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FRAGMENTED MEMORIES
Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India
By YASMIN SAIKIA Duke University Press
Copyright © 2004 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3425-5
Chapter One
Identification in India
At midnight August 15, 1947, the nation-state of India was born. The inaugural moment of India was marked by extreme violence, the memories of which are indelibly etched in the psyche of the people who lived through the horrific experiences of independence and partition. The new nation-state of India, officially declared as a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic consisted of sixteen states and nine union territories (at present it consists of twenty-eight states and seven union territories). "Secular nationalism and centralism," in the words of Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, were the underlining principles of independent India (1999, 202). Centralism, however, was immediately challenged by regional states, and the relationship between region and center became strained in the subsequent decades. Problems between Delhi and Assam, the principal state of the northeast, emerged quickly. The contestation between center and state was an anticipated problem. Congress stalwart Sardar Ballabhai Patel warned Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru about the northeast in particular when he stated that "the undefined state of the frontier and the existence on our side of apopulation with affinities to Tibetans or Chinese has all the elements of potential trouble between China and ourselves.... The contact of these areas of north-east with us is by no means close and intimate. The people ... have no established loyalty and devotion to India ... European missionaries and other visitors had been in touch with them, but their influence was, in no way, friendly to India or Indians" (cited in Kaul 1967, 220-22).
In the newly created political union of India, the northeast was not the only region that did not seem to fit. Glaring differences between the various communities that constituted the Indian populace were more visible than the similarities, and there was no glue to bind them together. In fact, challenges to the national state emerged immediately after independence. In the northeast many groups of Nagas revolted against their inclusion in India, and in the north the Kashmiris asserted their right to autonomy. In south India, in the early 1960s, the Tamil movement emerged and challenged the cultural and political hegemony of north India. The demand for Khalistan in Punjab in the 1980s marked the rising tide of secessionist movements. Many more regional and local nationalist movements emerged in different pockets of India and challenged the hegemony of Delhi. In 1979 in Assam the All Assam Students Union launched an identity movement demanding the deportation of all immigrants from Assam to safeguard Assamese identity. The Assamese identity movement led the way for the emergence of new and parochial movements in the region. These include the Bodoland movement, which emerged in 1987 to demand a separate autonomous state within Assam; the movement launched in 1989 by the United Liberation Front of Assam to secede Assam from India; and the Tai-Ahom movement for the separation of identity of the Assamese and the Indians. Recently, groups of Dimasa and Karbi in Assam have also launched their own identity movements.
Scholars of Indian history and politics categorize under the generic label "subnational" these movements as well as many more that are ongoing in India (Mitra and Lewis 1996; S. Baruah 1999). The concept of subnationalism is highly problematic when applied to the constructed nation-state of India; the term "local" may more accurately describe these regional movements. By describing them as local, however, I do not mean that they are discourses that are isolated and bounded to a limited territory. Rather, I use the term local to distinguish the identity movements from the national movement to homogenize Indian identity. The national movement, as is generally understood, is linked to capital, the West, and, at present, to the discourse of globalization. Local movements, on the other hand, attempt to override the power of the national. They seek to create a "different" sense of collectivity based on specific constructs that are emotional, sentimental discourses that give meaning to locality and enable the construction of a "homeland" as a different space from the homeland of "others."
In his 1882 lecture "What Is a Nation?" Ernest Renan argued that a nation is founded on the site of suffering, for "to have suffered together ... unites more strongly than common rejoicing" (1999 [1882], 153). Suffering creates cohesiveness and brings disparate groups together. In other words, the memories of loss can provide a site for people to convene as a nation. The local nationalist movements in India claim that the communities they represent are sufferers within the nation-state. They have been marginalized economically and politically, peripheralized socially and culturally, and their narratives are erased from the annals of national history. They are thus reduced to the subjects of the powerful, moneyed interest groups that control the nation, and the state has failed to protect their rights. They are the victims of the national enterprise. The leaders believe local movements will enable them to overcome erasure from national history and empower their communities politically and culturally to transform memories into action. Hence, although the local nationalist movements ongoing in India have different agendas, strategies, and goals, their common project is to undermine the national center. In turn, they are creating new labels to identify with and they are demanding benefits that are presently denied. Ultimately, what these movements seek to accomplish is to democratize the national site of power and politics and to be able to practice citizenship based on rights and choice. The issues of local nationalist quests in India are multiple. Because I am mainly concerned with the issues and movements in Assam, in this chapter I will focus on the politics of identity in postcolonial Assam in order to understand the contemporary manifestations of a Tai-Ahom history in process.
