Fashioning of identities: Nationalising narrative of the Bodoland Movement By
AMRAPALI BASUMATARY
Demographic homogenisation and demarcation of territory mark the Bodo people’s struggle for autonomy, articulated in the vocabulary of nationhood. The struggle has been marred by violence, perpetrated both inside and outside the community. But the most notable feature of this process is the sexualised violence and the victimisation of women in ethnic-based identity formation.
Like most of the sub-nationalist and ethnic revivalist movements, the Bodo movement has been associated with ideas of autonomy, liberation and revolution. Struggling to move beyond the historical experience of staying in the margins of the existing political and territorial structure of the state of Assam, the Bodos have sought to reconstruct their history and taken recourse to an organised, often armed assertion of themselves as a separate “nation.”
The attempt, here, is to trace how a people’s struggle for nationhood and autonomy, with its own mapping of demography and territory, assumes “oneness” as an essence for its victory. It is imperative to look at the Bodoland process, which is based on the articulation of its own exclusive “distinctness,” and bears a complex relationship with all those unarticulated identities that are still on the edge of political visibility. Since any contested identity cannot emerge without suppressing its own internal voices, which are potentially different or often contradictory, for the “sake” of its unity and strength as a monolithic politic community, Bodos cannot be different in this regard. However, without contesting the Bodo aspirations for a separate nationhood, it is worthwhile to look at and analyse the politics of their struggle in terms of how it categorises and constructs the Bodo identity within the trajectory of imagining themselves as “one people one nation.”
The term “Bodo” can be understood at two levels. In a broad sense, it is founded on the nineteenth century colonial ethnography and other anthropological studies based on the assumption that “language family” tells a definitive story about race. In this sense, it would include various tribes belonging to the Bodo language-family like Rabha, Sonowal, Lalung, Deori, Dimasa, Barman, Garo, Hajong, Hajong-Kachari, Tipperah, Chutia, Moran Kachari, etc. In the narrow sense of the term it refers to certain “tribes” who speak the Bodo-Kachari language. The earliest colonial reference to Bodos was made by Captain R. B. Pemberton in Report on Bootan (1838), where he observed that the Dooars (mountain passes in the frontier areas between Bhutan, Koch and Ahom Kingdoms), over which the Bhutan monarchical authority exercised control, were mostly inhabited by the Bodos and they were also to be found within the British limits. Based on the “elaborate” works like G. A. Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, which defined Bodo as “one of the branches of the Assam-Burmese branch of the Tibeto-Burman subfamily of the Tibeto-Chinese family of languages,” Sidney Endle concluded that the Bodos “were in earlier days the dominant race in Assam" (1) and the “race” is very widely distributed in the region. However, I use the category ‘Bodo’ differently, as a modern, conscious political community, trying to mark off itself out as a separate ‘nation’ through an organised political movement in the last decades of the twentieth century.
The period 1986 to 1998, which spans the peak moment in the history of the Bodo people’s struggle for nationhood and autonomy, has been looked at more closely. This period become important in terms of the offensive strategies adopted by the dominant forces of the Bodoland movement, which also witnessed the occurrence of most violent events in the history of ethnic rivalry and nationality claims. It is interesting to identify the processes of writing and telling history of the movement, how the dominant voice attempts at distinguishing itself, in all glorificatory terms, as “totally free” of gender based violence, despite upholding patriarchal values of uniformity, suppression and silencing. The Bodo society is a highly Hinduised and patriarchal one, even though its women enjoy a fairly equal share in property and have relative autonomy and freedom as compared to the non-tribal Hindu communities within the country. The high moral claims of the Bodoland movement needs to be questioned on the bases of the discrepancies arising out of its claims and actual politics that they did during the movement.
