Books
REBIRTH
by Jahnavi Barua. Penguin Books, Delhi, 2010.I picked up Jahnavi Barua’s Rebirth due to our shared Assamese background. But it was her rendering of womanhood – the duty, the intimacy, the expectation – that propelled me so quickly and thoughtfully through its 203 pages.
‘Rebirth’ has been creating much buzz within India for months. ‘…a powerful fabric of a social drama in which the being inside is at war with the persona outside’, wrote the Hindustan Times. And then came its placement on the long list for the Man Asian Literary Prize. And most recently, the shortlist for the Commonwealth Book Prize 2012.
But as international as her fame and success becomes, we Assamese continue to claim Jahnavi Barua as ‘ours’. Such is the modern Assamese identity: its tentacles stretch from Brooklyn to Bangalore, separated by miles and years from home, but the diaspora cling as closely to their customs and traditions, as to each other.
Like Ms. Barua, I too am a product of Assam, albeit further removed. My father left in the 1960s for Banaras Hindu University, found work in Jadugoda and then immigrated to the U.S. in 1971. I was born in New York City five years later – the product of parents from opposite banks of the Brahmaputra: one Sadiya, one Santipur. I lived in many places but there was little question of where ‘home’ was; the mighty river flows through my blood and overpowers most other backdrops and memories. So it goes for Ms. Barua’s fiction, told as first-person prose addressing an unborn child, frequently interrupted by writing as lush and fertile as the nature it describes and often personifies. On the all-important first page, Kaberi remembers ‘the open skies of my childhood’ and contrasts its colour, warmth and expanse to ‘the city of winds’ that is Bangalore. ‘I was a little afraid of the breeze as it pushed me against the parapet, belligerently, as if daring me to defy it.’
It is this world that Barua’s protagonist, Kaberi, inhabits. She lives in the cosmopolitan southern city, married to Ron who has his business trips and office parties and golf and tennis. He also happens to be physically abusing Kaberi and having an affair, but these key details do not form the spine of this book. Rather, it is the fierce want of and love for the unborn child that drives the narrative.
Perhaps these emotions most resonated with me because I read Rebirth just months after having given birth myself, that unique relationship between mother and fetus fresh in my mind (and my body!). The purity of an expectant mom’s instant love and the anticipation of new life are universal but nonetheless profound. As Kaberi goes through her day, she speaks to the child as all of us mothers have, silently, constantly. There are the pats on the belly after heavy meals or bumpy drives but mostly there are the plans, the constant plans, that mark the nest of pre-motherhood. ‘The beige and vanilla fabrics in the drawing room we had both agreed upon – that had been when there had been no indication of a child on the horizon; now, my darling, I will have to work out an alternative scheme,’ Kaberi tells her baby as she frets over the condition of her house before a sudden dinner party Ron has organized, and finds herself looking at the home they have built with new perspective.
Of course, Kaberi’s condition and Ron’s infidelity are discovered around the same time; so as the life within her grows, so too must her will and conviction to take control of her life and her family’s future. Throughout, her quandary and agony are the flashbacks of home. There are the colloquialisms like our intimate use of toi and the inauspiciousness of the colour black, and those remembrances of nature, of foreign, untranslated words like muga and phut and amlokhi.
Foreign, of course, to the non-Assamese audience. For those of us who share Ms. Barua’s northeastern roots, Rebirth exudes familiarity from the parents who spend a lifetime sleeping in the same bed, gifted on their wedding day, to the Pond’s cold cream on the dressing table. Consider Kaberi’s reaction to her in-laws’ tea estate lifestyle after marriage: ‘I was not ashamed of my mother’s curtains stitched lovingly at home out of printed casement cotton fabric costing all of twenty rupees a metre. What I felt was deprived – not of material riches but of what that wealth could buy. …money alone cannot buy happiness but money can, sometimes, sweeten the soil so that happiness is encouraged to grow.’
In Assam, unlike other parts of globalizing India, class is still largely not derived from income; the work of so many remains elusively defined. Thus become relevant Kaberi’s observations and clashes among the Assam of her upbringing, that of her in-laws and the Bangalore she and Ron have made home. How many of us come from these similarly economically blended – collided – families? Those who arrive to family weddings in rickshaws, auto and cycle, city buses, Tatas and Toyotas. How many of us are one type of Assamese in front of work friends and another when the relatives come to dinner?
A few years ago, I lamented these dichotomies to a close friend, also a journalist. ‘And I have a cousin,’ I said dramatically, ‘who has gotten involved in Ulfa. How could he? After all that our family has been through.’
‘Mitra,’ my friend responded, equally dramatic, ‘To be Assamese is to have one family member in Ulfa – and another killed by Ulfa.’
