Chapter2 The Ubiquitous Other, or the Muslims of Assam Is Peace Possible?

Constructing the Problem

The Othering of Muslims in India and Assam is anchored in the BJP’s ideology of Hindutva.10 Hindutva imagines India as a nation homogenously peopled by Hindu citizens and, in so doing, displaces Muslims and casts them as outsiders. Like Northeast India more broadly, Assam is targeted by the BJP’s Hindutva because of the relatively high percentage of Muslims in the state. Multiple caste groups and tribal communities constitute the Hindu community, which is the majority. Muslims are the largest of the minority groups in Assam, while Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and, in theory, Parsis make up the others. (Although Parsis are one of India’s official minority groups, Assam actually has no Parsi population.) The people share one common factor—their homeland, Assam—and are emotional about the place and their place in it. Each community claims belonging within the historically and culturally hybrid Assamese family that evolved through exchanges and interactions over a long period of time.

The BJP government has pointed to Assam’s close proximity to Bangladesh in an effort to whip up the deeply lodged fear of “infiltration” by illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.11 The government has effectively reinforced the narrative of infiltration by publicly emphasizing that Assam’s Muslim population consists predominantly of Bengali immigrants, variously labelled “miya” or “Bangladeshi”—a term that came into use following the Assam Agitation (1979–85), a struggle for Assamese identity that was initially directed against all outsiders but later settled on the Bengali Muslims as the quintessential outsiders. To end this “infiltration,” the government proposes to fence the border with barbed wire, catch Bangladeshis at the border, and identify, detain, and deport the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants who are already inside Assam. Hinduizing Assam and isolating the Muslims as illegal Bangladeshis are simultaneous processes.

An aggravated sense of the Other thus exists in Assam. The Muslim “termites” who are deemed ghuspaithiye (infiltrators) must be exterminated, as Amit Shah suggests in the chapter epigraph. The BJP’s approach is not merely political: it is ideological. India, they say, should be a “Hindu Rashtra,” a Hindu nation, encompassing the territory known as Akhand Bharat, “undivided Bharat,” with the term “Bharat” invoking the ancient Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, Extending from Afghanistan through to Northeast India, and encompassing Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, Akhand Bharat nullifies the partition of India in 1947 and effectively creates a new, Hindu empire.12 Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS), does not clarify what the status of Muslims in the imagined Akhand Bharat will be, but he promotes the idea of reuniting the entire subcontinent. By way of explanation, he claims that “people who got separated from India, leaving their tradition and culture, forgetting their ancestors, were unhappy since the beginning . . . even people of Pakistan were saying that it was a mistake.”13 The Assam room in this national house will shine as pure Hindu. The BJP has anchored this ideological position on the platform of the RSS, which, in turn, draws inspiration from the Brownshirts of Nazi Germany.

In keeping with its Hindu nationalist project, the BJP has undertaken to reclaim land, particularly from miya cultivators, and return it to the indigenous people of Assam.14 Two dominant narratives—invasion and displacement—convey a disturbing message about the Muslims as aggressive and illegal occupiers of Assam’s land, and because their original home is outside Assam and even India itself, they are deemed treacherous and destructive. Even the Assamese-speaking Muslims, who are now officially considered indigenous, are simultaneously labelled as Mughal outsiders, while the miyas are the Bangladeshi “infiltrators.” These labels were popularized during the state elections of 2021 and became part of the public discourse, a development in which the television media played an important role. Beyond the media discourse, a religious tinge was given to this discussion by self-styled Hindu ideologue Satyanarayan Borah, of the RSS, who called for the economic and social strangulation of Muslims because they were outsiders.15

In pursuit of its desire to be rid of these loathsome infiltrators, the BJP was keen on the plan to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, as doing so would identify illegal immigrants, as distinct from citizens. The process of updating took place from 2013 to 2018, but when the final NRC list was released at the end of August 2019, the government rejected the result because, contrary to their expectations, more than half of those whose citizenship could not be documented were Hindu Bengalis, rather than Muslim.16 This setback called for a sweeping remedy: the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which the national government passed on December 11, 2019, in order to assure Indian citizenship to all undocumented Hindus and other non-Muslims who had migrated to India from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan.

Its blatantly anti-Muslim character notwithstanding, the CAA is a hugely unpopular solution for the Assamese. Subnationalist (jatiyotabadi) groups reject the CAA on ethnic and linguistic grounds. Progressive Assamese groups also reject the CAA because they do not agree with the BJP’s religion-based approach to citizenship. They continue to believe in Assam’s secular past. Irrespective of their reason, soon after the CAA became law, the Assamese took to the streets to protest. Two things changed the course of mass activism in Assam. First, the national media shifted its attention to Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, where Muslim women had organized a peaceful sit-in to protest against the CAA. By making opposition to the CAA a “Muslim protest,” the media gave a religious colour to the people’s struggle.

Second, COVID-19 broke out. Shortly after the outbreak, a hyped-up narrative began circulating about how the virus had been brought to Assam (and elsewhere in India) by Muslims who had attended a meeting of the Tablighi Jammat in Delhi. The government’s public naming and shaming of the conference attendees from Assam emboldened the divisive forces within the state. In daily press briefs, Himanta Biswa Sarma, then the minister of health, read the names of each Muslim man or woman infected with COVID-19, even going so far as to detail their “bad behaviour” in quarantine hospitals, and urged the Assamese public to shun and isolate the contagious Muslims. People set up barricades with signs reading “No Muslim Entry” and “Corona Jihad”—anti-Muslim slogans that symbolized and represented the internalization of the government’s rhetoric.

Assam is at a critical juncture; it must choose between its multivalent, heterogeneous local pasts and a homogenous Hindu identity. The new, politically constructed image of the Muslim Other cannot serve Assam and the Assamese in the long haul. The lived history of xanmiholi, tried and tested over centuries, offers an alternative way of thinking about and being with the Other. To me, this local resource holds the key to the future and the possibility of living in peace with one another.

Defining “Assamese” opens a complex issue of belonging and citizenship. Many non-Assamese, although they might be citizens of India and have lived in Assam for multiple generations, are not accepted as Assamese. The Assamese are pitted against the non-Assamese, making “indigenous” versus “settler” a political issue. The BJP’s new vision of Akhand Bharat, which defines Assam in religious terms, further complicates the political situation. How did this politics become so powerful? Blaming the colonials after seven decades of independence does not resolve the problem. Postcolonial politicians endorse the colonial agenda of religious Othering, and the virus of hatred is spreading.

The Char-Chapori Miyas: Insider or Outsider?

The Muslims who inhabit the chars (islands formed by sand and silt deposits) and chapori (sandbanks) of the Brahmaputra River are variously called miyas, pamua (farmers), or charua (char residents), and are also labelled “Bangladeshis.” The term “char-chapori miyas” simply references the lands on which they live, which seems preferable to me. Ironically, elsewhere in India, miya is an honorific title given to a man of superior social standing, a “gentleman.” In Assam, however, the term is used pejoratively—although in recent years several miya poets have embraced the name to highlight their pride and dignity despite the degradation they suffer.17 I am using the term miya similarly, in the spirit of a refusal to accede to the politics of Othering and dehumanization. When I refer to char-chapori miyas, I do so with the hope that knowledge about the Othering process and the everyday lives of the miyas will motivate discussion and calls for redress and a reaffirmation of our mutual humanity.

