IDETNTITY CRISIS AMONG THE ASSAMESE PEOPLE

Hira Charan Narjinari

A strange and most interesting debate with respect to the definition of Assamese people that is now going on in Assam is certainly a rarest of the rare episodes in the history of any humankind during the last hundred years. Why are the Assamese-speaking people so keen to define the term Assamese? When the language called Assamese is constitutionally recognised as one of the national languages of India since the time of the coming of the Constitution of India into force on 26^th January 1950 then why are there such deep apprehensions among the Assamese about their own security as a race? In fact, the older Assamese political leaders were so defiant of the contemporary events that they ignored the prophecy of C.S. Mullan when he prophesied saying, “It is sad but by no means improbable that in another thirty years Sibsagar district will be the only part of Assam in which an Assamese will find himself at home”. Many Assamese scholars made mockery of his prophecy. However they failed to perceive the actual meaning of the prophecy and considered themselves as the strongest nation in the area assimilating other communities into Assamese-speaking community which has now proved disastrous for their own identity.

The All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), established in January 1967, smelt something fishy in the voter’s list in 1979 which drove them to agitation against illegal immigrants.  After a 6 year (1979-1985)  long agitation, a Memorandum of Settlement known popularly as Assam Accord was signed in the presence of the then Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi on 15 August 1985 between All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), Government of India and Government of Assam on the issue of foreigner’s problem. The Assam Accord contains 15 Clauses out of which Clause 6 is the most important one. It states about safeguarding the Assamese people constitutionally, legislatively and administratively and preserving and promoting the culture, social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people. 

About thirty years have elapsed after signing the Assam Accord but till date Clause 6 of the Accord could not be implemented in the absence of common definition of the term Assamese People as spelt out in Clause 6 of the Accord. There is no doubt about it that finding a common definition of the term Assamese People is very intricate and the road may not be so smooth so as to arrive at an ultimate conclusion. The multi-ethnic, the multi-lingual and the multi-cultural characteristics of the State of Assam is though unique but the Assamese people could not gratify different ethnic groups the way they should have been gratified.  In the 1891 Census it was stated that as many as 167 different languages were returned and in the 1901 Census it was reported that in the Province of Assam, Assamese was spoken by only 22 per cent while Bengali was spoken by 48 per cent. However, after independence, Assamese became the language of the new State of Assam.  In spite of being a dominant linguistic group, the Assamese people feared that unless constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards are extended to them they would be overwhelmed by non-Assamese people.

Recently the issue for determining the definition of the Assamese People rocked the Assam Assembly on 3^rd March 2015 when the Speaker Pranab Gogoi recommended, after consultations with 53 different organisations, that the year 1951 be taken as the cut off period and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), 1951, be taken as the basis for the definition of the Assamese People for the purpose of reservation of seats and constitutional safeguards as required by the Assam Accord.[The Hindu, 1 April 2015]. The members of Asom Gana Parishad, Bharatiya Janata Party and the Bodoland People’s Front backed the Speaker’s definition of Assamese People and insisted that the Speaker’s recommendation be treated as a recommendation of the House. 

NRC was prepared in 1951 after the Census of 1951. The Register contains particulars of all the persons enumerated during the 1951 Census. In other words, the Register contains details of persons irrespective of caste, tribe, creed, language and religion. If so, then in what way NRC 1951 is going to help determine the definition of Assamese People? Will Bengalis – both Hindus and Muslims – love to be defined as Assamese? 

Meanwhile, the Assam Sahitya Sabha stated that those Indian nationals who irrespective of community, language, religion and place of origin, accept Assamese language as their mother tongue or their second or third language are the Assamese people. This does not appear to be the appropriate definition of Assamese people.

According to AASU and 25 other organisations, the word “Assamese” in Clause 6 of the Assam Accord of 1985 means all indigenous communities and all indigenous Assamese-speaking groups of the State of Assam.  Bodo Sahitya Sabha has suggested replacement of the word Assamese by the phrase indigenous people of Assam”. According to Dhirendra Nath Chakravartty, a veteran journalist and former President of Kamrup Mahanagar Zilla Sahitya Sabha, “People from all the castes and the ethnic groups that had figured in the census books from 1901 to 1951 and the communities like the Gariyas and Mariyas as well as the tea-garden tribes should be treated as Assamese people.”

Phrases like indigenous people of Assam, indigenous communities and indigenous Assamese-speaking groups do not appear to be appropriate to define Assamese People. The very term Indigenous Peoples is confusing because most people of the world are “indigenous” to their countries in the sense of having been born into them or having descended from people who were born into them. Indigenous peoples are clearly native to their countries in this sense too, but they also make another claim, namely that they were the first and are still there and so have rights of prior occupancy to their lands.

The government of India does not accept marginal peoples of India to be called by the term “indigenous”. The government opines that most of the peoples of Indian subcontinent have been there for thousands of years and hence none can reasonably be singled out as indigenous. The Constitution of India rather calls the marginal peoples of India as scheduled tribe and not as indigenous peoples.