Identity politics in Assam are framed within larger questions of Indian national identity and politics. Questions such as what is Indian identity and whose history constitutes national history in India are crucial to understanding the struggles ongoing in Assam. In this chapter I first investigate the historical processes and actors that constructed the concepts of India/n to show that national political actors forged a unity among the disparate groups and communities by invoking categories and symbols acquired mainly from the colonial period. I undertake an investigative approach for analysis to show that in postindependent India the constructed label of Indian was made accessible to a select group of north Indian citizens who became the primary members of the nation-state while others were reduced to different levels of secondary citizenship. Built into the system of privileges and denial were the politics of religion and location that were deployed to include and exclude certain groups of people.
Later in this chapter I document the political processes that have taken place in twentieth-century Assam in order to highlight the strategies and goals of the Assamese and the Tai-Ahom identity movements. First, I outline the Assamese identity movement, which used language politics to contest Indian identity. I then outline the Tai-Ahom movement, which has challenged the concepts of both Assamese and Indian in Upper Assam by using a memory of connections to regions outside India, particularly Upper Burma and Thailand. I present the Assamese and the Tai-Ahom identity movements as strategies used for bargaining and demanding citizenship rights that continue to be denied to most people in Assam. In this sense, both of the movements are politics of opposition to the homogenization of identity that the label of Indian seeks to establish. By beginning the historical narrative of identity in the twentieth century, I highlight how groups of people create their collective identities and emphasize the role of modern memories and historical constructions in the project of identity politics. The labels Indian, Assamese, and Tai-Ahom, as well as several others under construction in Assam, are predicated on creating collective memories and a sense of belonging that are mobilized and crystallized in a specific moment of history and thus lead to different outcomes.
NARRATIVIZING NATION: THE CONSTRUCTION OF INDIA/N
The term India/n was first created by the Persians in the fifth century B.C. Following the Persians the Greeks and the Arabs used the label for the multiplex, polyglot communities of the subcontinent with whom they entered into practical and commercial interactions. They called these peoples Hindu/Indica after the Sindhu/Indus river. According to Andre Wink, the Arabs first demarcated and defined the area "as a civilization, set it apart and drew its boundaries.... In a political-geographical sense, 'India' or Al-Hind ... was an Arab or Muslim conception" (1990, 5). Toward the end of the thirteenth century, the Arab term "Hind" was Persianized into Hindustan, meaning Hindu Land. It is essential to remember here that the name Hindu at this time did not identify a religious community but referred mainly to geography. The influence and adaptation of Persian language and culture is intimately connected with the spread of Muslim political power into the subcontinent.
In the eighth century a group of Arab Muslims established a commercial and political kingdom in Sind in the northwest frontier. Over time, commercial interaction culminated in conquest, and in the thirteenth century the Delhi sultanate was established. In north India the Muslims, like their Hindu counterparts, were various. In the Indian texts we come across several names for Muslims. Sometimes they are referred to by the ethnic term Turuska (Turks) because several groups of the conquerors hailed from different Turkic backgrounds. Local people also referred to them as Yavanas, a geographic appellation that was also used for Greeks. In many Sanskrit texts they are referred to by the cultural epithet mleccha. Notwithstanding these markers of identification, everyone within the overarching sultanate was referred to as Hindustani, meaning inhabitants of Hindustan. Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty in 1526, noted in his memoir that the culture of sixteenth century "India" was not exclusively Hindu or Muslim, it was Hindustani (Babur 1996 [1483-1530]). The bond of connection between the diverse Hindustanis was a spoken language also referred to by the name Hindustani. This language emerged from the hybrid Urdu language, a language that scholars believe to have developed in the area of Delhi in military camps and in the Sufi establishments of Nizamuddin and Hindawi. This language had its roots in the local indigenous dialects of the Ganges plains.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the British colonial administration claimed the scepter and became India's rulers. The colonial administration's obsession with fixing the boundaries of people and territory led to the creation of new labels. The decennial census, started in 1871, organized the diverse people into a hierarchy of castes and tribes. Hindustanis were transformed into many different demarcated societies and were labeled Indian by the British. Further in the tenure of Lord Ripon (1880-1884), as Metcalf and Metcalf (2002, 117) have shown, the community called Indian was divided into "majority" and "minority" groups based on their religion, where Hindus became the majority group of Indians and Muslims the minority. However, administrative codification failed to give texture to the label Indian. An enterprise of history writing was undertaken by the colonial British administration to investigate and formulate a narrative and to make Indians a historical subject. Native elites from both the Hindu and Muslim communities were interlocutors in the colonial enterprise.
