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...