distinguish among the representations, among the descriptions that are purely natural, of the land, its extent, and the physical characteristics of its people, and those that make an explicit value judgment, as in comments on the behavior or temperament of the people. These have had their historical use in providing rationales for the occupation of the land, for policies of settlement in the “wastes,” and for the introduction of the plantation economy. At the same time, they have contributed to the contemporary conception of the people of the region by the detail and depth of their observations—influencing both self- and other-conceptions. Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities discusses the significance of these colonial accounting methods. The racial identification that became increasingly popular is seen in a case that Anderson reports from Indonesia, and that proves that the census has its beginnings much before the 1850s. Citing the Dutch and the local Cirebonese records, Anderson shows how two different conceptions of human classification are at work. The Cirebonese record refers to the accused murderer only as a high official in the Cirebonese court. The Dutch records “identify him as a Chinees.”

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For Anderson, “it is clear then that the Cirebonese court classified people by rank and status while the Company did so by something like ‘race’” (Anderson 1999 [1983]: 167). This difference in attitudes, expressed by the designation “high official” in one case and “Chinese” in another, represents the introduction of racial categorization that has had long-term postcolonial implications. In most instances, these have been divisive implications, as is apparent in the case of Assam where the category of tribe was firmly established with the British census. In a wider sense, this legacy is also apparent in the deeply fractured societies across the entire postcolonial world existing under the artificial unity of the “nation.” Bernard Cohn’s (1987) essay, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” places the census in a case study of the “objectification” that was taking place as a result of the entry of ideas of the Enlightenment into India, and its visible impact on the phenomenon that came to be called the “Bengal Renaissance.” Cohn extends this observation on the Bengal Renaissance to the impact of ideas of modernity in the 20th century: The Indian intellectuals of Bengal in the nineteenth century and then the whole Western educated class of Indians in the twentieth century have objectified their culture. They in some sense have made it into a “thing”; they can stand back and look at themselves, their ideas, their symbols and culture and see it as an entity.

Significantly, Cohn also notes the way in which this process of objectification actually provided a palpable sense to many of the more inaccessible and tenuous aspects of culture: What had previously been embedded in a whole matrix of custom, ritual, religious symbol, a textually transmitted tradition, has now become something different. What had been unconscious now to some extent becomes conscious. Aspects of the tradition can be selected, polished and reformulated for conscious ends.

His examples are Gandhi’s use of the concept of ahimsa, the nationalist interpretations of the Gita, Gandhi’s successful “objectification” of the message of the Gita, and the process by which this text came to stand “as the single most authoritative expression of Hinduism” (ibid.: 228–29).

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As one such method of objectification, facilitating that close look at one’s society and culture, Cohn offers a brief description of “the structure and function of the Indian census”: First it touched everyone in India. It asked questions about major aspects of Indian life, family, religion, language, literacy, caste, occupation, marriage, even of disease and infirmities. Through the asking of questions and the compiling of information in categories which the British rulers could utilize for governing, it provided an arena for Indians to ask questions about themselves, and Indians utilized the fact that the British census commissioners tried to order tables on caste in terms of social precedence. (Cohn 1987: 230)

The category of caste itself, as a way of ordering Indian society, was useful for the British, but it was also a picture of themselves that was indispensable for the Indians, a usable construct that has been described in different ways: by G.S. Ghurye (1932), who speaks of “a livening up of the caste spirit” (quoted in ibid.: 241), as each successive census elaborated on the caste structure of Indian society; and by M.N. Srinivas who, in his influential study Social Change in Modern India, averred that it served “to keep alive, if not to exacerbate, the numerous divisions already present in Indian society” (Srinivas 1988: 100). Both Ghurye and Srinivas are also quoted by Cohn to support his argument that the census indeed succeeded in helping that process of objectification, in giving concrete shape to and delivering that conception clearly and unambiguously in quantitative form to the Indians. Cohn extends his argument to ask the important question: “What influence did the census operations have on theoretical views which both administrators and social scientists developed about the Indian social system?” (1987: 241). While Cohn shows the caste system as an example of objectification, in Assam it is possible to see the category of the tribe itself being made available for scrutiny by the quantification modes of the census. This is achieved by naming, counting, and computing area, towns, and villages, describing occupation which is both caste- and tribe-related, and elaborating on “civil condition,” i.e., marital status. All of this is supplemented in the accompanying report by a detailing of the marriage customs of these communities, the categorization of their religious practices as animistic, reporting their parent tongues,

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and indicating birthplace. Features of this kind serve to “place” the tribe as different from others and as having a distinct “tribal” identity. An example of how this quantification could actually place people in strict categories may be seen in the census of parent tongues (it is worth noting that there are no hybrid categories anywhere in these lists): Assamese—1,435,820; Kachari (Bodo)—198,705; Khasi—178,637; Garo— 145,425; Naga—102,108; Mech—90,796; Mikir—90,236; Lushai—41,926; Lalung—40,204; Abor—35,703; Koch—8,107; Minor Northeast Frontier dialects—1,282 (General Report on the Census of India 1891, Table X: ix). The Census of Assam 1901 (vol. I, Report) contains an “Alphabetical Glossary” of all castes present in Assam in 1901 (Census of Assam 1901: 121– 44). By naming the “Assamese” as a separate category, the census shows the mode of examining Assamese society in terms of tribal and non-tribal; it sifts through religious and cultural practices, which it describes in the accompanying report, to produce an image of a society that is divided strictly along folk and sanskritized lines. That this was a convenient construct for the time, and may not actually have represented the larger contemporary Assamese society, becomes evident with only a cursory examination of the folk tales of Assamese tribes like the Rabha, Bodo, Mising, and Lalung, where tales from the Indian epics, for example, are retold, or the same tales as found in the Assamese language corpus also appear (see the manuscript of Mothers, Daughters and Others: Gauhati University 2003). From the strictness of these categories, it is evident that a person had to fit into one or the other. In other words, there was no room for a hybrid identity because the hybrid did not have clear demarcations. I remember as a child being told to say I was Assamese if anybody asked. This injunction would have come out of an unconscious adherence to the principle of acknowledging a single identity in an institution like the census. The census could not/did not deal with an ambiguous, dual category like Assamese-Bengali. One could be only one or the other. Such hybridity is, of course, invisible in official machineries and official documents. But it shows the rigidities of the census and its tendency to recreate the same, rather than accommodate the different. In Assam, for example, the category that the Char-Chapori Muslim could see herself entering logically had to be the Assamese, because she was no longer strictly speaking Bengali, and she could hardly claim to be both. This privileging of “purity” has often made it a source of misrepresentation and social division.

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Native Intellectuals Against the British exercise of producing Assam and its constituents, both natural and human, mostly for the purpose of aiding the colonial design of efficient administration and resource exploitation, is the complex response of the educated Assamese, who certainly began to see his land anew through the British production of it, but who was conscious of the importance of taking it into the future from these foundations. So what might appear as exploitative imperialist policies could also be viewed as the facilitating processes of a passage into modernity that brought in its wake a strong encouragement of “self ”-making, especially in resistance. One such effort is exemplified by the most colorful figure of these early years of Assam’s life as a British province. Anandaram Dhekial Phukan. Phukan is someone who fully deserves to be called the first of the moderns in his sensitivity to the business of self-making and in his recognition of the necessity of this undertaking for his people. Phukan’s statement appears as a submission to Mills. Divesting it of the tributes to British sagacity and administrative skill, inevitable in an employee of the British government, it is possible to see in it the effort to develop a narrative about Assam in a positive comparison with the nearby province of Bengal. This is the first of the instances of deliberate intervention in the identity narrative by those who might be called the mediators—individuals who cleverly selected and inserted into the narrative aspects about Assam that would swell gradually into the grand identity narrative. It is this aspect of self-conscious identity making that is evident in Phukan’s declaration that the aim of the Assamese could not be merely to become clerks in the courts like the Bengalis, hence offering a rationale for the education of the Assamese in their mother tongue: “the reason assigned for the substitution of the Bengalee for the Vernacular Assamese is that ‘Bengalee is the language adopted in the courts’ as if the object were to make the Assamese a nation of judicial officers.” He further goes on to point out that very few of the students coming out of this educational system were actually deemed fit to fill positions of trust in the courts. In this area, which seems to have been of vital concern to him, he offers a program of action for the British government: the following arrangements appear to be best calculated to promote the cause of education—viz., the substitution, in the schools, of the Vernacular

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language in lieu of the Bengalee, the publication of a series of popular works on the different branches of Native and European knowledge in the Assamese language, the establishment of a Normal school to train up a body of teachers, and the creation of a separate department for the study of Sanskrit in the several Vernacular schools. (Mills 1984 [1853]: 106)

This program for improvement is also a program of building an identity that will clearly not be insular or jingoistic, but will be aware of the near and the far, the local and the international, and yet be firmly grounded in its own language. The same sentiment is also audible behind Phukan’s repeated pleas for “instructing the Assamese in the science and literature of Europe” (ibid.: 107). The special plea for Sanskrit is an indication of the sense that this early generation of Assamese intellectuals had of being part of a larger entity than the area that was slowly taking shape as the province of Assam. It is important to note this because, in later years, it was this dual sense of collective selfhood that came to be frequently articulated by men like Jyotiprasad Agarwalla and Ambikagiri Roychowdhury. As part of the attempt to give this program concrete shape, Phukan urged the government to “supply the Schools with a complete series of elementary educational works in the Assamese language, in every useful department of learning, literature, history, science and art” (ibid.: 106). Phukan’s own contribution in this area included the three volumes of useful knowledge he put together under the title Asomiya Lorar Mitra (The Assamese Boy’s Companion). Another element of interest in this clearly constructivist effort is the modern institution of the library, which he felt should be freely available to his people if they were to adequately equip themselves to step into a modern era: “For the purpose of disseminating knowledge amongst the people, we would further suggest the expediency of establishing with schools a sufficient number of circulating libraries of Vernacular books throughout the country” (ibid.: 107). In an earlier piece that appeared in the American Baptist missionary magazine Orunodoi, “Englandar Bibaran” (“A Description of England”), Phukan (1847) reiterates the British assessment of the Assamese, calling them ignorant, lacking enterprise, and unaware of their poor state. However, in offering this criticism, he also suggests a program of improvement: he speaks of the need for education and points to the effect

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of British education in Bengal; he stresses the importance of agriculture and crafts, skills that he believes should be cultivated; he urges the Assamese to develop a business sense; and finally, he pulls them up for selfishness: “none of you think about the desh [country/nation/land] or the larger good; you only think about yourself and how to better yourself.” He follows this up with a prayer to the “Merciful God”: “Give these people of Assam the will to make themselves civilized, wise and spiritual [dharmik]; give them the power and the wisdom to recognize their own poor state; make them capable of knowing you and obeying you and of bettering themselves” (Phukan 1847: 130–31). The prayer is for the gift of doing things to and for themselves, for agency—that important aspect of modernity that makes an appearance at different times in the identity narrative. Active participation in the making of the identity narrative can be seen as a progression from this attempt by Phukan; to that associated with the independence movement in Assam and the generation of several narratives alongside it that wrested the power to forge an Assamese sense of self; through the Assam Movement, where the textual production was minimal and where agency was expressed in the call to the people to fight the battle for guarding and preserving the Assamese way of life and the Assamese language; and finally (and this is probably the most interesting shift, one that I discuss in the Conclusion), to the contemporary strains of another such attempt to remake the Assamese identity in the wake of an understanding of the past, an attempt that has brought to the narrative another set of politically gifted mediators. Phukan’s submission to Mills contains a comment on the sparse population and the need to settle vacant lands: “More than one-half of the country is a vast extent of wastes.” He lists three kinds of people as potential settlers: “ancient inhabitants” who had fled to the frontiers “during the civil wars and the incursions of the Burmese which followed them,” and who might now “be induced to come back and settle in the lands of their forefathers”; “numerous independent mountain tribes that surround the valley of Assam [who] may likewise, under proper management, be induced to settle in the plains”; and finally the Bengali migrant, who could be “invited to emigrate ... from some of the badly provided parts of Bengal” (Mills 1984 [1853]: 111–12). Three conceptions of the people are at work here that have had interesting resonances in the identity narrative: first, that of an “original people,” which, since

