Of "Xunor Axom", "Matir Axom" and bad roads....

In my last post, I had mentioned about economic underdevelopment as a cause of the ethnic-religious-linguistic conflicts peppering Assam. Here, I bring before you a video, recorded by a digicam, with some photographs thrown in, that has a sorry tale to narrate about how bad the roads in certain areas in Assam can be. The road in the video here is the 33 KMs stretch from Tangla, my hometown to Mangaldai, where one can get on to the highway on the road to Guwahati. the actual length is 43 KMs, but 10 KMs are motorable roads. It takes one exactly two and a half hours to cover that 33 KMs stretch on a small car. And to think of it, there are numerous other roads like these which have fuelled the underdevelopment of the state. And what better reason can we have than underdeveloped infrastructure as a creator of resentment and consequently, armed struggle - terrorism to many, struggles for an equal lot, and a disruption to the proper functioning of daily life for the common people. And yet we speak of Assamese linguistic chauvinism, Jai Ai Axom et al!!! The song that plays as a background score to the video is by Loknath Goswami, from his memorable album Amolmol Xewalir Gundh. Hats off to Loknathda. This video is not to be enjoyed. It is just supposed to make you think. And feel.

Assam Serial Bomb Blasts: Spontaneous Emotions Recollected in Turbulence

The last time I had written something was after the traumatic experience of being in a riot-torn town, and before the dregs could settle from that experience, I was brought down to my knees by the reports of the television news channels that Assam, my home state, the state i am so proud of, has been bombed. That people have died in hundreds. Predictably, I could sense an outrage at what happened, and immediately everyone started blaming Tarun Gogoi, the "Bangladeshis", the "Congress Government", the "Jehadis". Goddamn it, did anyone, anyone think that the problem lies in the economy of the state? That the Government officers are getting rich through emblazoned money while people are lying in hunger, empty dreams mocking their emptier eyes. The youths move around, burning eyes eating into their sockets, not knowing what they are supposed to do, while chasing the materialistic dreams brought before them by cold "capitalists", advertisements et al!!
Goddamn it, there are no good roads, no good schools, no good colleges, no industries. And people still indulge themselves in jingoistic slogans. Why don't people come out to protest the roads which have mini-lakes in them, or the bridges which shake like a maleria stricken patient even when a scooty paases over them, or simply the lack of industrial development? Rather than trying to chase "Bangladeshis" in order to take up the cheap labour being filled by the hapless migrants, refugees from their own land because of floods that devastate the area most of the year (for details, refer to Sanjay Hazarika's Strangers of the Mist), why not just let everybody assimilate into the multi-vibrant culture of Assam. As it is , we have already so many identities within the greater identity of being an Assamese, what harm would it do to have another sub-identity that would only enhance our reputation of being a pluralistic state? One ought to remember that continuous cultural onslaughts like branding a community as "those dirty miyas" would only work to drive the victimized community into any path available before them. So, if a hot-headed lot goes the way of fundamentalism, which I do not have any qualms (No political correctness here. Victimization does not mean resorting to fundamentalism, there are many other democratic options, but only if one would like to think of them as options) in branding as a path which is only bound to create more distractions and hatred (Don't you think the rising influence of the BJP and the RSS in Assam has a lot to do with it?). I find myself guilty of considering them as "them", different from "us" - the othering of a community looked at with distrust. Please let us not do that. we ought to know better.
Of course, the borders need to be sealed. Not because I am afraid of Bangladesh "swarming" into Assam, but only because Assam cannot have more people. It is still, even in this electronic world, a state which depends primarily on agriculture. And agriculture requires land. And how much land is our state left with? (I sincerely thank Prof. Manirul Hussain of Guwahati University, Political Science Dept. for bringing in this aspect to my notice.) The forests are being cut to fit in people, which will create havocs with the pleasant Assamese climate. Does any Assamese want that? I do not think so. And I sincerely believe what our "jingoistic" leaders call as "outsiderrs" will also support me.
And then let us do the unthinkable. Let us use the resources being created by migrants to build our state. Let us learn from their hard work. Let us learn from their struggle to survive in an increasingly hostile world, both environmentally and politically. And let us not crib like infants, infants with irresponsible bombs and guns in their hands. Let us not throw away industrialists with demands of extortions. Let us not scare away potential tourists with kidnappings. As Khagen Mahanta said a couple of days back in a concert in Delhi, " Let us show everyone we do not like bombs, terrorism and communalism. That we like music, arts, culture, peace, beauty, joy."
Period. Amen.

Udalguri conflicts.

Another home trip. Another experience. Again that reminds me of my rootlessness, how far I am from what had been my home when I had grown up. The mango tree is no longer there. It used to send ripe, mellow and sweet vollies at the tin roof with every passing storm. What a racket it used to be!! The mini - jungle in front of my home has now been chopped off. I see four buildings in that plot of land which had devoured at least five cricket balls!! Every six used to be a challenge, as it was very hard to look for the ball among the dense shrubs and thickets.
The jungle that I saw in Assam this time was that of communalism, ethnic cleansing and mindless violence among people who do not even know what globalization means. People I know, people who have lived in Assam for hundreds of years were killed. Their bodies lay rotting in the wild. They lay there for two days and two nights. The houses were burnt. The people now lie huddled in relief camps, doing nothing. What blankness burns in their eyes. You won't even be able to get one hundred miles near that blankness. Angry youths pass by mosques, and in their drunken state, shout, threaten, "BURN 'EM All". Durga statues have their heads chopped off. In one clean stroke. Communities shrink in fear after every incident. majorities and minorities get blurred. The fisherwoman speaks with troubled eyes,"mur loratu ghuri aha nai de. Buji naplung ki korah jai" (My son has not yet returned. Don't know what to do.) In another village, somebody else laments the loss of their years savings. The vegetables needed to be taken to markets are rotting, "Aamra khaibo kemon kore? Bengungula to sob posche jasche." (How will we eat? All the brinjals are rotting). There is fear in the eyes of everybody as they vainly try to realize what is going on, why is this that their religions, the language that they speak have turned against them. They have no answers. They are no journalists. They are no academicians either. They cannot comment on television. They do not write poetry. They do not write blogs.
It is so easy now to sit before this computer and theorize about what had happened. Yes, I will do that as well, later. Some other people are already doing that. I am posting the link. If anybody is interested to know what had happened, it will be a good starting point. However, one big defect of the article is that it kept on stressing on the deaths of muslims. Nothing was mentioned about loss of the other side. This is bad reporting. Nonetheless, here it is.
http://www.twocircles.net/2008oct13/dance_death_and_violence_udalguri.html
Another link:
http://www.twocircles.net/2008oct04/16_killed_assam_clashes_10_000_displaced.html
Please do not say, oh, they are "bangladeshis", they are "tribals", why should we worry? Think away, outside your narrow boundaries of success, fame and name, for a moment. It is not much to ask, really, for the fifty four people who are dead and the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced. They were, are, humans too.

Film(ed) Nights

I just watched, after a particularly depresing evening, a Stephen Spielberg movie, The Terminal, where Tom Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, who is caught in bureaucratic glitches that make him an "unacceptable", someone who can neither fly back to his country somewhere in East Europe nor can he go out of the terminal into the Big Apple to fulfill his father's wish of completing a tin of papers signed by 57 famous jazz musicians. He has to stay in the terminal for nine months, when he impresses and become friends with everybody in the terminal except the cold and ruthless boss who sees the east European, innocent, non-English speaking Navorski as a potential threat to the way he runs the airport. but Victor remains wise to his traps as well as his machinations and ultimately forces the boss to concede defeat and let him get the one last signature that will complete the set. A run-of-the-mill human interest story in a way, but nonetheless raises certain pertinent questions.

I was talking to a friend just before i switched on the movie and the conversation was largely built around success and its relation to family and human obligations. One aspect on which we both agreed on and I suppose most readers will do the same to was the increasing need of individual space, time and mental preparation to fulfill the challenges urban societies and a globalized reality would throw before us. Ambition is all, and success maketh a woman, or a man, more a man. And when was money more powerful than it is now? And yet, we speak of families, love, affection,bondage? Are not these all old fashiones, reactionary(!) concepts? Are not conversations, relations, friendships made based nothing but on work? Can a moonlit night be a moment to be savoured, silently, without thinking of deadlines? Are not people judging themselves based on which bigshots they are dining with or even better (if sexual orientations allow) sleeping with?

Navorski made me realize that this utterly artificial, selfishly individualistic outlook towards life may be actually damaging to our well being. His cool ways of taking things was diametrically opposite to the highly calculative brains of the Airport boss. But it was the boss who was breaking things, when Naborski stubbornly hung on to his wish to fulfill his father's dying desire - to get the last signature - to fill up that old can of peanuts with the signed papers of 57 great jazz artists. What a simple wish! And Spielberg so daftly keeps it hidden from the audience for most part of the movie,and we keep guessing Navorski's designs and drive ourselves nuts, just like that silly old successful head of JFK Airport, New York.