Perhaps it is Ms. Barua’s take on Ulfa that is one of the weaker, more simplistic parts of her book. Yet even here, she appeals to those of us who have tried to explain to others its complexities. ‘I do not pursue the topic; it is impossible to explain to an outsider how feelings of alienation have flared into a malignant blaze,’ Kaberi thinks when a woman at a party asks her about insurgents.
Kaberi’s best friend, Joya, was killed in a bus explosion rigged by the insurgents. Throughout the novel, her strongheaded friend contrasts to the cool, even-tempered Kaberi who has spent her life trying to do everything right. Yet by Rebirth’s end, it becomes clearer where the soul-searching Kaberi’s heart truly lies. Us Assamese readers, of course, knew it all along.
S. Mitra Kalita
Journalist and author, New York
FRONTIER CULTURES: A Social History of Assamese Literature by Manjeet Baruah. Routledge, New Delhi, 2012.
Manjeet Baruah’s Frontier Cultures: A Social History of Assamese Literature is another addition to the subject of Northeast India’s history which has experienced extensive critical performances by a range of scholars in the recent past. However, Baruah uses new sources, experiments with methodology, takes a new, if not a very convincing, position and draws our attention towards certain shared ‘socio-spatial relationships’ which, according to him, various communities of Northeast India shared in the past or share even in the present. Furthermore, Baruah proposes to view the Northeast more as a ‘continental crossroad’ than as a frontier region of the Indian nation state.
Baruah begins his analysis by identifying some of the precolonial textual sources which, according to him, suggest that the communities of Northeast India shared symbiotic relationships and, the foothills between the valley and the mountains played a vital role in it. Vaishnava hagiography and the Ahom Buranjis forms his understanding of the region’s spatial mapping in precolonial times. Baruah then goes on to discuss the failed attempts of the colonial state to put order in the region through administrative engineering of geography. Moreover, he opines that the Zomainist approach of understanding the hill politics of the Northeast is also an inadequate explanation, as contestation against state formation never led to the creation of migratory non-state spaces in the region. As Baruah believes that a common politics from within can formulate the base for economic and political autonomy for the region, he views the propositions of looking at Northeast India merely as a trade route between South and South East Asia as extremely detrimental to the political future of the region.
Baruah then, once again, draws the reader’s attention towards mapping of socio-spatial relationships in the Buranjis and neo-Vaishnavite texts. According to him the Buranjis did not mark any distinction between caste and tribe and thereby did not inculcate a practice of ‘othering’ different communities dwelling in the vicinity of the Ahom kingdom. Baruah further explains that the changing modes of narration of tales from Ramayana in the Brahmaputra Valley with respect to varying socio-economic conditions, describe a process of accommodation of different indigenous cultural forms into a collective fold. He argues that the constitutive elements of these cultural forms represent an inclusive and interactive social space. Thus, he firmly opines that simple explanations offered vis-a-vis the sanskritization process cannot describe the social formations in the region.
As the late 19th and early 20th century project of standardizing the Assamese language generated serious debates among the respective advocates of upper and lower Assam variants of the language, Baruah associates this transition with the transformation of the region from a continental crossroad to a frontier province of the colonial state. According to Baruah, it is the tools of empire which made the Sibsagar variant of Assamese language the standard. Baruah views the identitarian claims over the newly standardized Assamese language as a complete misinterpretation of the region’s own cultural past. Baruah concludes that the new mode of language use and its narrative forms under colonial modern conditions through a systematic practice of language codification does not represent the collective consciousness of the people. Thus, he argues that the struggle, or possibly the failure, of modern Assamese literature to represent a totalitarian picture of the Assamese world originated in the deliberate negation of its own cultural past.
In the second part of the book Baruah tries to conceptualize his central argument. Baruah argues that the shifts in language use and narratives in 20th century modern Assamese fiction with respect to different temporal frames describe the varying consciousnesses about identity politics in the region. He identifies three major temporal frames of transition: first, the period between late 19th century and the 1950s; second, the 1950s to 1980s; and finally, the 1980s to the present. According to Baruah, during the period between the late 19th century and 1950s, there was an attempt to resist the codified and structured use of Sibsagar language by writers like Padmanath Gohain Baruah through the use of lingua francas between Assamese and other tribal languages. Baruah observes that, after the 1950s, this consciousness about the shared social space vis-a-vis the historical and the ethnographic debate in the region gradually disappeared. He cites the example of Birendra Kumar Bhattacharjya who, according to Baruah, ‘drew a scheme in which the debate of the preceding period over the historical and the ethnographic contradictions on language and narrative vis-a-vis social base could disappear.’ Baruah opines that this scheme of collectivized Assamese consciousness was shaped by the social and political movements of the Assamese against the Indian nation state. Finally, Baruah argues that after the 1980s, there was another shift in language use and narrative strategy which attempted to explore the relations that constitute Assamese and critique the perceived notions of the preceding period.