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he makes a distinction with the mountain tribes, might be a reference to the “dominant or mainstream Assamese” as distinguished from the tribal people; second, the hill tribes; and third, the Bengali migrant, the most contentious component of the identity narrative and its most significant other. The feeling that the identity narrative is in reality a “dominant Assamese” identity narrative (the Assam Movement did nothing to allay fears of this kind) has meant that the tribal people have never felt part of it, and the periodic reiteration of this narrative has done nothing to assuage wounded feelings. There is also the not-so-curious mention of “proper management”—a Foucauldian disciplining of the deviant that has always been an aspect of a dominant community’s dealings with its designated aberrants, misfits, marginals, and minorities. The suggestion that the Bengali be invited to come to Assam in these middle years of the 19th century, and the subsequent development of fears of erasure in the last quarter of the 20th century, are a clear pointer to the dimensions that an issue like migration may assume as it develops from being a welcome addition into a society, to being a threat because the numbers become unmanageable and unsustainable for the host region. Anandaram Dhekial Phukan indeed succeeds in conjuring up a vision of a country of neatly engineered and managed hybridities, all of them known and visible to the administration—a picture that was already in the making in the detailed British surveying and recording of the territory under its rule. While Phukan concentrates on active engagement in the process of transforming the race through education, a couple of publishing episodes from this early period of Assamese modernity zero in unambiguously on the element that any identity narrative requires to fashion itself—an other who is substantial enough to enhance the self in its resistance. Beginning innocuously, this particular note, about “the Bengali,” becomes louder and louder over the following century. The first of these articles appeared in the magazine Asam Bandhu (1885), edited by Gunabhiram Barua (1984). The fact of writing itself is worth pausing over: Gunabhiram Barua is considered among the foremost figures of Assamese modernity, and his writing of a biography of Anandaram Dhekial Phukan is itself an impressive act of image-making that is a crucial indicator of the role he saw these early intellectuals playing in the development of the idea of the “Assamese.” Barua received his education in Calcutta and had close links with Bengal and the Bengalis throughout his life. His editorial

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decision to publish a piece of this kind, therefore, has a special significance. It must be seen in the context of the modernity issue of agency, where the individual takes on the responsibility of fashioning his/her identity. This is a trait apparent in the period of early modernity in Europe, with its confessional writings and many literary exercises in selffashioning, the most famous being perhaps that of Montaigne through his essays in France. It is difficult to impute any particular animosity toward the Bengali to Barua (as it would be difficult in the case of a later figure like Lakshminath Bezbaroa, who employed a strong anti-Bengali rhetoric even while personally remaining close to Bengali friends; Bezbaroa had a Bengali wife and many Bengali relatives, having married into the Tagore family). This is the reason why Barua’s decision to carry an article of this nature appears to be an exercise in self-fashioning. The article may be viewed as a deliberate and carefully thought out effort to shape Assamese identity by selecting a strong and visible other against whom such an exercise could be undertaken, employing a critique of existing Assamese sloth and passivity as a powerful rationale for such an effort. As this book seeks to demonstrate, the “Bengali” is a significant subtext in the “outsider” or bohiragato story that swelled to such massive proportions in the years of the Assam Movement and after. It is a subtext that seems to take on several, often contradictory features in the identity formation/identity-making process—elided over, or demonically present, an other without whom the “beleaguered identity” thesis would lose its theoretical spine. The early articulations are clustered primarily around the two issues of jobs and language. The memory of these deprivations functioned as a particularly strong impetus in the awakening brought about by the Assam Movement, the new migratory waves raising once again the specter of social and linguistic erasure. So this specter is already a kind of thematic trace on the ground that is recovered and reinfused back into the identity narrative. The beginnings are discernible in the early years of Assamese modernity. This is an area of historical ascription that requires some elaboration. The word modernity is used in several ways while speaking of the Assam of these years. The British/Western habit of systematization of time, land, and people through devices like the clock, the map, and the census appears to signal the arrival of modernity most effectively. Anandaram Dhekial Phukan’s organization of the papers of the Bijni

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royal family is also a favorite example. I use the word specifically in the sense of a moment when a people become conscious of themselves and take charge of their processes of self-making, in an act of what, in Charles Taylor’s delineation of modern identity, is called agency (Taylor 1989). I would link this to the similar self-consciousness, a sense of power, that came to life again during the Assam Movement. It is salutary to remember that agency does not always appear in the positive sense of selecting the best ingredients of a culture and society for representation. Much of the Assamese identity narrative carries in its texture components that have come out of the representations of others. There are, therefore, positive cultural elements, descriptions offered by others which include positive stereotypes about the culture and the people usually clustered around festivals, attire, and artifacts, and about the beautiful, green land, the home of the rhino. But there are also negative descriptions in relation to underdevelopment, corruption, and insurgency-related violence which are formed in the media, especially the national media whose interest in the region is in direct proportion to the scale of a disaster, in the discourses of central government officials who visit the region when a particularly heinous terrorist act has taken place, in discussions or ministerial reports in Parliament (see the discussion of P.C. Sethi’s report in Chapter 1, for example), in reports like the one carried by the India Today on the performance of India’s constituent states, studied through indices like agriculture, primary health, investment, environment, primary education, infrastructure, consumer market, and law and order (see Aiyar 2007: 22–33). On Assam, the report says that the state “has shown spectacular results in poverty reduction,” and was the “fastest mover in overall rankings” (India Today 2007). One is, in fact, tempted to wonder at the analytic basis for these conclusions, which, as the report claims, are based on central government data. Such claims run contrary to both the reality and the myth of corruption that are so often used to characterize the region. It is in the context of such selection of “useful” elements from the raw material on people and place that the two pieces from the Asam Bandhu and the Mau are presented here. The piece called “Bongali” from Asam Bandhu begins with a reference to tribes like the Khamti, Singhpo, Khasiya, Abor, and other hill tribes who live in the southeastern part of “our land.” “Towards the west is ‘Bongal Desh.’” The writer equates the hill tribes and the “Bongals” under

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the labels bideshi (foreign), “uncivilized,” and “impure” (see Barua 1984: 95). There is a peculiar transformation of the term, from a limited name for a race, to a generic name for all people other than the Assamese and the tribes named. The rhetoric of this ascription suggests this generalization in terms that are offensive: “Besides the people of our land and those hill tribes all other people on this earth may be called ‘Bongal.’ ... By the term ‘Bongal’ we mean a filthy, impure people” (ibid.: 95). The author then goes on to trace the coming of the “Bongal” to Assam. The soldiers came under Captain Welsh, and the Bongal came along with them during the Moamaria revolt. Subsequently, when the British annexed the region, more Bengalis came. The period appeared to be a Bengali era to the ordinary person: “The Amalas and the other officers of the court are Bengalis. School teachers are Bengali. Bengali is the language used in schools.” Having taken over important positions in society, the Bengalis were now the leaders of society and the Assamese were following them. The author writes of Assamese culinary specialties being replaced by Bengali ones, Assamese conventions of dress and look by their Bengali counterparts; cultural forms, sports, items of daily use, etc., all changed as a result of this regular contact with and the influence of the “Bongal.” He concludes with the lament that lots of foreign (bideshi) or “Bongali” modes have entered into Assamese lives, and that it would now be impossible to give many of these up (see ibid.: 96–97). “Despite knowing the foreigner or Bongal to be filthy, impure and uncivilized, we still borrow from them” (ibid.: 98). At this point, the writer changes track slightly to the question of the migration of outsiders from the west into Assam, listing several places from where outsiders have come and been absorbed into the life and culture of the place. This is said in the spirit of a historical rationale for the settlement of outsiders in the region, stressing that all the people currently living in Assam are not native or indigenous (adibashi, or those who had lived here from adi kaal, ancient times). Assam has been a land of migrants who have assimilated. “In those days the Bongals who came were received warmly, given land for settlement and the hands of daughters in marriage” (see ibid.: 99). The author mentions the reign of Rudra Singha as having been particularly welcoming to foreigners. He names several old Bengali families who intermarried with the Assamese and lived happily in Assam. It was only in the recent past that the character

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and profile of the Bongal who came in had changed. There were many who were uneducated and of low character, and these were the people that the Assamese viewed with disgust. The essay offers a historical context for the Assamese–Bengali animosity, suggesting that it was not the Bengalis as a race that needed to be resisted, but only the unscrupulous and low section among them. The writer ends with a pious expression of the duty of all Assamese to accept the Bengali as a brother and fellow human—envisaging a kind of union that he metaphorically represents as the union of the rivers Brahmaputra and Padma into the Meghna, which finally enters the ocean. The shifting tones of the essay are particularly interesting. The jingoistic posturing that is targeted at the new or recently arrived Bengali provides the basis for a discussion of the many Bengali influences in Assam. This reveals a subtle attempt to counter the stereotype and introduce inflections into it that would allow for a discrimination between the “Bongal” who is the target of hatred and the migrant Bengali who has become a part of Assamese society and contributes culturally to it. There are two kinds of impulses at work in this piece: first, the need for an “other” who is then constructed as the much-disliked Bongal; and second, the inflection of this narrative by a distinction from the earlier, assimilated Bengali, which appears as an astute move to counter the possible alienation of a constituent of Assamese society. Asam Bandhu also carried a poem titled “Asambashi,” or “The Assamese” (see Barua 1984: 12–16), which is virtually a call to arms—an invitation to the Assamese to awake from sleep and meet the challenges of the new age. The poem, which is hortatory in impulse, embarks on a catalogue of the qualities of the race through its urgings, using phrases like “open your eyes,” “awake from sleep,” “raise your head,” and “shun laziness or sloth,” and follows up with a description of the Assamese: “No labour, no effort, just laziness resulting in a senseless body and a melancholy face.... But there is a gleam of pleasure at the misfortune of others” (ibid.: stanza 4). It further characterizes the people as “uninterested in the development and prosperity of the land—no agriculture, no craft, no trade, ashamed to be carpenter, plough the field or engage in business,” a people who are satisfied that “our forefathers also lived and died without doing any of these things” (ibid.: stanza 5). This last sentiment is repeated as a satirical refrain in several of the

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subsequent stanzas, which urge the Assamese to travel in the country and the world (Barua 1984: stanza 7). Even as these urgent pleas are made, there is also a dig at the superficial aping of Western modes: “You have cut and refashioned your hair in an ‘albert’, started to wear shoes and socks, immersed yourselves in debauchery and drink” (ibid.: stanza 6). The stereotype that appears in this poem is an ironic critique that can also be instrumental in bringing about a shift in self-conceptions. In that sense, this is part of the cluster of responses from around this time that are all exercises in self-making. At the same time, many of the racial traits of the Assamese are also echoed in the British writings. Both impulses are serious additions to the identity narrative that is beginning to take a particular shape from this time onwards, and many of whose details are audible even today, both in the self-conceptions of the Assamese and in external assumptions about the people. The second article that will be discussed here is titled “Asomiya aru Bongali” (“The Assamese and the Bengali”), which came out in the periodical Mau in January 1887 (see Bora 2003). Mau was published for a year between 1886 and 1887 and was edited by Haranarayan Bora. This article is also interesting for the position it adopts with regard to a certain reading of Assamese society. It is heavily sarcastic, with a large portion of the essay devoted to a recounting of the various kinds of ills that beset Assamese society, setting up a severe self-scrutiny that identifies what the writer feels are the most damning traits of his people. It begins with the accusation that the Assamese as a people are proud and egotistic, and have therefore remained backward. The word bhem, which is used here, has a particular cultural weight that is difficult to convey through the English word “pride.” It contains nuances of “false pride,” with its flip side, a consciousness of inferiority, a “mulishness” and “whimsicality,” that are conveyed in the examples the author gives of the results of such bhem—the loss of kingdoms, jobs, and wealth. The Assamese, the author continues, have continued to demonstrate a quite unwarranted contempt for the Bengali, who has been more industrious, better educated, and able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the civilized races of the world (ibid.: 42). The critique extends to a concern with the state of a country that is inhabited by races who do not get along with one another. “Envy and hatred for the Bengali ... have become racial characteristics” (ibid.: 43). The writer touches briefly upon the Assamese/Bengali