The movie has a number of flaws, but I don't want to get started on that. My literature-spoiled-enriched-crooked-crumpled mind almost made me look at the movie as yet another popular appropriation of the subaltern, and it would have been absolutely easy to can the film using the paradigms of theory. But, just for this once, for a day, let me love, let me admire, let me write simply on Viktor "the goat" Navorski - my saviour for the evening. Now, it is well past midnight, and the computer clock is beckoning me of duties to be done tomorrow, starting at eight in the morning. I might be late, I might oversleep, and I don't really care a hoot. Because this is a moment when I need to write, I have to write. As i am saluting the human spirit, saluting the lovable, clumsy, magnificently human, saluting Viktor Navorski.

Narratives on Nellie

Most of us have heard about Nellie in Nowgong district and the massacre that had happened there. But how many of us actualy feel what had happened there on the 18th of February, 1983, in that year when Axom was burning. a year which has disappeared from the careers and lives of almost the entire Axomiya community? (For what I mean by the Axomiya community, please check out the disclaimer at the end of my post titled Home Post-1).

Anyway, there were a few texts which were published last year that tried to revisit those days from the vintage point of living twenty five years of the promises and failures of the monement. I wrote a review, goaded by the never-tiring Ashley and encouraged very sweetly and patiently by Xonjoy Borbora, of these three texts and which was published in the May-June, 2008 issue of Biblio: A Review of Books. Here is the link to the online version of the journal.

http://www.biblio-india.org/tocMJ08.asp?mp=MJ08

Here is the review. Hope it goads you to know more on what had happened in the movement that had shaken Assam in such a way that our dear state is yet to recover completely.

Shame and Pride

The Assam movement of 1979-85 remains a site of different interpretations, expressions and feelings. It is a reminder of bloody massacres of thousands of innocent men, women and children and ironically is also the source of nostalgic pride for the leadership of the movement. Such dialectical feelings have been a part of the Assamese cultural scenario and inform the three texts under review, where the same movement is interpreted and presented in different representative voices.

Two of them—Diganta Sharma’s Nellie 1983 in Assamese and Hemendra Narayan’s 25 Years On—are factual journalistic reports on the most horrific and notorious massacre of the agitation: on 18 February 1983, over 3,000 Muslims were killed in the tiny town of Nellie in the aftermath of the All Assam Students’ Union’s agitation against illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Even as both books condemn the incident as an abject attack on innocents, they try in different ways to show what really happened.

Sharma’s book tries, and with a lot of success, to bring to light the hidden communal, regional and linguistic forces that planned the massacre. What is most striking about Sharma’s book is that it is written from the perspective of an adult who was a mere six-year-old child when the massacre took place. And the tone of his book thus bears what Harold Bloom termed as the ‘anxiety of influence’- especially in his attempts at constructing a viewpoint that rejects the extreme sub-nationalism of the earlier generation that culminated in the massacre. What he stresses upon is the shame faced by the Assamese community, both internally and vis a vis the international community. Armed with facts and documents, he courageously exposes the hidden Hindu communal forces that instigated the Assamese people to massacre more than two thousand children, women and men, and also how the local tribes—such as the Tiwa—were made scapegoats by the movement leadership. He also points out that despite charge sheets being made no action was taken against anyone, something that needs to be rectified if the survivors and the killed alike are to receive any justice, even if it comes after a long twenty five years. An eleven-page appendix lists the available names and ages of the victims, and even a casual look will fill the reader with remorse, anger, guilt, pain or shame, depending on his subjective position. A very important aspect that he raises is that the wounds have not healed but have been forcefully covered by the victims as they needed to get back to their daily routine of life; survival itself was at stake, primarily because of their meager resources, which were further depleted by the attacks on their houses and livestock. One wishes though that Sharma had presented a bit more of analysis over and above the facts which have been so excellently put together. He also could have avoided a lot of printing mistakes which often irritate the reader besides taking a lot of the sheen away from what is a much needed work of investigative journalism, as the events of Nellie have always been tried to be swept under the carpet, both by the movement leadership and their opposition political parties. However, a chilling cover-page and more chilling photographs inside the book make up for the technical defects.

The author of the second book, Hemendra Narayan, was one of the four journalists who were present in Nellie by sheer chance on the fatefu day of 18 February 1983. They were the ones who exposed the brutal truth in the press as eyewitnesses to the ghastly massacres. He formulates a documentative anthology of the massacre but does not travel much beyond that. The eye-witness account had the potentiality of being a gripping and chilling read, but ridiculous linguistic and grammatical errors often leave the reader wishing for a better and more skillful editor. But 25 Years on is important simply because it tries to combine the eyewitness accounts with Government committee reports, public memoranda like that of the Lalung Durbar to the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi; a booklet that reflects the then Government of India’s view on the massacre, a Non-official Judicial Enquiry’s report and some observations by the Election Commissioner on the situation of Assam during the days of the 1983 election. However, it has all the faults of a hastily compiled work marred by a huge number of grammatical and printing mistakes.

Both these books have a number of shortcomings and might not rate highly in the index of books, but the importance of these books should not be gauged by their quality but by the fact that they bring to light one of the worst massacres of Indian history, where almost three thousand people were killed on a single day, going by unofficial records. And this was only a part of a number of lesser incidents that marked the blood-stained days of 1983 and the Assam movement. The victims because of their lack of education and their economic situation, could not speak back. These texts could act as a voice that might help bring some justice to the unfortunate survivors of Nellie, many of whom still carry multiple scars from wounds inflicted by spears, bows, guns, machetes, axes or clubs.

If these two books are primarily documentations of an event of the Assam agitation, Rita Choudhury’s Ai Samay, Sai Samay (These Times, Those Times) is an absolutely different take on the agitation. It does not mention any of the massacres and tries to portray the movement as a mass uprising based on ideological grounds of sub-nationalism (as Sanjib Baruah calls the feelings of ethnic unrest in Assam). Whatever might be the weakness in the way she tries to illustrate her ideological stand in the novel, Choudhury is indubitably successful in creating a very elaborate yet well-connected plot. Her narrative syle resembles that of a suspense novel and the reader just cannot keep down the book till the denouement ties up the myriad loose threads in terms of both plot and characters. There are some quite unbelievably melodramatic events in the novel, however the well etched out characters more than make up for this blemish in the text. At the level of ideas, the novel employs the Bakhtinian chronotope or the idea of time-space—temporal and spatial connections—evident the most in the title. The body of the novel however fails to really substantiate the associations Choudhury tries to explore between the idealism of the agitation days and the spirit of the generation which had missed the event, being born after 1983. She tries to interpolate past idealism within a generation brought up to believe the forces of globalisation and selfish individualism but does not really manage to link up these disparate processes of thought.

The novel succeeds not at the level of ideological formulations but at the level of plot and narrative, where the element of suspense acts as a strong measure against a very weak ideological framework. Another strong point of the novel is its ability to illustrate the spirit that went into the Assam agitation and also the disappointment, disillusionment and the consequent distress that follows when ideas do not work the way you intend them to do. It captures a period and sentiment in the history of Assam which one can look back on with anger, shame, remorse or pride, but which one just simply cannot ignore.

The three texts share one commonality, and that is the reaction of the new generation to the Assam movement. Though Rita Chaudhury’s novel seems to find the fire of the agitation burning in a difeerent way in the present generation, the other two texts try to expose the violence and turbulences that marked the movement, and which ultimately led to further unrests that continue till this day.

Nellie 1983: A postmortem Report into the Most
Barbaric Massacre of Assam Movement in Nellie on
18 Feb. 1983
By Diganta Sharma
Ekalabya Prakashan, 2007, 87 pp., Rs 55
25 Years On . . . Nellie still Haunts
By Hemendra Narayan
Self-published, Delhi, 2008, 47 pp., Rs 80
Ei Samay, Sei Samay
By Rita Chaudhury
Banalata, Guwahati, 2007, 472 pp., Rs 150
ISBN 81-7339-484-9

Nellie photograph

This is what we did twenty five years back..

the bidexot apun manuh video..

want to listen to the song of Assamese diaspora I wrote about in my last blog piece?? here is the video...

