Udayon Misra. Burden of History: Assam and the Partition - Unresolved Issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 264 pp. $45.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-947836-1.
Reviewed by Anwesha Sengupta (Institute of Development Studies Kolkata)
Published on H-Nationalism (June, 2019)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel (Ruhr University Bochum)
The otherwise vast scholarship on British India’s Partition has very little to say about India’s Northeast. Udayon Misra needs to be congratulated for drawing our attention to the intricacies of Partition in this region. His focus is on Assam. Between four chapters and an introduction, Misra discusses how the complex political developments unfolded in Assam in the 1940s and “how the shadow of Partition continues to fall over the society and politics of Assam” (p. 2). Who is an Assamese and who is an “illegal immigrant” has been a burning question in Assam politics since the early twentieth century. This is the question around which Misra organizes his narrative.
The two chapters that follow the introduction focus on the “critical forties”—a decade that witnessed intensification of conflicts around land and immigration in Assam, frequent changes in the provincial ministry, the rise of Congress in this region, and the strengthening of the demand for a separate Muslim homeland (p. 39). The main narrative that emerges from these two chapters is that the Muslim League in Assam, under the leadership of Syed Muhammad Saadulla and Maulana Bhasani, encouraged the immigration of Bengali Muslims from eastern Bengal to Assam through policies and politics. Often justified in the name of economic needs, such initiatives threatened the rights and interests of the indigenous population. As the demand for a separate Muslim homeland gained currency from 1940, the presence of an increasing number of Muslims in the province also meant that Assam could become a part of Pakistan. In this context, the Assam Congress emerged as the champion of indigenous interests, even if that meant conflict with the All India Congress Committee on certain occasions. For example, when in August 1946 the Cabinet Mission proposed to group the provinces into three clusters with autonomy on every account except for defense, foreign affairs, and communication, the Assam Congress led by Gopinath Bardoloi put up a fight as Assam was tagged with Bengal in this scheme. According to Misra, this resistance from Assam forced the central leadership of the Congress to reject the plan.
The next chapter focuses on Sylhet, a district that had moved back and forth between Assam and Bengal during the colonial period and finally became a part of East Pakistan in 1947, after a closely contested referendum. Misra outlines the positions of the various population groups from Sylhet and Assam regarding this referendum. The Bengali Hindus of Sylhet had always wanted to be a part of Bengal and their Muslim counterparts preferred to remain in Assam. But their positions changed during the referendum as religion became more important than language. The Assamese middle class and the Assam Congress had never wanted the Bengali-dominated Sylhet as a part of their province. Though they were in no way instrumental in making Sylhet a part of East Pakistan, they did not regret the results of the referendum either. Misra also touches on the post-Partition movement for separate statehood in Cachar.
The final chapter primarily studies the issue of “illegal immigration” in Assam in more recent times. Writing at a time when the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was being updated in Assam, Misra points out that there is no consensus about what should be the “cut-off year” for determining who is a citizen and who is a foreigner. While land remains central to this insider/outsider dispute, language and religion are also great fault lines in contemporary Assam politics.
As I was reading Misra, around four million people in Assam were trying desperately to prove their Indian citizenship. The draft NRC, which was published on July 30, 2018, excluded these people from the list. Thus they became potential illegal immigrants in the eyes of the state, people who could be deported unless they provided a set of varied documentary evidence to prove otherwise. Deportation would make them stateless. Due to this fear of becoming stateless, at least thirty-nine of them have till now committed suicide as they did not possess the necessary papers or the means to seek legal aid.[1] In this context, reading Misra is an uncomfortable experience as in his narrative of struggle between the “immigrants” and the “autochthons,” his sympathies are unconditionally with the latter. But then all histories are political, shaped by the subjective position of the author. Therefore, the politics of a historian cannot be a reason to dismiss his or her work, as long as it is empirically rich and well argued, and engages sufficiently with the relevant secondary literature. Misra’s book, unfortunately, does not tick some of these boxes adequately. It does not engage with the historiography of Partition nor does it engage with the critical migration studies literature. It seems from the citations that the author has not consulted any unpublished government records. In his determination to demonize the “land-hungry immigrants,” Misra has omitted the frequent incidents of anti-immigrant violence (including the Nellie Massacre of 1983 and the Kokrajhar Riot of 2012) (p. 7). Because of these silences and gaps, this otherwise interesting book remains an incomplete account of Assam’s experience with Partition.
Note
[1]. Sumir Karmakar, “NRC Exclusion Causes Distress Deaths in Assam,” Deccan Herald, December 23, 2018, https://www.deccanherald.com/nrc-exclusion-causes-distress-709480.html.
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Citation:
Anwesha Sengupta. Review of Misra, Udayon, Burden of History: Assam and the Partition - Unresolved Issues.
H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53549
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