A reader may feel the need to ask a question, as the book progresses, even without engaging much with Baruah’s ideological concerns behind his reading of socio-spatial relations among different communities in Northeast India. From the beginning till the end, Baruah repetitively criticizes the limitations of existing scholarship on the Northeast with respect to their approach vis-a-vis the politics of region formation, and thus states that ‘research based on the discourse of identity has failed in conceptualizing the trans-Brahmaputra Valley in particular and North-East India in general as a region.’ What may irritate a reader is Baruah’s own entrapment in the question of identity inspite of his high claims to disengage from it.
Baruah argues hard in search of historical explanations for a possible common politics from within the region but, unfortunately, his book remains more of a romantic fantasy than a historicized account on Assamese literature. A social history of literature should concentrate more closely on the question of literary form so that the sociological foundations of the literary can be located more accurately. To imagine that any geopolitical space was not divisively politicized in the pre-modern period would be naive. Moreover, it is hard to accept that Baruah’s escape from issues related to the process of vernacularization is an outcome of his ignorance. Certainly, Baruah’s book will cause annoyance to the historians who believe in historicism and appreciate the veracity of the archive. However, for the wishful thinkers for a distinctive political future for Northeast India, Baruah’s book may prove useful to pursue their dreams.
Abikal Borah
Kaziranga University, Jorhat
LOOKING BACK INTO THE FUTURE: Identity and Insurgency in Northeast India by M.S. Prabhakara. Routledge India, 2012.
Looking Back into the Future containing some select essays of M.S. Prabhakara is perhaps one of the most keenly awaited books in recent years. Awaited because anybody working on the recent political history of Assam or Northeast India cannot escape drawing insights from MSP’s articles and commentaries scattered mostly in the pages of The Hindu, Frontline and the Economic and Political Weekly and what makes it so endearing is the author’s rare ability to shuttle with elegance, to and fro between the two worlds of academia and journalism. The essays cover a time frame of thirty six years, starting from the mid-1970s and ending with the end of the first decade of the 21st century. All along, the reader of the book goes through two basic experiences – the author’s engagement with the immediate in the form of detailed reporting, and a critical analysis of the issues when he invokes his academic self to place them in perspective.
The book is a reflection of the author’s own engagement with the complex political trajectories of the region and, as the blurb on the jacket suggests, it poignantly tries reflecting a ‘northeastern mind’, fraught with inherent contradiction of loyalties between a pan-Indian identity and an exclusive community identity. Contradiction and contestation exist even within the communities and the author takes the reader through the nuances of many of them. Here, I will attempt to reflect on only two strands of the numerous themes that run across the book – first, its engagement with the ‘plains tribes’ of Assam, their movements for political power, and most importantly, their relationship with the Assamese speaking population with which they share territory and second, the author’s consistency of argumentation and ideological positioning vis-à-vis identity politics of the region.
In his search for understanding the disjuncture between the ‘Assamese speaking people’ and ‘Assamese people’, the author identifies a number of contributing factors. Complex historical circumstances and administrative processes have brought together the colonial geography of Assam and inherent in that formation is a disconnect between the people inhabiting that territory and their language and culture. The separation of the Naga Hills District and Tuensang Area (NHTA) into a separate state in December 1963, and a further reorganization of the state in the early 1970s, have only partly addressed this disjuncture. He makes a sharp distinction between the communities who have contested the political hegemony of the Brahmaputra Valley-based Assamese speaking elites and got their own territorial units by 1972, and the ethnic communities living in the Brahmaputra Valley, speaking their own languages other than Assamese.
In his understanding, the Khasis, the Nagas, the Garos, the Mizos, etc. were all, culturally as well as geographically, peripheral to the Brahmaputra Valley due to a colonial policy of deliberate segregation. Enjoying many privileges under the special provisions of the post-colonial Indian Constitution, they were, even while in Assam, never of Assam. But the tribal groups of the Brahmaputra Valley (a term, according to the author, inappropriate geographically but convenient to denote the six old districts of Assam plains during the colonial period), had lived so long near the caste Hindu Assamese speaking society that their search for identity was thought to be inexorably attached to the identity of the Assamese speaking people.
He shows how the distinction between the ‘hills tribes’ and the ‘plains tribes’ was made in the Government of India Act of 1935, where the hills tribes were accorded special safeguards that were later enshrined with modifications in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution of independent India. No such safeguard was, however, accorded to the ‘plains tribal communities’, as historically, the tribal people of the plains, despite their being numerically the largest tribal community in the whole region and despite being constitutionally classified as scheduled tribes, were viewed as indistinguishable in every other respect from the non-tribal peoples of the plains.
