“Where are you from?”
“My Abba’s village is from Jonia in Barpeta district.”
“Oh! My village is Goroimari (near Jonia); that means you are amar api (our girl)… Yes! Yes, come, I was displaced here; my house was demolished a year ago, and I haven’t received my compensation yet.”
Amin placed his net for fishing while his cows were grazing in the field nearby. Amin and I thus started our conversation about his experience of urban dwelling near the Silsako beel (lake). Amin has been working as an indentured labourer in the city for years now, coming from a small village in Barpeta district in Assam and belonging to the Miyah Muslim community. He has stayed in the city for over eight years with his family. To avoid paying massive rent to keep his cows, Amin has set up a shaft in exchange for rent money on the land of Abdul Da. According to Amin, Abdul was a Goria Muslim man who gave the land to him since he was struggling to find a place to rent in the city as a Bengali Muslim man.
The first time Amin saw me, there was an instant distaste towards my presence that I had felt which was the result of journalists and news reporters flocking towards the displaced people for a year. The media had shown numerous interviews by the Chief Minister where he said that the displaced people are ‘illegal migrants’ and the documents that they presented were fake, as reported by Prag News on March 3, 2023. The news of the displaced population being ‘illegal’ put people like him, who are Bengali Muslims in Assam, into an even more vulnerable position because of which the distaste towards my presence came as a response. He started talking to me because of what Carsten (2000) called relatedness and why Abdul provided land for him to build a shaft and live with his family in the city. In Culture of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (2000), Janet Carsten argued how kinship relations are shaped by everyday practice and memory of familiar land, especially for marginalized migrant communities. In describing ‘kinship of substance’, she argues that consanguinity, in its broadest sense, includes things beyond blood relations, such as shared qualities and effects transmitted through bodily substances and local micro-environments (Carsten, 2000). Hence, even though my visibility was an anxiety-inducing factor for him at first, through just the name of my paternal village, he established a sense of relatedness with me. As a result, he felt comfortable talking about his experiences, and I began to establish a sense of familiarity with an individual I had never met before that day. This instance highlights how kinship relations are lived and experienced as everyday experiences by people like Amin in urban Guwahati. It allows us to understand how such individuals establish their personhood in the larger socio-economic context of society through relatedness.
Citizenship is hierarchised, especially in a ‘developing’ city like Guwahati, because Amin belongs to a community that has historically fallen under the rhetoric of the ‘other’ or ‘outsider’ in the Assamese society. Such mythical norms of the ‘other’ make survival in the urban difficult. Kinship plays an essential site of such survival. Kinship relations are not always smooth sailing; instead, they also threaten migrant communities when proving one’s legitimacy as a citizen, especially when everyday experiences are not recognized in the discourses of kinship. Now, when one talks about these shared lived experiences of such communities in Assam, indignity and citizenship are distorted by hegemonic powers.
Ali, one of the others bereaved in the Silsako demolition, mentioned that he has not applied for his reimbursement yet since the documents asked for are not present with him, and to apply for one, he would have to go through a series of documentation processes to prove his ‘biological’ citizenship. “…and in times like these, I would rather have another couple of houses broken down than go to the detention centre,” says Ali as he tried to explain how the current situation of the NRC puts people like him in a vulnerable position under the state. The question of the dehumanisation of the ‘landless’ and ‘migrant’ communities in Assam is salient in such experiences. This creates a loop of generational marginalisation since society does not give such ‘outsiders’ who have lived in the region for generations the opportunity to establish their legitimacy in the land. The imagined ‘threat’ of the othered ‘outsider’ has reduced such communities to mere estimated numbers of humans. This reduction can be seen as a reduction of the ‘slave’ to a ‘threat’ in the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Nandy, 1989). In ‘Intimate Enemy’ (1989), Nandy argued how ideological shaping in a society carves communities into a ‘master’ and ‘slave’ mentality. This, as a result, dehumanises the minority population, which reduces them to mere disposable things for the state, and through ideological precedence, the phenomenon gets naturalised. (Nandy, A. 1989).