BORO HAARI, GEDER HAARI: A BRIEF HISTORY OF BODOLAND MOVEMENT
The above phrase, crudely translated, means “Bodo people, great people.” “Boro” is the popular term for Bodo and “Haari” means race. The phrase connotes the Bodo people’s claim as the “original autochthones” of Assam, borrowed from the colonial body of knowledge production, and thereby the Master race, which has been thrown to the margins of history dominated by the “caste-Hindu Assamese” (2) with its cunning and exclusive control over economy, administration and history. The Bodo people’s claim of being the “original autochthones” of Assam is largely based on the colonial historiography of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Having no written histories of its own, it relied much on what the colonial administration, linguists, evangelists and anthropologists had written. This process of retrieval of a constructed history from the colonial body of knowledge also arises from the processes of delimitation by Assamese historiographies in the post-colonial era. In the post-colonial Assam the history writings most focused on the composite “we-ness” of Assamese identity, subsuming all the “tribal” communities within the state of Assam. Thus, history of a composite Assam more often than not becomes the history of the mainstream Assamese society, that is, a non-tribal history. For instance, in the 1960s the Government of Assam initiated a voluminous project of recording the political history of colonial Assam, headed by none other than eminent historian like H. K. Barpujari, which resulted in the publication of The Political History of Assam in three volumes(3). Despite the Plain Tribes(4) playing an important role in the political drama of Assam during the freedom movement, reference to political role of the Bodos is restricted to minimal three lines in the three volumes. Most of the writings on social and cultural history of Assam also merely reiterate what administrator-historian Edward Gait wrote about the Bodos in his A History of Assam published in 1905.(5)
However, the modern Bodo people’s dependence on colonial historiography is not uncritical one. The popular history-writing criticizes both colonial and post-colonial writings of “consign[ing] the Bodos the past but not to history, they became the subject of anthropology but not history.” It is further claimed that “subversion of Bodo history began with the Bodos themselves, they allowed others to give them names and divide and sub-divide them into different groups,” and are compared to the Aborigines of Australia, “where Europeans constructed a clever history of the country by giving the impression to the world that the aborigines were mere artifacts of the human past. The Brahmans in Assam indulged in wholesale conversion of the Bodo rulers and then left nothing behind but little inscriptions on copperplates as if to facilitate future Aryan historians to practice a cult of forgetfulness and disremembering.”(6)
The Bodo community in the wake of experiencing the prolonged and historical domination in the hands of the caste-Hindu Assamese people raised the question of “Bodos are not Assamese”(7) and challenged the Assamese chauvinism since the early phase of the second half of the 20th century. Though the history of resistance goes back much before that period,(8) it is imperative to place the Bodo issue in the context of post-colonial period when the problem of its identity vis-à-vis the claims of a composite we-ness of the Assamese becomes more prominently visible and oppressive. The processes of unequal terms of assimilation into the composite Assamese identity in the post-colonial era, of all the “tribal” communities in Assam indiscriminately affectingthese “tribal” communities in every manner possible led to the formation of an alternative imagination which would not only protect but also develop the aspirations and ethnic identity of these communities. With this broader imagination of a united “tribal identity,” the Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA), a political party largely under the leadership of the Bodos, was formed in 1967, which asserted the constituent communities’ aspiration for a separate “homeland” called Udayachal, within the Indian Union, but separate from Assam, articulated in the nature of a union territory. The Bodos constituted the largest component of this visionary platform. But it was only in 1987, with the formation of All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU)-Bodo Peoples’ Action Committee (BPAC) alliance, that the younger leaders of the community were able to mobilise a large mass of the Bodo people to push forward the struggle for an “exclusivist”(9) separate state for the Bodos, called the Bodoland, in the northern banks of the river Brahmaputra.
This shift in the Assam Plains Tribal politics witnessed the transformation of a composite tribal struggle to a Bodo-centric movement of identity assertion, wherein the ABSU and BPAC became the dominant voice of the Bodos as a separate nation, which ironically gets articulated on the lines of the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU). Along side these democratic political bodies, this period also witnessed the formation of armed groups like the Bodoland Liberation Tiger (BLT) and National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) who were constantly at war with each other. The formation of the latter organisations created more feelings of resistance and antagonism as well as fear amongst the people, both Bodos and non-Bodos. Widespread killings, abduction and extortions marred the movement itself, thereby pushing it into the thresholds of stagnancy, counter-terrorism and militarization of the entire region for more than a decade.