Such a perception was undoubtedly influenced by historical considerations that viewed the plains tribes as an inalienable part of the still evolving (caste Hindu) Assamese society on whose periphery they were placed, but into whose lower ranks they would eventually find entry. Such was also the view of the nascent leadership of the tribal communities in the plains, if one were to go by the positions taken on various political and social issues by their organizations that deposed before the Simon Commission. Unlike the hill tribes, the plains tribal people have lived for long in close proximity to the rural poor of Assam. He surmises that perhaps it was the very exclusiveness of the caste Hindu society that has bred an exclusivism among the ‘plains tribal groups’, most glaringly visible in the case of the Bodos. For long, the Bodos (and other plains tribal people) considered entry into the lower ranks of the Hindu caste system as essentially a forward step. But what was once a phenomenon of mass conversion gradually stopped in the post-colonial period and, not merely that, there is also a movement of going back into the tribal fold by those people who or whose forefathers had once taken saran and uplifted their caste hierarchy.
Showing how there was a process of gradual linguistic assimilation, the author comments that the acceptance of the Assamese language as the mother tongue was the sine qua non of entry into Assamese society. A remarkable feature of the speakers of the tribal language of the state, specially those who speak the languages of the plains tribes of the state, is that in every case the number of people who returned themselves as plains tribes by community or ethnicity was larger than the number of people who returned the corresponding tribal language as their mother tongue, indicating that a substantial section of this tribal population has retained its tribal identity even while completely ‘Assamising’ itself in so far as its language was concerned. But, there is also a gradual reversal of this process as evident from the successive Census data. The author suggests that the initial mistake was to categorize the tribal people of erstwhile Assam on a topographical basis, as it were, as hills tribes and plains tribes, and superimpose presumed social and cultural modes and movements on that distinction. The assumption that the former were irrevocably separate from the Assamese while the latter were or were bound eventually to become an integral part of Assamese society was plainly ahistorical, even if at some points of time such assimilation did take place. Still, he argues in favour of a united Assam, as according to him, it is difficult even to conceive of a fragmentation of the Brahmaputra Valley, whose geographical and cultural homogeneity itself is predicated on a variety of people it has historically sustained.
By his own admission, the author has continuously evolved in his observations on the processes of making, breaking or remaking of identities in the region, usually adding fresh perspectives to these processes. But what needs to be emphasized is that he has not changed even a bit of his main argument and the ideological mooring from which it emanates. For example, throughout his writings he maintains his original position that there is no end to the demand of ethnic homelands in a place like Northeast India, and that territorial vivisection is no answer to the ethnic problems. In the earliest essay of the volume, while dealing with the political fallout of the movement for acceptance of the Roman script for Bodo language, he warns against the strategy of the Centre of making ‘a real patchwork quilt of the whole NE region, weakening the constituent units into heavily subsidized little bureaucratic empires’ and, almost prophetically, ends with the warning, ‘but to divide is also to multiply.’ In another essay written in 2009, the author condemns the government machinations of dividing the insurgent groups in the hope of weakening them, but with the completely opposite result of fragmenting communities and often escalating violence. Curiously, the essay has as its title ‘To Divide is to Multiply’. These two articles divided by a quarter of a century are just two obvious examples of the consistency of the author’s argumentation and his ideological positioning which persist through all the essays. Perhaps in this rests the unity of the disparate essays in this volume. Though dealing with diverse issues in different periods, it makes for a lucid and coherent read.
Uddipan Dutta
Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development, Guwahati
FORESTS AND ECOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ASSAM, 1826-2000 by Arupjyoti Saikia. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011.
RULERS governing polities within the realm of the Brahmaputra Valley have long histories of successfully resisting challenges to their supremacy from powers centred far away from Assam. In such long-term perspectives, the past two centuries represent a break with earlier legacies. With the six hundred century old Ahom kingdom in ruins and the Burmese ousted from the valley in the early 19th century, new regimes emerged to change the old order. A global mercantile corporation was followed by a colonial government within the British Empire, and the central government of the Republic of India placed Assam as part of a much larger legal and economic entity. In the modern history of Assam, the region became a piece in a larger puzzle.
However, while it is crucial to understand the larger polities that have framed Assam, this historical narrative is repeated so often as a matter of course that we risk going blind to the micro politics and social complexities of adjusting imperial and global visions to the varied everyday realities. Arupjyoti Saikia’s study of Assam’s history of forest administration goes into such details at great length. His meticulous treatment of empirical evidence allows us to understand institution building and the problems it both faced and caused in many sub-regional contexts. The author moves his arguments through every step of commercial competition for wealth from natural resources, the passing of legal regulations in the forest and conservation acts and their implementation, and the ideologies and policies that legitimized and explained the government-induced changes. Saikia covers a lot of ground, sometimes so much that for the reader it may better be described by the idiom, ‘one can’t see the forest for its trees.’
