[Assam] Who is the Sentinel of Freedom?

Tue Jul 31 06:16:14 PDT 2007

 >the muslim peasants
mentioned assamese as their mother tongue in the
census. at least some of them. and guess what, some
of them have gone ahead formed the asam chor-chapori
sahitya sabha. if you have watched "angst at large"
by shankar barua, he talks to a young assamese (a
sarma, who i have met in delhi) who calls them
na-asamiya. by all indications, some of them have
indeed taken to assamese. whereas the assamese send
their children to english schools today, some of these
muslim peasants send their children to assamese
>schools.

In Delhi (may be in other parts of India also, am not sure), I have seen some families, where the parents used to talk with their children in their homes in English or Hindi. Letting people know that they can't write/read Assamese is a matter of pride for these growing up childrens and their number is increasing day by day. 'Bihu', 'masor aanja', 'pitika', 'Chira-doi' etc. are out for them. 'Tandoori Chicken', 'Rajmah Chawal', 'Pizza', 'Burger' are the in thing. :)

  Mridul Bhuyan

xourov pathok <xourov at yahoo.com> wrote:

--- "Roy, Santanu" wrote:

> 
> And then all this talk about Bangladeshi versus
> Indian migration. If
> Bongals had not filled up the land, 

bongals.

by using the word bongals, i guess you are referring
to the anti-bengali feelings in assam. you might
recall that that word has a history. in days past,
before the british came along, bongal was used to
refer to foreigners. specifically, the turk and afghan
rulers of bengal. 

then, after the demise of the ahom kingdom, the
bengali babus, mostly hindus, came along and became
the symbol of colonialism. they too were called
bongals, maybe to anoint them with the same abhorence
of earlier times. it was not the ahom rulers who used
the word this time though. a different set of
people---the newly emerging assamese middle class
aspiring the jobs held by the bengali babus---used the
word. 

but the bengali babus had come to assam much earlier
than the muslim peasants. and skipping much of
history, we can say that the word bongal never much
caught on for the muslim peasants. i believe mainly
because the assamese middle class did not quite aspire
for the muslim peasants' job. 

social history is complex. the muslim peasants
mentioned assamese as their mother tongue in the
census. at least some of them. and guess what, some
of them have gone ahead formed the asam chor-chapori
sahitya sabha. if you have watched "angst at large"
by shankar barua, he talks to a young assamese (a
sarma, who i have met in delhi) who calls them
na-asamiya. by all indications, some of them have
indeed taken to assamese. whereas the assamese send
their children to english schools today, some of these
muslim peasants send their children to assamese
schools.

this is also something i want the people to talk
about, beyond the usual rhetoric.

some more later :-)

cheers,
x

> Counterfactual history is always dangerous. But
> think about it for a
> moment. If walls of fire were erected to prevent
> people from coming to
> Assam from East Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1947, the
> Indian constitution
> would not have defended the state from potential
> migration that the
> economic mechanism would have engineered instead
> from mainland India.
> The pace would be different. The fact that the poor
> arid regions of
> central and eastern India do not have the skills to
> exploit wet areas
> would have been a factor. In the long run, however,
> the socio-economic
> picture would probably not be very different. The
> faces would have
> looked different. Less of lungis, less Bengali, more
> Hindi, more Hindu
> possibly. 

> 
> Then, what remains of the 1979 agitation? Perhaps,
> an awareness of the
> reality that just won't go away. A gnawing feeling
> in the indigenous
> soul that something has changed, something has been
> lost - realized in
> hard facts. For the urban dwellers, the veils have
> been lifted. And as
> the last thirt years have taught, the change is
> irretrievable. The
> politics of camouflage has been replaced by the
> politics of ethnic
> polarization. The middle class has learnt that
> language. Even the
> oxomiya bhdralok has. 
> 
> Santanu. 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: assam-bounces at assamnet.org
> [mailto:assam-bounces at assamnet.org] On
> Behalf Of xourov pathok
> Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 10:17 AM
> To: assam at assamnet.org; Dilip/Dil Deka
> Subject: [Assam] Who is the Sentinel of Freedom?
> 
> > I can see you are trying to steer the discussion 
> > to the same issues that you are so fond of and 
> > have discussed here so many times - that India has
> > totally failed and Assam will be better off by
> > opting out of India.
> 
> dilip-da, that is c-da, not me. could you show me
> where i have argued assam is better off opting out
> of
> india? the possibility of that happening is too
> remote, imho, and there is not point in speculating
> on
> it. it is not going to happen. period.
> 
> i am trying to keep to the issue of immigration, and
> not going on a tangent on freedom. independence.
> principles. or thought experiments. 
> 
> i am trying to focus on the failure of the assam
> agitation and what it means for assam. also, i am
> trying to focus on the mechanism how immigration is
> happening. what sustains it. etc.
> 
> > On your email below - All of your allegations are
> > valid, not always but in many instances. India is
> > still experimenting with democracy 
> [snipped]
> 
> i am not interested in the discussion on indian
> democracy in the present context. i am strongly
> interested in the issue of democracy, of course. 
> but
> that is an entirely different issue.
> 
> x
> 
> 
> 
>
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