Burden of History: Assam and the Partition--Unresolved Issues
Udayon Misra
Abstract
The work attempts to show how the shadow of Partition continues to fall over the society and politics of the state of Assam and how issues such as immigration, demographic change, language, and identity as well as citizenship that occupied the centre stage in the years immediately before and after the Partition have not only retained their relevance but have also gained an extra sense of urgency in the contemporary politics of the region. It is interesting to note that in the archive of the colonial state, the reader is often confronted with the region’s colonial past. The quest to define the ... More
The work attempts to show how the shadow of Partition continues to fall over the society and politics of the state of Assam and how issues such as immigration, demographic change, language, and identity as well as citizenship that occupied the centre stage in the years immediately before and after the Partition have not only retained their relevance but have also gained an extra sense of urgency in the contemporary politics of the region. It is interesting to note that in the archive of the colonial state, the reader is often confronted with the region’s colonial past. The quest to define the Assamese identity still continues as it did in the 1940s and 1950s, and the historical effects of Partition have certainly had a long afterlife in the region. Not only did the Partition radically transform the political geography of the region and turn it overnight into a landlocked one, its aftereffects continued to be felt in the socio-political and economic life of the region in diverse ways. This book focuses primarily on the issues of immigration, land, language, and identity, which are seen as the unresolved issues of Partition politics. It attempts to show how after seven decades of Independence, the issues that almost exclusively engaged the public mind in the pre-Partition days continue to do so in today’s Assam. It is as if Assam has been caught in a rather eerie time warp.
Keywords:
Partition,
Assam,
language,
identity,
influx,
Assamese identity,
citizenship,
historical effects of Partition,
landlocked,
unresolved issues of Partition
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199478361 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: February 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199478361.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Udayon Misra, author
Former Professor, Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh, Assam
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