In fact, there is no universal definition of indigenous peoples. However, for practical purposes the commonly accepted understanding of the term is that provided by Jose R. Martinez Cobo, Special Rapporteur, United Nations Economic and Social Council, in his Study on the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Peoples, June 1982. The working definition reads as follows:

“Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.”

In the light of the above definition, the Bodos and their cognates can only be considered Indigenous Peoples. Before the arrival of the so-called Aryans, Brahmaputra Valley was already under the occupation of the Bodos. In other words, when the Aryans arrived in ancient Assam they referred to the Bodos and their cognates of ancient Assam as Kiratas, Mlecchas, Asuras and Danavas. It was clear that these peoples were natives to ancient Assam.

The conquering peoples like the Aryans and the Ahoms were racially, ethnically and culturally different from the Tibeto-Burman Bodo and other cognate tribes who in the course of time were subordinated by the invaders. The Bodos speak a language which is entirely different from the Assamese language spoken by a majority of the population in the area. Bodo culture invariably differs from the ‘mainstream’ Assamese. Bodo language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman family while Assamese is of Indo-Aryan origin. More than a decade ago Bodo was called a dialect or an unclassified language. Bodo is now one of the national languages of India because it was adopted in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India in 2003. Interestingly, in April 2014, Paramananda Rajbongshi the then vice president of Axom Xahitya Xabha sternly warned all the dignitaries and administrators of BTAD saying that insult of Assamese language is intolerable. He further said that Assamese is immortal and hence Assamese language has to be practiced as a State language along with developing Bodo language. This sadly demonstrates the Assamese intolerance towards other languages. The learned Mr. Rajbongshi may not be aware of the fact that Bodo language precedes Assamese language and that when the Bodo language was spoken in northern Bengal and north-east India, the Assamese caste and their language were not even born at that time.

It is accepted by scholars that the term Assam originated only with the coming of the Shan invaders to ancient Assam. “The word ‘Assamese’, says B. Kakati, is an English one based on the anglicised form ‘Assam’ from the native word “Asam”, which in its turn is connected with the Shans who invaded the Brahmaputra Valley in the 13^th century. Though the Shan invaders called themselves “Tai” they came to be referred to as Āsam, Asām and Acam by the indigenous people of the province. [ B. Kakati, ‘The Assamese Language’, in Aspects of Early Assamese Literature, Ed. 1953, p.1]. The Mughal historian who accompanied Mir Jumla in his expedition to Assam during the second half of the 17^th century A.D. refers to the Ahoms as “Asamiyans”. If the name Assam originated from the name Ahom, then it is reasonable to say that the name Assam and her language called Assamese began taking shape only after the arrival of the Ahoms. Shall we then take it for granted that the Ahoms are the actual Assamese People? Furthermore, the Ahoms invaded Assam and hence according to the construction of the working definition of indigenous peoples they cannot be called indigenous in the true sense of the term.  

An interesting conversation between Hilary Pais and his mother-in-law of Tezpur on who Assamese is may be cited here which will throw some idea about Assamese people. His mother-in-law was not an expert and emotionally involved with the definition of Assamese. But her replies are interesting to note. Pais asked his mother-in-law – who is Assamese? She replied, - “Ami Axomiya” – “we are Assamese”, “Ami Axomiya kom” – “We speak Assamese”.  What about Purna Narayan Sinha? She replies, - “Koch manuh, Axomiya koi”- he is a Koch who speaks Assamese. What about Attaur Rahman and his family? She replies, Mia manuh, Bongali koi – they are Musalman people who speak Assamese. What about Bahadur Basumatary? She replies, - Kochari manuh, Bodo koi – he is a Kachari who speaks Bodo. About Bishnu Rabha, she said, - Bishnu Rabha is a Kochari who speaks Rabha”.  From this it is clear that Axomiya are entirely different from the Koch, the Muslim, the Rabha, the Kachari, etc.

The Bodos have already declared that they are not Assamese. A song to this effect has already been composed which starts with Jwng nwnga Asomiya, Dabung jwngkhou Asomiya (We are not Assamese, call us not Assamese) which has become most popular among the Bodos. Recently, the Koch Rajbansis have also declared that they are not Assamese. Tomorrow all the Muslim population will say that they are Bengalis and not Assamese. Bengali Hindus, Hindi-speaking peoples, Nepalese, Santals, Adivasis of tea gardens, and all the Mongoloid peoples living in Assam, I am afraid, will not certainly be eager to bury their own ethnic identities dissolving themselves into Assamese ethnic group. In the long run, there will be a handful of Assamese-speaking community who would be found as prophesied by Mullan only in Sibsagar. And at the same time, Assamese language will be reduced to a minority language.

Instead of wasting time on the definition of Assamese People, we may seek a solution by changing the name Assam into KAMRUP which finds echo in Dr. Rajendra Prasad’s words, the First President of India, while speaking about the extension of the newly framed Constitution. He said, .....”a constitution for a democratic Republic which extends from Kashmir to Cape Comorin, from Kathiawar to Coconada and from Cuttack to Kamrup.”[O.P Aggarawala & S.K. Aiyar, The Constitution of India, 1^st Edition, 1950]. This will be in keeping with the region’s historical past as well as move past separatist debates on ethnic identities in the region.