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language controversy, particularly the resentment over the use of Bengali in the schools and the courts, but takes the position that the Assamese resentment in this respect is unwarranted. He also criticizes the willingness to ape the English, to use the appellation “Mister” and wear coats. At the same time, he points to the pervasive influence of Bengali modes of behavior, dress, food (especially sweetmeats), and music. The teachers who teach the Assamese are Bengalis; the only books available for acquiring knowledge are Bengali books (Bora 2003). While the writer expresses surprise that, in spite of all this, the Assamese dislike the Bengalis, he has actually put his finger on the crux of the problem by identifying these various areas of cultural influence and dominance. Rubbing salt into the racial wounds, as it were, he suggests that instead of showing hatred, the Assamese should in fact emulate the Bengalis. In a spirit of opening out to the world (a sentiment that was predominantly expressed by men like Dhekial Phukan, and one that is evident in many of the articles on natural events, history, geography, and the peoples of the rest of the world published in the missionary journal Orunodoi), he suggests that insularity would not help in the progress of the race: Alone, on the strength of one’s own physique or intellect, meeting with one’s own kind in Guwahati or in Rongpur, delivering speeches in one’s own language, hoping that one day the Assamese will rule their own land and have nothing to do with other lands—if such sentiments rise in the minds of the Assamese people, these are but mere illusions. O Assamese people! Expand your hearts and accept all the different people of Bharat as your brethren. (ibid.: 43)

He repeats his belief in the unity of peoples and the closely interlinked destinies of Assam and India. The final paragraph of the essay under review makes an effort to balance the caustic assessment of the Assamese with an equally strong critique of the Bengali: The Bengali considers the Assamese to be an uncivilized race. When one Bengali finds another he prefers his company to that of the Assamese. The Bengali refuses to learn the Assamese language which they consider to be the language of barbarians. In such a situation how can there be good relations between the two groups? ... Do the Bengalis who live in

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Assam hate Assam so much that, not to speak of establishing good relations with the Assamese people, they are not even interested in the affairs of Assam? ... Religion, language, mores, behaviour,—despite similarities in all these if the Assamese and the Bengalis cannot live harmoniously together, then it is pointless to hope for the unity of India. (Bora 2003: 44)

Against the backdrop of sentiments that used the other in a self-making exercise, we also discover another important component of the narrative that, while asserting distinctiveness, shows a willingness to be part of a pan-Indian conception. Significantly, this aspect of the narrative was strongest at the time of independence, when the collective fight against the occupying British fascinated Indians across all their dividing lines, and discipleship to the Mahatma was something few ordinary Indians would have liked to be deprived of. Enthused, energized, and united by these adhesive factors, the Assamese were both nationalist and regionalist, recruited into one agenda even while keeping alive the other. Among the figures who articulated this dual conception, one of the most interesting is Ambikagiri Roychowdhury. Roychowdhury was a central figure in the internal dynamics between Upper Assam and Lower Assam, and his resistance to incorporation within the Upper-Assam-centric identity narrative was legendary in his own time. At a gathering of nationalist poets in Delhi on January 26, 1955, Roychowdhury read a poem titled “Ey e Mor Anupom Sonor Asom” (“This Is My Incomparable Golden Assam”), broadcast by All India Radio. Roychowdhury described Assam in the opening lines as a jewel in the crown of India, and went on to speak of the Patkai range of mountains in the east, which open the doors to the sun every morning and which stand as doors to India or Bharat, the glittering peaks a sign that one has entered the land of Bharat. He ends with a paean to this unique and richly endowed part of India: “Where through the year life is worshipped in this way / That is my incomparable Assam, Mother India’s diadem” (Roychowdhury 2003 [1986]: 453). In another piece, he presents an elaborate list of the different peoples living in Assam, representing many of the divisions in Indian society: “Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Mussalman, Christian, Scheduled tribes, Ahom, Kachari, Miri, Mikir, Khasia, Garo, Naga, Abor, Dafla, Mishmi, Marwari, Bongali, Bihari, Panjabi, Madrasi, Nepali, Santhal, Munda, Nagpuri, whoever they may be, if they are inhabitants of Assam they are Assamese” (ibid.: 463).

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A second important mediator of the identity narrative around this time is Lakshminath Bezbaroa. In the monthly magazine he edited from December 1909, Banhi, he regularly carried articles on Assam, the Assamese language, and Assamese–Bengali relations. The first issue carried a piece called “Asomiya,” which began with the questions that keep reverberating throughout the century: “The people we call Asomiya, who are they? Did they always live in Assam? How did the Assamese race get formed?” (Bezbaroa 2001: 9). The essay offers a description of all the people belonging to different racial stocks who came to Assam and settled here; these include the Aryans and the Dravidians, as in the rest of India, but specific to the Northeast are the speakers of the Indo-Chinese languages, like the Mon-Khmer, Tibeto-Burman, and Siam-Chinese. Bezbaroa’s taxonomy of peoples is similar to what one is likely to find in the prehistory of India with which many history books begin. Of special interest in the context of this book is his observation that the land of Assam was fertile and welcoming, and that people from many places and of varied origins came here and created the Assamese race and the Assamese language. And among the strongest binding factors were the Vaishnavite sattras (ibid.: 9–13). Since Bezbaroa is a familiar and much-loved cultural figure, the circulation and adoption of his ideas about the Assamese people must be kept in mind while examining the formation of the identity narrative. Banhi also contains verses of praise to the motherland. These include “Aamar Janambhumi” (“Our Birthplace”), which sings of a land rich in food grains, vegetables, herbs, curds, gardens of betel leaf, bamboo and cane groves, a majestic river, festivals like the Bihu, the Miri dance— indeed, in all ways a unique and incomparable land (ibid.: 23–24). “Aai Mor Asom” (“My Mother Assam”) is a song that refers to the sadness of the land, and then goes on to sing of all those reasons that should make her happy—her great sons and daughters, among whom are Sankar and Madhav, who spread the Vaishnav faith that is revered by all Indians, Rukmini the beloved queen of Krishna, Joymati who sacrificed her life for her husband and her land. The song ends with the resolve to remove all reasons for her sorrow (ibid.: 127–28). Like many pieces written at this time, the conflation of both Assam and India in the term “land,” and the sense that “Asom” is a proud component of the land of “Bharat,” is apparent here too. Another poem which continues these

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themes is “Mor Desh” (“My Land”) (Bezbaroa 2001: 212–13). “Asomiya” describes the Assamese race through a play of several stereotypes that are part of ironic Assamese self-descriptions. A rough rendering would go something like this: “We are the true Asomiya / We are the special Asomiya/ Know us for what we are / We won’t be bilingual / Kharkharisa is our food / Lao-tokari our musical instruments / We who have come down from the heavens / Are the real dangariya” (dangariya is a term once used for the Ahom nobility). The tone of light-hearted satire continues with the familiar proverb about generations living upon the fruit of one man’s labors. The poem declares that on no account will the Asomiya be mistaken for a “Bongal in a loincloth” or a “milkpeddling Nepali”: “We are a heroic race and the signs of our heroism are there for all to see” (ibid.: 511–12). Jyotiprasad Agarwalla in his essay “Aideor Jonaki Baat” writes of India’s divided past, when there was no conception of a single entity and “Assamese, Bengali, Punjabi, Madrasi (sic), Marathi” lived as separate political formations, though there was always a cultural and spiritual unity. However, he believes that after August 15, 1947, it would be unreasonable to believe that they could carry on with the same regional or group consciousness. Today even if we are Assamese or Bengali, in the same breath we must acknowledge that we are also Indians (Agarwalla 2003: 502–06). Agarwalla himself is a crucial figure in the complex coming together of peoples that is Assam. His Rajasthani antecedents are imprinted in the distinctive surname, and he is credited with having brought a strong Rajasthani influence into the Assamese imagination, especially in the way he represented the myth of Krishna. At the same time, Agarwalla is totally immersed in the Assamese cultural milieu and expresses the sentiments of the Assamese people in songs that tell of a beautiful land and people. More than anything else, his lyrics express the strong urge to connect with the great Indian formation. Birendra Nath Datta writes of him that “he spoke up for Assamese culture not as an advocate of regionalism but as an ardent devotee of the greater Indian culture” (B.N. Datta 1985: 63). Datta refers to Agarwalla’s play Lobhita as exemplary for its concern with Assam and India, and for the significant context in which it was written—the Second World War, the 1942 Quit India Movement, and the entry of the Azad Hind Fauj through the northeastern border into

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India (B.N. Datta 1985: 61). In the preface to the play, Agarwalla disclaims a political position, but avers that The hero of the play is the entire Assamese race. Through the 1942 revolt this play portrays the Assamese racial character. By basing the play against an actual event I have tried to show that the Assamese people have not lost the strength to protest nor the power to assert their distinctive character in the world community. (Agarwalla, in B.N. Datta 1985: 62)

Datta comments on this, saying that “it is only through self-analysis and self-realization that a healthy consciousness of being Assamese would emerge and through that a fearless and proud Assamese identity would be established” (ibid.). It is important to note that, as in the case of Sankardev, it is the recovery and the “timely” representation that is effective for the identity narrative. So, even as one notes the significance of these early articulations in the history of identity formation, the particular placing of the historical figure in the present, or in a time that is thought to urgently require it, is equally worthy of attention. In fact, as we speak of the identity narrative and its development in the last thirty years, such recovery has been among the most noticeable features of how it has come to be constructed. The process has involved a concerted effort on the part of editors and publishers to compile and make available in portable forms some of the texts from the past that are thought to be most relevant at this juncture in Assam’s history.

Contemporary Constructs Just as William Robinson or Danforth came up with stereotypes about the Assamese in the 19th century, it is interesting to note the contributions made to the narrative by writers and intellectuals in the last three decades. Their submissions have consolidated many of these typical features. The Assam Movement has been the occasion for a recap or a historical rewriting of many of these issues. One such historical recap is undertaken, for example, by Hiren Gohain, who wrote extensively in the Economic and Political Weekly during this period on various aspects of the movement, and took part in a debate with other writers on Assam that ran over

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several issues of the weekly (through 1980–81).1 Present-day Assam, says Gohain, is an area that was ruled by three “native” races—the Bodos, the Ahoms, and the Kochs: They were patrons of a culture that has historically developed into Assamese culture and under their aegis an Assamese nationality had also developed over the ages. Another powerful unifying factor had been the great medieval Vaishnava movement which created the institutional framework for assimilating masses of tribal people into the mainstream Assamese society. (Gohain 1985: 24)

This idea of assimilation circulates freely in examples of identity critique. It has serious undercurrents that remain undiscovered because it is so often presented as the reality or the solution. Emerging out of the thinking on migration, it consistently assumes a willingness on the part of a smaller community to lose itself in Assameseness. Its contemporary fallout has been the loss of their languages for sections of the tribal communities, many of whom would ruefully admit that they speak only Assamese. Gohain moves into the present and to a rapid collation of the characteristics of the present-day Assamese: “the sense of insecurity among the Assamese is deep-rooted,” and is accompanied by a “fear of being overwhelmed” (ibid.: 24). The reason for a “weak nationality,” he suggests, is the lack of development, so that the Assamese are “materially and culturally backward compared to other national groups” (ibid.: 24). They suffer from a “siege mentality” (ibid.: 25), a common enough phrase that is likely to crop up in everyday conversations on the state of Assam and its inhabitants. Attempting to find reasons for all of this, Gohain recalls a crucial period from Assam’s recent past: “in the 1940s the Muslim League ministry of Assam, aided and abetted by the British Government made a determined bid to increase the proportion of Muslims in Assam through immigration under the camouflage of the ‘Grow More Food’ campaign” (ibid.: 24). Taking a broad view of the implications of a narrow conception of Assamese identity for a region of such ethnic plurality and diversity, Gohain points to the manner in which, after independence, Assamese chauvinism took the form of “exclusive enjoyment of financial and other benefits of the State Government by a small and privileged section of the Assamese Hindus” (ibid.). “Having failed to weld a strong Assamese nationality out of the heterogeneous ethnic groups, especially

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the latecomers ... the Assamese middle class is seeing everywhere around it signs of incipient revolt. The revolt is likely to take the form of ethnic separatism” (Gohain 1985: 26). A sense of the complexity attaching to identity questions in Assam—including both the way identity is constructed and the way it is perceived—is also evident in the two elements of the narrative identified by Ranjit Kumar Dev Goswami: (a) the proactive role played by William Robinson, a man now established as having been hard of hearing and unable to hear the differences between Assamese and Bengali, and therefore responsible for the myth of Assamese being merely a dialect of Bengali; and (b) the many-sided influence of the Bengal Renaissance, which was resisted, accepted, and variously othered in the project of making Assamese identity (personal communication from Dev Goswami). It is also possible to examine identity as receiving inputs from the political processes that are set up to deal with problems of insurgency. Anuradha Dutta has discussed how after a point the state and those taking part in resistant movements against the state acquire the same kind of characteristics. Just as the state has failed to perform its constitutional duties, similarly groups which have resorted to insurgency for advancing reformist and revolutionary ends, suffer from an ideological bankruptcy. Even those political parties which are directly associated with the common people are self-absorbed/ expedient in character. (Dutta 2006: 13)