Of "Bidexot Apun Manuh" and Some "Patronizing"Nostalgia

I am just back to Delhi after a whirlwind tour in Assam. I now remember the greenery amidst an electric blue sky, clouds hovering over green hills like a bridegroom’s veil; the horizon was pregnant with joy. Kohua danced the dance of a thousand gods. Trees stood sentry like guarding the cloudy hilltops, the river flowed by like a moat, and the road that disappeared into the hills seemed like a bridge that took my angst torn mind by storm. The smell of blood living with humans was replaced by the fragrance of rajanigandha, roses and kharikajai flowers. My train wound across the vast green plains in the day, impenetrable darkness as night fell.
And there was me, breathing the purity deep into my lungs. I felt the beauty embracing me, making love, sipping into my dry soul, tickling my insides. Soon we reached Guwahati, after we crossed the majestic Brahmaputra which lay like a deep chasm amidst the dark hills in the night. Mur maatir xubaax, I thought, meri mitti ki khusbu. Without even realizing it, I started humming a very popular song in Assamese, Bukue Buke Aase je Sirokal … Singibo Nuwari, Rudhibo Nuwari, kije maya xona Bondhon … Nijaanot monot pore bideshot apun manuh…(These relentless, ,inexorable mystic smeared ties reside unbounded in my heart…as solitude reminds me, abroad, of my near ones). It was a good feeling, I felt, I have not lost my roots even after ten years in the concrete nightmare of globalization induced fanfare of money and unending individualist materialism.
The first night was literally so. Starlit skies waved along with the cool breeze. I laughed indulgently, thinking of my brethren in Delhi inhaling dust, smoke and the desert loo. It was a surrealist dream, almost, as it was a summer visit to Assam after almost seven years. It was bound to get better, as I would be going in a couple of days to my hometown, which boasted of a climate and natural beauty found in few other towns in the state. The glowing feeling increased an almost bordered on pride on being a part of this beautiful state. And so there I was, at seven in the morning a couple of days later, boarding a bus to Mangaldai, from where I will take a bus to my town lying in the foothills of Bhutan, where a rivulet meanders through slowly like the life there. Ah, how far I was from the ultra-fast lifestyle of the wasteland in Delhi where every minute is a rushing madness of spiritually dead people.
I reached Mangaldai in an hour. I got down there, and enquired for a bus to Tangla. My first shock – there was none in that hour! A tracker however stood, shouting, Kalaigaon, Kalaigaon, Kalaigaon. That is the town thirteen kilometers before reaching Tangla. Trackers are a recent addition to the transport system in Assam. They are basically no frills SUVs like the Tata Sumo which load some fifteen people (and more), crossing short distances (see pic). Left with no choice, I sat on the back seat of the vehicle. It was crowded, but it promised to help me catch a bus which had already left Mangaldai for Tangla. It started moving after around five minutes, rocking like an elephant on the excuse for a road (see pic again)
. People boarded on to its roofs, hung from the doorsills, from the windows, precariously, as we chugged along. The person sitting next to me had a bandage on his head, and dried blood coated the banyan he was wearing, the consequences of an “accident” he had in the previous evening. Poverty loomed on the faces, the dresses of everyone who sat around me. I felt horribly out of place, my urban lifestyle a distant past, incongruous and anachronistic. Yet the beauty of unadulterated countryside floated into the jam-packed vehicle through the open windows.
Did I pity myself, or did I pity my co-travellers? I did not know, but my exuberance was fast disappearing. The FM radio in the tracker was fast blaring out Hindi and Assamese pop songs. Suddenly, to my utter surprise, the boy sitting in front me and dressed most unimpressively plucked out of his shirt pocket – guess what – a Blackberry Pearl! The blood stained banyan on one side and the Blackberry on the other started mocking my romantic daydreams of a pastoral state, where both people and nature remained untouched by ravaging globalization. Then arrived the visionary moment . . . the FM radio started playing the song Bidexot Apun Manuh! Thames nodir xute xute, Mississippir paare paare, bisaru loralir luitkhoni…hepahor Xuonxiri … xari xari mapler saayat, bisaru jibanar majuli…[I seek the Luit (Brahmaputra) of childhood, the Xuonxiri of hopes in the currents of the Thames, in the banks of the Mississipi . . . I look for the Majuli of my life in the shadow of Maple rows] – went the lyrics. And the absurdity of our Non Resident Assamese dreams struck me like the stench of a rotting carcass. Assam is not only a pastoral heaven..it is also a place where people are poor, floods destroy livelihoods like nowhere else, where politicians are corrupt and the youth prey to blind consumerism with no matching income in their homes to fulfill their demands. It is a place where the beauty of nature mocks the backwardness of the rural Assamese, the lower castes, the tribes. We might have tears from our eyes as we listen to Aikhoni gaon bukur apun (This village is close to our hearts) sitting in some faraway metropolitan city, but our villages have changed. It is no longer the same, not at all. Satellite television is sending the corporate dream into the most remote of villages and dissatisfaction at not attaining that ideal is turning the minds of Assamese people, specially the youth into a muddled nightmare. No jobs, no resources, no paths to freedom and joy. Aami axomiya nohoi dukhia buli Xantwana lobhile nohobo. Aji Axom xosakoie dukhia hol. We, Axomiyas cannot rest in peace thinking that we are Axomiyas and cannot be miserable. Today, Assam is indeed in a miserable state.

[I use the word Axomiya here as an umbrella term that covers everyone that stays in Assam, including the tribes, both caste and non-caste Hindus, Muslims (both indigeneous and non-indigeneous) and all migrants into our state who have actually enriched rather than deplore our resources. I use it for the lack of a better umbrella term, even when I am fully aware of the hegemonizing connotations of the term. I consider Assamese or Axomiya as a link language that unites the various ethnic subjectivities, rather than as a hegemonizing entity when seen as a mother tongue]

Censored History: A “Literal” Reading of The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses has been both reviled and supported like few other books in the history of English fiction. This controversial novel by Salman Rushdie indubitably prospered much more than it should because of the hype surrounding it. But, nonetheless it also draws our attention to a very vital aspect of urban society, that of the nexus between fundamentalism and censorship. M.F.Hussain or Mani Ratnam, Deepa Mehta or Tasleema Nasreen, we have had numerous instances of fundamentalist groups rising up in protest against parts of creative works which they consider as harmful to their sentiments. Unaffected groups too show their sympathy, much more for the sake of political correctness rather than for genuine ideological convictions, often backed by flimsy and fourth hand accounts of the nature of the offensive portions. Satanic Verses falls right into this framework and moreover, represents itself as a classic case of censorship backfiring upon itself. In this paper, I would be discussing the nature of the offence and the consequent events followed by a discussion of the relative merits of both the book and its detractors, ending with a social perspective on the causes that led to the controversy at the first place.

Protests against the book started before its publication itself, when, based on excerpts, reviews and interviews of the author published in India Today and Sunday in September 1988, Members of the Indian Parliament, Syed Shahabuddin and Khurshid Alam Khan started campaigning for a ban on the book. The Indian Government promptly acted banning the book on October 15th of the same year. The tone of the dispute can be estimated in the audacious and highly emotional rhetoric of Syed Shahabuddin, when he wrote, “I have not read it, nor do I intend to. I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is” (qtd. in Pipes 19-20). The action soon moved over to Great Britain, when, frustrated with the inaction of the British Government, Muslim organisations took over and burned copies of the book on December 2nd and again on the 14th of January, 1989. These was just the beginning and events took a stronger turn in Pakistan on the 12th of February when a crowd of over ten thousand, fuelled by a crude Urdu translation of the controversial aspects, burned the American Cultural Centre in Islamabad, resulting in six casualties which included five demonstrators and one Pakistani policeman. The next day saw another protest in Srinagar, Kashmir which left one dead and sixty injured. That night, the tone of the protest rose to the level of state policy when Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini of Iran took matter into his hands and issued a fatwa or legal judgement calling on all “zealous Muslims” to execute the author and whoever is involved in the publication of Satanic Verses. Anyone who died in the process was to be a martyr. The task of killing Rushdie was made more attractive by an Iranian charity organization the 15th Khorbad Relief Agency who announced a reward of 1 million Dollars to a non-Iranian and 200 Million Rials to an Iranian for Rushdie’s head. Lot other Iranians endorsed Khomeini’s action and many Islamic groups and individuals declared their intention to execute Rushdie. On the 17th of February, Rushdie offered an apology regarding the effect of his book though not regarding the contents of the book as such, and thus had very little ameliorating effect. Khomeini confirmed his edict once again putting the Iranian Government in sticky waters, and the latter distanced itself from the edict by saying that any action by a Muslim against Rushdie has nothing to do with the Republic. The controversy continued for another couple of months when on the 29th of March, two Muslims in Brussels, one of them an Imam in a mosque and the other a librarian there, were killed as they stressed on Rushdie’s freedom of speech though condemning the book itself as “gratuitously blasphemous”. This incident temporarily ended the international ramifications of the Rushdie affair (Pipes 19-37). India had its own share of troubles too. Prominent historian Mushir-ul-Hassan was severely beaten up as he had said in an interview, “I think the ban should be lifted. I think every person has a right to be heard and to be read”, even as he took care not to show any sympathy with the book’s contents (Pipes vi-vii). The controversy continued into the early 1990’s. The Italian translator of the Satanic Verses, Ettore Capriolo was wounded in an attempted assassination in Milan in 1991; and a week later, Hitoshi Igarishi, the Japanese translator, was stabbed to death in Tokyo and in 1993, William Nygaard, the book's Norwegian publisher, was shot and severely wounded outside his Oslo home (Martin 15).

What was there in the book that created such furore which resulted in so many deaths and instant fame for Rushdie? The book has its literary merits, it is sophisticated and employs quite a number of literary techniques like magic realism (though Rushdie does not think that he borrows anything from Marquez) and has some moments of poetry in it. But what concerns us more is the literal meaning of the text rather than its literary manifestations. It might sound what Daniel Pipes calls as an “intellectually deficient” reading, but fundamentalist censorship lacks sophistication and is concerned more with emotional issues and the power that comes easily with it. Such sentiments hark at fascism, but the argument has its merits. Hitler’s rise to power was based on emotional issues of race, as is that of the Bharatiya Janata Party ascendancy to power based on “religious nationalism”, especially in Gujarat now and in the Hindi speaking belt in the 1990s. Faith and emotions are indispensable for humanity, but have their own dangers when brought to the level of state polity which requires a higher level of rational thinking than fatwas and rath jatras. Nonetheless, Satanic Verses was lambasted by taking instances and examples in isolation. Indeed, as Pipes says, the real political effect that the book had can be gauged only by reading excerpts in isolation and out of context and that too preferably in translation. The book itself is a quite complicated one, more than 500 pages in length where three plots, seemingly unrelated at first glance, are developed. The first plot concerns two Indians Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamsha and follows their travails after their miraculous escape following a mid-air plane crash and are developed in five chapters (Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9). The second story is detailed in chapters 2 and 6 and it recounts the life of the Holy Prophet, relying partly on historical facts and partly on the author’s imagination. The third plot, in Chapters 4 and 8, is about the mass exodus of a village to Mecca and their subsequent death, when they expect the waters of the Arabian Sea to part as they follow the mystical Ayesha. This portion of the text has allusions of Khomeini’s exile in Paris and has strong suggestions that it is a parable on Iran and its Islamic Revolution of 1979. The last two plots appear interrelated though they have very little relation to the first plot which is about the complex relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. In fact, Rushdie once commented in an interview in 1984 that he had two books in mind, one on migration and the western world and the other a “novel about religion . . . which was not simply a secular sneer” (Pipes 54-55). Clearly, it was this second project which he mingled with the first that gave the book its controversial slant.