PRODUCING THE BODO NATION
The Bodo struggle under the leadership of ABSU evoked a new era of making “revolutionary” efforts of clearing the historical lag in terms of economic, political and social progress of the community. This historical effort consolidated into imagining the community as “a nation,” of which the young Bodo men and women would be the architects. There was large-scale awareness about the “speciality” and the “beauty” of the tribe’s language, culture, tradition and history itself.(10) The movement created a new vocabulary of articulating its sentiments and desires and thereby the roles that members of the community would play were more “clearly” outlined. The entire mass of Bodo students and youth were called upon to participate and lead the struggle.
The timing of ABSU taking over the leadership of the Bodo movement from 1987 has complex relationships with the “Assam agitation” led by the All Assam Students Union (AASU) demanding detection and eviction of foreigners from the state and a greater autonomy. The Bodo youth participated in this movement. After the singing of Assam Accord in 1985, they realised that the new government formed by Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) formed by the leadership of AASU was not much different from the earlier ones insofar as the Bodos were concerned. Amongst a list of 92 demands formed by the ABSU, three major political issues could be pointed out: (a) Formation of a separate state named Bodoland on the north bank of the Brahmaputra, (b) Establishment of autonomous district councils in the tribal dominant areas on the south bank of the Brahmaputra, and (c) Incorporation of the Bodo Kacharis of Karbi Anglong in the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution.(11) The Bodo movement under ABSU had witnessed the strategy of eviction and restriction against foreigners, which necessitated the sharpening of Bodo identity as well as a militant opposition against the “other.”
The paradigmatic shift towards becoming “modern” was necessitated by the Bodo historical experience of domination in the hands of caste-Hindu Assamese society. The struggle armed itself with issues of development, enlightenment, empowerment and reformation in order to wriggle out of the historical stagnancy perpetrated through strategic alienation of the “tribals” from every level of progress. At the same time, the Bodo movement is characterised by a feeling of the danger of getting contaminated and contested by the forces of the high caste dominance since the recent past as against their constructed memory of a “golden past.”
“Divide Assam Fifty Fifty” – the slogan that marked the epitome of Bodo demand for a separate homeland – did not produce a direct violent confrontation with the dominant caste-Hindu Assamese. The movement’s assertion of the Bodos being the original autochthones in the past legitimised the political claim to the territory in contemporary times. Whether the goals would be an independent sovereignty of the Bodos or an autonomous unit within the Indian Union, the demand for “homeland” was the hallmark of the movement. The Bodoland movement based primarily on a feeling of victimhood and carried out through the articulation of being a “master race,” not being the only movement with a similar claim on the same land, came in collusion with other political movements. The politics of identity assertion, through the processes of a homogenising community along with definite territorial claims resulted in violent confrontations with other groups having similar demands.
In the shared memory of the community, they have been subjected to unimaginable atrocities by police and para-military forces of the state, in their legitimate fight for reclaiming what is their birthright. The conflict and the consequent repression witnessed during the Bodo movement is precipitated by the relationship of the former with Assam and India and their political configuration. “The increasingly violent politics of a Bodo homeland bring to sharp focus the contradictions at the heart of the projects surrounding nations, nationalities, and homelands. That the Assamese sub-national narrative should be so violent[ly] contested just as it challenges the pan-Indian narrative lends both political and theoretical poignancy to the Bodo case.”(12) From time to time, police and military forces have carried out a spree of raids and indulged in violence like lootings, physical torture, rapes and other forms of sexual violence easily meted out on the men and women of the community. This process strongly highlights the way in which the community becomes identified as a totalistic and monolithic category of insurgent elements. These designs of suppression orchestrated by the state power are easily recorded in the memories of the public. In the act of remembering and recollecting the history of the movement, these facts of armed repression accentuate the Bodo people’s sense of collectiveness as a unified “nation.”