This is a dimension of identity formation that Sanjib Baruah sees operating at another level, in terms of the contribution of counter-insurgency discourse to such identity formation (S. Baruah 2005b). Indeed, there has been little coyness when it comes to writing on identity. Books, articles, newspaper columns, speeches—everywhere there is a willingness to jump in and define the Assamese. The constituents of most of these writings are more or less the same, but the periods in which these writings have been most widely published, and the links between such writings and the crises at hand, have given the reiteration and recall of each element in the identity narrative a novelty and a power to intervene at that critical moment. These moments of concern have been: (a) the period leading up to Indian independence (the focus in this period is on selfish British policies); (b) the immediate aftermath

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of independence itself (the focus is on Chinese aggression and national policies with regard to the state); (c) the language and “medium of education” movements; and (d) most recently, the Assam Movement. In an article titled “The Emergence of Industrial Middle Class in Assam,” the author, K. Alam, asserts that the middle class may have “originated mainly in the administrative, educational and legal system established by the British rulers” (Alam 1983: 90). However, he claims, as a result of a “pragmatic reorganization” (referring to the shifts and changes in the boundaries and the demographic profile of the province), “Assam was deliberately made a multinational province as a result of the inclusion of areas inhabited by people of different nationality, language and culture who were far more advanced in western education, trade and business” (ibid.: 93). This negative description that speaks of Assamese backwardness contains a reference to the inclusion of the Bengalis within the territory of Assam, and the start of a historical animosity. Also interesting is the fact that Assam became multinational as a result of the reorganization of the province. The truth of this claim is self-evident. Assam became recognizably multi-ethnic as a result of the administrative demarcations brought about by the British. The legacy of this reorganization is still visible in the tribal blocks of modern Assam. Alam resurrects an old strain of the discourse on the Assamese when he traces the slow rise of the middle class to what he calls the “social traits” of the Assamese people,2 traits that British administrators had so often lamented in their many reports and accounts of Assam. The section in Alam’s paper is titled “Social Traits,” and has sub-sections titled “Hatred for Physical Labour,” and “Opium Habits” (ibid.: 93–94). In efforts of this kind, the impulse is to imagine a composite identity based on behavioral traits, rather than through cultural or social constructs. This assumption of the predominant British stereotype of the Assamese is surprising, but absolutely common. Assamese identity has in large measure been produced by British description. The latter has, of course, been limited by the reasons that the British had in mind at any given point; very often, administrative, legal, or educational considerations determined that they saw only a particular set of traits. The familiar ascription of laziness, for example, was part of their frustration at not being able to recruit labor for the plantation economy. Identity in Assam has also been produced by the descriptions that developed in responses

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that were both resistant to and collusive with the British, and many of these traits continue in the identity narrative. At the same time, it is perhaps necessary to address anew the idea of a composite Assamese identity, which has been the favored mode in writing about identity in Assam. This is because different groups have produced their own versions and narratives of Assameseness—different ways of being Assamese—just as studies by outsiders to the groups have also contributed to the developing idea of an Assamese identity that has many and varied stakeholders, who realize their Assameseness in very different ways and with different historical markers. The dominant identity has therefore to be supplemented by these other little narratives. A hybrid identity narrative, and not a homogeneous or seamless one, has to be evolved.

Ways of Belonging Surrounded by Mising settlements, some 17 kilometers from the town of Bokakhat, is a small village called Baatiwalagaon, the village of the baati or lamps. The name is derived from the village’s ancestral profession of guiding vessels plying on the river Brahmaputra by showing a light from the banks. Baatiwalagaon is inhabited by thirty families of north Indian origin. They are the descendents of three men who were brought by the British from the Baliya region of Uttar Pradesh to work as sailors on their river vessels. While they still preserve some of the mementos, like the sailor’s cap with the name of the company for which they worked, or the diary in which the British company seals are still visible, they are completely assimilated into the Assamese society, speaking the Assamese and Mising languages and having no memory of a land left behind. But in that interesting blend visible in so many otherwise assimilated migrant communities, they continue to practice traditional rituals and celebrate their region-specific festivals. Sadin carried a report on August 17, 2007, somewhat misleadingly titled “The Search for Roots by Some Descendents of Sailors,” because it went on to say that this little island of human beings has neither the desire nor the curiosity to find out where they came from or who were the people left behind by their ancestors: “Baatiwalagaon is now their own land. The river Luit is the source of their livelihood.... Most of them today are fishermen.”

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This in itself is not unique in India. There are many examples of settlements where people of different origins lived in harmony together for generations, before multiculturalism became fashionable and made them unique. However, the sudden visibility given to communities like Baatiwalagaon at this point in time, when the illegal immigrant is again perceived as a threat in newer and much more dangerous ways, is a factor in the disciplinary dimension of the migration problem, whereby areas and realities that had remained ignored are selected as objects of study and “placed” in significant ways by the discursive energies at work in the public sphere. The timing of the Sadin report is significant because it comes in the midst of a revived interest in and threat perception from illegal migrants from Bangladesh. The picture of harmony painted by the report is one way of politically marginalizing the dreaded illegal entrant who now shows no signs of assimilation. Indeed, as the incidents of violence against people of Bihari origin increase, civil society responds by placing greater stress on the consolidation and articulation of harmonious living. The enemy now is clearly the illegal migrant, and in this scenario the reiteration of age-old togetherness is a way of marginalizing the migrant. This seems to have inserted into the identity narrative a renewed relationship with other Indians who are present in Assam. It is possible to view the complex, but not incomprehensible, response in two distinct ways. One aspect is, of course, the outbreak of violence, which cannot entirely be separated from the society, and which is apparent in social behavior and daily practices in a way that would be difficult to root out. The second aspect is the attempt to distance oneself from the violence, as well as from the migrant who is seen as the real culprit and whose presence in society is the flip side of the terrorist interest in Assam. Just as, at the time of the Assam Movement, the local print media played a major role in articulation and dissemination, similarly the media has again stepped in with “apt” pictures of an Assam that is alien to the very ideas of violence and hatred. The trend of reporting is indicative of clear interventionist intentions. The incident of violence occurs, is reported in the most ghastly detail, and is shown to be balanced by the presentation of individual and collective acts of generosity, through interviews that prove how much amity exists between communities. As an example, take the coverage of the violence in the village Daolamara, which is in

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the district of Karbi Anglong, some kilometers from Bokakhat. Fifteen people of Bihari origin were gunned down by the KNLF and the ULFA. The village in which this happened had a mix of inhabitants from the Karbi, Bihari, and Marwari communities, as well as tea garden workers. Many of them, when interviewed by the reporters of the television news channel NETV, asserted that all of them had always lived in the greatest harmony, and that the violence was the handiwork of outside agents who wished to disrupt this harmony (NETV report, Asamiya News, August 17, 2007, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.). Among the many hybridities that have been produced in the wake of migration is the diasporic community of the char-chapori. They are Bengali Muslim peasants who migrated from many of the eastern districts of Bengal at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. They settled on the sand banks and sand bars of the rivers (the char and chapori are low-lying riverine areas). They reclaimed these lands for cultivation and soon became important contributors to the economy of the state. It is, however, the story they tell of cultural assimilation and contribution that is most interesting for us, though it is true that it is economic security that forms the basis for this “other” story. While the components of this story are common knowledge, many of the most significant strands, showing the kinds of areas they identified as points of connection with the Assamese identity narrative, are collected in an essay in Assamese by Ismail Hussain (2000), titled “The Contribution of CharChapori Muslims to Twentieth Century Assamese Literature.” Hussain traces much of the history of migration into the region as the early history of the people in Assam. He speaks of the waves of migration in the first and second decades of the 20th century, and the beginnings of the contribution that is the subject of his essay in the third and fourth decades of this century. The Char-Chapori Muslim enters the narrative at a time of crisis for Assamese identity. After the British imposed Bengali (1836–72) in the schools, offices, and courts of the province, the census of 1931 showed that Assamese had become a minority language. This is the point at which the tea garden tribes, the Assamese tribal groups, and the nonindigenous Muslims stepped in as defenders of the language. As a result of the concerted efforts of the Char-Chapori Muslims between 1931 and 1951, the census of 1951 revealed that Assamese had regained its majority status. The community participated in the efforts to make Assamese the

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language of use in government offices and courts and in schools and colleges. They were also involved in the 1972 movement to make Assamese the medium of instruction up to the undergraduate level. This story about the rescue of a language, and thereby the defense of a people’s identity, also has its heroes and its martyrs. Mojammil Hoque, who gave up his life for the cause, is remembered with reverence. On June 19, 1961, ten Muslims (the writer names them all and gives their ages) died for the cause of the preservation of the Assamese language in the Barak valley. It is an enthusiastic narrative of participation, as also of welcome, and there is a particular poignancy in the retrospective desire, implicit in the recounting of little incidents, to be seen as a people who were more conscious than the indigenous Assamese about the need to increase the numbers who spoke and used the language. In this design are also incorporated other Muslims of Bengali descent who were variously connected with Assamese cultural life. Hussain writes in some detail about Musalehuddin Ahmed (1893–1971), who was bilingual in Assamese and Bengali, and who represented Nowgong in the first session of the Asom Sahitya Sabha held in 1917. Hussain recalls that Ahmed wrote on the “Asomiya Musalman” in the well-known Assamese periodical Banhi in its sixth year, where he expressed strong views on their inability to acquire the language: “Far from becoming practitioners of Assamese literature, we have not yet been able to improve our spoken Assamese” (Hussain 2000: 125). The mainstreaming effort here is quite striking. This narrative is representative of the way the char story is sought to be united with the Assamese identity narrative—often conveniently eliding the distinction between char Muslims and Muslims of Bengali descent from other areas, incorporating them, in fact, as part of the pantheon of great men in the history of a people. It is important to note that, in this form of the people’s story, it is the “Muslim” who took part in these movements for the preservation of the Assamese language, sacrificed life, wrote in mainstream magazines, and so on. Faced with these new and nascent identities made up of several linguistic and racial elements, it is necessary to keep in mind what Radhakrishnan (2004) calls “unequal mediation.” Among the communities who have migrated to the region in significant numbers are also the Marwari (from the western Indian state of Rajasthan) and the Nepali (from the neighboring country of Nepal).

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Chandan Sarma (2006) writes about the “new” participants in Assamese identity, while answering the question he raises in the title of his book Asomiya Koun? In his list of new additions are the tea tribes, the Marwaris, and the Nepali. Sarma makes a qualification in his reflection on the way these peoples may be considered to have entered Assamese society. Of the people belonging to the tea tribes, he says that despite severe oppression in the plantation economy established by the British, those who have overcome these odds and educated themselves have accepted Assamese society and culture as their own (ibid.: 62). Sarma seems to suggest that this gesture of consciously entering Assamese society by adopting its language and culture has also ensured that tea garden culture, specifically its music and dance, has found greater acceptance as a part of Assamese culture. There is a significant body of new literature in the Assamese language produced by members of the community, and some of its young poets are considered among the most talented new Assamese writers— and not only as partakers of a hyphenated literary identity. The broadening of the term Assamese has also meant the inclusion of other groups who have undertaken similar programs for inclusion. Sarma mentions the well-known case of the Agarwalla family, whose scion Chandra Kumar Agarwalla was, in Sarma’s words, “the warrior [maharathi] of a new age in Assamese literature.” Equally important is the role played by Harivilas Agarwalla, who printed the much-loved texts of Kirtan, Dasham, and the Naamghosha for the first time (C. Sarma 2006: 62). And while the perception of the Marwari business community in general as opportunistic and exploitative persists, Sarma also mentions the Marwaris in small towns and villages who have “become Assamese to their very bones. They have studied in the Asomiya medium, produced literature in the Asomiya language and they are concerned with the welfare of Assam.” In the same vein, Sarma includes the Nepali and the Bengali-Hindu, who have lived in Assam for generations, and whom no one would dare accuse of being anything but Assamese (ibid.: 63). Sarma also discusses the assimilative efforts of the immigrant from erstwhile East Bengal (later East Pakistan, and subsequently Bangladesh), especially through education and literary production in the Assamese language. He refers to the unfortunate victimization of the Char-Chapori Muslim (among whom admittedly there is still illiteracy, superstition, and the domination of the mullah, resulting in the community’s political

