Why is there so much apprehension about a population influx in the Northeast? Apart from periodic outbreaks of inter-ethnic violence in the region, the fear of the “outsider” is virtually everywhere. Often, this “outsider” is nebulous and ill-defined. For some, the word that substitutes this term is Bangladeshi. However, in the same breath, the term can become rooted in indigeneity, tending to exclude even bona fide domiciles who no longer are “outsiders” but nonetheless remain the “other”. This makes the fear border on the blindness of paranoia, diluting even advocacies of what is real about it.
The increasingly high-pitched demands—for a National Register of Citizens in Manipur (an exercise proving to be a wasted effort in Assam), the calls for stricter Inner Line Permit System regimes in the hill states, and the periodic explosions of ethnic clashes within a state and between states—would all appear confounding to observers outside the region. But not so for those who have a sense of the postcolonial history of the place.
The recent ugly uproar in Assam over the stitching of two types of scarves to felicitate guests at the conference of a newly formed literary society of the state’s ethnic Bengalis called Bangla Sahitya Sabha illustrates the extreme insensitivity.
Of the two fabrics at the centre of the controversy, one is the Assamese phulam gamosa, a rectangular cotton fabric with distinctive motifs, traditionally a towel but today transformed into an intimate cultural marker that is often used as a ceremonial neck scarf. The other is the Bengali gamcha, a similar fabric, though not as strong a cultural symbol. The literary body ostensibly tried to symbolise the fraternity of the state’s two major linguistic communities by creating the hybrid scarf. But in the face of powerful backlash from the Assamese community, who saw it as a cultural affront and insult, the literary body withdrew and tendered a public apology on March 28.
Those familiar with the region’s colonial history will know how the bittersweet relationship between these two communities in Assam was set in motion in the mid-19th century. After the Treaty of Yandabo (1826) formally ended the Burmese occupation of Assam and Manipur, Assam (then virtually the entire Northeast except for Tripura and Manipur) was annexed and made a part of the British Bengal province. The Assamese middle class being still too weak to handle their affairs, the British encouraged and brought in people already exposed to British-style education and administration. They were the Bengali middle class, mainly from neighbouring Sylhet, Dhaka and Mymensingh districts of East Bengal, as Sajal Nag notes in his book Roots of Ethnic Conflict. Soon enough, in the new power structure of Assam, an elite Bengali minority came to occupy a dominant position. In 1837, this Babu class used their influence to have Bengali declared as Assam’s official language, making it also the medium of instruction in schools, claiming Assamese was only a dialect of Bengali.
The Assamese middle class could not counter this immediately, but a language agitation was only to be expected in the days ahead. When Assamese linguistic nationalism got too hot, in July 1873, Assamese was restored as the official language of five valley districts of Assam—Kamrup, Darrang, Nagaon, Sibsagar and Lakhimpur. The next year on February 6, Assam was also separated from Bengal and made a separate chief commissioner’s province.
However, probably again prompted by the administration’s continuing need for the English-educated Bengali middle class, on September 12 of the same year, the populous Sylhet district was added to Assam. Interestingly, both the Sylheti Bengalis and Assamese resented this for different reasons. The Assamese because this would make Bengalis the majority in Assam, and the Bengalis because, for them, it was a degradation to be removed from culturally and institutionally advanced Bengal and clubbed with “backward” Assam.
There was another migration stream in the same direction—that of the land-hungry Bengali peasantry, chiefly Muslim. The earlier wave of these migrants, as Amalendu Guha indicates in his book Planter Raj to Swaraj, carried no sense of superior identity baggage and had no trouble switching to adapt and identify themselves as Assamese speakers. Identity friction in this manner became triangular, especially when India’s freedom drew close. And on this larger canvas, contests of religious nationalism began taking greater precedence over assertions of smaller linguistic identities.
In Assam, however, memories of the old and bitter linguistic rivalries lingered: when Radcliffe drew his line, and Sylhet district’s only hope of remaining within India came to be its acceptance as a part of Assam, the Assamese leadership, under revered Gopinath Bordoloi, said no. In the Sylhet referendum in July 1947, by a thin Muslim majority, the district was awarded to East Pakistan, giving the issue of migration, which continues to this date, another hue.
This inherent contradiction again arose after passing the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019). The strongest opposition to this Act—which seeks to segregate Hindu and Muslim migrants and evict only the latter while embracing the former—was in Assam. Assam did not want any immigrants, Hindus or Muslims. Making the irony even deeper, not long after, Assam voted to power the BJP which sponsored this much-hated CAA.
Is this demographic apprehension in the Northeast completely unreasonable? The Assam example is again illustrative. Assamese speakers in Assam are around 15 million (Census 2011) compared to 9 million Bengali speakers. But if the larger region were to be considered, and Bangladesh’s 164 million Bengali speakers included, Assamese speakers would be a tiny minority. Hence, the fear of demographic marginalisation in the region is not altogether illegitimate. All these nuances need to be understood for a balanced assessment.
Meanwhile, while it is true that the present is a product of the past, there must come a time for everyone to take stock of reality and decide whether it is time to break free from at least some of these prisons of the past.
Pradip Phanjoubam
Imphal Review of Arts and PoliticsEditor of