COMMUNITY VERSUS COMMUNITY: THE RIOTS
The clashes between the Adivasis and the Bodos serve to remind the complex histories of identity-based movements.(13) Though generically both “tribal” and “adivasi” carry the same meaning, the Bodos differentiate itself as tribal, the original inhabitants of Assam, as different from and superior to the Adivasis, who are immigrant population. Santhali, Munda, Oraon are the main communities which come under the umbrella term of the Adivasi. The Bodo-Santhali riots of 1996 and 1998 are one of the worst events that informs the Bodoland movement.(14) These riots are predominantly perceived as Bodo efforts at ethnic cleansing by the non-Bodo mainstream narratives in an effort to throw the non-Bodos out of the territory in order to make the authoritative claim over the area legitimate. The allegations by the Santhalis look at it as a ruthless and methodical programme of ethnic cleansing which the Bodos used to establish their majority status by force and violence, in order to justify their claims of autonomy and statehood. Since the Bodos inhabit a vast tract, not always contiguous, the possibility of such a design on the part of the Bodos to stop any competition for the territory is seemingly logical. Since the Santhalis are now beginning to dominate the landholdings in Bodo areas, they are perceived as the main threat to the territorial integrity of the Bodos. Considering that land forms an important source of livelihood, community claims over it become an important issue in the process of nation building. However, the Bodos claim that it was not a strategic act of ethnic cleansing and trace the source of this ethnic strife to the provocative killing of three Bodo women by the Santhalis, and how they have been making efforts to displace the Bodos from their own lands.
Land and territory, along with other economic and politico-social concerns, like any claims for autonomy and statehood in the post-colonial era, form an important part of identity formation of the Bodos. While language and culture are the primary co-ordinates of “identifying” the people belonging to the Bodo community, the identity can be imagined and drafted into concrete reality only through prescribing a territorial boundary that would protect, develop and sustain the Bodos as distinct nation with its own glorious history. In a fantastic delineation of its territorial claims, the ABSU defines Bodoland in the following terms:
The river Brahmaputra will divide Assam if the separate state demanded by the Bodos is conceded. The demanded areas consist of the plains of Himalayan foothills below the kingdom of Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh on the north bank of Brahmaputra. It starts from the river Sankosh in the west and extends up to Sadiya to the east. This narrow strip of land measure 25,478 sq. k.m. In comparison to Nagaland, Mizoram or Pondicherry the state demanded by the ABSU is larger and economically more viable. Packed with forest areas, hundred of tea gardens, vast area of fertile land and plenty natural resources this region is richer and more feasible than many other states of India.(15)
However, the ABSU avers that the existing tension could “worsen” due to “the demand of separate state in the heartland of the Bodos, by the Santals and their political voice against the creation of Bodoland”(16). This demand, and resistances put forth by the Santhals serve to create an anomaly in the apparently legitimate and harmonious Bodoland, imagined by the Bodo movement, which would embrace all the minorities within it in a truly democratic manner. Santhals have contested not only the legitimacy but also the possibility of a Bodoland, which, to the Santhals, could only mean further alienation from land and political power to handle their own affairs without being subservient to any “greater” forces.
IDENTITY POLITICS AND VIOLENCE: SILENCING GENDER DISCOURSE
The relationship between ethnic-based identity formation and territorial claims is almost gruesomely rendered simple through its deployment of gender by the logic of masculine aggression that operates within the nationalist ideology. The archetypal construction of “a woman” is repeated again and again in this blatant play of ethnic rivalry. A woman’s life and body is simultaneously marked with her identity of belonging to “other” ethnic category as well as her non-identity as a woman, which legitimizes the logic of her being both raped and killed: “How can one expect these boys to stay off from sexual violence in an opportune situation like that”(17) is an implicit indication of sexual violence and rape of women as an aspect of the riots. In this situation, women of each community involved in the riots have experienced not only the fear of being killed and displaced, but also of being raped and sexually abused. Thus, their difference as women also marks their differences of experiences of fear and trauma perpetrated by men of the “other” community.