The study explores two hundred years of state engagement with Assam’s natural and human resources. Chapter by chapter, it enquires into the EIC’s hunt for mineral and forest wealth. The colonial ideological underpinning of the polity is discussed in view of the new spatial orders it introduced into the landscape. Saikia further researches into issues of the imperial ambition to control the markets, the production of knowledge in support of forest management, and the annihilation of human and non-human threats to this all-encompassing project. The study concludes in the present, which places today’s peasant movements and forest politics in a long-term historical perspective. Considering the fine-grained detail of research, it is an enormous task that Saikia has taken on and the volume will be an important resource for research on Assam’s environmental history for a long time to come.
So what does the study convey of the larger historical transformations in which forest administration in Assam evolved? The line of argument follows from the formation of forest administration, via inventions, regulations and implementation, to the growth of popular and peasant resistance. As with other arguments framed as ‘the European expansion’ through colonial conquest, this study too follows European officers’ exploration and colonial subjugation of lands and people that awaited them. We, so to speak, enter Assam together with the Europeans, a phase which also marks the beginning of profound transformations. From the perspective of subaltern history or the transition from early-modern to modern histories, which might select other key actors and historical baselines, this may seem like an odd choice. But considering the fact that the study moves along the spine of British forest administration, which evolved into the Forest Department and continued almost intact as a ministry under independent Indian governments, the framing of the study is a relevant one.
Perhaps more than any other arm of government, the Forest Department today is often held out as imbued by colonial legacies and acting in complete opposition to popular interests and forest-based livelihoods. This perspective also explains well why so many studies of the state’s capacity are framed in Foucauldian inspired analyses of disciplining discourses of power. Saikia also points out more continuities than changes over time. However, his study may challenge us to further problematize the daily working of the department in more nuanced ways. We may then be able to see how draconian legislation and omnipotent institutions often function through many layers of everyday negotiations that involves a great variety of actors and is characterized by contradictions and ambiguities.
Having said this, we may also notice a contrast in the study between the introductory and concluding remarks of each chapter, and the investigation itself. This appears at times as a discord between analytical frames and empirical evidence. While the general remarks often emphasize a binary and an opposition between state and people, the documents referred to represent the more complex realities. For example, when the author writes: ‘Conservation meant a complete command of the Forest Department over the forest resources’ (69), he continues with a critical examination of the failures of exclusionary forest reservation, which immediately disproves any claim to the department’s panopticon control. Or when the study convincingly shows the great difficulties that the Forest Department faced when implementing regulations, its conflicts with the Revenue Department, and the disagreements between officers at high and low echelons of the administration, this is concluded by a statement that ‘[t]he State had total control over the topography of the forest and knew how to work it for the well being of the empire’ (89). The rich and often contradictory empirical evidence may at times suggest more nuanced conclusions.
Today’s continuing pressures on Assam’s lands, waters, forests and mineral resources is evidence to the pressing need for solid research which Forests and Ecological History of Assam represents.
Gunnel Cederlöf
Uppsala University, Sweden
BECOMING A BORDERLAND: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India by Sanghamitra Misra. Routledge, New Delhi, 2011.
Becoming a Borderland focuses on the colonial history of Goalpara, the westernmost part of the present-day state of Assam. It is commonly assumed that Goalpara has always been a borderland, marginal to the polities of which it was a part. Misra argues against this, and sets out to show how due to the transformation of Goalpara’s political economy in the colonial period, the region was actually reworked as a borderland. Centres, margins and borders are not givens, but socially and politically constituted. Most historians, Misra maintains, are reluctant to think both outside the conceptual framework provided by the modern state, and outside the colonial spatial order. This results in the past being framed as an extension of the present and induces a ‘reading-back’ of present national sentiments into a timeless past. Notably for the study of borderlands, areas understood in terms of marginality and ambiguity, a rethinking of conceptual frameworks applied is essential for an engaged and open analysis of historical data.
In the decades preceding the extension of colonial rule (the late 18th century), Goalpara constituted the easternmost part of the Mughal empire. However, rather than being pervasively controlled by the Mughals, political relationships were characterized by overlapping of territoriality and sovereignty. The local landlords (zamindars) did not just owe allegiance to the Mughals, many also paid tribute to rulers who were not subjected to the Mughals, such as the king of Bhutan. Likewise, some of the landlords demanded tribute from people who were located outside the Mughal political realm. In Goalpara, land was available in abundance, and thus, rather than controlling ‘land’, landlords and kings attempted to control the people who worked it. Taxation levied at weekly markets (haats) also played an essential role in the trade in vital commodities between the hills and the plains. Likewise, control of religious centres was important, since these drew pilgrims from across distinct political spheres of influence. Markets and centres of pilgrimage thus acted as nodes that enabled rulers to maintain control over the social and political fabric of the region. Misra’s analysis of the pre-colonial period is original and challenging, but there is definitely scope for more extensive research into the kind of networks and exchange relationships that she identifies. Given the persistence of religious relationships, notably the historiography of what she calls the ‘sacred topographical space’, this aspect deserves to be researched more extensively.
Goalpara was incorporated in the colonial state by the early 19th century creating a powerful disjunction with the past. For rather than aiming for the control of people, the balance shifted towards the control of territory: land, and the products it could yield. Previously, cultivators had been relatively mobile, shifting wherever land proved to be most suitable and productive. The colonial state’s policy implied a strong encouragement of sedentary cultivation. Land that was not permanently occupied became either qualified as forest (which the state often claimed as timber reserve) or as ‘waste’ land. It was deemed important to bring this waste land under cultivation, in order to make use of its productive capacity, and clear ‘unhealthy’ jungles. The subsequent ‘colonization of wasteland scheme’ failed to catch on among the local population, but due to large-scale migration from Bihar and Bengal into Goalpara, the area of arable land rapidly increased.
Framed in a civilizational narrative, the promotion of sedentary agriculture became coupled with a negative approach towards mobile types of farming such as shifting cultivation. Whereas sedentary, settled cultivation stood for civilization, shifting cultivation was not only seen as unproductive and harmful, but also backward and uncivilized. Its framing as a natural mode of agriculture for the hills, contributed to the creation of an ideological distinction between plains and hills.
Whereas in pre-colonial times, lowland cultures and hill polities were closely intertwined, the colonial state from early on saw their interaction in terms of conflict rather than contact. Restrictions imposed on the markets (haats) appear to have contributed to a sharp reduction in the trade that took place between hills and valleys, and by the end of the 19th century the trade of Goalpara with the surrounding hill areas had sharply declined. Instead, the emergence of trade by river, and also by rail, resulted in the valley being firmly integrated with eastern India. The colonial state’s policies thus played a central role in the creation of the hills-plains dichotomy that would become such a divisive political force in the 20th century. How does this relate to James C. Scott’s argument that hill dwelling people prefer to distance themselves as much as possible from states? Did the dichotomy also emerge due to the hill people’s aversion to the increasing coerciveness of the valley based polity?
Misra then takes her argument a step further, linking processes of change regarding land use, legality and political control, to the emergence of what she calls a Goalparia identity. The ‘redefinition’ of Goalpara that had been effectuated by the colonial state, had provided the region with a distinct cultural character. Assamese nationalism came into being at the end of the 19th century with the emergence of Assamese as a separate language, and the institutionalization of Assamese history. Whereas Assamese nationalists included Goalpara in a unified Assam, some of Goalpara’s landlords resisted such attempts, producing counter-narratives that encompassed what was presented as an alternative history. Misra shows how these landlords also attempted to anchor Goalparia identity with the songs and orality or itinerant people such as boatmen and mahouts. But although the importance of such traditions can hardly be underestimated, more research is needed to convincingly show that they have provided an important contribution to the development of the cultural consciousness of Goalparians. Misra concludes that even where Goalparians were imaginative in their attempts to engage Assamese cultural hegemony, they could only do so by developing counter-nationalist claims that made use of the same conceptual realm. For better or for worse, it seems that there is no escape from the ‘nation’ once that concept has entered the political field.
Erik de Maaker
University of Leiden, The Netherlands
EMPIRE’S GARDEN: Assam and the Making of India by Jayeeta Sharma. Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2012.
IN the first half of the 19th century, prospectors of the British East India Company found tea in the forests located in the Singpho territory of upper Assam. When the commercial cultivation of tea began, the company considered partnering with Singpho chiefs in harvesting tea from those forests. ‘Wild Assam tea’, as Jayeeta Sharma tells the story, was seen as ‘a useful supplement to the newly cultivated crop.’ More than a thousand pounds of wild leaf collected by the Singpho chief Ningroola even found its way to London. The idea of that partnership was soon dropped: the company decided to annex those forest tracts instead (p. 41). But the distinction made between ‘tea forests’ and ‘tea gardens’ has endured. Tea plantations are still called tea gardens in English, as well as in Assamese and a number of other Indian languages.
The colonial vision was of European capital and science turning ‘savage forests’ into tea growing areas. The ‘idyllic vision of unordered Nature blooming into ordered gardens’ (p. 43) appealed to many others as well, including members of the emerging modern Assamese elite. The title Empire’s Garden alludes to the hold of that image on the colonizer, as well as on certain elite segments of the colonized.
