An Ambitious Book on Post-Colonial History of Assam

Ankur Tamuli Phukan

Historians or rather the apprentices of history (the waiters of historical imaginations!) would often quote great Marx to deflect that eternal question, “When are you going to finish your book?” Marx once told an impatient publisher that his delay in delivering a manuscript was due to poverty, liver disease, and “preoccupations of style!”. But then there are other more intimate ways to transfer the guilt back to the heart of the individual who has asked this impertinent yet guilt-invoking question. This was once done by one of my brilliant friends. Responding to a fellow traveller’s impatient query about his book on the interaction of frontier and global history, my friend retorted with the legendary French writer Andre Breton’s classic statement, “I write the books, I need.” With a cryptic line at the end, “Write yours!” In that sense, Arupjyoti Saikia’s The Quest for Modern Assam: A History: 1942-2000, is the book I need.  Given my short initiation with Assam’s postcolonial archives, I can sense the difficulties the project faced.

The history of postcolonial Assam is almost a blank field. Assam’s colonial archive is scattered, and spread out across continents, the post-colonial archive is even tougher to imagine. Not only the official ones with their usual restrictions and red tape but also the alternative archives. Even vernacular materials are more carefully preserved in distant universities around the globe than here. We do not have a professional public library in Assam. Unfortunately, the library movement of the 1950s in the state never produced any fruitful results. The digital archive movement has just warmed up a bit (Professor Saikia used one from Tezpur University), and I do not know where it will take us in the coming years. In this gloomy, sad environment, Modern Assam traces not just the story of Brahmaputra Valley, but a global network of events, political discourses, and cultural and social imaginations that shaped the post-colonial Assam. After reading the book, the first thing that came to my mind was the size of Professor Saikia’s hunting boot. Because, Historians, as we all know, do not search for materials, they hunt materials!

I think one of the significant methodological contributions of the book is its engagement with a diverse range of archival sources and the insightful dialogue it establishes between them. It produces a time with different dimensions, even within a deeply emotional narrative of human sufferings, the local, the sense of quotidian, banal every day emerges with ease in the narrative. It has insisted on the critical conversation of archive(s) even though the author followed the events, not the every day to write a comprehensive history of postcolonial Assam. The tragic exodus of Indians from Myanmar in the wake of the Second World War has been given adequate attention in the book. Hundreds of thousands of people had to walk through the dangerous Chindwin Valley to enter India.

As one of the contemporary accounts has noted, “The butterflies in Assam that year were the most beautiful on record. They added to the sense of the macabre as they flitted amongst the corpse.”  But then at the end, Saikia discusses Purnakanta Buragohain’s famous travelogue, Patkair Sipare No Bosor, and how Buragohain returned home through the thin settlements of the Singphos, Naga, Kachin and the Shan communities with ease on his way back from Burma at the same time (Remember Edmund Leach’s brilliant commentary about the relationship between claims of territory, logic of the size of settlements and commercial roads of these areas in his book, “Political Systems of Highland Burma.”) These contrasting imagery of experiences produced insights about shared habits and networks of the region with the larger Southeast Asian world. Somewhere in the book Saikia laments how these precolonial networks of roads and commerce had been disrupted through political geographical alteration by India’s partition. But today we know that most of these roads and networks were revived, and reused by Northeast insurgents in the latter half of the century. That means the traditional networks sadly become insurgent networks and that is the tragedy of being in India’s Northeast today.

This constant conversation between official and vernacular, between travelogue, literary classics-- sometimes even private citizens' diaries with official notes, reports, statistical accounts and newspapers produce a deeply insightful understanding not just of the time(s) of the events, but the times that were banal and quotidian. The pleasure of reading comes from reading snippets of times, by reading intimate figuration of historical characters, specific political events and their resonance in different locals. Pandit Nehru here emerges not much as a wily politician with Prime Ministerial power but as an apolitical activist, an organizer whose understanding of Assamese people was far deeper than many self-obsessed breathing public intellectuals of our times. The eviction program of Gopinath Bardoloi’s government largely against the Muslim peasantry of lower Assam around 1946 was one of the most arresting narratives of the pre-partition politics of the period.  So reading “Modern Assam,” is not about finding a somewhat schematic, conclusive account of a time but the pleasure of reading plural, heterogeneous archival imaginations: A sum of individual histories, to borrow French historian Braudel’s phrase.

Now, what is the central theme that connects this sum of individual histories? An overpowering sense of loss I think runs deep throughout the book and perhaps that is the underlying thread that readers get familiar with. Modern Assam recognizes the deep significance of partition as an analytical framework for understanding India’s postcolonial history. So far partition has been studied as a human tragedy, or in eastern India as a question of refugees, victimhood, and the complexity of citizenship. Even a nativist perspective would see India’s partition as an unnecessary burden to the area. But hardly one discusses the disruption of infrastructure, traditional commercial networks and geographical restrictions and how these disruptions affected the future politics of the region, and its relation with the Indian state as this book has done.

The alienating tendency of capital in colonial times has been given too much attention without much empirical evidence. It is true that the joint-stock companies’ annual turnover cannot be compared with traditional economic activities, but the relative acceleration of commodities within the traditional economic network because of the effect of the colonial performative capital has not been discussed much. Lamenting the disruption of these economic networks a Kashi politician once said, “ (In) the old days before 1947..there was a saying…that the border people are so rich and well off that you can pluck gold out of the tree leaves, that is, the golden oranges. That time has gone with the coming of Independence followed by Partition.” Unable to secure true economic federalism in the constituent assembly, the increasing burden of refugees, and migrants and the perpetual geographic isolation means that being in the Indian Federation, Assam has not gained much.

Modern Assam discusses Assamese nationalists’ attempts to develop institutional and cultural fronts. Gauhati University, the experimentation with Kamrupi Music School, and the successful movement with Assamese literature in the 1950s are some examples of Assamese nationalism’s fantasy with modern. From the 1970s, the book also recognizes, that this romance was somewhat lost. Why was it so? Why the over-encompassing movement like the Assam movement did not produce any phenomenal artistic, or literary achievements like the French Revolution or any serious political movement usually does? Many have argued that the superficiality of the movement itself was the reason. But I differ. I think the initial romance with the modern has been lost in the cacophony of the burden of partition, it is the “spectacle” that remains as the sine-qua-non of Assam’s future. In search of many of such analytical and conceptual frameworks, we will return to “The Quest for Modern Assam” again and again. Thank you.

This short note was read out at a book discussion jointly organized by Cotton University and Penguin at Cotton University on October 7, 2023.