Azadi - Arundhati Roy

which they foolishly believe the BJP has found a lasting solution. Surely, however, as migrants themselves, their
understanding of what is happening in Assam could be more nuanced. Or maybe it’s too much to ask of those who,
in a world riven by refugee and migrant crises, are the most fortunate of migrants. Many of those in the Houston
stadium, like people with an extra holiday home, probably hold US citizenship as well as Overseas Citizenship of
India certificates.
The “Howdy, Modi!” event marked the twenty-second day since almost two million people in Assam found their
names missing from the National Register of Citizens.
Like Kashmir, Assam is a border state with a history of multiple sovereignties, with centuries of migration, wars,
invasion, continuously shifting borders, British colonialism, and more than seventy years of electoral democracy that
has only deepened the fault lines in a dangerously combustible society.
That an exercise like the NRC even took place has to do with Assam’s very particular cultural history. Assam
was among the territories ceded to the British by the Burmese in the peace treaty signed after the First Anglo-
Burmese War in 1826. At the time, it was a densely forested, scantily populated province, home to hundreds of
communities—among them Bodos, Cachar, Mishing, Lalung, Ahomiya Hindus, and Ahomiya Muslims—each with
its own language or speech practice, each with an organic, though often undocumented, relationship to the land. Like
a microcosm of India, Assam has always been a collection of minorities jockeying to make alliances in order to
manufacture a majority—ethnic as well as linguistic. Anything that altered or threatened the prevailing balance
became a potential catalyst for violence.
The seeds for just such an alteration were sowed in 1837, when the British, the new masters of Assam, made
Bengali the official language of the province. It meant that almost all administrative and government jobs were taken
by an educated, Hindu, Bengali-speaking elite. Although the policy was reversed in the early 1870s, and Assamese
was given official status along with Bengali, it shifted the balance of power in serious ways and marked the
beginning of what has become an almost two-century-long antagonism between speakers of Assamese and Bengali.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the British discovered that the climate and soil of the region were
conducive to tea cultivation. Local people were unwilling to work as serfs in the tea gardens, so a large population
of indigenous tribespeople were transported from central India. They were no different from the shiploads of
indentured laborers the British transported to their colonies all over the world. Today, the plantation workers in
Assam make up 15 to 20 percent of the state’s population. But unlike, say, the Indian-origin population in South
Africa, in India, shamefully, these workers are looked down upon by local people, and continue to live on the
plantations, at the mercy of plantation owners and earning slave wages.
By the late 1890s, as the tea industry grew and as the plains of neighboring East Bengal reached the limits of their
cultivation potential, the British encouraged Bengali Muslim peasants— masters of the art of farming on the rich,
silty, riverine plains and shifting islands of the Brahmaputra, known as chars —to migrate to Assam. To the British,
the forests and plains of Assam were, if not terra nullius, then terra almost -nullius. They hardly registered the
presence of Assam’s many tribes, and freely allocated what were tribal commons to “productive” peasants whose
produce would contribute to British revenue collection. The migrants came in the thousands, felled forests and
turned marshes into farmland, where they cultivated food as well as jute. By 1930, migration had drastically
changed both the economy and the demography of Assam.
At first, the migrants were welcomed by Assamese nationalist groups, but soon tensions arose—ethnic, religious,
and linguistic. They were temporarily mitigated when, in the 1941 census, as a gesture of solidarity with their new
homeland, the entire population of Bengali-speaking Muslims—whose local dialects are together known as the Miya
language—designated Assamese as their mother tongue, thereby ensuring that it retained the status of an official
language. Even today, Miya dialects are written in the Assamese script.
Over the years, the borders of Assam were redrawn continuously, almost dizzyingly. When the British partitioned
Bengal in 1905, they attached the province of Assam to Muslim-majority East Bengal, with Dhaka as its capital.
Suddenly, what was a migrant population in Assam was no longer migrant, but part of a majority. Six years later,
when Bengal was reunified and Assam became a province of its own, its Bengali population became migrants once
again. After the 1947 Partition, when East Bengal became part of Pakistan, the Bengal-origin Muslim settlers in
Assam chose to stay on. But Partition also led to a massive influx of Bengali refugees into Assam, Hindus as well as
Muslims. This was followed in 1971 by yet another incursion of refugees fleeing from the Pakistan Army’s
genocidal attack on East Pakistan and the liberation war that birthed the new nation of Bangladesh, which together
took millions of lives.
So, Assam was a part of East Bengal, and then it wasn’t. East Bengal became East Pakistan and East Pakistan
became Bangladesh. Countries changed, flags changed, anthems changed. Cities grew, forests were felled, marshes
were reclaimed, tribal commons swallowed by modern “development.” And the fissures between people grew old