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and religious exploitation), every time there is anger against the illegal immigrant (C. Sarma 2006: 65). Sarma, like most writers on these problems, holds Assamese chauvinism responsible for the alienation of the different groups of people who live within Assam. He accuses the chauvinists of utter ignorance about the language, literature, and culture they purport to defend, as also ignorance about the history of the land or the contribution of important individuals to the growth and formation of the society, for the sake of which they have been so angry for so long. While the char-chapori case is a unique example of a community shaping itself, as a result of the complexities of migration and assimilation, through processes of participation in the social, economic, and cultural life of the host community, the case of the tribal communities shows other results of living in the midst of migration. A desire to clarify territorial, linguistic, and social boundaries is most easily apparent. But so is the urge to demarcate economic boundaries in traditional livelihoods—in the revival of exclusive weaving techniques and designs, in traditional crafts, and in the marketing of traditional cuisine. Among the most indicative steps in acquiring visibility, or being given visibility by state and central policies, is the task taken up by the Tribal Research Institute, Assam, “to bring out a popular series of books containing ethnographic notes on each scheduled tribe” in order to acquaint people with “the basic characteristics of the tribes of each state, their pace of development and their role as an integral part of the greater Indian society.” Such publications would also “help the administrators, planners, development agencies, scholars.” “This would ultimately pave the way for national integration” (Bordoloi et al. 1987: i). This peculiarly British legacy of description for the sake of better administration along with knowledge for better understanding is harnessed to the task of compiling notes on all of Assam’s tribal communities, not only for the sake of better understanding, but, as the concern with national integration shows, also to address the sense of neglect and marginalization and the fears of engulfment, either by the majority community or by the hordes of immigrants who have settled in many tribal lands. The timing of publication of this multi-volume project coincides with that of many of the other books that I believe are a deliberate attempt to intervene at a crucial juncture in the identity narrative—in the years following the ventilation of many of these identity issues through the Assam

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Movement and the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985. The proactive role played in many publishing episodes by the Asom Sahitya Sabha, for instance, including the retrieval of texts from the archives and their timely release into the public domain as evidence of a strong and not easily eroded cultural, historical, and literary identity, is a similar attempt to not simply be, but to take part in the shaping of that being. The first of the three volumes of Tribes of Assam (Bordoloi et al. 1987) published so far contains descriptive accounts of seven tribal communities—five from the plains, namely, the Bodo-Kacharis, Deori, Lalungs (Tiwas), Mishings, and Rabhas; and two from the hills, namely, the Dimasa Kacharis and the Karbis. The second volume (Bordoloi and Sharma Thakur 1988) contains accounts of six communities—two from the plains, including the Barmans and the Sonowal Kacharis, and four from the hills, namely, the Hmars, Kukis, Rengma Nagas, and Zeme Nagas of the North Cachar Hills. The third volume (Bordoloi 1991) in the series describes one plains tribe, the Mech, and four hill tribes concentrated primarily in the two hill districts of Karbi Anglong and North Cachar—the Garo, Hajong, Jaintia, and Khasi. The majority of these four groups are, however, concentrated in the neighboring state of Meghalaya. What Myron Weiner has called a “mosaic” is evident in the coexistence of so many distinct communities, each with unique life practices. The mosaic, while aesthetically pleasing as an idea that harmonizes with that favorite cultural description of India, “unity in diversity,” gives little hint of the troubled contiguity of these communities with each other and with the dominant Assamese community. The fashionable, globally approved multiculturalist society is an equally inappropriate idea for the deeply ingrained imbalances, historical complacencies, and continuing injustices experienced by these communities.

Notes 1. The debate in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) was initiated with an article by Amalendu Guha (1980) titled “Little Nationalism Turned Chauvinist: Assam’s Antiforeigner Upsurge, 1979–80.” The responses and comments ran through EPW, vol. 16 (1981), numbers 8, 9, 13, and 15. Participants in the debate included Udayon Misra, Hiren Gohain, Gail Omvedt, and Sanjib Baruah, under the title “Little Nationalism

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Turned Chauvinist: A Comment.” Issues 17 and 21 carried “A Reply” and “A Summing Up” by Amalendu Guha. Besides, EPW also carried related essays: “Immigration and Demographic Transformation in Assam, 1891–1981” by S.K. Dass (1980); “The Assam Question: A Historical Perspective” by K.M. Sharma (1980); and “Assam: A Colonial Hinterland” by Tillottama Misra (1980). 2. It is worth noting that the studies of society made in the last three decades have all been studies of the middle class. It is therefore perhaps significant that the middleclass version of the identity narrative has so often been passed off as the general idea of Assameseness. This is a clear example of the link between scholarly and disciplinary preoccupations and their contribution to the development of a “dominant Assamese” identity.

Conclusion Shifting the Terrain, Renewing the Narrative

Illegal immigration into Assam has continued unabated over the last

thirty years, despite the energies marshaled against the phenomenon by the Assam Movement. The large number of migrants has determined the response of the host society in this period. When the past is tracked with the aid of this contemporary problem, it becomes clear that the presence of the migrant and the changing responses to her both constrained and, in the resistance, contributed elements to the identity narrative of the Assamese. The reception of the migrant over the thirty years since the Assam Movement has been manifested in violence and distaste for the other and the suspicion of others of all kinds. Immigration has also resulted in renewed articulations about “others” and “otherness” by groups of different kinds in the state—including students’ bodies, NGOs, journalists, gatherings of “intellectuals,” and cultural–political institutions like the Sahitya Sabha. It is almost as if a clearer picture has emerged of the “immigrant as threat.” The process of otherization is more comprehensive, because the contours of the other are clearer. The transformation of the immigrant into an aggressive figure who holds on tenaciously to markers of identity; whose numbers relieve the pressure of integration into anonymity in the host society; the global phenomenon of the “Islamic other” and the negative stereotypes about the Islamic terrorist and jihad that have seeped in from the international discourse on terrorism to accompany and strengthen post-Partition suspicions about Pakistani designs on India, and especially on the territory of Assam—all of this has resulted in a phenomenon that can only be described as a society closing in, finding solidarities within, grouping together to confront a common threat. The question of narrative agency has been a necessary assumption in this book, not least because of my decision to identify my critical subject

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position in terms of my parent discipline. This was driven by the conviction that a literary and more specifically a narrative perspective offers different insights into a jaded area of study. It has been a lesson in how the contingent produces and transforms existing discourses. There has been unparalleled violence, but, in the response, especially in the condemnation of the violence, there is evidence of the emergence of a new rhetoric of inclusiveness and a new element for the identity narrative. This has happened in incidents like the flare-up over the border and the subsequent comments on immigrants by various people. The rhetoric of violence persists, as is evident in the trading of insults between the All Assam Minority Students’ Union (AAMSU) and the AJYCP over the fate of supposed illegal immigrants driven out of neighboring states into Assam. The AJYCP and AASU activists have actually been shown on television herding people like cattle, and the secretary of the AAMSU has been shown saying that Hindus in the Muslim-dominated districts of Dhubri, Goalpara, and Barpeta would be driven out in retaliation (NETV, July 31, 2007, news, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.). However, there is a very fine line dividing these violent utterances and the emergence of a different element. Little nuggets may be cited, like the AUDF (primarily a minority political party made up of thirteen minority groups) protesting against the threat by the AAMSU and calling for an apology from its secretary. This shows a desire to be seen as speaking for “all Assamese” that marks the shift in this rhetoric. The AUDF, in fact, is a significant manipulator of the new rhetoric. One of its members, Sirajuddin Ajmal, after his election to the state assembly, spoke of two things that are aspects of the stated assimilationist desire of the migrant. First, he asserted that the word “minority” in their lexicon meant all those who are oppressed, including tribal communities, Other Backward Classes (OBCs), etc.—every group that had been left behind, educationally and economically. This indicates an identification with the host community that the older migrant finds necessary and even possible to imagine. Second, Ajmal claimed that the wider vision they had was of a “golden Assam,” a trope that these new participants in Assam’s public life have adopted and reinscribed from the rhetoric in use at the time of the independence movement (interview to NETV, Asomiya News, November 12, 2006, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.). But it is also this particular group’s reinvention and application of the trope of “sonar Bangla,” or “golden Bengal,” a

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popular expression of the patriotic sentiments evoked in the fight against the British that became a rallying cry in the struggle leading up to an independent Bangladesh. This assimilationist rhetoric proved to have been not just a testing of the waters, but a concerted move in socio-political engineering backed by visible gestures of unity. The president of the AUDF, Badruddin Ajmal, is reported to have visited the sattra of Bardowa, one of the centers associated with the inclusive Vaishnavism of Sankardev, and a part of its sacred geography as the birthplace of the medieval saint. Ajmal made a donation for the renovation of the place and expressed a desire to have it become a meeting point for Hindus and Muslims (NETV, Asomiya News, November 9, 2007, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.). The political gains from this move are inextricably linked with the vision of a unity among warring elements of the host society, through a distinction between the new illegal immigrant and the old migrant, whose economic and political acceptance is now sought to be supplemented by a cultural unification with the host society that is based on statements of loyalty, concern, and commitment to this society’s vision of itself. The expansion of the rhetoric of Assameseness, interestingly, now comes out of this historically alienated space between the two linguistic groups. Shifts have occurred in the last couple of years in the narrative of identity, with certain components added to it quite dramatically by new mediators on the political and cultural scene. Some of these new components have come from the two major sources of the movement narrative and its rhetoric of chauvinism and insularity, and are by that token worthy of notice. These two agents, the AASU and the Asom Sahitya Sabha, are also the region’s most powerful social institutions. They have often in the past blurred the dividing line between the social and the political, but have tremendous potential for articulating alternatives to the troubling elements of the present. These new directions became discernible at the time of the incident relating to the music reality show, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa, discussed later in this chapter. Also audible is a new and growing discourse about the “outside agent,” who is clearly identified as the illegal immigrant who refuses assimilation because she now has the security of numbers to carry on with her old way of life. The illegal immigrant is also seen as having transborder links with religious fundamentalist groups and the ISI based in Bangladesh (links

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that are perceived by the host society as sources of strength for the immigrant group), as well as with the ULFA. Because of the violence the ULFA has perpetrated against its own people and against other Indian citizens living quite legitimately in Assam, the organization has begun to be seen as pursuing the agenda of a subversive foreign agency, and has therefore ceased to have any claims on the sympathies of a large percentage of the Assamese; the militants have ceased to be “our boys.” The Assam Tribune on April 20, 2007, reported the following. The All Assam Students’ Union and 10 students’ bodies representing different ethnic groups of the State today decided to launch a joint movement to put pressure on the Government to take immediate steps for permanent solution of the problem of infiltration of foreigners to Assam.

