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Assam, one of the states of North Eastern part of India, lies between
twenty-fourth and twenty-eighth degrees of north latitudes and eighty-
ninth and ninety-sixth degrees of east latitude. Criss-crossed with
hills and dales, rivers and rivulets, the state is surrounded by Bhutan
and Arunachal Pradesh in the north, Nagaland, Manipur and part of
Arunachal Pradesh on the east, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya and Bangladesh
on the South and West Bengal on the West. Spreading over an area of
78,438 sq. km. which constitute 2.39 per cent of the total land area
of India and with a total of 26,655,528 souls according to 2001 census,
the state is a complex mosaic of multicultural, multilingual and multiracial
mix of population. Although geography has imposed a formidable barrier on her contact with the rest of the world, people of diverse ethnic and cultural background entered into this region in different successive waves at various times through the passes and the river routes. History says that the region, known as Pragjyotishpur or Kamrupa in the earlier epic period, was ruled by several dynasties viz, the Varman (436-648 A.D.), Sala Stambha (664-780 A.D.) Pralambha (800-1000 A.D) and Pala (1000-1048 A.D.) dynasties (Chatterjee, 1951:91). The local dynasties, however, had contact with the Hindu states of India. In the first half of seventh century, Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang came to India. When he visited the Nalanda Monastery in Magadha, or South Bihar to study “the profound law of Buddha”, Kumar Bhaskar Varman, the then king of Kamrupa, invited him to his capital. After his visit Hiuen Tsang described the land and people of Assam with all praise. He wrote: “The present king belongs to the old line of Narayan Deb. He is the Brahman Caste. His name is Bhaskara Varman, his title, Kumar. From the time that his family seized the land and assumed the Government, there have elapsed a thousand generations. The king is fond of learning and the people are so likewise in imitation on him. Men of high talent from distant regions, seeking after office visit his dominions”. (Gait, 1997:23) By the twelfth century local kings of the Brahmaputra valley who were of Mongoloid origin became Hindus. To quote Gait (1997:30) : “It is claimed by the scribes of this dynasty that they were descended from Narak and Bhagadatta, but in the copper plate inscriptions of the Pala kings, who in their turn put forward the same claim, they are referred to as Mlechchas, or non-Hindus. The explanation doubtless is that both dynasties were of aboriginal origin and that, when they raise to power, they were converted to Hinduism and fitted out with a noble ancestry by the Brahmans, who have always been adepts in procuring for themselves protection, favour and power by inducing the aboriginal chiefs to enter the fold of Hinduism on the fiction that they are descended from some god of the Hindu pantheon or some potentate in Hindu Mythology. In more recent times the Rajas of Rani and Dimarua have in this way been connected with the dynasty of Bhagadatta, and the Koch, Kachari and Manipuri Rajas have also been provided by their priests with divine or a heroic lineage”. In the caste-based Hindu social order, thus emerged, the Mongoloid rulers such as the Koch kings in the lower Assam region made a significant contribution in forming the Assamese Hindu society (Bhagabati, 1992). In the thirteen century the Ahoms, a Shan tribe of upper Burma migrated to Assam and ruled it for nearly 600 years from 1228 to 1826 A.D. The Ahoms have not only managed to forget their language and have accepted Assamese as their mother tongue, but have fully integrated into the Hindu socio-economic order (Chatterjee, 1970:10). There are other local Mongoloid groups like the Sonowal Kachari, the Chutia, and the Pati-Rabha who have also accepted Assamese as their mother tongue. At the same time the Bodo Kachari, the Rabha, the Mishing, the Deori, the Karbi, the Tiwa, the Dimasa, the Itonia, the Phakial, the Turung, the Khampti and many others speak their own language. (Goswami, 1992). Assam came into contact with the Muslims for the first time in the early part of thirteenth century when Muhammad Bin Bakhtiyar Khiliji, a Muslim General of Kutubuddin led a Turkish army to this region. This was followed by several Muslim invasions and each time a few Muslim soldiers preferred to stay in Assam instead of going back with their defeated commanders. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Azan Fakir, a Muslims saint came to Assam who promoted and stabilized Islam in Assam. The Ahom monarchy started declining from the middle of the eighteenth century. “The throne was occupied by a number of weak but unscrupulous rulers whose only ambition was the preservation of their own lives and power regardless of the interests of the state. The court became hot-bed of intrigues and conspiracies and this was followed by political assassinations and insurrections”. Barpujari, 1999:2) Taking advantage of the situation, the Burmese entered Assam in 1819 and unleashed a region of terror leading to destabilization of the entire social system. This Burmese conflict invited the British East India Company to Assam. The British declared a war against the Burmese in 1825 and at the Treaty of Yandabo, 1826 the Burmese king surrendered the claim over Assam. Thus, British took charge of lower Assam region in 1828 and finally extended its territory to upper Assam region in 1838. Eventually, Assam for the first time became the part of British India. During