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MAY 7, 2016 / JYOTIRMOY TALUKDAR

I just read an article published in Raiot a couple of weeks ago titled ‘Axomiya

Nationalism is Dead’. Once, Prof. Sanjoy Hazarika had told me an anecdote from

his days as a young journalist in the eighties. Prafulla Kr Mahanta and others had

 just taken oce and ‘Bodofa’ Upen Brahma, along with other tribal leaders, had

gone to meet their comrade-turned-minister friends. They were in, though, for an

indecorous reception, by being kept waiting for hours before they could see the

new oce bearers. Emerging, Brahma prognosticated a future where never again

will any tribal community and leader believe the caste-Hindu Assamese politics

and politicians.

One can of course read similar, but more cultivated statements Karbi leader

Jayanta Rongpi and others in the newspapers of 1985-86. If consolidation of 

Axomiya nationalism started in the 1880s, it reached its high noon in the 1980s,only to see a steep nosedive post the Assam movement. This was anything but

unforeseen. The assertion of the dierent tribes and sections of people in face of 

the caste-Hindu Assamese hegemony is old, and each time that these sides

 

AXOMIYA NATIONALISM IS DEAD BECAUSE IT WAS

AXOMIYA

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came together on common grounds, like in 1947 and 1985, the disenchantment

that followed only became more acute and immutable.

Axomiya Nationalism is dead precisely because it was ‘Axomiya’. From its genesis

in the ght for the status of the Assamese language confronted by Bengali in the

1830s and the memoranda to Moat Mills by Anandaram Dhekiyal Phukan and

Maniram Dewan among others – if not in Xankardeb’s eorts of democratizing

knowledge by bringing dierent castes and tribes under the Vaishanavite

umbrella – it has been a nationalism which is strictly linguistic and almost equally

staunchly caste-Hindu. Lex talionis followed towards the second and the third

decades of the nineteenth century, with the formation of not only independent

Koch Rajbongshi, Bodo Kachari and Sutia organizations but also umbrella

organizations like the Tribal League to counteract the dominant Assamese

middle-class. The nescience and lordliness of the Assamese, for Sanjib Baruah, is

an “inevitable consequence of the very logic of language-based subnationalisms

and the cultural grammar of the nation-province in India”. The smug, supercilious

superiority of language also subsumed under it the varieties of Assamese

spoken in the not-so-opulent sides of the state. Standard or national languages

are anyway always maintained by dominant bloc institutions from the upper 

middle class of the upper  caste of the upper -rank-holding places with natural

and (post)colonially intellectual resources which in the case of Assam was upper 

Assam. The nationalistic process of false consciousness and absorptionsucceeded to the degree that Goalporia and Kamrupi became permanently

redundant.

Most political commentators and scholars by now concede that the All Assam

Students’ Union and Axom Xahitya Xabha, two of the most prominent corps of 

Axomiya subnationalism, are inherently sti-neckedly Axomiya, despite saying

Assam/Axom in their names instead of Axomiya. So has it also always been with

the Axom Gana Parixod, or the AGP, that came out of the All Assam Students’Union and the Assam Movement. Pronounced and interesting debates exist,

though, about the nature of nationalism espoused and endorsed by the United

Liberation Front of Assam, or the ULFA. Many like Udayon Misra and Kaustubh

Deka argue that ULFA’s approach was more inclusive and catch-all, but the fact

that the All Bodo Students’ Union would in 1987 demand protection from ULFA’s

‘political assassination and determinism’, calling it an ethnic Assamese

organization, showed its limited appeal among the tribes and other indigenous

peoples of the place. Also, ULFA’s insular and parochial emphasis on the ideal,

historical Ahom Assam as an exemplum and parable straight from the Gospels

did not hold attention and euphoria for long and it lost relevance just like the

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other ethnic Assamese groups.

But, as the article rightly suggests, Assam is as yet not a home to Bharat Mata Ki

Jai wholly and if in parts it is, it is because of the chanters’ sense of painful

vacuum, of an upsetting nihilism. Reading any newspaper in Assam after every

election where AGP fails miserably, be it the 2011 Assembly Elections or the 2013

Guwahati Municipal Corporation Elections or the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections,

would show people venting their disdain and dienchantment with the regionalist

party and their desire for an inclusive and sensitive brand of subnationalism of 

the people of multiethnic and polyphonic Assam.

That is why it is great news indeed that Axomiya nationalism is dead. It is dead for

a good reason. The sooner this cultural and hegemonic Leviathan is irrevocably

obliterated, the better. Before the monster of religious fundamentalism and

Hindi-Hindu upper India misogynist nationalism completely mops up the

historically heterogeneous state, a regionalist politics of the people(s) of Assam

will manifest itself, as distinct from, if not in a showdown with, borderland-hating

Indian nationalism. Hopefully this happens sooner rather than later. The demise

of Axomiya nationalism has just laid the ground for it.

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WRITTEN BY:

JYOTIRMOY TALUKDAR

Jyotirmoy Talukdar is a research scholar in the Department of English at

the University of Delhi and a struggling freelance journalist. He can be

reached at jyoti.feedback@gmail.com

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