These controversial excerpts need to be examined. One of them concerns a dream of Gibreel regarding the Prophet which makes two chapters of the book, Mahound and Return to Jahilia. Mahound is an archaic name for the Prophet and Jahilia is Rushdie’s name for Mecca and the word means ignorance in Arabic. The most offensive verses are those that have to do with the satanic verses as they are in the Qur’an. Now, any doubt on the Qur’an is not to be had as they are deemed as the exact word of Allah as any doubts would question the very basis on which Islam has developed. Now to the case of the satanic verses themselves. The Prophet’s monotheism was not attracting the well-to-do of Mecca because of their polytheistic propensities and in order to make them friendlier towards His preaching, He recited the following verse with reference to three of the most prominent Meccan Goddesses:

Have ye thought upon al-Lat and al-Uzza
And Manat, the third, the other?
Then, originally, the verses (known today as the satanic verses) followed:
These are the exalted cranes
Whose intercession is to be hoped for. (53:19, 20) (Trans. qtd in Hahn )

Thus, Muhammad accepted the three Goddesses and resultantly, Polytheism, to work out a temporary peace measure with the Meccan rulers. However, the second couplet, the one undermining the monotheism of Islam, was supposedly breathed into the Prophet by Satan, and thus is named as the satanic verses. The Prophet changed the lines later, when He is supposedly informed by the Angel Gabriel about his “mistake”. These lines represent quite a delicate issue because of the unlikely explanation of His changing the narrative of God while retaining the sacrosanct element of the premises of the Islamic faith. Commentators often take a neutral course on this issue but Rushdie did not do it. He opines that the Prophet spoke the false verses not because of satanic influences but because He saw an opportunity to further His cause. But doing that, Rushdie constructs the Qur’an as a human artifact rather than being the word of God, making the entire base of Islam as one built on a deceit. It is equivalent to saying that Jesus is not the Son of God or that Ram or Krishna was not an incarnation of Vishnu. Even the fact that this entire narration takes place in a dream does not absolve Rushdie of his “blasphemy”.

The Muslim World had to deal with this now. They could not dismiss or ignore the story regarding the satanic verses. The issue was raised in 1936 by Muhammad Hasayn Haykal where he exposed the inherent contradictions in the meaning of the word “birds” and the matter was considered as settled. Rushdie pried open something that was supposed to be healed and questioned an assumption that had found its roots even in the Christian West. A New York Times account summarizes the incident as one where Rushdie tries to “revive a blasphemous story (that was) discredited by later experts on the Koran”. Rushdie doubts the divinity of the Qur’an in other instances as well, like when Salman, a character in the novel, alters the dictations of Mahound, though he is caught later on in the act. But the episode ends ambiguously, as Mahound took some time to discover Salman’s trickery, raising doubts on the authenticity of Mahound’s words themselves. These instances have historical ramifications and are not figments of the writer’s imagination, as Daniel Pipes points out. Again, Mahound is portrayed by Salman as a “damned successful businessman” taking his dictation through a very “businesslike archangel” from a “highly corporate, if non-corporeal, God”. The ramifications are that the Prophet had narrated the Qur’an to suit His purposes, once again reflecting on the Qur’an as messages of a mortal human being rather than of Allah. Such explanations of the Qur’an had comprised the polemics of medieval Christian writers. Muslim anger against Rushdie was more because he revived archaic calumnies against Islam and indeed so, as the name Mahound itself dates back to the medieval era. Rushdie justifies himself by saying that he wanted to use the name Mahound by turning a term of insult into one of proud identification. But once again, it is hard to pin down Rushdie as to what he actually intended.

But what really takes the cake is the episode in the Brothel called The Curtain, a translation of al-hijab or the veil. Here, the twelve prostitutes all take the names of the Prophet’s wives and also their personalities. People who circled the Kaba at daytime circled the fountain of love there at night waiting for their turn. The Brothel is itself shown as an anti-Islamist hub, where the newly converted men could have sexual gratifications with the Prostitutes imagining them as the Prophet’s wives. And in His death, once again the Prophet ambiguously thanks one of the deities of the satanic verses, raising questions regarding His own beliefs. In all these instances, Rushdie keeps alternatives open; most probably fearing a direct backlash in case of a direct unambiguous stand. But that cut no ice with his critics. They denounced him as a detractor of Islam and thus followed the controversy and violence that made both Rushdie and his book famous as well as notorious. And finally, we need to keep it in our purview that Rushdie also ridiculed contemporary Islamic figures like Khomeini, his most flamboyant critic and the Shahi Imam Syed Abdullah Bukhari of Delhi’s Jama Masjid, and no wonder he endorsed Khomeini’s edict to kill Rushdie (Pipes 53-69).

Was Rushdie ridiculing Islam? The answer is no. Rushdie, though, obviously wanted to ruffle some feathers as he had a deep knowledge on the nexus between fundamentalism and censorship. And he obviously could predict the furore that would happen, as he says in the novel through Mahound’s mouth that he is setting his words against the very words of God. But what he did unintentionally was to drag an above average novel into the cauldron of what Samuel Huntington termed as the clash of civilizations. Rushdie’s book, felt his critics, gave another opportunity to the liberal West to denigrate Islam and the argument goes that being a Muslim, he ought to speak for the Prophet rather than against Him. These are issues for which it is hard to reach a conclusion, as even a rational understanding would mean being anti-religious or anti-caste or even anti-nation. Rational explanations of emotional issues also raise problems of obfuscating relations of power that often determine such issues, thus often taking a stand which goes against a victimized community. But how far can we allow fundamentalism to spread its wings based on this imbalance of power is also a very touchy issue. It is often debated that Indian secularism applies only for Hindus while letting Muslim fundamentalists go Scot free, but once again, we need to keep in mind that there is already a level of criticism present regarding minority fundamentalists being aired openly by majority backed fundamentalists. Equating the two would mean ignoring the balance of power. Rushdie, if he is guilty, is guilty just of doing that.

Works Cited

Martin, Brian. “Making Censorship Backfire.” Counterpoise, Vol. 7, No. 3, July 2003, pp. 5-15. http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/03counterpoise.html

Hahn, Ernest. “Satanic Verses.” http://www.answering-Islam.org/Hahn/satanicverses.htm

Pipes, Daniel. The Rushdie Affair. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990.

Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Vintage, 1988.

The Annexation of Assam and After

The medieval Kingdoms of Manipur, Jaintia, Cachar and Assam were first noticed by the East India Company after the acquisition of the Diwani of Bengal in 1765. However, the colonizers did not bother to annex them as they did not have enough economic potential and they did not bother to lose any sleep over these areas until the Burmese invasion (1817-1824) of Manipur, Assam and Cachar plains. After a rule of 600 years under the Ahom kings, Assam went into colonial hands through the Yandaboo Treaty of 1826 between the East India Company and the King Ava of Burma (Guha, Planter 1) The British initially were reluctant to linger on in a province which they thought was economically not profitable, but did not hand over the reins of the Kingdom to the erstwhile rulers. They retained Lower Assam and placed Upper Assam in the hands of Ahom King Purandar Singha on a tribute. However, with the entry of the British ended a long period of political turmoil in the state created by “tussling South and South-East Asian forces – ‘barkandazi’ mercenaries from Eastern India, Shan levies from Upper Burma, and Moamoria insurgents from Upper Assam” (Sharma). The British, very unenthusiastic about the province, described it as a “profitless, primeval jungle”. Such a view was based upon the “nature of the partially monetized, subsistence-peasant economy of Assam and its relative lack of urbanization and commercialization”. The small hamlets along river banks with urban towns possessing no more than a few thousand occupants seemed rather bleak for the company’s interests compared to the thriving cities of Lucknow or Calcutta. Assam was just a contact point for further adventures into South East and East Asia. However, the empire had its intentions of ‘civilizing’ the province and offered it to the American Baptist Missionaries in the 1830s (Sharma).