The chars are scattered along more or less the entire length of the Brahmaputra River. Some of the present-day chars are more than a hundred years old, and there are over two thousand of them, but not all are habitable. Although many Nepalis and other communities also migrated and settled in the chars, the chars have become synonymous with the miyas. Majuli, located in the district of the same name, is Assam’s largest char, but since miyas do not live there, it is not called a char. Instead, it is promoted as a living museum of the Assamese culture.

The chars occupy roughly 4.6 percent of Assam’s total land area. At 690 persons per square kilometre, the population density is more than double the state average of 340 persons.18 Many of the chars are located in districts with a high percentage of Muslims, namely, Dhubri, Goalpara, Bongaigaon, Barpeta, Darrang, Morigaon, and Nagaon (see figure 2.1). Altogether, the chars fall within a total of fifty-nine rural development blocks, which are home to roughly 9.35 percent of Assam’s total population—the most illiterate population in India.19 Few have primary schools, dispensaries and/or health care centres, or business establishments. In 1993, the government established a Directorate for Char Areas Development; after nearly three decades, there is no published documentation on this “development.” Geography and social neglect combine to produce a dearth of knowledge about the people and the chars. They are forgotten spaces, disconnected from the mainland.

In October 2019, I visited the chars of Lakhipur and Morisakundi, in Barpeta district. Conditions were pathetic. Houses were precariously made of bamboo and thatch, and poverty was evident in people’s torn and dishevelled clothes. Young children played aimlessly, their one-room schoolhouse closed for lack of a teacher. There was no mosque, graveyard, or marketplace. A run-down shop was the only public space. Both chars were desperate places, and people had little to say about the development they have experienced. Parvin Sultana, a char-chapori scholar, laments that char miyas have become the “nowhere” people living in “missing villages” that no one cares about.20

In Lakhipur and Morisakundi, people were gravely concerned about the future, particularly for those left out of the NRC roll of July 2019. Almost everyone I talked to told me that their ancestors came to Assam more than a hundred years earlier. They had colonial land documents as proof, which they had guarded carefully even when they lost all their other belongings in floods. The authenticity of these documents has been called into doubt by the government of Assam, which adjudicates their claim to citizenship. To me, the reduction of their lives into bits of paper was even more disturbing. Even those whose names do appear on the citizen rolls fear that they can be declared “foreigners” and thrown into jails and/or government detention centres until deported.21 They do not know where they might be sent because they have no home except Assam. Those who continue to have voting rights are desperate not to lose their status as citizens, which they know the BJP government can take away.

In the Assamese view, the chars are a “mini Bangladesh,” and the char dwellers are “Bangladeshis.” The tag “illegal immigrants” relegates them to the bottom of the Muslim/Other pile in Assam. The char-chapori miyas know in their hearts that they are abandoned people. Even the char lands at times discard them. The chars are precarious islands created by the Brahmaputra River. The floods erode the chars; with each passing year, as floods intensify, the people’s condition worsens. When the Brahmaputra changes course, the char inhabitants must migrate to new areas, where they encounter new problems as “infiltrators.” Their woes are unending, yet they are blamed as the “culprits” who rob the Assamese of their identity, land, and culture. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has stated that harmony will not be possible as long as Muslims are unwilling to protect “our Sankari Culture.”22 The lumpen, underprivileged miyas are blamed as scheming, treacherous thieves who threaten the Assamese people.

These images of the alien and hostile miya were undone for me during the COVID lockdown in Guwahati, Assam’s largest city, from late March to July 2020. My firsthand experiences made me appreciate their humanity, expressed in the face of acute danger to their health and life. At the break of dawn, they came in their country boats, braving the Brahmaputra’s turbid waters to provide food to the townspeople. Our neighbourhood survived because of them. Several miyas, young and old, offered support in a variety of different ways. A disturbing question emerges for me about my own community: how did we, the Assamese, became so ruthless toward the miyas? A combination of factors, such as fear of the Other, Assamese self-deception, the economic marginalization of the India’s northeast, the BJP’s Hindutva rhetoric, and the expectation of reward for denouncing the miyas are hastening the demise of humanity in Assam.

Originally, “miya” was the name give to Muslim peasants who migrated to Assam early in the twentieth century primarily from the Mymensingh district of East Bengal—although, since then, the term has come to be applied to Bengali Muslims more broadly, not in any historical sense but rather as a political label used to cast Muslims as outsiders. During the period of colonial rule, Hindu landlords owned almost all of the arable land in Mymensingh, and the Muslim peasants were landless. Becoming landowners in Assam was thus an attractive option to these peasants, and since movement within British India was open and encouraged, they came to Assam in the hope of improving their condition. Although the migration of Bengali Muslims to Assam began slowly, during the partition of Bengal (1905–11) the migration of both Muslim and Hindu Bengalis increased. Educated Hindu Bengalis took up jobs as “babus” (clerks) in the colonial administration, while the peasants, mostly Muslims, took to cultivating the land. Besides growing rice, the newcomers were encouraged to cultivate jute; as a cash crop, it increased the revenues of the colonial state. By 1919–20, the immigrants claimed more than 106,000 acres for cultivating jute.23

The early immigrants settled in the islands in the western districts of the Brahmaputra Valley, initially in the Goalpara area, which was adjacent to East Bengal. They cleared the uninhabited land and brought it under cultivation and were good neighbours to the local people. In 1927, the colonial commissioner of Assam, B. C. Allen, described their land thus: “Near the river the land as a rule is low and is covered with reed jungle, much of which has in recent years been taken up by hardy immigrants from Bengal, who are trained to snatch a living from places which an up-countryman would consider to be quite unfit for human life.”24 As one can imagine, the chars were not a prime property for the Assamese. No one wanted to live in the middle of the river or start new agriculture in the sandy, unstable banks. Today, however, the government has plans to develop the permanent chars as the site for small industries. The miyas are excluded from these entrepreneurial projects. In the arithmetic of electoral politics, however, the “immigrant” miyas, who outnumber the Assamese Muslims, have proved useful. On the one hand, the poverty-stricken miyas are branded as illegal immigrants, and the Assamese public is provoked into viewing them with anger and contempt. On the other hand, the BJP courts them with promises of financial benefits, in hopes of winning their votes. The party aims to divide the Muslims in Assam against each other and prevent them from building trust among themselves or from voting as a unified political bloc. But before I discuss the Assamese Muslim condition, we need to understand the history of miya exclusion.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the immigrant peasant population grew and spread into new areas in central Assam, notably the districts of Kamrup, Darrang, and Nagaon.25 In 1920, the colonial administration introduced the “Line System,” which restricted the areas in which Bengali-speaking Muslim immigrants were allowed to settle, thereby segregating miya villages from those of indigenous Assamese. The miya peasants nevertheless moved beyond the lines of demarcation because the Assamese were willing to sell land to them and because “the local administration was found to be increasingly indulgent” in dealing with the settling of land.26 Isolated from their neighbours, the Assamese felt threatened by the rising numbers of Bengali immigrants, seeing them as land-grabbing “Muhammadans.” The animosity grew more intense following the 1937 elections, when the Muslim League formed a minority government in the province. Between 1937 and 1946, the government encouraged migration into presently uncultivated areas of western Assam as part of its “Grow More Food” program, which was widely seen as a strategy to increase the Muslim population.27