The students’ bodies, in a meeting in Guwahati, “demanded that the ongoing process of delimitation of constituencies should be kept in abeyance till the process of updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) is completed.” This is a demand that has since been conceded by the central government. The meeting expressed concern at the failure of the Government of India to seal the Assam–Bangladesh border, and demanded that the fencing along the international border should be completed as soon as possible. It also expressed concern at the non-implementation of the Assam Accord and the inability of the political parties to raise the issue forcefully enough. Demands were also made that immediate steps should be taken to protect the tribal belts and blocks, and that foreign nationals who encroached on these areas should be evicted immediately (Assam Tribune, April 20, 2007). This demand, which had underpinned the movement, is now, however, renewed against the backdrop of the shift in the narrative. In sharp contrast to the rhetoric of Assamese chauvinism that had echoed through the period of the movement and had blurred the distinction between “foreigner” and “outsider,” there is now a relatively more careful and deliberate use of the language of inclusiveness. Investing outside agents with the responsibility for many of Assam’s fundamental problems has resulted in two significant shifts. The first involves a recognition of fraternity and brotherhood with other communities who have lived in Assam for many generations, and who till now were viewed as objects of suspicion and as having dubious

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loyalty to the entity “Assam.” The most interesting manifestation of this shift is the changed relationship with the always alienated Bengali. The overture made tacitly during the music reality show has probably been an investment with deeper consequences than was realized immediately. However, a possible result has been the re-entry, into the lexicon of public life, of a term that had been sporadically used earlier but had not exactly captured the imagination of the people it described or those it was designed to woo. The term is “Bangabhashi Asomiya”— Bengali-speaking Assamese, a quite unexpected response to those overtures, the willingness to describe oneself with a hyphenated term that would once have been anathema to this group, considered against the background of the historical animosity of the two communities and the tendency of the Bengali to remain separate and supercilious. The term slipped into usage in circumstances that are equally worthy of notice. A meeting of the Bangabhashi Asomiyar Jatiya Mahasabha (Convention of Bengali-Speaking Assamese People) was held recently, at which the chief minister described the Bengali-speaking people as “part of the greater Assamese society,” even while declaring that “each caste, religion and linguistic group should make progress equally” (report in Assam Tribune, October 24, 2007). The political mileage that might be got through populist inclusive statements by the respective political parties involved with other such processes is immaterial for this argument. But the fact of statement, the public use of a particular rhetoric, has actually resulted in the addition of such elements to the identity narrative. The related possibility is change in the potential of terms and concepts like migration and hybridity, which are patently challenged by new manifestations like the invention of new hybridities, and the threat perception from the migrant contributing to their social acceptance. These turns are apparent against the backdrop of the immigrant having become, in popular perception, a force that needs to be countered by everything that can be recruited against it. That this is a more widespread and insidious process is also evident in the reference to “our Assamese culture” by members of communities traditionally perceived to be alienated from such a conception. An actual instance of such usage occurred during a cultural program put up by students in the Department of English of Gauhati University, when the student compere, who was of Bengali origin, introduced a series of performances of

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songs and dances from different communities, including the tribal and, of course, the Bengali, using this phrase. Awareness of how narratives are constructed, refurbished, elaborated, and disseminated, and the significant contributions of mediators, both intellectual and political, in adding or subtracting aspects, are necessary adjuncts to understanding not only the atmosphere of turmoil but also the shifts and tangents from such an atmosphere to sudden expressions of harmony. In fact, examination of this “matured” narrative and acknowledgment of its constructedness also point to ways in which such manipulation may be positively interventionist, actually involving the injection of selected elements into the grand narrative. It is quite possible that the politically expedient element is also the socially, culturally, and economically beneficent one. The following incident is an example of the way in which a shift occurs in a narrative in which a whole society has been invested. The actual acknowledgment of the shift slides under the assertions of the new narrative as if the other older, more divisive one never was. On January 21, 2006, the Assam Tribune reported a statement made by AASU advisor and North East Students’ Organisations (NESO) chairperson Samujjal Bhattacharyya (one of the most powerful users of the space available for “civil society resistance”) and AASU general secretary Tapan Gogoi. The two were commenting on the treatment meted out to a particular singer on a private entertainment channel, ZEE TV’s music reality show Sa Re Ga Ma Pa: Last night’s episode of Sa Re Ga Ma Pa has exposed the plot against Debojit which is only because of the fact that he happens to come from Assam and the North East. Debojit’s case betrays the fact that for a section of mainstream India ... there is no India beyond Kolkata. Debojit has established that nothing can suppress talent. Now it is for the people to give a fitting reply to the conspiracy against Debojit and thereby ensure that he scales new heights in the world of music. (Assam Tribune, January 21, 2006)

The statement is worth noting for several reasons. First, of course, it emphatically repeats the conspiracy leitmotif implicit in the narrative of neglect and alienation that has characterized Center–state, mainstream India–northeastern periphery relations. This is a complex complaint

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and attribution emerging from both sides of the binary is evident in the statement made by a member of the audience that if the aim of the reality show was to choose the voice of India, that representative voice could not come from the northeast. Second, as subsequent events and further statements revealed, Debojit’s victory was ensured; a “fitting reply” was given (the format of the show, involving public voting through text messages and phone calls, was not difficult to manipulate). The third point that emerges from this statement is, however, the most suggestive and important. In taking up the case of this particular young man as a representative of “Assam and the northeast,” the speakers inducted a new element into their political discourse. Subtly, without drawing special attention to the fact, they elided the traditional Barak valley–Brahmaputra valley binary: Debojit hails from the predominantly Bengali-speaking town of Silchar in the Barak valley. The manner in which this shift was achieved points to the way a discourse may be constructed, changed, and strategically remodeled. It also highlights the kind of role that influential figures may play in such constructs through their public pronouncements.1 This incident is particularly interesting for its layered significances that draw in the national and the subnational, and that return to the questions of borders and their strengthening or dissolution, ethnic integration, and, by extension, the future of the nation-state formulation. As this book has sought to indicate, the academic popularity of ideas like borderlessness is no guarantee of their success and acceptance on the ground, where identification across borders—the borders of the nation’s constituent states, as well as the traditional demarcations of tribal lands that were consolidated by colonial mapping—in isolated instances like the foregoing might be accompanied by the reiteration of the border narrative, or at best by an extension of the idea of identification among peoples that might just strengthen the felt need for clear boundaries. And this despite assertions about “the withering away of the strength and significance of borders” in the context of the predicted demise of the nation-state as “the pre-eminent political structure of modernity” (Sengupta 2002: 13). The AASU also intervened in the renewed problem of illegal migrants, but this time round with an assertion about the distinction between those who had lived in the state for many generations and those who

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were illegal aliens—a distinction that had been blurred during the movement. The AASU’s statements and its protest programs on the issue were brought to the fore three decades after the Assam Movement when suspected Bangladeshi immigrants were evicted from the neighboring states of Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, and were then pushed through the borders into Assam. These assertions reveal both the determination to clearly make the distinction between legal citizens and illegal aliens, and a greater effort to tread carefully in the sensitive ground of minority sentiment. A similar attempt to make the identity narrative more inclusive is evident in the Asom Sahitya Sabha’s declaration that it would play a proactive role in promoting the culture and literature of the ethnic groups of Assam. As part of this intention, it decided to observe September 27 as Janagosthia Bhasha Sahitya Bikash Divas (Tribal Literature Development Day), in memory of Bihuram Bodo, Bodo littérateur and erstwhile secretary of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha (report in Assam Tribune, September 27, 2007). This gesture would seem to suggest that the conception of Assamese identity now involves the ethnic group in its distinctiveness, and not because of its willingness or ability to assimilate into Assameseness. The Asom Sahitya Sabha’s most recent contribution to the inclusive narrative is the statement by a president of the Sabha, Kanaksen Deka, that the role of the Asom Sahitya Sabha now is to provide a common platform for all the Sahitya Sabhas of the state (Assam Tribune, April 9, 2008). During a meeting to release a Tai–Assamese–English dictionary, Deka recalled that, historically, conflicts in the state had been connected with the rulers and those who worked as troops for the rulers. Among other ideas that were aired was the use of Assamese as a lingua franca by all the people of the state, irrespective of linguistic background. The reiteration of these ideas in reciprocal gestures of goodwill and fraternal coexistence would seem to suggest a renewed acknowledgment of the errors of the past and a tacit desire to make amends. Yet intriguingly, these initiatives are also entangled in the relative merits of having the various Sahitya Sabhas of the tribal communities (which are also functional institutions and keenly conscious of the big-brotherly attitude of the Asom Sahitya Sabha) promote, sustain, and preserve the literature and language of the communities they represent, or allowing the Asom Sahitya Sabha to intrude into these spaces, which have been so laboriously recovered.

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Following the incident of the music reality show, the discursive scene began to push for attention in ways that appear significant for the society, against the backdrop of continuing violence and continued illegal immigration. The most audible instances are statements made at the time of the sudden spurt in violence against people of Bihari origin in Assam. I have shown that this phase of violence was an igniting factor for the evocation of memories of overt and covert violence from the period of the Assam Movement, and a symptom of the present that gives a certain slant to the Assamese identity narrative. However, the nature of the violence, its specific target group, as well as the revelation of the changing alignments of the ULFA—its ISI links and its readiness to provide support to indigenous insurgent groups engaged in violence—have also meant the coming together of forces that have not always in the past spoken in unison. The president of the Asom Sahitya Sabha, Kanaksen Deka (for the years 2005, 2006, and 2007), referred to the massacre of innocents by the ULFA as a “blot on Assam’s heritage,” bringing “shame and disgrace to the Assamese society.” Deka then made that now predictable reference to the glorious past: “Since time immemorial Asom has been exhibiting a sense of oneness with India ... and has contributed significantly to the great Indian civilization” (report in Assam Tribune, January 20, 2007). He evoked Assam’s active involvement in the independence movement and the many Assamese who became martyrs. He also referred to the participation of many Assamese leaders in the process of framing the Indian Constitution. He countered the ULFA’s regular reference to “Indian colonial rule” with the declaration that Assam was and always would be an inseparable part of India. Deka here reiterates a narrative that has always been available, but has had to be regularly remembered and freshly articulated, especially in the face of callousness and indifference from the central government in New Delhi. The theoretical results are now interesting to observe. The key areas in which these are visible are, of course, in the notions of migration itself, of hybridity, and in their entry into the identity narrative. But more specifically, these effects are to be seen in the significant domain of self–other, subject–object relationships, in the ethics of such configurations, in the reception given to the other. The specific character of migration into the region—whereby a particular linguistic group was invited/ encouraged to settle in the province, setting up an opposition between

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two linguistic communities—has had long-term consequences, including the sense of paranoia with regard to economic exploitation, the cultural threat perception, and the political marginalization that is emphasized and strengthened by this contiguity. The early perception of this particular kind of migration was consolidated by the opening up of the region to economic activity, bringing in the business community of the Marwaris and labor for the tea plantations from tribal communities of other parts of India. Had economic exploitation not been tied so inextricably, in these early years, to white-collar jobs and natural resources like tea, oil, and timber— fields that were tied essentially to the early migrant—the reception and assimilation of the migrant in the subsequent period may possibly have had a different trajectory. As it stands, however, the particular kind of migration experienced by Assam, first under the British and then in the form of unabated illegal migration throughout the 20th century from East Pakistan/Bangladesh, determined settlement in sensitive areas of the region including the vulnerable tribal belts and the sacred sattras, and the attitude of the migrant to assimilation in the host society inviting hostility and aggression, has centered the issues of the response and the fate of the host society. This question, significantly ignored in the shadow of international migration theory’s single-minded focus on the migrant, is one that emanates in postcolonial regions of this kind, where migration does not meet the expectations or the demands of theory. The same is true of “hybridity”—a notion that is repeatedly and with variations popularized under different theoretical compulsions. The final multiculturalist presentation of it disguises the resentments and resistances put up within societies to social and cultural hybridization. A theme that has run through this book has been participation in acts of self-making—what might be recognized as the “agency” of modernity. It might be worth noting here, at the end, that a schizophrenic sense of self is a legacy of the many and often contradictory processes of collective self-making. These processes include a peculiar mixture of government/ official, individual/social, institutional/civil society efforts, giving shape to a narrative about “Assamese identity” that is constantly being made and remade. However, the element of modernity is one of those areas that still requires detailed and painstaking uncovering, especially because the master-narrative of the Bengal Renaissance is so often perceived to

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have subsumed Assamese attempts at a similar awakening. Scholarship in this area has found it hard to shake off the shackles of this interpretative legacy. The notion of a distinctive identity that has so troubled the Assamese narrative requires this angle of vision to explain its uniquely fractured contemporary manifestation.

Note 1. That such a move need not necessarily be a fluke is made apparent by subsequent incidents. One other music reality show, Indian Idol on Sony TV, ran through several months in the year 2007. It united the people of the northeast, and especially the diverse peoples of the state of Meghalaya (particularly the local Khasi, and the remnants of the Assamese and Bengali populations of the state from the period when the region was part of the state of Assam), who otherwise existed acrimoniously side by side, behind a talented young singer who just happened to be a Bengali. The people of Meghalaya united to vote for him, huge crowds gathered to felicitate him, and generally forgot their differences, while the state government appointed him a kind of informal ambassador for Meghalaya.

