The question of belonging is not a very old concept; it was shaped with the British annexation of Assam with the treaty of Yandaboo in 1826. In the name of running colonial administration, the British imported skilled Bengalis from Bengal who had working knowledge of both Persian and English. At the same time, in 1836, the imposition of the Bengali language in educational institutions and the court created deep resentment among Assamese people, and even missionaries faced difficulty in spreading Christianity among locals. As a protest, Anandaram Dhekial Phukan filed a petition to the government in 1853 to reintroduce Assamese as the medium of instruction. In 1873, Assamese was reintroduced in the state. This is a period which may be referred to as the first language movement; moreover, the matter of ‘belonging’ was to be decided by the criteria of language, where Bengali Hindus were excluded from Assamese society.

With the commercialisation of agriculture, British officials recruited poor landless peasants from Eastern Bengal. This time period was crucial because of the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. Immigration was increasingly seen as a threat and a sense of loss to the local Assamese population.  Sanjib Baruah quotes C.S. Mullan’s notorious 1931 Census Report, which warned that the migration of “land-hungry Bengali immigrants, mostly Muslims” would “destroy more surely than the Burmese invaders of 1820 the whole structure of Assamese culture and civilisation.” The hyper visibility of immigrant Muslims in this census created statistical demographic dangers.

In contrast to Mullan’s claim and political development, Assamese Cultural icons like Jyoti Prasad Agarwala’s famous poem, Axomiya Dekar Ukti, diminished narrow narrow-minded definition of being Assamese. It overshadowed the census’s arithmetic of difference and the political shadow of the Muslim League’s two-nation rhetoric. This attempt was to give a broader definition of Assamese identity to include the Mymensinghia Muslims. This reflected what Yasmin Saikia called Xanmiholi (blended humanity), which also reflected Ambika Giri Raichowdhury’s statement on the assimilative nature of Bengali Muslims into Assamese Muslims. 

Post-colonial Reinventions of the “Outsider”

Independence did not dissolve these colonial legacies; it repackaged them. In the first post-colonial census of 1951, many Bengali-origin Muslims identified themselves as Assamese, signalling both an aspiration and a strategy: to belong by linguistic assimilation. As a result, the percentage of Assamese speakers jumped from 31.4% in 1931 to 56.7% in 1951, an unprecedented linguistic shift largely due to Bengali Muslims’ adoption of Assamese. It effectively unsettled Mullan’s apocalyptic imagination of Assamese identity.

After three decades, due to political circumstances, the same paradigm of colonial Assam repeated in post-colonial politics. The same assumption of Mullan’s census took a different shape, based on the statement of then India’s chief election officer S.L. Shakdher on October 24, 1978, about large-scale inclusion of foreign nationals in the electoral rolls in northeastern states. This was seriously taken by AASU (All Assam Students’ Union) and Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AGSP), which created an unprecedented Assam Movement (1979-85). According to Monoj Kumar Nath, the leadership of the movement identified all ‘outsiders’ (bohiragato) as the enemy to the existence and identity of indigenous Assamese people which gives the event a secular nature, but it specifically targeted Bengali origin Muslims, even as many joined protests and some were martyred like Muzammil Hoque in the Medium of Instruction Movement (1972-73) demonstrating loyalty to Assamese identity. Due to its communal nature, it targeted legal Indian Muslims living in the state and led to the infamous incident of the Nellie Massacre (1983).

Malini Bhattacharjee argues that the involvement of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) during the earthquake in 1950 or charity works were not apolitical, but calculated strategies to weave Assam into the Hindutva imagination. The Muslim outsider was thus reinvented not only as a threat to Assamese identity but shifted as a civilizational danger to the Hindu nation itself. The NRC draft of 2019 as a final solution of citizenship became an unworthy bunch of papers with the introduction Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019, which is a vivid systematic exclusion of Muslims from Citizenship rights as The Hindu reported, “while the CAA will come to the rescue of non-Muslims excluded from the NRC, the excluded Muslims will have to prove citizenship”.

A Contested Identity

Hate speeches against Bengali-origin Muslims and labelling them as Miya (originally meaning “gentlemen,” but now often used pejoratively for Bengali-origin Muslim migrants) have become central to Assam’s contemporary political discourse. Yet the community’s conscious reappropriation of the term through Miya poetry demonstrates both dignity and belonging, reflecting a refusal of exclusion and a continued investment in the xanmiholi concept, which embodies an Assamese cultural ethos grounded in coexistence. As historian Sanjib Baruah has noted, it would be appropriate to call them Miya or Miya Musalman instead of calling them Muslims of East Bengali descent. Even the Miya poetry movement prefers the term over neo-Assamese because of its continuing assimilative nature and Bengali-origin Muslims, which fails to include the new generations of the community and even their parents.

The Congress and the All-India United Democratic Front (AIUDF)’s rivalry from 2005 complicated the contest over identity over the protection of Miya Muslim identity. This environment created a space for Hindu Nationalism. Such rhetoric directly challenges the xanmiholi concept, providing a justificatory framework for aggressive state interventions, including eviction drives in Darrang (2021) and Goalpara (2025), which targeted communities that have lived in these regions for generations.

Their identity always remains contested. Labourers of colonial rule are now cast as outsiders despite generational continuity in the land. While they engage in cultural activities and social activities to be part of the assimilative (xanmiholi) identity of Assamese society.

References

Ashraf, A. (2018, July 17). The reaction to Citizenship Bill in Assam should remind Centre of Pakistan’s mistakes in Bangladesh. Scroll. in. https://scroll.in/article/885891/the-reaction-to-citizenship-bill-in-assam-should-remind-centre-of-pakistans-mistakes-in-bangladesh

Baruah, S. (2020). In the name of the nation: India and its Northeast. Stanford University Press.

Choudhury, R. (2025, August 15). “Infiltration existential threat”: Himanta Sarma in Independence Day message. NDTV. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/facing-love-jihad-threat-assam-chief-ministers-independence-day-message-9092937

Khan, S., & Bhattacharya, S. (2025, August 19). Bengali Muslims of Assam: In extreme poverty and yet harassed. The India Forum. Retrieved September 28, 2025, from https://www.theindiaforum.in/politics/bengali-muslims-assam-extreme-poverty-and-yet-harassed

Nath, M. (2020). Assam Movement and communal polarisation. Social Change and Development, 17(2), 36–53.

Nath, M. K. (2021). The Muslim question in Assam and Northeast India. Routledge India.

Rehman, K. (2025, August 1). Stateless Bengalis of Assam: Weaponising identity, migration, border insecurity. The Bengal Gazette. Retrieved September 28, 2025, from https://bengalgazette.org/2025/08/01/stateless-bengalis-of-assam-weaponizing-identity-migration-border-insecurity/

Saikia, Y. (2021). Muslim belonging in Assam: History, politics and the future. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 44(5), 867–884.

Shahid, R. (2022, August 12). Revisited: Partition and the Bengali Muslims of India. The Geopolitics. Retrieved September 28, 2025, from https://thegeopolitics.com/revisited-partition-and-the-bengali-muslims-of-india/

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Jahidul Hassan is an undergraduate student at Swahid Sowarani College, Bamunbori, Gauhati University, Assam. He is currently researching identity formation, intra-group tensions in North-East India.