Although the colonial government had initiated the migration of Muslims from East Bengal, they laid the blame for the demographic changes in Assam on a “Muhammadan invasion” that was altering the culture, language, and religion of the Brahmaputra Valley. This emboldened the Hindu Mahasabha (the religious platform of the RSS) to stoke tensions, claiming the existence of “alarming reports of forcible occupation of lands in mass-scale by Muslims.”28 Organizations such as the Assam Sangrakhani Sabha (Assam Protection Society), the Jatiya Mahasabha (People’s Assembly), and the Indian National Congress party made it a public issue to resist the Bengali Muslim invasion. In 1941, when Assam’s Muslim population numbered 1,696,978 against 3,222,377 Hindus, people were alarmed.29 Statistics and terms like “native” and “outsider,” which the colonial British had used for administrative purposes, acquired new value for manufacturing “facts” for politics and expanding the boundaries of interpretation. The economic grievances of the Assamese were aggravated by reminders of the struggle between the Bangla (Bengali) and Asamiya (Assamese) languages that raged between 1836 and 1873—but instead of blaming the Hindu Bengali babus, who were both the proponents and beneficiaries of the Bangla language in Assam, the Assamese people directed their anger and fear at Bengali Muslim immigrants. The term “Bengali” came to be equated with the term “Muslim,” and the much-hated miyas became the embodiment of negative connotations: adjectives like criminal, dirty, litigious, greedy, licentious, thieving, smelly, and so on were heaped on top of “foreigners” and “invaders.” The rhetoric of indigeneity versus outsiderness that emerged produced cleavages among the Hindus and Muslims and an atmosphere ripe for violence.

In these circumstances, one could hardly expect those viewed as outsiders to embrace Assamese culture and language. Yet that is what the char-chapori miyas, in their earnest effort to assimilate, did. Unlike Bengali Hindu immigrants, immigrant Muslims adopted Assamese as their mother tongue, thereby earning themselves the name Na-Asamiya (or Na-Axomiya), “new Assamese.” In so doing, they increased the percentage of Assamese speakers from 31 percent in 1931 to well over 56 percent in 1951, paving the way for Assamese to become Assam’s official language in 1960.30 Both the language and the Assamese community benefited from the support of the char-chapori miyas, but the benefactors themselves did not. Speaking Assamese could not wash off the stigma of being immigrants. Nor were the Assamese communities interested in sharing their homeland: they continued to devise new ways to depict the miyas as strangers. As Zygmunt Bauman argues, building on the work of Georg Simmel, the stranger is someone who has come and does not go away. This is what the Assamese feared: the miyas would never go away unless they were driven out. Driving out the immigrants was the fundamental goal of the Assam Agitation in the early 1980s, and, in the BJP’s Assam, this objective has been incorporated into official policy.

Although the ethnonationalist Assam Agitation of the early 1980s started as an economic and cultural struggle against non-Assamese “foreigners,” it went through a sea change after the RSS entered the fray and the term “Bangladeshi” gained currency. Miyas now found themselves condemned as illegal foreigners. On February 18, 1983, Assamese peasants and members of local tribal communities torched the miya village of Nellie, in the Nagaon district of central Assam. The violence swiftly spread to other Muslim-majority villages, killing thousands of miya peasants and their families. Fear crippled the Muslim mind, while the Assamese Hindus assumed ownership of Assam. The Assamese Hindu claim to be the primary citizens of Assam created another rift, this time with a plains tribal group called the Bodos.

In 1993, the Assamese government attempted to placate the Bodos, who were angry not only about being placed in a position secondary to the Assamese but also about encroachments onto their lands by miya peasants and were agitating for an independent state. The government set up an autonomous administrative district governed by the Bodoland Autonomous Council. The 1993 Bodo Accord stopped short of formally demarcating Bodoland territory, however, and in 2003 another agreement was signed—which, while it did define Bodo territory, proved to generate a new round of conflicts. In this ongoing cycle of violence, the Bodos periodically directed their anger at the neighbouring miya villages, most notably in major pogroms that took place in 1994, 2012, and 2014.31 In the meanwhile, academics, government officials, and journalists produced numerous statistics to “prove” that the Bangladeshi immigrants were overwhelming the local people. The welter of numbers confused the public, as intended. Adding to the confusion, rumours proliferated, public discourse became the site for lamenting Assamese losses, and the yarn of the story grew until the government’s version of the “truth” was publicly accepted. No longer perceiving any distinction between the two, people now freely talked about the “Bangladeshi miyas” as their “enemies.”32

Disillusioned with upper-class goriya Muslim politicians who had previously won election from miya constituencies but had failed to adequately represent their interests or offer them protection from potential deportation, the miyas were drawn to a new political party that promised to stand up for the rights of the marginalized and vulnerable: the Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF). The party was founded in 2005 by a coalition of Muslim minority groups under the leadership of the wealthy businessman and Islamic scholar Badruddin Ajmal and was then relaunched in 2009 as a national party, the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF). A prominent member of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, a well-respected organization of Islamic theologians and scholars, Ajmal forged a combination of politics and religion that captivated the miya imagination, assuring them inclusion and support.33 In multiple conversations with miya voters, I learned that, although the majority had voted for the BJP in the general elections in 2016 for fear of reprisals against their community, they are more comfortable with the AIUDF representatives, who sport long beards, wear tunics and ankle-length pyjamas, speak a Bangla dialect, and observe Islamic religious rituals. However, some were astute enough to understand that the AIUDF makes them more vulnerable by communalizing politics and galvanizing support for the BJP among the Hindu majority and tribal groups.

Another profound development that has pushed the Muslims to the brink is, of course, the CAA. The government responded harshly to the surge of protests, attempting to silence the opposition. In December 2019, on the very eve of the passage of the CAA, Akhil Gogoi—leader of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS), which was a formidable presence in anti-CAA activism—was accused of having Maoist connections, arrested, and imprisoned. Two days later, another KMSS leader, Biju Tamuli, was arrested, followed by a third, Sashi Sensowa, in January 2020.34 The government also strangled media coverage of the CAA protests, going so far as to black out the Internet.35 It strives to change how people know themselves and applies new rhetoric of hatred for writing a new version of history emphasizing the story of two opposing groups—indigenous and outsiders. There is no “we” in this story.

As outsiders, immigrant Muslims have now been targeted for removal. Under the terms of a new land policy, miya lands are designated “encroacher” property, confiscated, and returned to local people or acquired by the government for other purposes. The consequences of this new policy became brutally evident in September 2021, when thousands of miya settlers were violently evicted from their homes and land in the village of Dhalpur, in Darrang district. This was not the first such eviction, however—merely the latest in a series.36 The motive is to narrow the circles of inclusion and expand the boundaries of exclusion.

In addition, the BJP government has split Assam’s Muslim population into two broad categories, each containing more than one community. In July 2022, the government declared the Assamese-speaking Muslims, constituted by the goriya, moriya, deshi, julha, and syed communities, to be indigenous, while the Bangla-speaking miyas and the Muslims of the Barak Valley were deemed to be immigrants.37 The Barak Valley Muslims are not, in fact, immigrants: they were originally from the Sylhet district, which was part of Assam until 1947 (when it became part of East Pakistan). All the same, as Bangla speakers, the Barak Valley Muslims are, like the miyas, viewed as a threat to the Assamese and are thus excluded from the indigenous Muslim groups.