The narrative ‘mati putro‘ (sons of the soil) and ‘jai ai axom’ (all hail mother Assam) have been appropriated by the Assamese upper-caste middle-class population to establish an exclusive kinship with the land. Amalendu Guha (1980) talks about this ‘little nationalist’ movement of the Assamese community, which eventually took a chauvinistic turn through othering of the imagined ‘outside’, believed to be the biggest threat to the Assamese society. This process of claiming the ‘khilonjia‘ and othering the minority restricted the state from being questioned for the slow development of the region. This is mainly because of the association of blood with the land or the soil and patronizing it as a kin. Hence, kinning with the land has been a primary way of asserting one’s claim to the land and establishing a hierarchy against the one outside the kin. The marginalised Miya Muslims are imagined as the illegitimate children of the ‘aai’ (mother) in Assam. Illegitimacy, as a child and as a citizen, threatens an individual’s rights. The illegitimate child has to prove their legitimacy through documents continuously and is vulnerable to having a ‘home’. This idea has been hugely highlighted in the recent NRC (National Register of Citizenship) update of 2019. Updating the 1951 NRC that went on for almost five years (from 2015 to 2019, still ongoing technically) is a direct consequence of ‘anti-immigrant’ and ‘jatiyotabaad’ belief systems (Saha, A, 2020).
The conversation between Amin and I took a turn to talk about the char area near the Beki nodi (river), which flows through our villages. Jonia is a small village in the Barpeta district of Assam, with a char area in the beki nodi (river). Amin said, “Oh! My uncle’s family lives in the char there… Did your family get their names on the first list of NRC itself?” When I answered yes, he continued, “Oh! Your dada (grandfather) must be a big name in the village then… But it does not matter if we have our name in the NRC. We will be landless and homeless either way; that is why it did not matter much when my house was demolished. I knew this fate was coming my way,” Amin said as he kept on collecting the small silver fishes from the lake. He did not reply to the question when I asked him if he had his name in the NRC, indicating that it doesn’t matter. If one had to look at this conversation without prior knowledge about the NRC document, one would think that it is negligible if one looked at how dismissive Amin was regarding NRC. Nevertheless, this reaction did not come out of dismissal, nor did it portray ignorance; it was mostly a reaction to sheer exhaustion and shared anxiety around this phenomenon. The shared anxiety comes from the exclusion of people like him from the imagined legitimate citizen, ‘khilonjia’.
The ‘khilonjia’ question has been a long historical discourse in Assam’s political and everyday discourses. Who is the true son of the soil? Who has the right to land in the accelerated urbanisation of Guwahati? What category of citizens can live with dignity in a city like Guwahati? Can the non-khilonjia claim the land and establish a ‘home’? Who can qualify as an ‘original inhabitant’ in relation to land? Who is the citizenship made for? Are legal documents enough to claim one’s belongingness to the land? These are some of the questions one comes across while trying to understand the large-scale demolition drive taken up by the state of Assam in recent years in the larger socio-political context. State machinery and its ideologies create a narrative about what it stands for and what it deems necessary for creating a social order. It is the only legitimate user of violence. By understanding how the state works and who it works for through its presence in the everyday lives of citizens belonging to different social groups, one can understand the state’s imagination of how a society should and for whom it should exist. Hence, this exclusion by the state of specific communities from its imagination and the fear-mongering it induces in such situations through state actors creates a hierarchy legitimised through notions of legality (and illegality) of citizenship. The fear induced in these citizens can be seen throughout their everyday experiences, where kinship is central to survival.
References:
Carsten, J. (ed.). (2000). Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge University Press.
Guha, A. (1980). Little Nationalism Turned Chauvinist: Assam’s Anti-Foreigner Upsurge, 1979-80. Economic and Political Weekly. 1699-1720.
Nandy, A. (1989). Intimate Enemy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prag News. (2023, March 3). The Eviction Drive at Silsako Beel Haulted for Ten Days After Meetings with Assam Chief Minister. https://youtu.be/ag9j0peBdU0
Saha, A. (2021). No Land’s People: The Untold Story of Assam’s NRC Crisis. Harper Collins India.
Scott, J. C. (2020). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.
I would like to thank my dear friend and classmate Antarul Haque for helping me in this research and in editing this article.
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Shahin Afrin has finished a post-graduation in Sociology from Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi.