Modern Asian Studies The Making and Unmaking of AssamBengal Borders and the Sylhet Referendum (original) (raw)
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The creation of Assam as a new province in 1874 and the transfer of Sylhet from Bengal to Assam provided a new twist in the shaping of the northeastern region of India. Sylhet remained part of Assam from 1874 to 1947, which had significant consequences in this frontier locality. This paper re-examines archival sources on political mobilization, rereads relevant autobiographical texts, and reviews oral evidence to discover the 'experienced' history of the region as distinct from the 'imagined' one. The sub-text of partition (Sylhet) is more intriguing than the main text (Bengal), because events in Sylhet offer us a micro-level study. Generations of historians-writing mostly in Bengali and relying on colonial archives-have tended to overlook the mindset of the people of Sylhet. This paper, on the basis of an examination of combined sources, argues that the new province was implicated in overlapping histories, across Bengal-Assam borders. The voice of the indigenous-mostly Hindus but partly Muslim-elites were dominant from 1874 onwards. However, the underdogs-particularly 'pro-Pakistani' dalits (lower-caste Hindus) and madrasa-educated 'pro-Indian' maulvis-emerged as crucial players in the referendum of 1947. Hardly any serious study, however, has focused on the Sylhet referendum-a defining moment in the region. This study of the Sylhet referendum will reveal a new dimension to the multiple responses to these issues and provide a glimpse of the 'communal psyche' of the people in this frontier district, rather than a binary opposition between 'religious' and 'secular' forces. * I am immensely indebted to the anonymous reviewers whose critical comments made it possible to put my arguments into proper perspective. This revised version of the paper was read by Professor Colin Heywood, Professor Fakrul Alam, and Dr Iftekhar Iqbal whose comments were also much appreciated. All limitations of course are mine.
CASTE DIMENSIONS IN THE ETHNOCENTRIC POLEMICS OF ASSAM
“There is a popular saying in the academic as well as non academic circles of Assam that ours is a state free from caste related prejudices and social tensions. However, reality is somewhat different. Though it is not lucid, in comparison to the society of mainland India one may rather find caste in a diluted and fluid form in Assam. Analysing the discourse of the present day ethnocentric polemics of Assam one may find that its genesis has deep rooted relation with the caste based social division of ancient Assam. Going through available supporting documents of different genre an onlooker may easily find that many of the present day’s unresolved problems has roots in the caste based social system of the pre-British Assam. Germinated in the seedbed of the pre-colonial caste-based Sanskritized social condition and nourished under the colonial rule, these problems became more complex and seemingly irresolvable in post-colonial Assam. It may be traced that roots of the present ethnic discontents in Assam lies in her structured social system since the pre-colonial era and in this very social-structure Caste played the role of a dominant centre. As every structure depends upon a centre and the latter always tend to exclude those lives in the margin, Caste based Sanskritized social system considered different ethnic communities of Assam as its worthy ‘Other’. With the advancement of time, interplay between the ‘Caste and Tribe’ had been freezed in a historical process and as a recourse to this process of the dominance and exclusion, in the post colonial Assam, one after another ethnic communities started to assert ethnocentric-identity on the basis of their ‘difference’ with the Caste based society. Available literary and other sources help one to find that in a historical process the Colonial rule and the colonial anthropology further stratified the structured society of pre-colonial Assam and contributed to the creation of an irresolvable condition in her post-colonial situation.
Ethnic Boundaries During And After The Assam Agitation Of 1979-1985
International Journal of Scientific & Technology Research, 2019
The Assam Agitation against alleged foreigners in Assam raised identity questions amongst the diverse ethnic groups living in the state. The Agitation showed dominance of a middle-class Assamese speaking group of people. The eulogy of ―mother Assam‖ brought a short-lived sense of unity amongst the people. The demand for Udayachal during the Agitation and Bodoland afterwards shows growing ethnic boundaries in the region. This paper is an attempt to find the roots of ethnicity based autonomy demands in the Assam Agitation. The Agitation, irrespective of the validity of its aspirations, reflected unparalleled unity of people. It also showed an ugly facet of communal clashes at the same time.
Partition in Bengal: Re-visiting the Caste Question, 1946-47
The essay introduces caste as a category for discussing the history of Partition of India, which until now has focused almost exclusively on the Hindus, Sikhs and the Muslims. The Dalit or the 'untouchables' of India are usually left out of this discussion, and whenever they are brought in, they are portrayed as either disinterested onlookers or accidental victims. On the contrary, as this essay will argue, the Dalit were deeply entangled in Partition politics, which threatened their natural habitat in eastern Bengal, where they had reclaimed land from marshes and forests, extended cultivation and set up human settlement. Their regional movement was gradually drawn into the broader subcontinental politics that led to Partition, and the movement as a result lost unity, autonomy and purpose. While one group of the Bengali Dalit leaders were opposed to Partition and believed that a Dalit–Muslim alliance was in the best interest of the Dalit, others got closer to Hindu nationalism and demanded Partition of Bengal. Many Dalit peasants were caught in this politics and became both victims and perpetrators of violence. The essay concludes that while the Dalit lacked power to influence the decision to partition, they nevertheless were forced to take positions within the political divide, which they did according to their own perceptions of caste interests and preferred political future of their physical space.
Kol, Coolie, Colonial Subject: A Hidden History of Caste and the Making of Modern Bengal
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Tanika Sarkar (eds.), Caste in Bengal: Histories of Hierarchy, Exclusion, and Resistance (Ranikhet: Permanent Black), 2022
A Hidden History of Caste and the Making of Modern Bengal uday chandra istorical anthropologists of modern India such as Bernard Cohn, Arjun Appadurai, and Nicholas Dirks have argued forcefully that caste, as a modern social institution, came to be revived and reproduced by the colonial state via its classificatory and enumerative policies. 1 Yet this colonialismcentred perspective, though useful in many senses, obscures the everyday socio-cultural and political-economic processes by which the colonised organised themselves under colonial overlordship. Insofar as caste is a system of organising labour on the basis of a hierarchical social logic, it is important to understand how distinctive "regional modernities" were built, quite literally, on the backs of labouring groups assigned the lowest ritual and socioeconomic status in these new regions. 2 This essay uncovers a "hidden" history of one such labouring group in nineteenth-century Bengal, who appear in the colonial archives as "Kols", despised in caste terms by the Hindu bhadralok yet categorised subsequently via ethnological accounts as "tribes". The 1 Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination", 314-40; Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Dirks, Castes of Mind. 2 Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal, ed., Regional Modernities.
Tribal Politics in Assam:1933–1947*
2021
The term "Plains Tribal" was first used by the colonial rulers in Assam to lump together a diverse set of people defined in semi-geographical and semi-sociological terms. It was taken up and crafted into an identity in the competitive politics of late colonial Assam by representatives of tribal groups who successfully welded this diverse set into a unified political and social category. This article traces the emergence of the "Plains Tribal" in the political map of Assam and shows how it came to be defined partly in opposition to other competing social categories and partly in terms of internal markers of identity.
Bhadralok Communalism in Bengal (1932-1942)
Dominant discourses on the phenomenon of Communalism resulting in the partition of the subcontinent have often talked of it in terms of ‘Muslim Separatism’. Investigations into Muslim separatist tendencies do not tell the whole story. Through this paper, I have tried to describe the process by which the upper-caste Bengali Hindu middle class, referred to as the bhadralok class – bhadralok simply means a respectable man in Bengali – increasingly veered towards a politics marked by communalism. The changing political context from the 1920s onwards, characterized by greater democratization of organized politics with the Non Cooperation Movement and later through the implementation of the Government of India Act 1935, the implementation of separate electorates through the Communal Award of 1932 which brought a Krishak Praja Party – Muslim League coalition into power in Bengal, had in a way jeopardized the prominence and power of the bhadralok. Thus, a shift towards communal politics seemed the most convenient option for them.
Identity, Indigeneity and Excluded Region: In the Quest for an Intellectual History of Modern Assam
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
If Indian intellectual history focussed on the nature of the colonial and post-colonial state, its interaction with everyday politics, its emerging society and operation of its economy, then how much did/ does North-East appear in this process of doing intellectual history? North-East history in general and its intellectual history in particular is an unpeopled place. In Indian social science literature, North-East history for the last seventy years has mostly revolved around separatist movements, insurgencies, borderland issue and trans-national migration. However, it seldom focussed on the intellectuals who have articulated the voice of this place and constructed an intellectual history of this region. This paper attempts to explore the intellectual history of Assam through understanding the life history of three key socio-political figures – Gopinath Bordoloi, Bishnu Prasad Rabha and Chandraprabha Saikiani. Their engagement at the turn of the twentieth century with ideas for the ...