Somnath Batabyal
Occidentally Yours
Being a Bengali in Assam: Then and Now!
By Somnath Batabyal
An early memory is of a classmate and me, walking back from school chattering away happily. He stops at a roadside shop to buy sweets. We are talking 19-to-the-dozen when a man tells us to stop. “Stop talking in Bengali”. We did.
Back home, however the questions flew. “Baba, why did he ask us to not speak in Bangla? Why are we so scared of the Assamese?” The general tenor of the answer was: the Assamese are bad people. My classmates, teachers, friends, were all of them bad?
They were not, of course. What the Assamese were was threatened. Scared enough to ask young children to stop talking in the language they felt was redrawing the geopolitics of the state, the same fear right-wing parties across the world exploit. It is the feeling that we will lose our sense of identity, our way of life and language.
Until Indian Independence and even after, Bengalis dominated the bureaucracy in the state. Though Assamese had replaced Bengali as the state’s official language, the latter remained pervasive in the fields of literature and arts and disproportionate in the government services.
The Assamese agitations that began in the 1980s were sparked off by the influx of Bengali speaking migrants, from across the national borders and from the neighbouring West Bengal. It was seen by the Assamese as an attempt to change the demography of the state. In search of a slightly better life, Bangladeshi migrant workers were pouring in through the porous borders of the state, sharing the already scant resources and adding to the paranoia of the Assamese. Bengalis from West Bengal who did not have to cross national borders, but perhaps borders of the mind, were clubbed together as “illegal migrants”. My family and I were illegal in our own country.
Xenophobia was awakened during the agitations and a silent, somewhat placid people reacted virulently; a sleepy land exploded in violent catharsis. Thousands were killed, the para-military forces were brought in, men vanished, women were raped and a generation grew up brutalised.
Atrocities are not new in our democracy but what was perhaps unique in the case of Assam is that not only was it politically ignored by an apathetic state, it was also geographically remote and badly connected. In the 80s, getting to the region from other parts of the country was a nightmare, involving multiple train changes and only one functioning airport in Guwahati. The arguments of multiculturalism, the fact that language prospers when in contact with others, are difficult to make to people who were landlocked and isolated.
Which one shall I wear?
Growing up in Guwahati — the gateway to Assam — was not your usual small town experience. Yes, we made up our games, played in the streets: football with a makeshift bundle of newspapers and cricket with a bat fashioned from odd bits of wood. But we also played other games, more violent ones that we invented from the spaces and situations around us. Boys and girls played at the two communities, the Bengalis and Assamese and we fought each other. We simulated staying up all night to guard our streets, like our elders. And like them the Bengalis were always humiliated in our games. Instinctively therefore, each of us wanted to be Assamese. The Assamese, in our limited childhood geography were the powerful.
As we grew into adolescence, our neighbourhood and everything around us changed. The streets which had been largely desolate were now populated by military men in their olive green attire, their brusqueness and their own fears and loneliness. I saw the once powerful Assamese of my childhood mind questioned and threatened, humiliated and beaten, in their own land. Dragged out of their homes, every young man was labelled a potential enemy of the state. This great multi-lingual nation of ours was going to elicit loyalty, beating it out if necessary, from its citizens.
A few months back, 20 years after the agitations, I returned to Guwahati. Liberalisation, a sudden influx of capital, media technology and the forces of globalisation have all pushed open this once remote place. The children of today are less bothered about identity politics and more concerned with their MBA degrees. The urban Assamese are no longer bothered about the languages spoken on their land as long as their children speak English. Assamese however, as many other languages of this country, still remains marginalised.
If history tells us anything, future generations, once the euphoria of prosperity is over, will come back to identity politics. Hopefully, the government would have learnt from history and will listen well.
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Somnath Batabyal is Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. A former journalist, he is interested in news production practices in Indian media. His book, Making News: Behind the Scenes at Star News and Star Ananda, was published recently by Routledge. When not following such lofty pursuits, he dabbles in fiction and is experimenting with graphic novels.
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This column appears in Sunday Guardian as Nomad Notes and can be read here