The ancestors of the indigenous Muslim communities were present in Assam well before the start of the twentieth century. The goriyas emerged as a Muslim group during the period of Ahom rule and are sometimes mentioned in the buranjis. The moriyas, who were traditionally brass workers, also originated during the precolonial period and were distinguished from the goriyas by the British. The deshi and julha communities, which differ largely in terms of line of descent and place of origin, are also well established and live alongside miyas in the Dhubri, Goalpara, and Kokrajhar districts of western Assam. As I discovered during a field visit to Kokrajhar, an intense rivalry exists between the deshis and miyas, as is particularly evident in the politics surrounding Panbari Mosque, the oldest mosque in Assam, which is controlled by the deshi community but receives huge numbers of miya pilgrims who donate generously to the coffers of the mosque.38 In addition, some julha groups reside in the “tea belt” of eastern Assam, having been transplanted there by the British from Bihar and eastern India. The BJP government also created a brand-new community, labelled syed, made up of the descendants of various Sufi teachers who arrived in Assam many centuries ago but were not otherwise closely related.39 Nowhere else in the world is there a Muslim community called syed.

Assamese Muslims differ in terms of their occupation, level of education, and social standing. Goriyas, who have thoroughly assimilated into Assamese Hindu society, rarely marry into moriya or julha families.40 In colonial Assam, the goriyas held a commanding position because they were better educated than the moriyas and julhas and had been an established community for several centuries, during the period of Ahom rule. As a goriya Muslim and a historian, I have tried to trace the origins of this community, but its history is obscure.41 Nothing exists, except occasional family silsilas (genealogical histories). The buranjis do, however, include stray references to goriyas in the royal Ahom administration. While not explicitly named, they are distinguished from the “Bongals,” outsiders from the west who arrived with the invading “Badshah’s army” (that is, the Mughals).42 It appears, then, that even in the precolonial period, goriyas abdicated their past when they became Assamese. Today, no one recognizes the loss of their history as a disappearance, an unmourned “social death.”43 Rather, it is their assimilation into Assamese society that is variously celebrated for political purposes or weaponized against them. The erasure of history allows for the making and remaking of their place in Assam as suits the purposes of powerful others. Those who were once “Mughal invaders” have been transformed into an indigenous minority group by government decree.

In addition to fragmenting the Muslim community, the government is pursuing another divisive strategy. In late March 2022, Assam’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, brought forward a proposal for a new approach to defining minority groups, one based on individual districts rather than entire states—an approach “clearly directed at benefitting Hindus in the Muslim-dominated districts.”44 As the majority community in Assam, Hindus are presently ineligible for the government financial assistance available to minority communities—even if they happen to live in a district where the Hindu community is actually in a minority. Under a district-by-district system, however, Hindus who reside in Muslim-majority districts would be considered a minority group, to their obvious benefit. By the same token, miyas and Barak Valley Muslims living in the Muslim-majority districts of Hailakandi and Karimganj would no longer be able to claim minority status as Muslims, to their obvious detriment. The designation of minority groups is up to the central government, and Sarma’s proposal is currently under review by the Supreme Court—but, if adopted, it would draw another line of divide between the “indigenous” Assamese Muslim minority and the much larger community of “immigrant” Muslims.

Especially coming on the heels of the district-by-district proposal, another source of concern is Sarma’s announcement, early in June 2022, that the Assamese government intends to issue “minority certificates” to members of minority groups so as to provide them with official proof of their eligibility for financial aid and access to social welfare programs. Many Assamese Muslims live in rural areas and do agricultural labour. Education is a luxury that few can afford, and lack of education, coupled with scant opportunities for employment, has contributed to economic stagnation. Some thus view minority certificates, with their attendant benefits, as a doorway to economic and educational opportunities. Many of the indigenous Muslims are keen to partake of the government benefits and distance themselves from the other Muslim groups. Yet many other Muslims are skeptical of the idea. They see in it a BJP strategy designed to garner electoral support and undo the stronghold of the AIUDF and Congress-led alliances in Muslim-majority districts, as well as to shatter Muslims into multiple communities and reinforce the gap between the Assamese Muslim minority and the far more numerous miya and Barak Valley Muslims.45

Isolating the Muslim groups from one another marks the slow death of the Assamese Muslim community. Little by little, the fragmentation is orchestrated from the outside, until Assamese Muslims no longer have a sense of unity and the community becomes unrecognizable to itself as a community. Because of their elevated status both educationally and professionally, the goriyas had long been the most influential Muslim group. Their social place as nobles and administrators in the Ahom kingdom and later their high-ranking jobs in the colonial administration had allowed them to position themselves as the main representative community of the Muslims of Assam. Today, divided and pushed to the margins, the goriyas, who once proudly claimed to be “pure Assamese,” are being reduced to silence: they are observing their own demise. They had died in history once before by forgetting their past because they wanted to fit into the Assamese world. Today, the goriya Muslims are dying because they want to escape their Othering—dying without power, without unity, and without a way out. The shattering of Muslims, however, is more than a matter of one community. It threatens to weaken and ultimately obliterate the shared humanity of “we” in Assam.

Xanmiholi in the Future

More than seven decades after independence, the politics of Hindutva has legitimized the colonial policy of divide and rule and the Othering of Muslims has become an act of patriotism. The BJP’s agenda requires forgetting the lived memories of xanmiholi. The Assamese have accordingly suppressed their local struggles; they have effaced the local histories, memories, and traditions upholding xanmiholi and are streamlining their desires to accord with the BJP’s vision of creating one nation, one people, one history of loyal Hindu Indians. Hindus who have not embraced this vision are deemed to be the enemy and are blamed for destroying Assam and India. Convincing the people of Assam that Hindutva will save them from the Muslims and demanding the sacrifice of former relationships with Muslims for a manufactured Hindu national identity allows Assam to be recast as an integral part of India and inserted into the narrative of Hindu power.

In turn, the BJP sees an opportunity to establish power in Northeast India, with Assam as the gateway to the region. The party’s most immediate goal is to ensure electoral victory. The target communities are the tea tribes and the plains tribes. Within these two groups there are no Muslims. Muslims working in the tea industry are labeled julha and are excluded from the tea tribe community. However, the converted Christians within the tea tribes and plains tribes are not excluded. The tea tribes and plains tribes constitute over a third of Assam’s population, and they can play a decisive role in Assam’s politics. Therefore, the BJP as well as the Indian National Congress party woos them with infinite promises of future opportunities for their support.

Like the char-chapori miyas, the tea labourers migrated to Assam during the colonial period. Unlike the Bengali immigrants, they did not move to Assam of their own free will. They were coerced, abducted, and physically forced to relocate by contractors and recruiters, who transported them from east and central India to work in the “tea gardens,” where hellish indentured servitude awaited. They became “coolies,” beasts of burden, for the thriving capitalist tea industry that grew rich on their backbreaking labour. The ostentatious lifestyle of the planter class contrasted starkly with the coolies’ pitiful lives. Such contrasts illustrated the absolute power of the colonial regime over local people’s lives.

Despite the abjection of tea garden life, the “coolies” numbered “well over a million” in 1919. Together with some 300,000 settlers from East Bengal, about 104,000 Nepalis, and another 100,000 casual visitors and temporary labourers from places such as East Bengal, Burma, and Bihar, the total population of “foreign and foreign extraction population” in Assam stood at 1,837,000 in 1921, or 28 percent of the total population of the state. Of this total were 1.3 million tea labourers.46

The inclusion of tea labourers as a community in Assam developed gradually. Despite low wages, by 1920 nearly 50,000 labourers whose work terms had expired owned land outside the plantations. As Assamese historian Jayeeta Sharma observes, “Relations with local society became less abrasive, although still marked by caste disdain,” a shift of attitude evident in “the locals’ gradual acceptance of ‘garden baat (the plantation dialect)’ as a form of the Asomiya language.”47 These labourers became the nucleus of Assam’s tea tribe communities. Nobody sought to drive them out. While their social interaction with the Assamese was negligible, they rejected the derogatory term “coolie” and instead called themselves “tea tribes,” the name given them by the state, or “Adivasis” (“original dwellers”), or baganiya, an Asomiya term meaning “garden people.”48 The case of the tea tribes offers a model for the inclusion of other groups in the spirit of a new xanmiholi, etching the path toward a humanistic future in Assam.