The British initially, as mentioned earlier, retained Lower Assam only, as it was deemed profitable from a revenue point of view. David Scott, Assam’s first British administrator willed to restore Upper Assam (the eastern portion of the state as opposed to lower Assam, i.e. the western part) to the Ahom descendent, Purandar Singha, on the payment of a tribute. However, his successor, Major Francis Jenkins vehemently opposed this idea and brought Upper Assam into British hands by 1836. It was a momentous decision, as it saw the entry of “commodity capitalist structures” into Assam. As Jayeeta Sharma remarks, “While the original conquest of Assam can certainly be understood in terms of P.J. Marshall’s theory that East India company’s expansion usually occurred in a piecemeal and haphazard manner, driven on by short-term opportunism of the men on the spot, the future character of British rule would be determined by the newly discovered prospects for Assam’s economy”. There are two main events which would contextualise the annexation rather than Jenkin’s justification of “misgovernance”. The first is the Charter act of 1833 which allowed British settlers to take up land ownership in Assam “to offer a better prospect for the speedy realisation of improvement than any measures that could be adopted in the present ignorant and demoralised state of native inhabitants”. And the second is the discovery of a wild plant in Upper Assam which is quite similar to the Chinese tea plant. Immediately, the “profitless, primeval jungle” transformed into the possibility of a “smiling cultivation” (Sharma). However, the construction of this Planter’s Raj along with the introduction of British administration created a number of significant changes in the province in geographical, economic, linguistic, demographic and cultural terms.

The first change was that Assam was redrawn to be a political frontier of India’s North-East, completely opposed to its “historical positioning at the cultural and ecological crossroads of South and South East Asia”. The British also emphasized upon “control” and “encroachment” of the surrounding “numerous, savage and warlike tribes”. The Ahom kings had a much looser relationship with the hill tribes based upon barter, trade, gift and tribute ties. The British view of these tribes as the “marauders” led to the policy of segregation and containment, often through incorporations of these regions within the province of Assam. This binary construction of the Ahoms and the hill tribes as “Assam sovereigns and their savage neighbours” led to the formation of strict boundaries between the plains and the hills (Sharma). It is needless to speak about the adverse effects of this demarcation which we see right to this day in the separatist demands of different tribes from North-East India.

Such a policy is the result of what Jayeeta Sharma calls as the “ethnographic imaginings of non-western people ...(as a) part of the processes by which British colonialism ordered and separated groups into tribes and castes within a discursive framework built around ideas about savages and primitives, and about hunting, pastoralism, agriculture and commerce”. Obviously, the Scottish enlightenment theorists’ influence moulded the company servants to follow such policies. Later, by the beginning of the twentieth century, after the introduction of the inner line system in 1873, the hill tribes were thought to be pacified enough to be regarded as “noble savages”. However, by then, “a situation emerged whereby the Assam plains began to be regarded as an extension of a larger Indic schema, while the hills were constructed as an externality”. Colonial separatist policies served to break the intersection that Assam was between Indic and Sinic worlds to its west and east. Despite the entry of Sanskritic cultural and political ingredients, the Ahom rulers never quite lost sight of the cultural motifs of their Thai ancestors. But after the colonial ethnographic redrawing of boundaries, caste Assamese Hindus, Muslims and Sikh groups started claiming affinity with “Indic ritual status and territorial affiliation. As Jayeeta Sharma opines, the Orientalist theories of “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” were used to construct a rigid boundary between “caste” and “tribe” populations, as descendents of the “Aryans” settled amongst Mongoloid races. The result was the numerous agitations which have peppered the North-Eastern states and are continuing till this date. Even the decolonization of India in the last half-century hasn’t been able to reverse the impact of British colonial policies. Mongoloid races from the hill tribes of the North-East are still looked at as the ‘subnational’ (Baruah 5) ‘other’ within a primarily Aryan dominated nation-state. It remains to be seen if the “Look East” policy of the present day administrative set-up can do something to re-establish the connections severed in the past, first by British imperialism and then perpetuated by the new nation-states in Asia (Sharma).

Colonial engineering was supposed to regenerate and lift the stagnant and backward state which was completely within the feudal fold, a system which consolidated itself under the Ahoms. By the eighteenth century, the “economic and social contradictions” resulted in a civil war between the Moamarias and the Ahom kings (Guha 84). However, the merchant capital had hardly developed like in the other parts of India. Surplus extraction was the form of revenue being collected with a very negligible presence of merchant and usury capital. There was no land tax and the nobility had “khels” or “parganas” under their control in which they collected revenue in kind. The people of the land were divided into “gots” consisting of three or four “paiks” each. The paiks were called upon to work as soldiers, labourers or cultivators. The state flourished within this system and it was a common saying that for the people in Assam “akalu nai, bhoralu nai” (neither is there famine, nor plenty). A British official, Lt. Rutherford acknowledges this fact. “There is not a doubt that Assam until the arrival of the Burmese was in a most flourishing state and we could not afford the same system”. And since they could not afford the same system, they introduced a new system based on direct money taxation coupled with elected representatives called Choudhuries who were responsible for collecting the revenue. But this move by David Scott to introduce money-economy to the region backfired because of the atrocities committed by the Choudhuries who had both judicial and police authority (Lahiri 237). They extorted the ryots i.e. the peasants under them mercilessly. That, coupled with the inexperience of the natives regarding the use of money along with the scarcity of genuine coins forced the peasants to migrate from one waste land to another, as it was not required to pay any revenue for the first three years after settling on waste lands. Others fled to inhospitable Bhutan. In a narrative left by Captain Boyle regarding the state of affairs, he writes, “The system hitherto adopted has been hateful in the extreme and that its direct tendency has been to reduce the ryots to a state of poverty and dejection of the most distressing nature and to enrich a few worthless beings at the expense of the whole population of the country” And he continues later, “the inhabitants instead of finding in the British Government a power which would protect them in the enjoyment of their hearths and homes, have fled by hundreds in all directions not only to the neighbouring zemindaries of Bengal but what is much more painful to contemplate, to the lawless regions of Bhutan” (qtd. in. Lahiri 231).

It was not as if David Scott was sitting idle all these days from 1826 to 1832. He kept reporting the state of affairs to the Company headquarters but the board of directors did not find reasons enough to really incur anymore expenditure in the unprofitable region. Scott required more administrators and he did not get them, and the author of History of Assam, Sir Edward Gait plainly acknowledges the fact in his book (Gait 278). The question of permanent control over the entire province was yet to be decided. Actually, the presence of tea was already detected in 1823 by Mr. Robert Bruce. But it could not be decided until 1832 whether cultivation would be economically viable, as the species was different from the already established Chinese tea plant. However, the economic profitability of the industry was certain by 1833 and the Company decided to go forward with tea cultivation in the state. Permanent control was put in place and Upper Assam was also brought under British rule. Mr. Robertson and then Captain Jenkins succeeded David Scott, who breathed his last in August 1831, as the Commissioners of the state (Gait 333). They abolished the “Choudree” system replacing it by the ryotwari system which helped a lot in the rehabilitation of the peasants who had fled the atrocities of the Choudhuries. A system of European control and inspection was introduced. Land was distributed “under the guarantee of Pattas (title deeds) countersigned by the collector and a great number of Europeans was appointed to run the administration” (Lahiri 237).

The changes did regenerate the economy for the cultivating classes, but trouble loomed on the side of the erstwhile aristocracy, who were impoverished because of the abolition of the Paik system. They had to now either “sink to the level of ordinary cultivators” or take up administrative white collar jobs under the British Government (Gait 286). There was also the prospect of becoming tea planters, but colonial policies made it a Herculean task. The Charter granted to the East India Company in 1833 allowed Europeans, for the first time to hold land outside the Presidency towns on a long term lease or with freehold rights. That paved the path for a colonial plantation economy. Francis Jenkins, in 1833 had already advocated the settlement of Englishmen of capital on Assam’s waste lands. He thought that a scheme of colonization “offered a better prospect for the speedy realization of improvement than any measures that could be adopted in the present ignorant and demoralized state of native inhabitants”. The scheme caught the fancy of the board of directors in Calcutta. Meanwhile, the prospects of cultivation of tea were gradually improving with the formation of the Tea committee in early 1834, the starting of the Government Experimental Tea Gardens and the first successful manufacture of Assam tea in December, 1837. The Assam Company was started in 1839 and in the next year it acquired two thirds of the Government Experimental Gardens, rent free for the initial years. A special set of rules called the Wasteland Rules of 1838 were framed to make wastelands available for cultivation on attractive terms. Wasteland was offered on lease for forty five years with a lot of concessional grants. Indigenous aspirants were not discriminated against as such, but the rules were framed in such a manner that they were excluded from any concessions (Guha, Planter 7-12). Under the rules, one-fourth of the land could be enjoyed tax-free for life and the remaining land would also be tax-free from five years to twenty five depending upon the productivity of the soil. British planters acquired almost seven lakh acres of tax free land in Assam, while indigenous planters had to pay revenue of two to three rupees per acre. Maniram Dewan, a prominent figure in the struggle against the Raj during the 1857 mutiny was one of those who had to suffer because of British discriminatory policies. He succeeded in acquiring two tea gardens, but they were not on wastelands and therefore had to pay very high rates of land revenue. This policy of excluding indigenous tea planters resulted in very few native takers of the gardens when they were for sale later and thus most of the gardens went into the hands of industrialists from other states of India (Misra 50-52).

