2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review B 3(1) Assam: Snapshots from History The question of whose presence is legitimate in the State of Assam has been a contested one since the 19" Century. A closer look entails deconstructing the evolution of the issue across multiple historical stages. 1 Colonial Era As an outcome of colonial socio-economic policies, the Assam region began to bear witness to waves of immigration in the 19 Century.°2 Assam bordered the Bengal province and as a part of new administrative changes introduced by the British, Hindu Bengali elites were brought into the newly annexed state to carry out administrative tasks.”*? Bengali was designated as the official language in the region, and the native Assamese language was projected as being a mere dialect of Bengali. ?* These changes led to resentment among the local population, which was directed towards the hegemonic Bengali population.” The discovery of tea and oil in the region led to the flow of migratory populations to work on tea gardens and oil fields. ‘The stout and hardy Muslim cultivators of East Bengal were considered to be the most eligible for the job’, Bodhi Sattwa Kar writes.”° Apart from the elite capture of bureaucratic positions, in the 1900s there was also an influx of Muslims who came in from the East Bengal region, who cleared and settled forest lands for cultivation.?” CS Mullan, the superintendent of the census operations in 1931, used the term ‘invasion’ to describe the migration of Muslim peasants to Assam, and, in florid prose, pronounced a dire verdict — ‘Wheresoever the carcases, there will the vultures be gathered together — where there is waste land thither flock the Mymensinghias’ .”8 Mymensinghias is a term used to denote Muslims from East Bengal. This was beginning of the rise of regionalist sentiments among the indigenous population, a sentiment that 1s popularly captured by the phrase ‘Jatiotabaad’. Baruah uses the term ‘sub-nationalism’ to define the political scenario of Assam during that time by denoting that ‘Assamese micro-nationalism began in the middle of the nineteenth century as an assertion of the autonomy and distinctiveness of Assamese language and culture against the British colonial view of Assam as a periphery of Bengal’.”’ This project of sub-nationalism took seed and continues to influence political thought in the state to this date. 92 93 See, eg, Chetna Sharma, ‘Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016: Continuities and Contestations with Special Reference to Politics in Assam, India’ (2019) 20(4) Asian Ethnicity 522, 529. ibid. 94 Navine Murshid, ‘Assam and the Foreigner Within’ (2016) 56(3) Asian Survey 581, 590. °6 Bodhi Sattwa Kar, ‘British Colonial Policy of Immigration in Assam (1826-1910) 1(1) Pratidhwani-A Journal of Humanities and Social Science 219. > 97 98 °9 ibid. (2012) Sharma (n 92) 529. Ahmed (n 75) 61-2. Sanjib Baruah ‘““Ethnic” Conflict as a State-Society Struggle: The Poetics and Politics of Assamese Micro-Nationalism’ (1994) 28(3) Modern Asian Studies 649, 654. 246