Today, the tea tribes are estimated to account for roughly 7 million of Assam’s more than 35 million people—nearly 20 percent of the population. Their presence in electoral politics is immense. Recognizing that their support can be decisive in elections, both the Congress Party and the BJP make lucrative promises. One of the tea tribes’ demands is their inclusion on the list of Scheduled Tribes, which will guarantee them “reservation” status with respect to political representation, access to higher education, and job hiring, along with a number of other constitutionally mandated benefits. They still await the fulfillment of this demand.49

There are also various plains tribal groups, who, as of the 2011 census, made up about 12.5 percent of Assam’s population and can play a significant role in state politics. Assam’s former chief minister. Sarbananda Sonowal, is, for example, from the Sonowal Kachari plains tribe community, now administered by the Sonowal Kachari Autonomous Council. The community is at this point thoroughly integrated into Assamese society, and the Sonowal Kacharis speak Assamese as their first language. The Bodo tribe, whose drive for independence was mentioned earlier, is similarly governed by the Bodoland Territorial Council, established in 2003. In 2020, the Bodos signed a further peace agreement with the Assam Government, and the Bodo language became an “associate official” language in Assam, alongside the Assamese language. Given their long history of oppression, including the plains tribes as part of the larger Assamese community is not only prudent but essential.

At the same time, the BJP has taken full advantage of the penetration of RSS cadres into tribal communities via humanitarian relief work, in which the RSS has been engaged for some time now.50 Through projects such as establishing village schools, health care clinics, and vocational training centres, along with a variety of village social welfare projects, the RSS has drawn plains tribes’ communities more closely into the Hindu fold. Influenced by the ideology of Hindutva, they learn to see their miya neighbours and even the Assamese Muslims as enemies.

The Assamese Hindus, who dominate Assam’s politics, are divided in their approach toward the BJP. Generally, they support local or regional Assamese parties and reject control by Delhi (regardless of whether Congress or the BJP is in power). Winning the Assamese Hindu community over and rallying them together on a common national platform is the BJP’s project—for which identifying the Muslims, particularly the miyas, as the alien Other is crucial.

Subdividing and certifying the “Assamese Muslims” as minorities and differentiating them from the Bangla-speaking miya and Barak Valley Muslims not only breaks up the Muslims into smaller communities, but it also makes them more vulnerable.51 The char-chapori miyas, the largest Muslim community in Assam, are the most exposed and politically harassed. Despite embracing the Assamese language and choosing Assam as their homeland, they remain excluded. The fear that miya Muslims will change Assam’s demographics and consequently the balance of political power is a driving factor behind isolating them and discriminating against them. The BJP seeks to remove all miyas from the electoral roll to reduce the number of Muslim voters and to marginalize the community politically.

Hafiz Ahmed’s poem, “Write Down ‘I am a Miya,’” written in the context of the NRC, captures the agony of the miyas who, despite their century-plus contribution to Assam’s economy in the form of back-breaking labour, have been stripped of their rights as citizens and are now the targets of hate.52 The fate of the Barak Valley Muslims, as well as the goriyas, is moot. They are distinguished from the other Assamese groups, and the Barak Valley Muslims are not even recognized as an indigenous community of Kachar origin, although their Kachari Hindu counterparts are. Muslims are strangers no matter how hard and how long they try to become part of the Assamese. What is ironic, though, is that Bangladesh is the fourth largest remittance source for India, and more than one million Indians are working there illegally.53 Yet no one in Assam appears to be aware of this, whereas invented stories about Bangladeshi infiltration changing the demography and culture of Assam are a matter of daily discussion.

The colonials bequeathed to the Assamese a consciousness, whether real or imaginary, of the Other, expressed in the opposition between indigenous/outsider or native/stranger. The emotion invested in the construction called “Assamese” has taken many shapes and forms since then. In the postcolonial period, it became particularly evident in the founding moments of India (1947) and the struggle for Assamese subnational identity (1979–85). Assam has played out the ritual of hunting and humiliating the Muslims, particularly the miyas, as illegal Bangladeshis. The BJP government has extended the hatred to the other groups of Muslims as well. In 2006, the Sachar Committee Report on the social, economic, and educational status of the Muslim community in India established that the Muslims were on the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder, even lower than the Dalits, who stand at the very bottom of the caste hierarchy. Muslims’ lack of opportunities for education and economic advancement, their experience of the everyday, routine violence carried out in the name of political cleansing in India and Assam, and now the threat of their removal from the register of citizens have made them the perfect strangers. Those of us who are not in their situation must remind ourselves that we can only dimly understand their daily trials. All the same, this understanding can help us to step beyond the blinkered view of politics and perceive a different way to be: in peace with the Other. Demanding assimilation is not enough. Tolerating difference does not erase aversion toward the Other because it does not remove the stain of Otherness.54

An authentic desire for inclusivity requires a new way of thinking coupled with positive actions that move away from narrow identitarian politics and expand the circle of a humanistic awareness of the Self. In Assam, this is a tall order in the current moment of hatred of the Other. Nonetheless, inclusivity is possible if we approach it in small chunks, as the story of the tea tribe illustrates. Unshakable confidence in one’s identity as Assamese is possible when one can be Assamese and simultaneously a part of the human community. This is not watered-down Assamese-ness that I am calling for but an unclouded, easily recognizable Assamese identity that reaffirms the xanmiholi past and brings it forward into the future. A new xanmiholi human community is possible, for this is the Assamese way of being in peace with the Other.

Notes

1. 1 Quoted in Devjyot Ghoshal, “Amit Shah Vows to Throw Illegal Immigrants into Bay of Bengal,” Reuters, April 12, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/india-election-speech/amit-shah-vows-to-throw-illegal-immigrants-into-bay-of-bengal-idUSKCN1RO1YD. For Shah’s comments quoted at the chapter opening, see “Amit Shah: 100 Crore Infiltrators Entered Country, Eating It Like Termites,” Vartha Bharati, September 24, 2018, https://english.varthabharati.in/index.php/india/amit-shah-100-crore-infiltrators-entered-country-eating-it-like-termites. A crore is 10 million, so 100 crore is one billion. According to the Government of India, India’s Muslim population is 20 crore, or 200 million. Ambika Pandit, “Muslim Population in 2023 Estimated to Be 20 Crore: Lok Sabha,” Times of India, July 21, 2023, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/muslim-population-in-2023-estimated-to-be-20-crore-lok-sabha/articleshow/101996898.cms?from=mdr. The claim that one billion Muslims have infiltrated into the country is a hyperbole without evidence to support it.

2. 2 See “Janagosthiya Samannay Parishad Asom Starts Census of Indigenous Assamese Muslims,” The Sentinel, April 17, 2021, https://www.sentinelassam.com/topheadlines/janagosthiya-samannay-parishad-asom-starts-census-of-indigenous-assamese-muslims-534146. At the time of the 2011 census, Muslims accounted for 34.22% of the population of Assam (with Hindus making up 61.47%): “Assam Hindu Muslim Population,” Population Census 2011, https://www.census2011.co.in/data/religion/state/18-assam.html. Only two states in India have a larger percentage population of Muslims: Lakshadweep (96.6% in 2011) and Jammu and Kashmir (68.3%): “Muslim Population in India,” Population Census, 2011, https://www.census2011.co.in/data/religion/2-muslims.html.

