Burden of History: Assam and the Partition—Unresolved Issues

Abstract

On April 26, 1947, less than four months before the partition of British colonial India into two separate states, Mohammed Ali Jinnah—the leader of the Muslim League and the founder of Pakistan—wrote a note to Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten on the future status of the frontier province of Assam (92). It reiterated his organization’s position that Assam was effectively a Muslim majority province that should become part of Pakistan, because two large segments of the population— those categorized as tribal and the workers in the tea plantations and their descendants—could not be counted as Hindus. This claim was, of course, intensely contested, both politically and ideologically. In the Assam of the 1940s, the possibility that the province could become a part of Pakistan generated feelings of fear, uncertainty, and hope and was a source of significant political tension. Beginning in the early twentieth century, British colonial policies encouraged migrants from densely populated deltaic eastern Bengal to settle and reclaim the low-lying areas of the floodplains of the Brahmaputra River in Assam and to cultivate raw jute, in order to meet demands from Bengal’s jute industry. Migrants began coming on their own to this relatively sparsely populated region after social networks connected the two regions. However, they soon began facing opposition from locals, and colonial policies had to restrict migrant settlements. Still, settling more Muslim eastern Bengal peasants in Assam became a part of the Muslim League’s campaign for Pakistan, whereas the provincial Congress Party vigorously opposed these policies (74-78). Following the partition, except for the Bengali-speaking and Muslimmajority populous district of Sylhet, the rest of Assam remained a part of India. Despite the insertion of an international border, however, the flow of migrants from what became East Pakistan and, subsequently, Bangladesh continued. That the partition generated a massive flow of Hindus to India and of Muslims to Pakistan is well known. What is less well known is that poor Muslim peasants also continued to cross the border to certain parts of India. Colonial Assam roughly corresponds with the region now called Northeast India, though Assam remains a key state. The continuities between “preand post-Partition politics” (1) are the focus of this book by Udayon Misra, a former professor of literature and wellknown public intellectual of Assam. The issues of “land, immigration, identity, and language,” which were central to the politics of Assam in the 1940s, writes Misra, “continue to occupy major public space seventy years after the Partition and Independence” (ix–x). For many, “while the Partition put an end to the fear of Assam and the northeastern region being included in Pakistan, it now raised the fear of illegal infiltration from the newly created East Pakistan and, from the 1970s, Bangladesh” (63). Two chapters on the “the turbulent forties” and a chapter on the politics surrounding the question of Sylhet constitute the substantive core of the book. The concluding chapter addresses the partition’s “unresolved issues” (142). Seven key documents and a useful timeline on immigration into Assam from 1900 to 1950 are included as appendices. The Sylhet issue is important in this context because, although the bulk of the district became a part of Pakistan and Bangladesh, a small area remained a part of Assam, and a large number of Hindus from the rest of Sylhet migrated to this area. A fundamentally different set of memories of the partition prevails among Hindu Bengalis in this part of Assam. There are books and articles by historians on the politics of British colonial Assam. Misra draws on this scholarship. Journal articles by this reviewer and others deal with some of the same issues raised by Misra. Yet his book is exceptionally useful and timely because of its singular focus on the continuities between preand postpartition politics. At the time of this writing, Indian newspaper headlines are dominated by the news of a vast bureaucratic exercise known as the updating of the National Register of Citizens in Assam. There is concern that, at the end of it, millions of people might lose their status as Indian citizens. The issue has drawn the attention of the international human rights community, but remarkable historical illiteracy marks public discussions of this issue. Misra’s book is a salutary reminder that no solution to this crisis is possible without coming to terms with history.