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Bibliography 257 Heisler, Barbara Schmitter. 2000. “The Sociology of Immigration: From Assimilation to Segmented Integration, from the American Experience to the Global Arena,” in Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield (eds), Migration Theory: Talking across Disciplines (pp. 77–96). New York and London: Routledge. Howe, Irving. 2003 [1988]. “Writing and the Holocaust,” in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (eds), The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (pp. 288–90). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hunter, W.W. 1986 [1879]. A Statistical Account of Assam, 2 vols. Guwahati: Spectrum Publishers. Hussain, Ismail. 2000. “Kuri Satikar Asomiya Bhasha Sahityaloye Char-Chapori Musalmanar Abadan” (“The Contribution of Char-Chapori Muslims to Twentieth Century Assamese Literature”), in Ismail Hussain Sr and Anowar Hussain (eds), Char-Chaporir Jiban Charcha (On Life in the Char-Chapori) (pp. 124–46). Guwahati: Natun Sahitya Parishad. Hussain, Monirul. 1993. The Assam Movement: Class, Ideology and Identity. Delhi: Manak Publications. Hussain, Rafiqul. 2007. “Aranya Katha: The Inner Journey of a Poem,” Nivedon, 1(2): 54–57. India Today. 2007. “Leaders Lead, Laggards Lag,” Cover Story, September 24. Jameson, Frederic. 1986. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” Social Text, 15: 65–88. Kakati, Banikanta. 1995. Assamese: Its Formation and Development (rev. and ed. Golokchandra Goswami). Guwahati: LBS Publications. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2001. “In Search of Civil Society,” in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (eds), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (pp. 287–323). New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Khataniar, Bipul. 1999. “Dhumuhar Paasot” (“After the Storm”), in Hridayananda Gogoi (ed.), Uttar Ramdhenu Jugar Nirbasita Galpa (Selected Stories from the Post-Ramdhenu Era) (pp. 145–61). Guwahati: Jyoti Prakasan. Kimura, Makiko. 2007. “Nellier Ghotonar Parinoti” (“The Consequences of the Nellie Massacre”), Nivedon, 1(2): 22–24. Light, Ivan. 1979. “Disadvantaged Minorities in Self-Employment,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 20(1&2): 31–45. ——— . 1984. “Immigrant and Ethnic Enterprise in North America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 7(2): 195–216. Mahanta, Prafulla Kumar. 1986. The Tussle between the Citizens and Foreigners in Assam. New Delhi: Vikas. M’Cosh, John. 1986 [1879]. Topography of Assam. New Delhi: Logos Press. Mills, A.J. Moffatt. 1984 [1853]. Report on the Province of Assam. Guwahati: Publication Board. Miri, Mrinal. 2005. “Community, Culture, Nation,” Seminar, 550: 54–58. Misra, Udayon. 1988. North-East India: Quest for Identity. Guwahati: Omsons Publications. ——— . 2000. The Periphery Strikes Back: Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. ———. 2001. “The Transformation of Assamese Identity.” Lecture delivered at the 21st Session of the North East India History Association. Shillong: NEIHS. ——— . 2005. “The Margins Strike Back: Echoes of Sovereignty and the Indian State,” IIC Quarterly, 32(2&3): 265–74. Misra, Tillottama. 1980. “Assam: A Colonial Hinterland,” Economic and Political Weekly, 15(32): 1357–59.

258 Questions of Identity in Assam Miyoshi, Masao. 1993. “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,” Critical Inquiry, 19: 726–51. Mohanty, Satya P. 1997. Literary Theory and the Claims of History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Moral, Dipankar. 1997. “North-East India as a Linguistic Area,” Mon-Khmer Studies, 27: 43–53. Nair, Rukmini Bhaya. 2002. Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Narasimhaiah, C.D., ed. 1972. Asian Responses to American Literature. Delhi: Vikas. Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1981 [1946]. The Discovery of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nkrumah, Kwame. 1973. Revolutionary Path. London: Panaf Books. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, 26(Spring): 7–24. Norris, Christopher. 1993. The Truth about Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell. Pandey, Gyanendra. 2001. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Park, Robert. 1928. “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology, 33(6): 881–93. Parry, Benita. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London and New York: Routledge. Pemberton, R.B. 2000 [1835]. Report on the Eastern Frontier of British India. New Delhi: Mittal Publications. Phukan, Anandaram Dhekial. 1847. “Englander Bibaran” (“A Description of England”), Orunodoi, 2(4): 128–31. Phukon, Nilamoni. 2006. Complete Poems. Guwahati: Orthat. ———. 2007. Nivedon, 1(2), March–April. Portes, Alejandro. 1997. “Immigration Theory for a New Century: Some Problems and Opportunities,” International Migration Review, 31(4): 799–825. Portes, Alejandro and Rumbaut, Ruben. 1990. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Putnam, Robert. 2007. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century” (The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture), Scandinavian Political Studies, 30(2): 137–74. Radhakrishnan, R. 2004. “Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity,” in Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta (eds), Identities: Race, Class, Gender and Nationality (pp. 312–29). Malden and Oxford: Blackwell. Rahman, Isfaqul. 2007. “Abhigyatalabdha Mulyayan,” Nivedon, pp. 25–29. Ramesh, Jairam. 2005. “Northeast India in a New Asia,” Seminar, 550: 17–21. Robinson, William. 1975 [1841]. A Descriptive Account of Asam. Delhi: Sanskaran Prakashak. Rowe, John Carlos. 1997. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Roy, Ramashray, Miri, Sujata, and Goswami, Sandhya. 2007. Northeast India: Development, Communalism and Insurgency. Delhi: Anshah Publishing House. Roychowdhury, Ambikagiri. 2003 [1986]. Ambikagiri Roychowdhury Racanabali (ed. Satyendranath Sarma). Guwahati: Asom Prakashan Parishad.

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Index “Aai Mor Asom,” 226 Aajkal, 89 “Aamar Janambhumi,” 226 “absolute hospitality,” 157 “accumulation of discontent,” 177 action-knowledge and knowingabout, distinction between, 19 Adams, Matthew, 197 Adorno, Theodor, 20, 120 Agarwalla, Chandra Kumar, 236 Agarwalla, Harivilas, 236 Agarwalla, Jyotiprasad, 216, 227–228 agency, (Taylor’s delineation of modern identity), 220 Agradoot, 92 Ahmad, Aijaz, 22 Ahmed, Musalehuddin, 235 Ahoms, 176, 229 Ajmal, Badruddin, 242 Ajmal, Sirajuddin, 241 Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), 58 Alam, K., 231 All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP), 81 All Assam Minority Students’ Union (AAMSU), 241 All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), xxviii, 51, 58, 75, 81, 149, 241, 242, 245 and Assam Movement, 48, 60, 92 history of, 60

on legal citizens and illegal aliens, 246–247 president at time of movement, 92 role in violent acts, 58 All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU), 183 All Koch Rabongshi Students’ Union (AKRSU), 55 American Baptist missionaries, xiii, 202–205, 209, 211 “Amra Bangali,” 171 Anderson, Benedict, 14, 201–202, 211–212 anthropology, preoccupations of, 16 antiuniversalist cosmopolitanism, concept of, 18 “Apaharan,” 126–127 Appadurai, Arjun, 16 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 18, 38, 39, 101 The Argumentative Indian, 87 Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), 130 arson, 78 Arunachalese, 174 Asam Bandhu, 8, 218 Asomiya, 226, 227 “Asomiya aru Bongali,” in Mau, 223–225 Asomiya Lorar Mitra (Phukan), 216 Asom Jatiyotabadi Jubo Parishad (AJJP), 89

262 

Questions of Identity in Assam

Asom Jatiyotabadi Yuva Chatra Parishad (AJYCP), 58, 68, 86, 241 Asom Sahitya Sabha, xxvii, 235, 238, 242, 247, 248 Assam, xv marginalization of, xv Assam: A Burning Question (Hiren Gohain), xxvi Assam Accord, 4, 68, 85, 111, 147, 172, 173, 238, 243 Assamese–Bengali animosity, 199–200, 222 Assamese-Bihari community, targeting of, 52–53 Assamese identity, 173, 176 Assamese language, influences on, 175 “Assamese mind,” 178 Assamese modernity, 219 Assamese Muslims, 143, 165 Assamese Renaissance, 202 Assam Movement, xv–xvi, 3–4, 46, 48–49, 173–174. see also violence by AASU, 48, 60 aim of, 60, 171 identity crises in Assam and, 145–146 lack of intellectual framework in, 50–51, 110 memorandum, 77, 78, 79 plan of action, 60 programs, 70–73 role of press in, 61, 81 violence with protest programs in, 61–62, 75–77 young boys and girls involvement in, 73–74 Assam Public Service Commission (APSC), 58 Assam Public Works (APW), 134 Assam Tribune, 135, 243, 245 Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF), 197, 241, 242 Assam Voluntary Association for Rural Development (AVARD), xxviii

assimilation model, of migration, 151, 155 “Atmasamarpan,” 128 autonomy demands, 182–184, 196–197 Baatiwalagaon, 232–233 Balibar, Etienne, 162 bandhs, 70–71 Bangabhashi Asomiyar Jatiya Mahasabha, 244 Bangalir dalal, 76 Banhi, 226 Barkataki, Arindam, 129 Barooah, D.P., 146 Barpujari, H.K., 92 Barua, Gunabhiram, 190, 202, 206, 218–219, 221, 222 Barua, Rupam, 134 Baruah, Apurba, 144 Baruah, Prasanta J., 135, 164 Baruah, Sanjib, 84–85, 200 survey of movement by, 84 Breakdown of Order, 84 Confrontation, 84 Festival of Protest, 84 Bengali-Assamese conflict, 171 Bengali language, introduction of, 143 Bengali-speaking Assamese, 244 Bengal Renaissance, 143, 212, 230 Bezbaroa, Lakshminath, 8, 190, 219, 226 Bhabha, Homi, xxix, 21–25 Bhattacharyya, Hiranya Kumar, 63 Bhattacharyya, Samujjal, 149–150, 178, 245 Bhuyan, B.C., 185 bideshi, 94 Bilgrami, Akeel, 20, 117, 201 Biswas, Prasenjit, 144 Black Skins, White Masks (Frantz Fanon), 42 Bodo, Bihuram, 247

Index 

Bodo Sahitya Sabha, 247 bohiragato, 94, 95, 219 Bongali, from Asam Bandhu, 220–223 Bora, Haranarayan, 223–225 Bora, Jnananath, 185 Bora, Satyajit, 127–128 Borgohain, Homen, 88–89 on Bihu’s politicization, 62–63 on silence of Assamese society against violence, 63 Borgohain, Nirupama, 62, 76, 125, 133 Borgohain, Pradipta, 105 Bormudoi, Purabi, 124 bribery, 137 British description, of Assamese identity, 231–232 British Journal of Sociology, 197 British policy of settling outsiders in Assam, 205–206 Bronson, Miles, 204 Brown, Reverend Nathan, 204 Butler, Judith, 20 Cachar, union territory status for, demand of, 187–188 “Celebration,” 125–126 census, quantification modes of, 213–214 centrality of self-concerns, 199 Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC), 138 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 18, 162, 192 char-chapori Muslims, 234, 236–237 Chere Asha Gram, 162 “civic violence,” 59 coercion, element of, 113–114 Cohn, Bernard, 212–213 collective violence, Roger V. Gould on, 66 colleges, role of, in movement, 106–107 colonialism, legacy of, 144 communalism, 171 communalization of movement, 89

263

conspirators, 78 contraction of the social universe, and violence, 199 contracts and supply, businesses of, 164 corruption, 137–138 in Assam, 137–140 definition of, 137 social acceptance of, 138 Corruption Perception Index, 137 Cotton, Henry, 206 coverage of violent incidents, by local channels, 53–54 crisis of leadership, 116 cultural markers, 182 cultural violence, 67 culture of extortions, 13 culture of kidnappings, 13 Culture (Williams), 25 Dabwali disaster, 139 Danforth, A.H., 208 assessment of Assam by, 208–209 Das, Arati, 126 Dasgupta, Anindita, 167 Datta, Birendra Nath, 194, 227–228 Death Squad, 81 Debojit in Sa Re Ga Ma Pa, treatment to, 245–246 Deepor Beel, 59 Deka, Harekrishna, 60–61, 176–178 Deka, Kanaksen, 92, 192, 238, 247 on formative process of Assamese identity, 192–193 Derrida, concept of hospitality, 157–158 A Descriptive Account of Asam, 204 Dhareshwar, Vivek, 18, 19 “Dhumuhar Paasot,” 120–124 Diner, Hasia R., 44 DissemiNation (Bhabha), xviii, 22, 24, 43 “dominant Assamese” identity narrative, 116, 218