In 1826, the colonial administrator James Mill published the first modern narrative of Indian history, History of British India. Later works, including Mounstuart Elphinstone's The History of India: The Hindu and Mohammedan Periods (1872) and Vincent Arthur Smith's The Early History of India from 600 B.C. to the Mohammedan Conquest (1878), created a linear, periodized narrative. Colonial historians told a story of India in a chain of episodes in which one event led to another and culminated in the entry of the British. The periodized history made different groups owners of fragmented segments of the past. In the colonial depiction of history, which was based on ontological, ethical, political, cultural, and geographical schema, "ancient" India was made into Hindu history and deemed more "Indian" than that of others. The period following the ancient era was called "Medieval India" and was converted into a period of Muslim occupation. Between these two extreme classifications of "Hindu" and "Muslim" Indians, colonial scholars located a variety of people they saw as Indianized /Indianizable. These peoples were identified as the "indigenous," "tribal" people spread throughout the subcontinent with high concentrations at the frontiers, and with local systems of administration and communities. Nineteenth-century colonial practices and administrators created for the land and people of India a metahistory of identity, and over time the concept of "India" underwent more radical changes.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the political fervor against colonialism and a newfound consciousness of Indian identity motivated the several newly identified and hierarchical caste communities to organize themselves. They formed sabhas (organizations) and samitis (associations). Initially these sabhas served as sites for religious and social discourses. The Brahmo Samaj founded by Ram Mohan Roy; the Poona Sarvajnik Sabha founded by Mahdev Ranade; the Servants of India Society founded by Gokhale; the Arya Samaj founded by Dayanand Saraswati; the Ramkrishna Mission led by Vivekananda, and others became centers of Hindu reform and revival. Among the Muslims, the Deoband movement emphasized the role of religion and reform in defining community and identity in nineteenth-century India. Supported by the Western-educated Indians, some of these sabhas became centers for political mobilization against British colonialism and thus created a space for presenting new visions of Indian identity.
The politics of late-nineteenth-century India were determinedly anti-colonial. The anticolonialist leaders rejected the British representation of India as a divided land and people and, in turn, forged an imagination of a national unity. Hindu and Muslim were now represented as a composite community that bore little resemblance to the layer cake of British historians. The nationalists emphasized the "blended past" of Indians; but to construct Indian they had to invoke colonial paradigms. One such paradigm that persisted was the categories of Hindu and Muslim communities. Religion became an important tool for group identity and for imagining community in late-nineteenth-century India. Also, an appeal to Hinduness was expedient for the nationalists to bring various caste groups together and thus create some semblance of unity, which they thought could not be achieved otherwise. Hence, while rejecting the colonial construction of "Hindu" and "Muslim" history, the nationalists had to lean on the cultural commonality forged by "popular Hinduism" and generate a vocabulary of resistance to arouse the masses against the colonial regime (Khilnani 1998; Guha 1997). Some of the anticolonialist Hindu leaders such as Bankim Chandra in Bengal, Bal Gangadhar Tilak in Maharastra, Lala Rajpat Rai in the Punjab, and even Gandhi, the undisputed leader of the Indian National Congress (INC), embraced a Hindu religious vocabulary as a weapon of resistance against colonialism.
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