[Reader-list] Strangers in the City: Lives & Longings of Bangladeshi Immigrants in Guwahati

[abdus salam]

Throughout much of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth
centuries a hungry tide of humanity left their flood-ravaged,
cyclone-prone homelands to cultivate vast tracts of wetlands in what
was the virgin agrarian frontier of the lower Brahmaputra valley.

Negotiating their way through harsh legislative proscriptions like
the Line Settlement System, which demarcated permissible regions of
influx and zones of prohibition, the "Bangladeshi" immigrants
established themselves as the vanguard of the rice economy. But the
ever-changing course of the inundated river wrought periodic havoc on
their settlements, pushing them, in the first instance, into the
so-called 'char areas', riverine islands thrown up and getting
submerged with a crude logic of their own, and finally onto that great
urban refuge, the 'gateway to the North-east', Guwahati.

Growing up in the capital city of Assam in the turbulent years of the
Assam agitation I saw the xenophobia that immigration-legal or
illegal-whips up in the native or if I may say, those who form an
older, inner layer in the societal onion. The resentment and the
non-acceptance persists even in a situation where the immigrant,
knowing his condition of no-return,makes an extra-effort to ameliorate
cultural forms that to the native gaze constitutes an alien manifest.

I study history and often justify my engagement with the discipline
as an indispensable tool for coming to an understanding of the
present. Yet I feel the possibility of understanding the past can
arise from an attempt to unravel the present too. To understand
certain meanings of immigration, of acceptance, of crossing the bridge
from being an immigrant to a native, I wanted to look at the clusters
of Bangladeshi immigrants in Guwahati, how the city they try to adopt
takes to them: does it ever become home or do they remain strangers in
the city? What means do they invent to navigate the social barricades
this moving to a different cultural and linguistic zone throws at
them?
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The aforementioned abstract constitutes my I-fellowship Project.I have
structured my work into two components-the research bit and field
surveys. But before i indicate the direction my efforts have taken a
very important clarification is in place. It is the fact that i use
the term "Bangladeshi immigrants" in a very loose and all-encompassing
sense. The history and pattern of migration in present-day Assam is a
bitterly contested domain. I cite an incident that took place not too
far back in time to illustrate my point-On the 10th of April, 1992,
the then Chief Minister of Assam, the late Mr. Hiteswar Saikia
announced on the floor of the legislative assembly that there were 30
lakh [3million]Bangladeshi immigrants in Assam. The statement raised
such a ruckus that the very next day Mr. Saikia was forced to go into
denial mode. Saikia's backpedalling had a lot to do with the
portentous ramifications such statistics entail.While inviting severe
backlash from the "minority lobby", it could also constitute a belated
admission of the continued porousness of the shared international
border, and the demographic threat to the "indigenous populace".The
emotive content that beleagueres this issue precludes any informed and
considered discourse on the situation/condition of the "Bangladeshi".
Rather than stir up the hornet's nest,i use Bangladeshi immigrants in
a catch-all sense, to mean anyone who traces his ancestry to the
present-day nation state of Bangladesh.