3. 3 This narrative draws on two broad historiographical traditions that conspired to sideline the history of Muslims. In 1912, the newly founded Kamarupa Anusandhan Samiti (KAS), or Assam Research Society, embarked on a project to recover and promote Assam’s Hindu heritage. As an antiquarian society focused on documenting the Hindu cultural and religious tradition of Assam, the KAS collected materials dating back to the days of the Hindu kingdom of Kamarupa, which flourished from the mid-fourth century to the twelfth century in the Brahmaputra valley, an area subsequently occupied by the Ahom kingdom and is today the commercial and political center of Assam with Guwahati as the capital city of the state. With the development of another institution, the Directorate of Antiquarian and Historical Study (DHAS), founded in 1928 and headed by the well-known historian S. K. Bhuyan (1892–1964), a new trend of historical writing emerged, one grounded in the buranjis—the chronicles of the Ahom kingdom, written later in the precolonial period. Drawing on the buranjis, Bhuyan wrote many books that aimed to establish the greatness and valour of the Ahom kings in their struggles against the invading Mughal armies. For further discussion, see Arupjyoti Saikia, “History, Buranjis and Nation: Suryya Kumar Bhuyan’s Histories in Twentieth-Century Assam,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 45, no. 4 (2008): 473–507, esp. 482–84.

4. 4 “Mughal Aggression Still On, Says Assam CM Sarbananda Sonowal,” The Hindu, October 10, 2020, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/mughal-aggression-still-on-says-assam-cm-sarbananda-sonowal/article32819866.ece. See also Prasanta Majumdar, “Assam Polls: BJP Likens Ajmal’s Party to Mughals, Says Don’t Give into Their Aggression,” New Indian Express, October 12, 2020, https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2020/oct/12/assam-polls-bjp-likens-ajmals-party-to-mughals-says-dont-give-in-to-their-aggression-2209299.html.

5. 5 Syndicates backed by powerful political actors control illicit businesses in coal, betel nuts, eggs, cows, logging, brown sugar, drugs, and wildlife poaching. Environmental groups are concerned about the oil and gas drilling ventures of OIL (Oil India Limited), which has caused irreparable environmental damage in eastern Assam; the mining activities of COAL India Limited (CIL); and the government’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) policy, which gives local land to outside investors. In view of such actions, the government’s rhetoric about protecting Assam’s environment, natural resources, and local culture and enhancing its economic potential do not ring true.

6. 6 “Activists Akhil Gogoi, Pranab Doley to Contest Assam Polls with Few Thousand Rupees in Pockets,” Economic Times, March 26, 2021, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/elections/assembly-elections/assam/activists-akhil-gogoi-pranab-doley-to-contest-assam-polls-with-few-thousand-rupees-in-pockets/articleshow/81705482.cms?from=mdr. Gogoi won election to one of the seats in the Sivasagar (or Sibsagar) district.

7. 7 See Yasmin Saikia, “The Muslims of Assam: Present/Absent History,” in Northeast India: A Place of Relations, edited by Yasmin Saikia and Amit R. Baishya (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 111–34; Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and In the Meadows of Gold: Telling Tales of the Swargadeos at the Cross Roads of Assam (Guwahati: Spectrum Publications, 1997).

8. 8 Committee for Protection of Land Rights of Indigenous People of Assam, Final Report, submitted by Rohini Kumar Baruah, Anil Kumar Bhattacharyya, Ajoy Kumar Dutta, and Romesh Borpatragohain, December 30, 2017, https://pratidintime.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/2018/05/BRAHMA-COMMITTEEM-Report.pdf, 28, 9, 179. See also “B’deshis Have Swarmed into Assam Like ‘Ants,’” The Sentinel, July 30, 2017, https://www.sentinelassam.com/top-headlines/bdeshis-have-swarmed-into-assam-like-ants/.

9. 9 Keith Tester, The Inhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1995), x.

10. 10 Vinayak Damoodar Sarvakar, the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) popularized this idea in his book Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (Bombay: Veer Sarvakar Prakashan, 1923). Madhav Sadashiv Gowalkar, also of the RSS, likewise made a strong appeal for a theocratic Hindu state inhabited by Hindu people in We and Our Nation Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1949).

11. 11 On the politics of Bangladeshi immigrants entering India illegally and stealing jobs, see Navine Murshid, India’s Bangladesh Problem: The Marginalization of Bengali Muslims in Neoliberal Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

12. 12 The concept of Akhand Bharat is taught in the Vidya Bharati schools run by the right-wing Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS). There are presently about 12,750 of these schools throughout India, with an enrollment of nearly 33 million students (“Spread of Vidya Bharati,” accessed April 8, 2023, https://www.vidyabharatialumni.org/spread). In this view, Pakistan and Bangladesh are illegally occupying Indian land. The BJP presents this same idea in public forums. On June 14, 2020, cabinet minister Nitin Gadkari—speaking in the context of recent skirmishes along India’s disputed border with China, and taking the opportunity to refer back to the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War—announced in a public meeting in Gujarat that India does “not want land either of Pakistan and China,” tacitly blaming China and Pakistan as the aggressors (“India Does Not Want Land of China or Pakistan: Nitin Gadkari,” NDTV India, June 14, 2020, https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/nitin-gadkari-says-india-does-not-want-land-of-china-or-pakistan-2246204?pfrom=home-topstories). This is a very clever way of injecting the public with a dose of hostility toward India’s neighbours.

13. 13 “‘Akhand Bharat’ the Undisputed Truth, Says RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat,” The Hindu, April 1, 2023, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/people-in-pakistan-unhappy-believe-partition-was-mistake-says-rss-chief/article66686787.ece.

14. 14 The reclamation of land was among the recommendations of the Committee for Protection of Land Rights of Indigenous People of Assam, chaired by Hari Shankar Brahma. See, for example, Vivan Eyben, “Brahma Committee Recommends Strict Implementation of Land Laws,” NewsClick, May 12, 2018, https://www.newsclick.in/brahma-committee-report-recommends-strict-implementation-land-laws. In its December 2017 report, the committee stated: “Wherever unauthorized occupation has taken place by encroachment, the Government has a duty to clear such encroachments. And above all, occupation or settlement of land should be made only to the indigenous persons and there can be absolutely no ground to allow foreigners to be settled in any land,” adding that the “first and foremost duty of the government in such cases is to detect and deport them” (Final Report, December 30, 2017, https://pratidintime.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/2018/05/BRAHMA-COMMITTEEM-Report.pdf, 74). These proposals were subsequently supported by another high-level government committee, convened in September 2019 and chaired by B. K. Sharma, which recommended that the “vast tracts” of char lands be cleared and then surveyed with a view to resettlement (Report of the Committee on Implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord, February 10, 2020, https://cjp.org.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Clause-VI.pdf, 58).

15. 15 There are many videos of his speeches on YouTube. In one of them, he explicitly denounces Muslims as foreigners in Assam and warns them either to conform to Hindutva or to leave Assam: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faTi6uJoD-c, accessed on February 6, 2024. Himanta Biswa Sarma added another twist to this narrative on February 8, 2024, when he stated on the floor of the Assam State Assembly that Muslims of the Ahom kingdom are converts who should return to Hinduism to enjoy the benefits of land grants made by the BJP government. For a video of his speech (in Assamese), see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJw8ZNuwX18.