The issue of suffering and displacement during the riots that affected thousands of people across both the communities stands as the starkest testimony of the Bodoland project and its politics. As Brahma, who witnessed the riots recalls, “Those days were so frightening. Why and how it happened does not make any sense.”(18) Whether this woman fails to or ignores to establish a causal connection between the movement and the riots in her personal narrative, the gaps and silences in her narrative fills itself under the aegis of “bad time” that “displaced” so many. Standing outside the structure of formal politics of the movement, with which she does not identify at all, she narrates how she and her villagers had experienced fear and apprehensions of termination of life during the riots. Her recollection of the riots occurs in terms of both “the time” of and the “incidents” that happened during the riots. With her narrative travelling in and out of objective and emotional recollections, her spontaneous perspective filtered with the passage of time, allows us to witness the riots from an alternative point of view. She remembers how the faces of “those” boys frightened her as they came looking for a Santhali girl who lived in her neighbour’s house: “They all had red clothes tied around their forehead and they seethed to be in a state of mad fury and frenzy.”(19) She had tried to misguide the boys as she sensed the ensuing danger. Her remembrance of this incident is interspersed with a strong sense of regret in not being able to finally save that “lovely” girl from those boys who were inflicted with “queer madness.” Despite the (girl’s) landlady’s pleading with the boys, they ‘took’ her away and was never heard of after that day. As she recalls, “The girl had completely become a Bodo – in her language, her dress and her ways.” Yet they took the innocent girl away to be murdered, because she was a Santhali by birth, and violated because she was a woman.
In the riots, like any other instances of warfare or political terror, the instruments with which the body has been abused in order to violate, avenge and break the spirit of the other community has tended to be gender differentiated and, in the case of women, to be sexualised.(21) Thus, rapes have always been part of the male war strategy: dominating, humiliating, conquering and destroying the “other” and the hatred and violence are crystallised in rape.(22) In contrast to these experience of women in general, and as individuals, the dominant and the male narratives of the event is once again silent about the women of the “other” as special targets of the violence. Both at the formal and the discursive level, men of Santhali and Adivasi communities have been vocal about how the Bodos have “raped and killed” Santhali women: “There have been ample instances of our women being violated and killed by the Bodos. I can even give you reports and data about it. You can also go through my newspaper cuttings.”(23) The Bodo dominant discourse uses the same terminology against their “enemies.” But both the groups of men claim that men of their respective communities have never indulged in these crimes. The question then is – who committed these crimes? The answer will likely be a volley of mutual allegations rooted in the patriarchal narratives articulated by both the communities. On the other hand, the All Bodo Women’s Welfare Federation (ABWWF) is almost categorical about the riots being free of any sexualised violence: “Nothing of that sort happened. Maybe, there were some stray instances, but we have not got any reports of any such violence. It was a tragic event in our history, through.”(24)
The commonplace accounts of men and women of both the communities are uniform to the extent of locating the beginnings of the riots: “It all began with the murder of three women whose dead bodies were found in a rotten state in the forests near Satyapur”(25) is the commonsense embedded in the minds and memories of the people. The more marginalised men and women concern themselves with memories of fear and trauma inflicted upon them by the attackers. On a very experiential level, the displaced Santhali women are ignorant and mostly incapable of analysing the cause.
In a more politically constructed narrative of the Adivasis, the riot discourse, while unable or strategically conscious of avoiding the personal narratives, show the necessity of bringing up issues of sexual exploitation perpetrated on their women. There is a felt need of politically remembering, telling and circulating “facts” about these incidents with the “Bodo” as “other nation” emphasised. In his construction of a history of the Adivasis in the area, an Adivasi leader tells how “cases like rapes and murders were numerous during the 1998 riots. Women and children were worst sufferers. Such violence is always part of the society. Further, some people have witnessed molestations and rapes. It was the season of cultivation and most of these crimes happened in the paddy fields. So they were less visible.”(26) Apart from establishing women and children as chosen subjects of violence, his narrative is not different from what Bodo men and dominant Bodo discourse would say about the Adivasis. Where the credibility of some incidents is real cannot be doubted, they are also embedded in the political scenario of the riots.