264 

Questions of Identity in Assam

dress code, 149 drive-out-foreigners campaign, 71 Dummett, Michael, 158–159 Dutta, Anuradha, 230 Dutta, Uddipan, 11 “dynamic nominalism,” 192 Economic and Political Weekly, 46, 90, 228 educational institutions, closure of, 111–112 environmental violence, 59 ethics of application, 20 ethnic enclave economy model, 152 ethnic entrepreneur model, 152 “ethnic” identity, 144 ethnic identity movements, 197 Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (Shahid Amin), 6 extortion, 163 Fancy Bazaar, 70 fear of influx of migrants, 186 festival of Bihu, 62–63, 149–150 Folklore and Culture of North-Eastern India (Praphulladatta Goswami), 184 Freedom, 55 Friend of India, 204 Gait, Edward, 202–203 Galting, Johan, 67 Gandhi, Mahatma, 74–75, 86, 97, 98, 113–115, 117, 202, 212 Geneva Convention, 37 gherao (enclosure), 72 ghettoization of community, 70, 113 Ghosh, Amitav, 5, 34 Ghurye, G.S., 213 Giddens, Anthony, 196 Gogoi, Tapan, 245 Gohain, Hiren, xxviii, 61, 76, 88–91, 94, 133, 147–149, 228–229

Goswami, Homeswar, 46, 169 Goswami, Mamoni Raisom, 135 Goswami, Ranjit Kumar Dev, 109–110, 195, 196, 230 Gould, Roger V., 66 government policies, towards Northeast, 180 culture paradigm, 180 development paradigm, 180 politics paradigm, 180 security paradigm, 180 grievances, of Assamese, 177 Grimshaw, Allen D., 66 Guha, Amalendu, 144, 167, 170 Guha, Ranajit, 113–115 Guide, 137–138 Gupta, Shekhar, 79 Guwahati-based North East Television (NETV), 53, 54, 234 Hazarika, Bhupen, 63 Hazarika, Niru, 93 Hazarika, Sanjoy, 82–83, 135, 156 Hind Swaraj, 97 homeland thesis, 186 Hoque, Mojammil, 235 Hussain, Ismail, 150, 234 Hussain, Monirul, 71, 76, 86, 94 Hussain, Rafiqul, 62 on violence in movement, 131–133 hybridity, xvi, 7, 38, 142, 175–176, 249 identity, 8–9 Identity and Violence (Amartya Sen), 150 identity crisis in Assam, 143 identity movements, violence of, 149 identity narrative, 17 identity problem, in postcolonial nations, 142–143 illegal immigrant, 233, 242 illegal immigrants Muslims, and indigenous Muslims, 164–166

Index 

illegal immigration, xv, xx, 46, 240, 249 Illegal Migration (Determination by Tribunal) Act (IMDT Act), 85 Illustrated Weekly, 79 Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson), 211–212 immigrant, long-held anger against, 68–69 immigrants infux in UK, concerns on, 160–161 Immigration and Assam Politics (Alaka Sarma), 169 immigration effect, on host society, study on, 161–162 In an Antique Land (Amitav Ghosh), 5, 34 India after Gandhi (Ramachandra Guha), xviii India Today, 79, 220 inequality, in public representations of Assamese, 182 insurgency in northeast India, study on, 198–199 internal migration, 207 international border, fencing of, 243 The Intimate Enemy (Ashis Nandy), 192 Islamization, 145 Jameson, Frederic, 22 Janagosthia Bhasha Sahitya Bikash Divas, 247 Jenkins, F., 207 Kabir, 195 Kakati, Banikanta, 175 kaneeah, 208 Karbi Longri North Cachar Hills Liberation Front (KLNLF), 53 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 17 Khataniar, Bipul, 120 Kimura, Makiko, 6, 11, 75 Kmara in Georgia, 49

265

language movement of 1960s, 50 Line System, for land settlement, 144–145 linguistic hybridity, 174–175 location, xx, xxiii, 2–3, 7, 21–29 identity issues in, 38–42 and renewal of theory, 31–33 and theory of migration, 33–37 traveling theory and, 29–31 The Location of Culture (Bhabha), 22 “the Logic of the Same,” 149 Machel, Samora, 97 Mahanta, Prafulla, 153 on influx of migrants, 94 rhetoric on movement, 92–94 Malik, K.N., 79 Marwaris, 236 Marxism and Literature (Williams), 25 Masks of Conquest (Gauri Viswanathan), 203 mass mobilization, and discipline, 113 mass picketing, 71 Mau, 8, 223 Medhi, Manoroma Das, 127 mekhela sador, 116 memories, 12 and interpretation, 13–15 revelations of, 10–11 role in formation of identities in societies, 12 midday meal scheme, 140 Midnight’s Children, xix migrants, 154–155 in assimilationist and transborder phases, 145, 151 linguistic culture of, 160 menial jobs by, 154 as threat to internal law and order situation, 153 migration, 7, 37, 42–47 historical perspective on, 166–170 models, 151–157

266 

Questions of Identity in Assam

migration-related identity problems, in Assam, 165 Migrationwatch UK, 160 Miri, Mrinal, 35 modernity in Assam, 50 modernization, process of, 208 Mohanty, Satya P., xxx–xxxi Moral, Dipankar, 174 “Mor Desh,” 227 Mor Jivan Sowaran (Lakshminath Bezbaroa), 190 Mor Sowarani (Padmanath Gohain Barua), 190 movement for Assamese, 50 as medium of instruction, 50 muscle power, use of, by student leaders, 107 Muselmann, 103 museum in Assam, 14 Muslims influx of, from Bangladesh, 143 role in preservation of Assamese language, 234–235 “Muslim stereotype,” 166 Nagamese, 174 Nair, Rukmini Bhaya, 139 National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), 70 national identity, 201 National Register of Citizens (NRC), 243 National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), 172 naturalization of violence, 65–69 Nayar, Kuldip, 79 neglect, 172 by center, 90 feeling and articulation of, 56–57, 180 neglect narrative, 179–185 fears with, 186 neglect syndrome, 177

Nehru–Bordoloi exchange of letters, xxxiii, 5 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 177, 185 neighborhood, dynamics of, 69–70, 73, 105–106 Nellie massacre, 11, 67–68, 79 legitimation of, 75 Neog, Prabal, 53 Nepali, 236 Nilachal, 109 Nivedon, 11, 52, 62, 129, 133 Nora, Pierre, 9, 11–12 Norris, Christopher, 26 northeast Indian students, instructions for, 190 North East Students’ Organization (NESO), 149, 245 North East Television (NETV), 53, 54, 234 Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC), 71 oil blockade, 72–73 Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development (OKDISCD), 46–47 On Cosmopolitanism (Derrida), 37 On Human Diversity (Tzvetan Todorov), 1 Orientalism, 33 Orunodoi, 8, 205, 211, 217 other-construction, of identity, 191–192 Otpor in Serbia, 49 “our boys” syndrome, xxvii Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), 95, 134, 242, 248 Parry, Benita, xxxi, 23, 25–27 Parthasarathy, E.S., 84 peaceful Assamese, 77 The People of Assam: Origin and Composition (B.M. Das), 174

Index 

People’s Consultative Group (PCG), 68, 134–135 The Periphery Strikes Back (Udayon Misra), 185 permanent revolution, concept of, 96 personal memories, movement and, 104–119 phenomenology of violence, 67 Phukan, Anandaram Dhekial, 202, 206, 215–218 Phukan, Dhekial, 206 Phukon, Nilamoni, 120 on episodes of violence, 130–131 physical coercion, 114 placid Assamese, 80 Planter Raj to Swaraj, 144 political boycott, 115 “politics of recognition,” 144 Population Trends in the Brahmaputra Valley (1881–1931): A Study in Historical Demography (Homeswar Goswami), 169–170 Pora in Ukraine, 49 pragmatic reorganization, 231 Prantik, 126 “Prem Gatha,” 127 The Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, 137 processions, 71 protest programs, 70–73 neighborhood-centered nature of, 69–70, 73 Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty), 18 Pujari, Anuradha Sarma, 128 Purbachal, 187 Putnam, Robert, 161 racial categorization, 212 racial purity, 142 Rahman, Isfaqul, 89 “Rajniti Nubuja Manuh,” 124–125 Ram, P.C., 118

267

rapid and slow influx, distinction between, 159 reciprocity, 21, 40–41 recognition, and politics of recognition, 144 Remembering Partition (Gyanendra Pandey), xxix, 5 Report on the Eastern Frontier of British India (Pemberton), 210 Report on the Province of Assam (Mills), 206–208 revolutions, in colonial world, 96 Rites of Passage (Sanjoy Hazarika), 156 Robinson, William, 204, 230 Roychowdhury, Ambikagiri, 8, 216, 225 Sadin, 56, 134, 232–233 Said, Edward, xxi, 29–33 Saikia, Yasmin, 9, 10 Sanglot Fenla (Parag Das), xxviii Sankara, Thomas, 96 Sankardev studies, on composite Assamese identity, 193–195 Sarma, Chandan, 199, 236–237 Satarka Vani, 81 sattra land, occupation of, 171 satyagraha and courting arrest, 71–72 self-conscious identity making, 215 self-sufficiency, concept of, 57 Seminar, 35 Sen, Amartya, 87–88 Senapati, Bolairam, 184 Sentinel, 68 Sethi, P.C., 80–81 The Shadow Lines, xix Shourie, Arun, 79 siege mentality, 145, 229 social boycott, 115 social capital, 161 Social Change in Modern India (M.N. Srinivas), 213

268 

Questions of Identity in Assam

social coercion, 114 social perception, shift in, 134 Sons of the Soil, 76, 111 Soviet solution, to problem of migration, 149 Srinivas, M.N., 213 A Statistical Account of Assam (W.W. Hunter), 210–211 students’ movements, use of public pressure in, 49 Suroor, Hasan, 160–161 “Surrender,” 128–129 surrendered ULFA (SULFA), xxix, 57, 68, 118, 163 Swadeshi movement, 113–114 swaraj, 75 “Sylheti bhodralok,” 167 Tagore, 114 Tai–Assamese–English dictionary, 247 Taylor, Charles, 27, 144, 189, 191–192, 220 tea gardens, 57–58 tea tribal residents, 57–58 tea tribes, 236 Tiwa community, 184 Todorov, Tzvetan, 1 Topography of Assam (John M’Cosh), 210 transborder model, 155 transnationalism, model of, 155–156 traveling theory, 29–31 tribal groups, autonomy demands by, 182–184, 196–197 Tribal Research Institute, Assam, 237 tribals, alienation of, 89–90 Tribes of Assam, 238 “ULFA-generated worldview,” 163 unequal mediation, 181, 235 United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), xxiv, 53, 70, 133, 243

allegations of discrimination and unfair treatment by, 55 bandhs called by, 71 extortions by, 70, 163 functioning of, xxvii, 163 ideology of, 87 killing of people of Bihari origin by, 52, 234 links with ISI, 95, 134, 248 program of sovereignty for Assam, 163 public anger against, 134 Robin Hood phase of, xxvii–xxviii, 11, 13, 163 role in kidnapping, 118 role in violence and corruption, 13, 47, 52–53, 64, 243 separatist aspirations of, 55, 90, 123 transformation of, 133, 248 victimization of, by state, 135 United States of America, xxvi Uzan Bazaar, 69–70 Verghese, B. G., 63–64 on movement and violence in Assam, 63–64 violence, 4, 12, 133 direct, 67 government record of, 80–82 hidden, 67 of identity movements, 149 at individual level, in today’s Assam, 129 inner, 68 internalization of, 118 legitimation of, 75 manifestations of, 52–60 ULFA role in (see United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) in village Daolamara, 233–234 “violence strata,” 67 Vittal, N., 138 volunteers, 74–75

Index 

weak nationality, 229 Weiner, Myron, 76, 111, 238 White, Hayden, 104, 181 Wilson, Edmund, 6 women involvement, in movement, 108–109 The Wretched of the Earth, 24

269

Yandaboo Treaty, 203 Yaruingam (Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya), 5–6 Young India, 97, 113 Young, Robert, 27, 38 youth of Assam, changes in, 92, 106, 116

About the Author Nandana Dutta was born in Shillong (erstwhile capital of Assam) and educated at Shillong and Guwahati. She received M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Gauhati University, Assam (India). She is currently teaching at the Department of English, Gauhati University. She has earlier taught at Dibrugarh University (1990–91) and at Handique Girls’ College, Guwahati (1987–90). She has published essays on issues like identity, ethnic diversity, location and theory, and Assam and modernity in journals like Journal of Contemporary Thought (JCT), Interventions, Global South, and Journeys, and in collections like Beyond CounterInsurgency (2008). Her areas of interest include American Studies, Women’s Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Assam and Modernity, Terror and Ethics, Location and Theory, and English Studies in the Northeast. She has edited, with an introduction, a volume of translated folk tales from the various tribal groups of Assam, titled Mothers, Daughters and Others (forthcoming). She received the Katha Prize for Translation from Assamese in 1999.