Maniram Dewan was a member of the erstwhile nobility class who lost their privileges after the abolition of slavery in 1843. But he was one of the rising Assamese middle class who were to take over the cudgels of leadership in the coming years. Anandaram Dhekial Phukan (1829-1859) also was one of them. While Dewan had turned extremist and took an anti-British stand, Phukan, from an enlightened Brahmin land-owner family and educated in the Hindu College of Calcutta, believed in the “regenerative role of British rule” and served the Government till his death (Guha, Planter 16-21). Both had submitted memorials to A.J. Moffat Mills, but considering the opposite trends of their political consciousness, we need to analyse the rise of the middle class from both points of view. The British have affirmed their rule over the province and have manipulated the policies to help them in their economic exploitation. Resistance wasn’t much except from some noblemen who had lost their positions. However, Dewan and Phukan symbolized the growth of the sub-national Assamese identity, something which was going to affect the future of the state in a way that continues till this day, unabated. That, along with the language debate, will form the next part of this paper.

Assam was in a state of waste when the British entered the state. The erstwhile feudal nobility was already plagued by infighting and the Burmese invasion and consequently was in no position to rescue the state from the consequences of feudal decay. It is no surprise that the new Assamese elite would welcome the return of law and order and the “benefits”of British rule. Anandaram Dhekial Phukan, one of the early leaders of the Assamese elite, had written,

No greater benefit could accrue to the people of this country than the deliverance from the Burmese invaders whose barbarous and inhuman policy depopulated the country and destroyed more than half the population, which had already been thinned by intestine commotions and repeated civil wars (qtd. in. Gohain 5).

This was the kind of support that the British got from the new Assamese elite. Interestingly, however, this new middle class was not formed out of the ranks of the erstwhile nobility. The advantages of British modes of employment, education and trade now were “cornered by caste Hindus who had served the former rulers as their clerks and bureaucrats”. The decline of this Ahom nobility was because of the abolition of slavery and forced labour by the British (Gohain 5). The Imperial Gazetteer of India remark of 1909 proves the point,

The native gentry were, however, impoverished by the abolition of the offices they had formerly enjoyed and by the liberation of their slaves, and they had some grounds for feeling discontented with the British rule (qtd. in. Gohain 14-15).

The two directions the new Assamese middle class was to take gets clear from this remark. Maniram Dewan’s rise and fall is an example of the other side of the rising Assamese middle class. A friend to the British in the beginning, Maniram worked as a Dewan in the Assam tea company. However, being an independent spirited person, he went on to start two tea-estates of his own. His venture was a success while the ones of the British weren’t. Immediately, Maniram was burdened with a revenue assessment which was increased manifold. Obviously, colonial policies determined that whoever might turn out to be better than the British had to be eliminated through justifiable means. Maniram was later hanged by the British, as he was found plotting against the colonizers along with the successor of the former ruling house. The British Magistrate who hanged him, exemplified the vindictive British attitude by declaring: “Hanging first, trial afterwards” (qtd. in. Gohain 6).The uprising was brutally suppressed, and the Assamese middle class wasn’t going to try anything rebellious until the days of the Non Co-operation (Gohain 5-6).

Maniram Dewan had pleaded for the restoration of monarchy in his memorials to Moffat Mills. He also resented the loss of privileges incurred by the Ahom nobility and protested the employment of Sylhet Bengalis and Marwaris when a “number of respectable Assamese were already out of employ”. He was also against the new form of taxation, the treatment of the hill tribes, the sale of abkari opium as well as the discontinuing the puja at Kamakhya. However, he did welcome the abolition of slavery and punishment through mutilation. His demands obviously were revivalist in nature, betraying the orthodoxy of the old feudal nobility. Nonetheless, even if he might not be progressive enough to launch an adequate struggle against the British, his role in the 1857 revolt places him in the people’s imagination as the staunch anti-imperialist and he lives in the folk songs and patriotic literature of Assam (Guha, Planter 16-17).

Anandaram Dhekial Phukan on the other hand was a product of the modern age of enlightenment who considered the British occupation as the best thing to happen for the rise of the state’s fortune. He was influenced by the reforms of Peter the Great and advocated the rise of modern science, trade and commerce and the elimination of superstition. His Few Remarks on the Assamese Language was to become a very important document in the sub-national feelings of the Assamese middle class, which is later elaborated in the section devoted to the language debate. But, on the whole he was a British supporter and worked in a position as high as Sub-Assistant Commissioner. Moffat Mills, who was quite irritated with Maniram’s memorandum, was quite impressed by Phukan’s memorandum which had schemes of improvement but did not ask the British to hand over the reins of rule. Another person who followed the line of Phukan was Hemchandra Barua, though the later was far more radical, being an atheist and one who refused high posts under the British. His unorthodox ways shocked the people so much that people hesitated to cremate his body in the traditional Hindu manner after his death. He was the editor of the first English newspaper in Assam, Assam News (1882) and also wrote the first scientific dictionary of the Assamese language, tracing the etymological roots of the Assamese words. However, even Baruah was not adverse to British rule which he saw primarily to be an agent of peace and progress. This class of the Assamese middle class is strongly reminiscent of the Bengali Bhadralok who are from the ranks of caste Hindus rather than the nobility, who have the support of western education, are free from superstitions and yet are attached to traditional mores and cultivation of vernacular literature, and yet are not strongly opposed to British rule because of the land holdings facilitated by the British and the administrative jobs under the rulers. The Assamese middle class was a complete child of British administration, even more than his Bengali counterpart. But a proper development of a trading class never took place, because of which the Assamese middle class never had economic power and had to give up economic privileges to the people coming from other states, especially Marwaris and Bengalis. This, along with the affiliation with a nobility class made the Assamese middle class highly reactionary, the effect which could be seen in the Assam Agitation of 1979-85 and the subsequent rise of militant organizations like ULFA.

The rise of the middle class co-incided with another aspect which was to become one of the most important factors of the rise of Assamese sub-national chauvinism. It was the language debate. The middle class was entirely dependent upon the white collar sector under the British. But, they found a new competitor, and a strong one at that, for these jobs. They were absolutely dominated by the Bengalis whose inflow had started right with the annexation of Assam. Armed with the impact of the Bengali renaissance which had already happened in Bengal, the migrant population started taking up the jobs being offered by the British administration. In April 1831, Bengali was made the language of the court, and soon these Bengali settlers made the judicial and revenue departments their sole preserve. They were also required for teaching purposes in the government schools as there were very few local teachers who could teach in Bengali, which had since been made the medium of instruction as well (Nag 41-45). The Assamese were given the jobs based on their family lineages as compared to the Bengalis who got them because of their English education. The Assamese were also crippled by some stereotyped ethnographic opinion by British authorities. Henry Hopkinson says in a letter to the secretary, Government of India ,

I used the phrase ‘very inefficient’ in a comparative sense to express my opinion that the native of Assam as a body is inferior to those in other parts of India; . . . the Assamese cannot be expected to go more than a certain level of efficiency which their whole race is capable only . . . there is nothing an Assamese can do or will do that cannot be got much better done elsewhere. (qtd. in. Nag 45)

Finally, in 1838, Bengali was made the official language of Assam.

When Jenkins was made the Commissioner of Assam, he found that most of the bureaucratic jobs were in the hands of the Bengalis who had mostly accompanied David Scott. These functionaries did not understand any language other than their own, and it was a natural step that Bengali was made the first language in the offices and schools of Assam. The Bengali policy was what Jenkins would write, something which will prove “expedient under every circumstance for the gradual amalgamation of the people with our subjects in Bengal” (Nag 51). To convey education in Assamese was considered “ruinous” to the Assamese population, while education in Bengali was supposed to enlighten the Assamese population. A letter by Jenkins illuminates the British policy:

All the elementary and preliminary step towards the education of Bengalis have been successfully overcome . . . There are vast numbers of educated individuals who have made themselves masters of the western world, the means of pushing forward their intellectual improvement at almost an equal pace with the most favoured countries of Europe. They are in fact independent of foreign aid and nothing could impede or prevent the full development of the native mind . . . it must be equally our policy and the duty of the government of India, by all means in its power to assimilate the many nations and tribes under our rule into one people and if the early introduction of Bengali in this lately conquered province of Assam would be in any degree productive of blending the people of Assam with the people of our earlier acquired provinces and of civilization, I think the Government have course to rejoice at the chance of necessity which made Mr. Scott, Mr. Robertson adopt Bengali as the official language of our courts (qtd. in. Nag 51-52).

This language policy was fervently opposed by the Assamese middle class, especially because it restricted their options for education and jobs in a Bengali dominated scenario. They found a most unlikely ally in the American Baptist Missionaries, for whom the introduction of Bengali as the state language proved to be a stumbling block in their proselytising work. Therefore, they took up the task to establish a separate identity for the Assamese language. The influences of missionaries like Nathan Brown and Miles Bronson led Moffat Mills to make strong statements on the language question as he questions the viability of the continuation of Bengali as a state language when there were already enough Assamese youths ready for employment but being barred by a language which is different from their mother-tongue (Nag 52-53). The missionaries also found support from the rising educated Assamese middle class youth, especially Anandaram Dhekial Phukan who complained in his memoir to Moffat Mills that the primary textbooks being in a different tongue had few takers He wrote strongly, “. . . the reason assigned for the substitution of the vernacular is that Bengali is the language adopted in the court as if the object were to make the Assamese a nation of judicial officers” (qtd. in. Nag 53). In 1854, the debate was given a new turn by William Robinson who opined that Assamese was a mere dialect of the Bengali language. It was now to the supporters of Assamese language to prove an identity of their own. Dhekial Phukan then came up with his Few Remarks on the Assamese Language, published by the Baptist Missionary Press, Sibsagar, and was distributed free to the British officials. He countered the idea that the Assamese had no literature of their own by providing a list of works in ancient Assamese literature, “sixty two religious works and Puranas and over forty dramas based on events from the celebrated epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana”. The struggle went on for over quite a long time and despite the strong resistance from Henry Hopkinson, the next commissioner, Assamese was finally given its due in 1873 (Nag 52-59).