Despite the image, the project of turning Assam’s forests into tea gardens was anything but idyllic. It was about producing tea on an industrial scale which needed ‘a vast pool of cheap, docile, easily reproducible labour’ (p. 71). This was not easy to find in 19th century Assam. It was sparsely populated, and peasants embedded in pre-capitalist social formations were not about to give up their traditional freedoms to come and work in tea plantations. The industry eventually settled into the use of migrant indentured labour, and Assam became a major destination of indentured workers.
Empire’s Garden covers a hundred years of the history of Assam from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century – a period during which, in the author’s words, Assam ‘moved from being a previously peripheral frontier kingdom into an imperial tea garden and a key hinterland for British India’ (p. 7). The main narrative is informed by Benedict Anderson’s ideas about print capitalism, and the Jürgen Habermas inspired literature on the public sphere. However, the public sphere that developed in Assam under conditions of colonial modernity had its very particular form and concerns. With extensive use of Assamese language sources, Sharma gives a rich and engaging account of this process.
A segment of Assam’s pre-colonial elites – ‘the service gentry’ – Sharma argues, ‘transformed themselves into a modern intelligentsia and dominated the new public sphere and its discussion around history, nationhood and progress’ (p. 17). They understood the opportunities that western-style education could bring. But institutions providing such education were much slower to develop in Assam than in metropolitan India. Thus, pursuing a college education in 19th century Assam meant undertaking ‘a long, expensive journey and a long sojourn in Calcutta’ (p. 152).
The Calcutta experience – the education as well as the encounters with urban modernity – ‘precipitated a perceptible shift in the Assamese gentry’s mental landscape’ (p. 154). They lived with fellow students from Assam, and a thriving Assamese associational life of literary clubs, meetings and print publications developed among these sojourners. With their exposure to colonial modernity, the theme of Assam’s ‘backwardness’ resonated strongly with them. They became strong advocates of Assam’s ‘progress’ – a stance that was entirely consistent with their career ambition of finding jobs in the colonial administration.
There was a pernicious aspect of what this group got out of their encounter with India, and their newly acquired knowledge about India. ‘Assam’s elites were morbidly conscious of their inclusion among the "barbarous hordes" who inhabited British India’s frontiers’ (p. 196). They were attracted to developments in philology about the Indo-European family of languages, and the advent of the so-called ‘scientific’ theories of race. Drawing on the classification of Assamese as an Indo-European language, Assamese elites began to make linguistic and racial claims of ties with high status groups in other parts of India, and to superiority over their ‘primitive’ fellow subjects. Only in the 20th century did this begin to change with Gandhian, Marxian, Socialist and other progressive political ideologies gaining ground, and challenges from subaltern groups.
Sharma refers to historian and anthropologist Bernard Cohn’s observation that the Queen’s proclamation of 1858 ‘functioned as a cultural statement encompassing two divergent or even contradictory theories of rule’, one that sought to maintain feudal India, and the other that anticipated changes that could only lead to the destruction of that order (p. 139). Arguably, a similar contradiction characterized the British colonial attitudes toward tea workers and their categorization as tribes in their lands of origin. Tribes are supposed to stay in one place; so considerations that go with the category ‘tribal’ were available only in their homelands. Once a person from a tribe was recruited as an indentured worker, s/he became simply a ‘labourer’, no longer entitled to recognition as member of a tribe. To borrow Mahmood Mamdani’s words, the scheme had the effect of penalizing those that the commodity economy dynamizes.
Postcolonial India has not resolved this tension between the contradictory theories of rule embedded in the institutions of the colonial state. As a result, while pressing their demand for scheduled tribe status, the descendents of indentured workers in Assam today often demonstrate with bows and arrows as symbols. Presumably their goal is to meet the test of a ‘primitive’ past – part of what a group apparently needs to prove to be recognized as a scheduled tribe. Thus, descendants of a group of people who provided the muscle for the 19th century capitalist transformation of Assam are forced to find a symbol of remembered tribal-hood to make claims for compensatory justice in 21st century India.
Sharma writes at the outset of her book that she locates her ‘subject-field in terms of larger trans-regional and trans-imperial discourses and institutions’ (pp. 6-7). Given this ambition, one wishes she had pursued the comparison with other plantation economies more closely. Her insights on the differences in the circumstances of the descendants of indentured workers in the overseas plantation colonies and in Assam would have been valuable.
Empire’s Garden is an excellent piece of historical research as well as an enjoyable read. Her account of how the Assamese public sphere developed under conditions of colonial modernity is not just of interest to historians, it provides vital clues to the troubled postcolonial politics of Assam.
Sanjib Baruah
Bard College, New York
THE STORY OF FELANEE by Arupa Patangia Kalita (trans. Deepika Phukan). Zubaan, Delhi, 2011.