16. 16 On the history of the NRC, see K. V. Thomas, “The Politics of NRC and Its Pan-Indian Dimensions,” December 6, 2019, Centre for Public Policy Research, https://www.cppr.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/The-Politics-of-NRC-and-its-Pan-Indian-Dimensions.pdf, 6–7.

17. 17 On the emergence of miya poetry, see Jebeen Yasmeen, “Bengali Muslims in Assam and ‘Miyah’ Poetry: Walking on the Shifting Terrains of ‘Na-Asamiya’ and ‘Infiltrator,’” Journal of Migration Affairs 1, no. 2 (March 2019): 69–84, esp. 74–75. As Yasmeen points out, the use of the term miya helps to build a sense of political identity and self-empowerment, while it also calls on the surrounding society “to confront the humiliation it has meted out to a whole community for a long time and start a dialogue that is overdue” (75).

18. 18 Abdul Kalam Azad, “Char Residents of Assam,” India Exclusion Report, 2018–19 (New Delhi: Centre for Equity Studies and Three Essays Collective, 2019), http://indiaexclusionreport.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Char-Residents-of-Assam.pdf, 42. As Azad notes, the residents of chars currently inhabit under 4 percent of Assam’s cultivable land—and this small portion is rapidly eroding in annual floods. For further reading, see Manoj Goswani, Char Settlers of Assam: A Demographic Study (Guwahati: MRB Publishers, 2014).

19. 19 Martin Rabha, “Status of Muslims in Higher Education in Assam: With Special Reference to Goalpara, Darrang and Kamrup (Rural) Districts,” working paper presented at “Conference on Rural India 2019: Towards Inclusion of the Marginalized,” VikasAnvesh Foundation, November 7–9, 2019, Pune, http://www.vikasanvesh.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Status-of-Muslims-in-Higher-Education-Assam.pdf, 2.

20. 20 See Parvin Sultana, “The Nowhere People: Tales of the ‘Missing Villages’ in Assam,” The News Mill, August 2, 2020, https://thenewsmill.com/2020/08/nowhere-people-missing-villages-in-assam/.

21. 21 The main detention centre is at Matia, in Goalpara district. The largest such facility in India, it opened early in 2023. See “Assam: First Batch of ‘Foreigners’ Shifted to Matia Detention Centre,” The Wire, January 30, 2023, https://thewire.in/government/assam-first-batch-of-foreigners-shifted-to-matia-detention-centre; and “India’s 1st Illegal Immigrant Detention Camp Size of 7 Football Fields,” NDTV, September 12, 2019, https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/assam-detention-centre-inside-indias-1st-detention-centre-for-illegal-immigrants-after-nrc-school-ho-2099626.

22. 22 Bikash Singh, “Muslims Constitute 35% of Assam’s Population, They Cannot Be a Minority, Says CM Sarma,” Economic Times, March 16, 2022, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/muslims-constitute-35-of-assams-population-they-cannot-be-a-minority-says-cm-sarma/articleshow/90245598.cms. The term “Sankari” culture is associated with the Ekasarana Dharma, a form of Vaishnavism promulgated by Srimanta Sankardeva (1449–1568) that became popular among the non-Brahminic masses in Assam. The Ahom rulers did not adhere to the Ekasarana Dharma but adopted the Sakta form of Hinduism that was dominated by the Brahmin priests. The Ahom kings Rudra Singha (1686–1714) and Siva Singha (1714–44), and the latter’s consort, Phuleswari Konwari, were patrons of this form of Hinduism. On the Ahom court of the period, see Sumayak Ghosh, “Two Kings in the Tungkhungia Court? Love and Courtly Culture in Early Eighteenth-Century Hindustan,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 42, no. 2 (August 2022): 348–55. The contestations between the two forms of Hinduism became intense and led to the Moamoria Rebellion (1780–1810), a protracted revolt of the followers of Sankari Hinduism against the Ahom rule. See Saikia, In the Meadows of Gold, 128–29, 226. Nonetheless, today, Sarma, although he is a Brahmin, makes frequent reference to the Sankari culture as the culture of the “genuine” Assamese.

23. 23 Kaustavmoni Boruah, “‘Foreigners’ in Assam and Assamese Middle Class,” Social Scientist 8, no. 11 (1980): 44–57, at 51. See also Debarshi Das and Arupjyoti Saikia, “Early Twentieth Century Agrarian Assam: A Brief and Preliminary Overview,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 41 (October 8, 2011): 73–80. As they note, by the time of the Second World War, Assam had become India’s third largest jute producer (76–77).

24. 24 B. C. Allen, “Assam,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 75, no. 3892 (1927): 764–86, at 765.

25. 25 For an insightful account of the gradual settlement of Alopati char in Barpeta district, see Mofidur Rahman, “Historical Account of Char-Chapori Muslims in Assam Vis-à-Vis the Muslims of Alopati: An Introduction,” chap. 3 in “Living at the Margin: A Comparative Study on Majuli and Alopati River Island, Assam,” PhD diss., Department of Political Science, Gauhati University, 2018, https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in:8443/jspui/handle/10603/267643.

26. 26 Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, 1826–1947 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1977), 207. See also Report of the Line System Committee, vol. 1 (Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1938), 1–4.

27. 27 Makhanlal Kar, Muslims in Assam Politics (Delhi: Omsons Publications, 1990), 68. See also Cai-fong Chan, “British Colonial Policy on Frontier Areas Adjoining Assam and Burma: With Special Reference to the Crown Colony Scheme,” Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies 13 (2001): 76–106, at 95, 105n99 for the reproduction of Lord Wavell’s statement on this issue.

28. 28 Suryasikha Pathak, “Tribal Politics in the Assam: 1933–1947,” Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 10 (March 6, 2010): 61–69, at 63.

29. 29 Kar, Muslims in Assam Politics, 7.

30. 30 Ahmed Abu Naser Sayad, Nationality Question in Assam: The EPW 1980–81 Debate (Guwahati: Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development, 2006), 122. As Yasmeen notes, the national literary society, the Assam Sahitya Sabha, supported the efforts of the miyas to assimilate and accepts them today as Na-Asamiya (“Bengali Muslims in Assam and ‘Miyah’ Poetry,” 73).

31. 31 On this violence, see, for example, “Atrocities Against Assam Muslims Must Cease, Demand Indian Americans,” Mills Gazette, May 9, 2014, https://www.milligazette.com/news/indian-muslims-press-statements/10403-atrocities-against-assam-muslims-must-cease-now-demand-indian-americans/; and Yasmin Saikia, “Blame ‘Em, Bludgeon ‘Em,” Outlook India, February 5, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20210113120234/https://magazine.outlookindia.com/story/blame-em-bludgeon-em/281846. For an analysis of the Bodo movement, see Monoj Kumar Nath, “Bodo Insurgency in Assam: New Accord and New Problems,” Strategic Analysis 2003 (October–December): 533–45.