Though the job was done for the time being, the polarisation between the Assamese and the ‘outsiders’ had already happened and the nascent subnational feelings were waking up in the Assamese. By the time of the mutiny, the Assamese middle class was put into shape to take over the reins of leadership. But the fact remains that British policies were responsible for a lot of troubles that Assam and the other North-Eastern states were to witness, both before and after independence. In the name of development, the British had set the stage for an imperilled frontier that is still troubling the homogenization of India as a nation-state.

Works cited

Banerjee, A.C. Eastern Frontier of British India 1784-1826. Calcutta: A.Mukherjee and Co. Pvt. Ltd., 1943.

Barpujari, H.K. Assam in the Days of the Company 1826-1858. Guwahati: Lawyer’s Book Stall,1963.

Baruah, Sanjib. India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality, New Delhi: OUP,1999.

Bhuyan, S.K. Anglo-Assamese Relations 1771-1826. Guwahati: Lawyer’s Book Stall, 1956.

Butler, John. Travels and Adventures in the Province of Assam: During a Residence of Fourteen Years. 1855 London: Smith, Elder and Co.; Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 2004.

Guha, Amalendu. Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam 1826-1947. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006.

Lahiri, R.M. The Annexation of Assam 1824-1854. Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhapadhyay, 1975

Gait, Edward. History of Assam. Calcutta: Thacker Spink and Co. Pvt. Ltd., 1905.

Gohain, Hiren. “Origins of the Assamese Middle class.” Social Scientist, Vol. 2, No. 1. (Aug.,1973), pp. 11-26. JSTOR. 10 June. 2007 .

Lahiri, R.M. The Annexation of Assam 1824-1854. Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhapadhyay, 1975

Mills, A.J. Moffatt. Report on Assam, Calcutta, 1854.

Misra, Tilottama. “Assam: A Colonial Hinterland.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol, XV, No. 32, (Aug.,1980), pp.1357-64. Rpt. In Nationality Question in Assam: The EPW 1980-81 Debate. Ed. Ahmed, Abu Nasar Saied. New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2006. 47-69.

Nag, Sajal. Roots of Ethnic Conflict: Nationality Question In North-East India, Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1990.

Robinson, William. A Descriptive Account of Assam, Calcutta, 1854.

Saikia, Yasmin. Assam and India: Fragmented Memories, Cultural Identity, and the Tai-Ahom Struggle, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005.

Sharma, Jayita. “A Historical Perspective.”

http://www.indiaseminar.com/2005/550/550%20jayeeta%20sharma.htm

James Tod - Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan: The Feudalism Debate

Lieutenant–Colonel James Tod (1782-1835) came to India as a cadet in the Bengal army in 1799. He commanded the escort of his friend Graeme Mercer, then Government Agent at the court of Daulat Rao Scindhia, from 1812 to 1817. In these three years he organized detailed surveys in Rajputana and Central India. These surveys greatly helped the British in the third Anglo-Maratha War and in the campaigns in Rajputana which led to the signing of treaties with Scindhia regarding assistance against the Pindaris. After that, nineteen other Rajput states signed alliances with the British. This greatly assisted the British in curbing the aggression of the Marathas as well as Pindaris. Tod became the political Agent in Western Rajputana in 1818 and continued to be so till he went back to England in June, 1822 at the age of 40.

It was in this period when Tod managed to conciliate and settle the feuds within the Rajput states and also managed to collect materials which went into the making of the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, in two volumes, published between 1829 and 1832. It was reprinted in Madras in 1873, in Calcutta in 1874 and again in 1898, and in London in 1914. It was published again in 1920 in three volumes, edited, with an introduction and notes by William Crooke and published by Oxford University Press. In this voluminous work, Tod describes the geography of Rajasthan, a history of the Rajput tribes, a sketch of the feudal system in Rajputana during that period and then devotes the remaining sections for historical narratives of the main states, interspersed with personal experiences. In this paper, I would like to illustrate Tod’s version of feudalism in Rajasthan and the different debates surrounding it.

In the chapter “Sketch of a Feudal System in Rajasthan”, Tod contests Henry Hallam’s view that feudalism was a phenomenon that was unique to England, France and parts of Germany. He attempts to establish several underlying commonalities between the Rajputs and the English. He argues that the tribes of early Europe and the Rajput tribes had a common scythic origin in Central Asia and that the Rajputs had a feudal system similar to which had existed in parts of Europe. In dealing with the Rajputs, Tod pointed to land grants, military liability and even feudal incidents, including relief of a year’s revenue payable by an heir, wardship, escheat, forfeiture and aids levied for war or on the marriage of the king’s son or daughter. However, he sets aside marriage and alienation while describing Rajasthan’s feudal polity. The principle of government was “truly patriarchal” as, “the greater portion of the vassal chiefs, from the highest of the sixteen peers to the holders of a chursa( skin or hide) of land, claim affinity in blood to the sovereign” (Tod 109). About three-quarters of the land was distributed as grants, the king living off his own revenue from the rest. Rajput chiefs were formally graded according to the size of the land they enjoyed, right from the king who owned the best land to the “offsets of the younger branches” of the king’s family. Each chief was supposed to look after his own dependants in this feudal tenurial hierarchy. “Legislative authority” was in the hands of the Prince who promulgated “Legislative enactments”, with the aid of his civic council, the four ministers of his crown and their deputies. The posts of ministers were not hereditary as they were not from the Rajput castes as against the “Purdhans” who were the “military ministers” and were Rajputs (Tod 119).

The word Feudalism comes from the fee, feud or feudom, that is, the fee or the fief. This was the form of property described in the law books of medieval Europe. John Critchley describes the fief as a piece of land handed over by “one person, X, . . . to another, Y, on condition that Y do services for him” (Critchley 12). The personal relationship of lord and vassal, that is, grantor and grantee is described as feudal. The Libri feudoro, the most famous collection of feudal laws, states that the vassal should never attack his lord or his castle while the lord is in it, should keep his hands off his lord’s wife and near relatives, must warn his lord about any plot being hatched, must help him in wars and must never forsake his lord in the battlefield (Critchley 31). This relationship could be found in Rajputana. Another aspect that was similar was the emphasis on honour. However, when it comes to military liability, the one difference that lay between the European vassals and the Rajput states was that the Rajputs fought not because they were given lands but because they were a warrior race determined by the caste system in India. Again, the patriarchal Rajput polity based on kinship was different from the lord-vassal relationship in Europe, later to be taken up by Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall and Maine to prove that the society in Rajasthan was more tribal or pre-feudal in character (Inden 176).

Harbans Mukhia provides another aspect to the feudalism debate. He rejected a universal abstraction for feudalism. To him, Indian feudalism is marked by a relatively free peasantry in terms of the mode of production, though the means of production lay in the hands of the chiefs, the beneficiaries as grantees of land. The difference in fertility between European and Indian soil, the ability of the Indian peasant to subsist at a much lower level of resources compared to their European counterparts, advanced use of agricultural equipments and irrigation, smaller land holdings, a much longer period of agricultural activities resulted in Indian agrarian history dominated by free peasantry in terms of economy, though not in the legal sense. The earning of revenue from the land being the chief objective for Indian states, there were legal restrictions imposed on the Indian peasants’ mobility and their right to free alienation of land as well as subjecting them to the rendering of forced labour. But, on the whole, the mastery over the means and the process of productions still remained intact in the hands of the peasant provided he properly cultivated the land and paid the revenue to the state or its assignees. Thus, Mukhia proves that social formation in Medieval India cannot just be explained in terms of a Eurocentric notion of feudalism. Nor does he consider Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production exhaustive as it ignores private property of land. Tod is right as far as ownership of the means of production is concerned, but the peasant’s independent control over the process of production made the “Indian medieval economy”, as Irfan Habib terms it, different from the European feudal system (Mukhia 59).

R.S. Sharma refutes Mukhia’s argument regarding the peasant’s autonomy. The grants that gave the landlords general control over the means of production, also covered agrarian resources, substantially reducing the peasants’ autonomy. The caste system, unquestioned obedience to the landlords and lack of judicial and political rights meant that the autonomy meant almost nothing. Sharma says that the difference between European feudalism and that of the Indian agrarian system lay in the fact that the European landlords did not have to pay taxes to the king, while in India, Kings made grants just in order to collect the revenue, which is the surplus of production. In their turn, the grantees collected rents from their tenant peasants who could be evicted and even subjected to forced labour.