the colonial regime different communities with their distinctive heritage of language and culture came to Assam. They brought a lot of Bengalis as teachers and for different administrative work. There was further flow of Bengali people to Assam with the coming of Railway in 1881. With the beginning of tea plantation, the Britishers recruited tribesmen from Bihar, Bengal, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Tamilnadu and Uttar Pradesh – under a system of contract labourer. These migrants were very much heterogeneous in terms of language and culture. At present, they constitute an important social stratum in Assam (Bhagabati, 1992). Another group of people who came to Assam during the British period was the Nepalese who were engaged in army and as graziers. (Hussain, 1989:29). The Marwaris from Rajasthan also came to Assam during this period as traders. It was during the British period that the state of Assam was merged with East Bengal in 1905. The province so formed was named as East Bengal and Assam with its capital at Dacca. In 1911 the pre-merger position was restored and Shillong again became the capital of Assam. During 1905 and 1911 people from East Bengal districts (mostly Muslim population of the lower strata) migrated to Assam quite confidently. No one could question their legal status as it was the inter district migration (De, 2005: 13-14). Since then Assam is receiving flow of migrants from the East Bengal districts (now Bangladesh). Thus, people of diverse ethnic and cultural affiliations migrated to Assam during the British period. Some of the migrant populations got fully assimilated with the local inhabitants while others tried to preserve their own identity and still others tried to impose their own language and culture on the local people. To quote Goswami, 1993: “I perceive it to be a strong force in generating a vital but cohesive strength for assimilation, identification and final merger with the dominant linguistic group. It emerged and became identifiable under the dominant Ahom rulers, who, significantly, instead of imposing their tongue of culture on their subjects, adopted the language and culture of the local inhabitants, viz., the collective group of Assamese speaking inhabitants. This is an exemplary instance of voluntary assimilation with the socio-cultural aspirations of the majority groups of the subject population. The tribal principalities of the Bodo, the Chutia, the Barahi, the Asura, the Koch etc., likewise voluntarily assimilated themselves with their subject population. Relation between the rulers and the ruled, between the protector and the protected became so merged that their interests got identified into one. This spontaneous identification led to the emergence of the nationality which embraces numerous ethnocultural groups, some of whom lost their ancestral identity altogether. In this context, it is worthwhile to state that a liberal attitude and all embracing policy of the great religious preacher, Shri Sankardev and other Vaisnavite socioritual reformers played no mean part in assimilating and absorbing the tribal groups into the fold of the Satra System of Assam. The neophyte entrants attracted and encouraged their cognate groups to follow their suit overwhelmingly accepting the neo-Vaishnavism which preached and practiced equality for all the disciples irrespective of caste or class. It suited the tribal groups which could as well retain their essential cultural traditions including animistic faith. Shri Sankardev’s religious preachings had a universal appeal in as much as neo-Vaishnavism emphasized upon equality of all human beings. At the same time the sacerdotal complexities in rituals were studiously avoided to suit the tribal psychology. What is more, his teachings through local language reached the masses without an intermediary exploitative priestly group”. (Goswami, 1992). The state, therefore, can be called a melting pot where people of cultures of diverse origin coexisted, commingled and lived cheek by jowl. However, due to long pervading perception of deprivation on the part of the mainland population, the state has experienced intercommunity distrust in the post independence period resulting in intermittent clashes and violent situations. While the long standing issues pertaining to interethnic divide are being attended to in varying degrees through political intervention, not much attention is being paid to the fragile relation of mainland people of Assam with the communities from other parts of the country who have settled here over a long period of time and others who frequent this land for varying interests-occupational and commercial. The last couple of decades have witnessed sustained violence by extremist groups against the Indian nationals all over the state of Assam. While the people of Assam have unequivocally condemned the secessionist advocacy by the violent groups, opinion leaders and the media tend to reflect a pattern of deep frustration of the people of Assam for not receiving their due despite providing tremendous amount of natural resources to the country. While the communities from the rest of the country like the Marwari, Bengali, Bihari and other North Indian and South Indian populations are contributing their own ways for the betterment of the economy of the state, there seems to be a perception of not enough being done by these communities for the interest of the state. In turn, there appears to be a perception on the part of other communities about the mainland Assamese being chauvinistic and unkind towards them. |
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