32. 32 I was in Assam in March 2020, when the COVID pandemic hit, and was unable to leave until the lockdown ended. During that time, I had the opportunity to engage a variety of people on the miya problem and almost all expressed fear of the “Bangladeshis.” I befriended a couple of miya boatmen and, after the lockdown was lifted, invited them to my apartment, much to the shock of my neighbours and the staff of the building. It was not the fear of COVID: they were certain that the “Bangladeshis will steal and rob the residents,” as one of my neighbours put it. Another remarked, however, that she was able to see that “the Bangladeshis are just like us.” In a fleeting moment, the distance between “them” and “us” was overcome—but, in the face of the rampant anti-Muslim sentiment, it seemed that my neighbour was expressing an insight that was new to her, and I was doubtful that this moment of shared humanity would last.

33. 33 On the AIUDF, see Monoj Kumar Nath, “Muslim Politics in Assam: The Case of AIUDF,” Studies in Indian Politics 7, no. 1 (2019): 33–43, esp. 35–38.

34. 34 See Avik Chakraborty, “KMSS Leader Held for CAA Violence,” The Telegraph, January 20, 2020, https://www.telegraphindia.com/north-east/kmss-leader-sashi-sensowa-held-for-caa-violence/cid/1737546. Gogoi’s arrest was widely reported, but for his own comments, see Abhishek Saha, “Akhil Gogoi Rules Out ‘Maoist’ Links, Calls Arrest ‘Ploy to Delegitimise Movement’ Against Citizenship Law,” Indian Express, December 18, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/north-east-india/assam/akhil-gogoi-interview-citizenship-act-assam-protests-6172858/.

35. 35 On the government’s repressive response to CAA opposition, see Nazimuddin Siddique and Roshni Sengupta, “Assam: Anti-CAA Protests and the Silence of the Media,” The Polis Project, January 15, 2020, https://www.thepolisproject.com/read/assam-anti-caa-protests-and-the-silence-of-the-media/. “The heavy hand of the State,” they write, “has left five protestors and several injured with the police firing live bullets on unarmed crowds.”

36. 36 For an in-depth look at these evictions and the evolution of land policy in Assam, Teesta Setalvad, “Assam Discord,” Frontline, October 22, 2021, https://cjp.org.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/FL-EBook-22-10-2021-pages-4-13.pdf. Assam’s new land policy, promulgated in November 2019, was based on the final recommendations of the Committee for Protection of Land Rights of Indigenous People of Assam, popularly known as the Brahma Committee. The committee stipulated that the government should reclaim land currently occupied by “encroachers,” who would then be evicted. The committee gave scant attention to the question of where those evicted might be resettled.

37. 37 See, for example, Kabir Firaque and Tora Agarwala, “Assam’s Muslims: Why Some Have Been Declared ‘Indigenous’ and Some Left Out,” Indian Express, July 13, 2022, https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-who-are-assam-indigenous-muslims-8022121/, which includes a description of the five groups as defined by the Assamese government. See also Pallab Bhattacharya, “Fresh Churn for the Muslims of Assam,” Daily Star, April 26, 2022, https://www.thedailystar.net/views/opinion/news/fresh-churn-the-muslims-assam-3012371.

38. 38 I learned this during a conversation with several board members of the mosque on January 28, 2023.

39. 39 That said, the majority of syeds in Assam claim to be the descendants of Azan Faqir (also known by his birth name, Shah Miran), the most famous Sufi teacher in Assam. He lived during the seventeenth century, but his lineage is unknown, nor is there any record of him in the buranjis. It is only in the poetry composed by his followers that we get a glimpse of his religious orientation and work.

40. 40 Abu Nisar Md. Irshad Ali, “Marriage Among the Assamese Muslims,” in North East India: A Sociological Study, edited by S. M. Dubey (Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1978), 111–23.

41. 41 My own family traces its history back to immigrants from Delhi who arrived in Assam in 1604. On the settlement of goriya Muslims in the Ahom kingdom, including my family, see Saikia, “The Muslims of Assam,” in Northeast India, ed. Saikia and Baishya, 119–23.

42. 42 See Saikia, Chronicles III, IV, and V, in Saikia, In the Meadows of Gold, 57–137. Ironically, the term “Bongal”—originally the name given to people from the Mughal province that today includes Bangladesh—came to refer to any outsider.

43. 43 I borrow this term from Orlando Patterson, who coined it with reference to the condition of Black slaves in the United States, who were widely viewed as not fully human. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

44. 44 Pallab Bhattacharya, “Fresh Churn for the Muslims of Assam,” Daily Star, April 26, 2022, https://www.thedailystar.net/views/opinion/news/fresh-churn-the-muslims-assam-3012371. For an extended discussion, see also Utpal Parashar, “Assam CM for District-wise Definition of Minority,” Hindustan Times, March 31, 2022, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/assam-cm-for-district-wise-definition-of-minority-101648666846530.html.

45. 45 See Nayan Kumar Moni, “Beyond Common Consciousness: Understanding the Rise of Separate Identity Consciousness Among Indigenous Muslims of Assam.” Asian Ethnicity 25 (2024), published online January 3, 2024.

46. 46 G. T. Lloyd, Census of India, 1921, vol. 3, Assam, pt 1: Report (Shillong: Government Press, Assam, 1923): 5, 44.

47. 47 Jayeeta Sharma, “‘Lazy Natives,’ Coolie Labour, and the Assam Tea Industry,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 6 (2009): 1287–1324, at 1318.

48. 48 Sharma, “‘Lazy Natives,’ Coolie Labour,” 1321. As Sharma notes, “Adivasi”—literally “dweller from the beginning”—conveys a political message. The term came into use in India during the 1930s as an expression of solidarity among indigenous tribal groups, and its use by tea workers is an assertion of a shared identity.

49. 49 See Risha Chitlangia, “Congress MP Slams BJP over Delay in Awarding ST Status to 6 Indigenous Communities in Assam,” The Print, July 25, 2023, https://theprint.in/politics/congress-mp-slams-bjp-over-delay-in-awarding-st-status-to-6-indigenous-communities-in-assam/1684450/.

50. 50 On the humanitarian agenda of the RSS, see Syeda Ambia Zahan, “The Bitter-Sweet Hindutva Experiment Deep in Tribal-Dominated Northeast India,” Outlook India, May 30, 2022, https://www.outlookindia.com/national/the-bitter-sweet-hindutva-experiment-deep-in-tribal-dominated-northeast-india--news-199256.

51. 51 Miya lawyer Aman Wadud explained to me that “the miyas are the shield for the goriyas. Once the BJP weakens the miyas, they will attack the goriyas, but the goriyas are not paying attention to this because they are so keen to be loved and accepted by the BJP.” Personal communication, February 2, 2024.

52. 52 For Ahmed’s poem, see “I Am ‘Miya’—Reclaiming Identity Through Protest Poetry,” Sabrang India, July 3, 2019, https://sabrangindia.in/i-am-miya-reclaiming-identity-through-protest-poetry/. As an assertion of political identity and also a form of protest, miya poetry has provoked backlash from the Assamese. In 2019, for example, during the months leading up to the passage of the CAA, legal complaints were filed against a group of miya activist-poets, including Ahmed, for allegedly fomenting violence through their poetry. See Geetanjali Gurlhosur, “On the Riverine Islands of Assam: The Resistance of Miyah Poetry and the Women Writing It,” Ritimo, April 4, 2022, https://www.ritimo.org/On-the-Riverine-Islands-of-Assam-the-Resistance-of-Miyah-Poetry-and-the-Women.

53. 53 “Bangladesh Becomes 4th Largest Remittance Source for India,” Daily Industry, June 7, 2022, https://dailyindustry.news/bangladesh-becomes-4th-largestremittance-source-for-india/.

54. 54 See Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) for an important argument against tolerating Others as a policy of differentiating rather than including them.