The Story of Felanee, Deepika Phukan’s English translation of Arupa Patangia Kalita’s well-known Asomiya novel, Felanee, is the story of a woman known as ‘Felanee’, ‘she who was thrown away’, and a group of people, who are ravaged, time and again, by events beyond their control, and the horrific violence that is unleashed on them.
Conflicts between various ethnic and linguistic groups over the decades, the Assam Movement and its degeneration into lawlessness, form the background of this story. Recent history is revisited in these pages. It is a story of survival, but it is also an indictment, and a portrayal of the dark underbelly of the Assam Movement as well as of the several violent upheavals that have periodically gripped this land. In a place where no dissident opinion on the movement was tolerated while it was happening, the effect of bandh calls, riots, bomb blasts and curfews on this vulnerable group of people is detailed with a great deal of anger. However, the focus is firmly on Felanee and the band of women who struggle together to survive against all odds.
The series of misfortunes that fall on Felanee is given in detail. She evolves, through the pages, from a delicate young mother, cared for tenderly by her husband, to a strong single woman who is shown as taking a position of leadership, towards the end, in her community. She learns whatever skills are necessary in order to raise her son single-handedly. She is firmly moral in a place where immorality of various kinds is rife. This, even though the author takes pains to show that ‘morality’, in the conventional sense, is just not possible for these women in the face of such extreme economic deprivation. Her kindness and consideration for others, even in the face of great hardship, allows her to survive with dignity in a milieu of degrading destitution and violence. Indeed, in spite of being thrown into this environment in sudden, extremely traumatic circumstances, she still retains this essential goodness of the soul. This is her achievement, a triumph of humanity, even in the face of acts of unimaginable inhumanity. And the fact that this is shown in a quiet, understated manner, marks it with a certain poignancy.
As the settlement of refugees grows, the bonding between the women of the group becomes stronger. They look out for each other, even though each has her own problems. It is this spirit that the author celebrates.
Felanee is not a novel that places importance on plot or nuances of character. The plot is linear and moves from incident to incident. Most of the individuals stand for certain characteristics. If Sumala is the woman who has ‘gone mad’, then Minoti is the woman besotted by a student leader of good looks and glamour. This typecasting is even more pronounced in the male characters. There are very few who are drawn fully. For the most part, they are portrayed as power hungry exploiters who are prey to lusts of all kinds – sexual, financial, political. This kind of characterization was perhaps necessary for a story whose underlying idea is the indomitability of the human spirit which can survive, with dignity and a sense of humanity and, at times, even joy, in the face of the deepest adversity.
The story has a litany of physical atrocities that pepper its pages. Babies’ bodies are split into two down the middle, heads and sexual organs are chopped off, limbs are cut, and there is a great deal of savage detailing of sexual brutality against women. There are also the problems of penury – what happens to a woman with a prolapsed uterus who has no money to go to the hospital for surgery, what happens when an abortion is botched. After a while, though, the shock-value of all this abates since they become somewhat repetitive. A more nuanced presentation of the horrors would have worked better, with things left more to the readers’ imagination.
The origins of the ethnic clashes and the several movements remain unexamined. The reasons why they happened in the first place, the ‘other sides of the story’, are not even hinted at. It is the effect of violence on this vulnerable group of mostly Bengali people who live in Assam, just below the Bhutan hills, which concerns the writer. These are after all not people who can, in any way, influence the course of events, but people on whom events fall like a series of thunderbolts.
What does remain, though, is the image of these deprived women, impoverished beyond belief, who rebuild their lives, nurture their families, even manage to laugh in spite of all hardships, and how they help each other through their numerous problems to emerge as triumphant survivors. This is what saves The Story of Felanee from becoming a harangue and a tract, and makes it a story of the human spirit, a story that delineates how a delicate woman becomes like a white chilli, small to look at, but fiery inside.
The author, Arupa Patangia Kalita, is greatly respected in her native Assam as a writer of unflinching views. The Story of Felanee is a book that has, in its original Asomiya, held up a mirror to a society that is most often not given to self-reflection about the path which it has taken in the past several decades. It shows up in stark, unvarnished detail, this ‘other’ side of conflicts that have festered in this land for long decades. Indeed, in what can be said to be a case of life imitating art, the recent clashes in western Assam have once again shown that a society that does not learn from the mistakes of history is doomed to repeat them. Shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award 2011, Deepika Phukan’s translation takes the reader through the story in language that is accessible and readable.
The Story of Felanee is an important landmark both in its original and in translation, the latter because much of what is happening in this state in India’s Northeast remains unknown to the rest of the country. And as always, even in this age of 24x7 news on the electronic media, even in these times of images of horror being beamed into our homes all the time, it is the fictionalized account that creates the most impact on the mind. Possibly, this is why The Story of Felanee also becomes a story of hope.
Mitra Phukan
Writer, vocalist and music critic
