Entangled by Borders: Bodies, Citizenship, and Gender in Assam

Abstract

This paper will scrutinize the politics of border construction in Assam through the lens of Border Studies and Memory Studies. The unique geo-political location of Assam vis-à-vis its crisis of identity and belonging as a result of the 1947 Partition, makes it a complex site of study. My scrutiny of the literary and cultural memory of this region will be based on a comparative reading of a selection of short fiction entitled Barbed Wire Fence: Stories Of Displacement From The Barak Valley Of Assam (2012) by Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das, and Debendranath Acharya’s Assamese novel Jangam on the 1942 Indo-Burmese exodus (Sahitya Akademi award, 1984). My intervention is driven by the persistent need to deconstruct the 1947 Partition as a monolithic history of violence and disruption, and to draw attention to the many instances where multiple borders and multiple forms of disenfranchisement took place. The texts that I am close-reading, focus on such similar histories of disjuncture that shaped the history of Assam vis-à-vis issues of bodies, citizenship, and gender. Using news articles and commentaries from 2019 to 2022, I will subsequently connect the traumatic events surrounding the 1942 exodus and the 1947 Partition to the current state apparatuses that are using biomarkers to discriminate against perceived others and eliminate them from the protection of the nation-state. I will connect the past trauma with the insecurities and (im)possibilities that have cropped up surrounding the implementation of a Citizenship Amendment Bill, and creation of a National Register of Citizens (NRC).

Keywords:

• Bodies
• borders
• migration
• gender
• trauma
• partition
• exodus

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The CAA and NRC have been instrumental in controlling and shaping India’s population vis-à-vis refugee settlement. While CAA was an amendment of the 1955 Citizenship Act, NRC was implemented post 1951. To read more, visit: https://scroll.in/article/930482/explainer-what-exactly-is-the-national-register-of-citizens.

2 Sanjay Barbora talks about migration patterns, settlement, and representation in Assam in his 2022 publication Homeland Insecurities: Autonomy, Conflict, and Migration in Assam.

3 This strategic move to divide the state, and hence the community, was met with enormous resistance from both the Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, and the Partition was annulled later in 1911. This initial attempt at border construction caused anxieties regarding the political status of Assam and its identity, as the Bengali-speaking district of Sylhet was incorporated into the Bengal province. This would continue to create conflict among Bengali-Assamese people in terms of linguistic, cultural, and economic dominance.

4 Baishya uses the word chakrabehu, which refers to Chakravyūha or the labyrinth/maze like formation in Mahābhārata, where the entrance was accessible, but it was impossible to make an exit.

5 Ayya’s Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India by Anand Pandian and M. P. Mariappan talks about how the Burmese had no idea of a specific caste/community that owned their lands. Their anger was directed towards all foreigners i.e., Indians and not the Chettiar community alone.

6 American photojournalist Margaret-Bourke White documented the violence of the 1947 Partition for the Life magazine, and her frames capture the macabre, the gore surrounding the displacement and death of the citizens.

7 I borrow this term from anthropologist Jason de Leon’s book title The Land of Open Graves (2015) that talks about U.S border policies and control over migration from Mexico through the Sonoran Desert.

8 nagarera pathe pathe dekhecha adbhuta eka jība

ṭhika mānuṣera mato

kiṃbā ṭhika naẏa,

yena tāra byaṅga-citra bidrūpa-bikṛta!

tabu tārā na$\underset{¨}{\text{r}}$e ca$\underset{¨}{\text{r}}$e kathā bale, āra

jañjālera mata jame rāstāẏa-rāstāẏa.

ucchiṣṭera āstākū$\underset{¨}{\text{r}}$e base base dhom̐ke

āra phyāna cāẏa.

rakta naẏa, māṃsa naẏa,

naẏa kona pātharera mato ṭhānḍā sabuja kalijā.

mānuṣera sat bhāi cāẏa sudhu phyāna;

tabu yena sabhyatāra bhāṅenāko dhyāna!

9 It is estimated that somewhere around 3 million people perished in the Bengal province during the famine.

10 The naked, ugly condition where human bodies become mere killable flesh (Agamben 1988).

11 Baishya uses this in his introduction to the translation of Jangam to refer to a “valley of death.”

12 Nicole Grimaldi brings up Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death” in the context of enslavement and how natal alienation leads to estrangement of people from historical memory, culture, kinship. traditions, material inheritance

13 Chandradhar Das, a daily wage earner, migrated from East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) in 1955 and entered with a refugee certificate in Tripura, Assam. In 2018, he was declared a “foreigner” by the Foreigners’ Tribunal and was sent to Silchar detention center at the age of 102. With the history of Partition as the backdrop, it is only evident how complex the issues of migration, refugee resettlement, and documentation could be. However, in his long lifetime of 104 years, Das’ status as a non-citizen remains a glaring example of the state’s inaction and indifference to the crisis of its citizens. Just like Das, millions of others were left out of the final database of the citizens published in 2019, without any explanation whatsoever. Scroll.in (2020) published Chandradhar Das' story in an online article.

14 Baishya discusses how the dog is endowed a national identity, that subsequently makes it disposable in his essay (2022) “Dogs of War, War Dogs: The Afterlives of Manto in Two Kashmiri Graphic Novels.”

15 Ayya’s Accounts talks about how the Indo-Burmese traders, laborers who worked for them, common people and their families, and other settlers had to come back to India and build their lives from scratch. Ayya, the protagonist and his elder brother Mutharasu went back to Pudur, their village in Tamil Nadu to reunite with their family. Their shops in Burma remained, and they had to start over in India, as they had sold off their lands and properties while leaving India for Burma.

16 Parashakti (1952, Tamil language) is an Indian film that is a dramatic depiction of how the Indo-Burmese exodus affected the lives of citizens and remains a commentary on the socio-political scenario of India during that time.

17 Pisharoty brings up the case of Shoburi Jaan Nessa who was excluded from the final list even though she provided her family’s ration card that establishes her relationship with her father. Her family, that includes her father (included in the 1951 NRC) and her brother (who is included in the current list) used the same ration card as their supporting document, but she was left out. There were confusions whether a digitized ration card is accepted over traditional cards, but another woman Nurjahan Begum’s experience of submitting a digital copy yet being left out dismisses that theory as well. Pisharoty’s accounts from multiple women brings to light the absence of any method to the processing and updating of the NRC list.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ragini Chakraborty

Ragini Chakraborty is currently a PhD candidate at UIUC, working on borders, migrations, trauma, and gender. She is also interested in Partition Literature, Indigenous Literatures of North America, Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Literature, and Comparative Literature in India. She has received her M.A. and M.Phil. degrees from the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. She has been a recipient of the Shastri Research Scholar Fellowship, for her M.Phil. research work in 2018. Her latest work “Re-imagining the Komagata Maru incident: Canadian history through fiction and film” (2022); DOI: 10.1080/19438192.2022.2090376, was published in the South Asian Diaspora journal.