Tod’s intention while describing the feudal polity in India was, however, not just to construct a universalistic notion of feudalism. It rose, partly from “the powerful appeal of the medieval ideal in Britain” and partly from the need for Imperial England to strengthen its hold over the Indian states. The medievalist ideal of the ordered society, for the “world we have lost” because of the advances of industrialization, the French Revolution and Benthamite principles, the overriding nostalgia for “paternalist ideals of social order and proper conduct” and the longing for chivalric ideals made it an attractive dream for Indian civil servants in India (Metcalfe 75). This, along with the notion of “romantic nationalism” (Peabody, Rajasthan 205) constituted Tod’s eulogic description of a feudal Rajasthan. This I would like to elaborate upon in the following section of the paper.

Tod saw feudalism as representing a condition of political perfection, especially for the continuation of British rule in India. He posits the Rajput feudal polity against the despotic Mughals and the predatory Marathas, and the verdict is all for the Rajputs. Actually, the Rajputs being divided into the solar and lunar clans were embroiled in their own feuds, consequently not being inimical to British interests. “The British rulers could save, restore and co-opt polities of this type”, says Inden (175). Tod is quite candid about what sort of relation is to be maintained with the Rajputs. “We have nothing to apprehend from the Rajput states if raised to their ancient prosperity”. He dwells further upon this:

Let there exist between us the most perfect understanding and identity of interests; the foundation-step of which is to lessen or remit the galling . . . let the ties between us be such only as would ensure grand results: such as general commercial freedom and protection, with treaties of friendly alliance. Then if a Tatar or a Russian invasion threatened our eastern empire, fifty thousand Rajputs would be no despicable allies. (Tod 155-56)

Inden argues that Tod’s notion of Rajput feudalism is an attempt to design the “essence” of the Hindu state in general (174). Though exemplary Hindus to Tod, the Rajputs did not represent all Hindus. They were primarily identified as distinct from the Marathas, the latter being the main indigenous rivals of British rule in India. While as a political agent in Rajasthan, Tod tried to garner Rajput military and logistical support against the Marathas and to alleviate worries about possible Russian expansion designs. European rivalry has a lot to do in this conception of the orient as a highly varied terrain where it was necessary to co-opt local groups to take part in the global struggle. So, rather than being an essentialist position, Tod’s depiction of Rajput polity is shaped by the arena of European rivalries as well as internal threats to its rule (Peabody, Rajasthan 204).

The discourse of romantic nationalism is another aspect that goes into Tod’s formulation of the Rajput state. He treated the Mughals, Marathas and Rajputs as distinct, transcendent nations. According to Hobbsbawm and Benedict Anderson, characters now associated with romantic nationalism emerged during the early nineteenth century when Tod was writing and that Tod’s use of the term “nation” arises from the policies he enacted or advocated in his career (Peabody 205). Anderson defines the nation as a social group that is imagined to be limited, sovereign and a community. It has “finite, if elastic boundaries” and is “imagined as sovereign insofar as it does not accept inclusion within any larger ‘divinely-ordained hierarchical dynastic realm’”, maintaining the “ideology of a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’ among all those who belong to it”. Its existence is “absolute and everlasting though at any moment in time this national identity may not be fully manifest” (Peabody, Rajasthan 205-206).

Norbert Peabody finds three of Tod’s policy recommendations being informed by these ideas. The first was of the belief that “the nation consists of a single community”. Tod wanted the Rajput leaders to expel all foreign groups, that is, the Pindaris and the Marathas. The second is that the nation-state should be territorially bounded. He saw Rajasthani state formation as “neither founded on the basis of territorial integrity nor absolute and exclusive political loyalties” caused by the disruptive effects of Marathas invasion. He aimed to correct this degradation by recreating consolidated states. The third policy recommendation is that of Rajput sovereignty but it was not implemented (Peabody, Rajasthan 206-207). He felt the treaties of alliance and protection had the same destabilizing effects as Maratha invasion. Though he supported the policy of indirect rule, he knew the subversive effects of preserving the “visible entities” of the native states. I quote Tod here:

Our anomalous and inconsistent interference . . . operate alike to augment the dislocation induced by long predatory oppression in the various orders of society, instead of restoring that harmony and continuity which had previously existed. The great danger, nay, the inevitable consequence of perseverance in this line of conduct, will be their reduction to the same degradation with our other allies, and their ultimate incorporation with our already too extended dominion. (Tod 102)

Tod minces no words when it comes to the sovereignty of the Rajput states. Anything else is fraught with the dangers of denationalizing effects:

The inevitable consequence is the perpetuations of that denationalizing principle . . . “divide et impera”. We are few; to use an Oriental metaphor, our agents must “use the eyes and ears of others.” That mutual dependence, which would again have arisen, our interference will completely nullify . . . all the sentiments of gratitude which they owe, and acknowledge to be our due, will gradually fade with the national degradation . . . Who will dare to urge that a government, which cannot support its internal rule without restriction, can be national? that without power unshackled and unrestrained by exterior council or espionage, it can maintain self-respect, the corner-stone of every virtue with states as with individuals? This first of feelings these treaties utterly annihilate. Can we suppose such denationalised allies are to be depended upon in emergencies? or, if allowed to retain a spark of their ancient moral inheritance, that it will not be kindled into a flame against us when opportunity offers, instead of lighting up the powerful feeling of gratitude which yet exists towards us in these warlike communities? (Tod 103)

However, this proposal of the Rajputs possessing a “transcendent national identity” actually could further British imperial ambitions. First, the Rajputs and the Marathas could be divided into two opposed groups where previously no such absolute distinction had existed. Secondly, Tod delegitimated the Maratha presence in Rajasthan by branding them as “foreign” invaders who had a “denationalizing” effect on the “indigenous” Rajputs, thus barring the Marathi presence in the trading centres of Rajasthan. Third, Tod constructs the contemporary Rajput polity as “fallen” because of Maratha “denationalizing” influences, paving the way for British imperialism in the guise of resuscating a “lapsed local nationality”. This is a justification for intervention while “articulating a basis for who could be safely co-opted into the apparatus of the ‘empire’ and who should be excluded”. Furthermore, it had the additional effect of shoring up support as to what the East Indian Company was doing in India. Tod also made further distinctions and denationalizing regimes by branding the Mughals as “despotic” and the Marathas as “predatory”, and considered both forms of government as highly unstable. However, Tod’s three political forms, feudal, predatory and despotic cannot be considered as eternal essences in the sense suggested by Inden. Tod’s description for the rehabilitation of the Marathas in the Deccan, his praise for Shivaji and most importantly, his treatment of Jhela Zalim Singh of Kota suggests redefinitions of the outsider/insider motif to suit the apparatus of the empire (Peabody, Rajasthan 208-214). However, constraints of space do not allow me to substantiate this argument.

It is interesting to note that the “romantic nationalism” of Tod regarding the Rajput states was later on taken up by Indian writers themselves to construct a pan-Indian nationalism as a natural extension of the putative local nationalism of groups (Peabody, Rajasthan 214-218). This contradiction in Tod’s formulation of the Rajput nation-states had further ramifications post the mutiny, leading to Lyall and Maine to say that the Rajputs are more of a tribal, pre-feudal society, a formulation which could justify British presence in India better than Tod’s stage-theory driven notion of a feudal Rajasthan similar to that of mediaeval Europe.


Works Cited

Cotton, H.E.A. Rev. of Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han or, the Central and Western Rajput States of India, by Lt. Col. James Tod. Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London,Vol.2, No. 1. (1921), pp. 139-145. JSTOR.10 Mar. 2007 .

Coulborn, Rushton. “Feudalism, Brahminism and the Intrusion of Islam upon Indian History.” Comparative studies in Society and History, Vol. 10. No. 3. ( Apr., 1968), pp. 356-374. JSTOR. 10 Mar. 2007 .

Critchley, J.S. Feudalism. London: George Allen and Unwin (Publishers) Ltd, 1978.

Haynes, Edwards S. “Rajput Ceremonial Interactions as a Mirror of a Dying Indian State System, 1820-1947.” Modern Asian Studies, Vol 24, No. 3. ( July, 1990), pp.459-492. JSTOR. 10 Mar. 2007 .

Inden, Ronald. Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Metcalfe, Thomas R. Ideologies of the Raj. The New Cambridge history of India iii.4. Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1995.

Mukhia, Harbans. “Was There Feudalism in Indian History?” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 8(3), April 1981, 273-310. Rpt. in The Feudalism Debate. Ed. Harbans Mukhia. Delhi: Manohar Publications,2000. 34-81.

Peabody, Norbert. Hindu Kingship And Polity in Precolonial India. Cambridge Studies in Indian History And Society 9. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

---. “Tod’s Rajast’han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India.” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No.1. (Feb., 1996), pp. 185-220. JSTOR.10 Mar. 2007 .

Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. “Rajputana under British Paramountcy: The Failure of Indirect Rule.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 38, No. 2. (June, 1966), pp.138-160. JSTOR. 10 Mar. 2007 .

Sharma, R.S. “How Feudal Was Indian Feudalism?” The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 12, Nos. 2 and 3 (Jan. and April). Rpt. In The Feudalism Debate. Ed. Harbans Mukhia. Delhi: Manohar Publications,2000. 82-111.

Thavaraj, M.J.K. “The Concept of Asiatic Mode of Production: Its Relevance to Indian History.” Social Scientist, Vol.12, No. 7. (July, 1984), pp. 26-34. JSTOR. 10 Mar. 2007 .

Tod, Lt. Col. James. Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han or, the Central and Western Rajput States of India. 2 vols. 1914. London: Routledge; Delhi: M.N. Publishers, 1983.