[Assam] Who is the Sentinel of Freedom?

Tue Jul 31 06:47:48 PDT 2007

>>> 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. :)

  Very true. But have you 'analysed' the reason behind this sense of  overwhelming shame for being what you are by birth and trying to be 'Dhunati Kaori'? There is yet another conscious effort to take away our sense of history. These are nothing new, like we wear trousers today; although it has become trendy to give ourselves an ethnic aura sometimes, we wear dhotis with elastic. Unless pizza, burgers for whole of India and 'Tandoori Chicken', 'Rajmah Chawal', for Assam are dinned into the ears of the people ( read as the urban middle class) as the 'in thing' and they begin to believe it, would the likes of the Mc Donalds, KFC etc. have a market in India and the Khalsa Parivars, Yellow Chillies have any takers in Assam? I still remember the day I first took a sip of Coca Cola at Sibsagar (that has changed to Sivasagar due to the relenless efforts of recently deceased R R Sinha). I also found it amusing that when the first fast food joint was opened in Sibsagar in the
 eighties, it flopped, as every one could easily roll some sabji or scrambled egges into the roti at home than come out to the joint to eat a 'roll'. 

  We are mercilessly being invaded in all spheres of life by the invisible hands and we cannot turn the streamrollers back. Yes, one Miss India or Universe would wear Mekhela Chadar on her visit to the President to show that she's somewhat different by adding the ethnic flavour of the North East. So, that too is for the purposes of sale basically.     

Mridul Bhuyan <mridul_mb at yahoo.com> wrote:
     >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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