NOTES & REFERENCES:
1. Sidney Endle, The Kacharis, reprint, New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1993 (original pub. 1911), p. 4.
2. The term “caste-Hindu Assamese,” here, implies the Sanskritised, high-caste, Assamese-speaking Hindus who “enjoyed a ‘superior’ culture by dint of their background of Sanskritic civilization” and who dominate the political, social and economic scenario within Assam. Jadav Pegu, Reclaiming Identity: A Discourse on Bodo History, Guwahati: Saraighat Offset Press, 2004, p. 4.
3. My reference to these volumes is from the second edition published in 1999.
4. “Plains Tribal” refers to the tribal communities residing in the plains of Lower Assam. During the Bodo movement, the term referred to the collective of politically conscious Plains Tribes who organized themselves to fight against the all-round exploitation by the “Assamese” under the broad banner of Plains Tribal Council of Assam in 1967.
5. See B. K Barua, A Cultural History of Assam, Guwahati: Lawyers Book Stall, 1969.
6. Pegu, Reclaiming Identity, pp. 15–17. Emphasis added.
7. See Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
8. The Bodo people’s consciousness, and apprehension of their marginal situation, was
articulated by the beginning of the 20th century. The Kachari Jubok Sanmiloni and the Boro Jubok Sonmiloni submitted a memorandum to the Simon Commission demanding recognition of the Boro as distinct and independent society separate from the Hindu society. See A Brief History of the Boro people in http://www.geocities.com/ndfb2001/history.htm.
9. The term is used to refer the progression of the Assam Plain Tribal movement for autonomy and political recognition, initially articulated in terms of a larger tribal solidarity, which got crystallized into a predominantly Bodo assertion of its identity in exclusive terms.
10. The language issue is crucial in the Bodoland movement. Founded in 1952, Bodo Sahitya Sabha is the vanguard of Bodo language and literature. See http://www.bodoland.org/sahitya.htm.
11. Sudhir Jacob George, “The Bodo Movement in Assam: Unrest to Accord,” Asian Survey, Vol.34, No. 10, October 1994, p. 880.
12. Baruah, India Against Itself, p. 174.
13. Adivasi has been used in this paper in the popular sense in which the teagarden “tribal” population is perceived in Assam.
14. The Santhali, one of the Adivasi sub-tribes, were brought to Assam during the nineteenth century under colonialism largely from the Chotanagpur region as tea labourers. The riots did not affect the other Adivasi groups like the Mundas and the Oraons. The riots were exclusively between the Bodos and the Santhalis.
15. ABSU, The Bodoland Movement (1986 – 2001): A Dream and Reality, Kokrajhar, 2001, p. III.
16. Ibid.
17. Personal Interview with Ms. Brahma, July 2005. She has been working as a helper/maid in one of the most affluent landlord’s family in her village since her youth. She owns her cultivable land, poultry house and cattle.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Cynthia Cockburn, “The Gender Dynamics of Armed Conflict and Political Violence,” in Caroline O.N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark (eds.),
Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence
, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2001, p. 22.
22. Mirjana Morokvesic, “The Logics of Exclusion: Nationalism, Sexism and the Yugoslav War,” in Nickie Charles and Helen Hintjens (eds.),
Gender, Ethnicity and Political Ideologies
, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 78.
23. Personal Interview with Lakra, July 2005. He belongs to the Munda community and has led the counter Bodoland movement of the Adivasis in the region.
24. Personal Interview with Rozey, July 2005. She has been an ABWWF leader since the formation of the Bodo Women
’s organisation.
25. Different narratives claim different identities of these three women who were murdered just a few days before the Bodo-Santhal riots broke out in 1996.
