Last August, the alleged harassment of a local girl by “non-Assamese” persons convulsed Sivasagar district. Enraged Assamese ‘nationalist’ organisations forced business establishments shut after the arrest of two persons from the Marwari community.
Protests soon morphed into demands: name business establishments in the Assamese language, reserve 80% jobs for locals, introduce legislation to disallow the sale of land to “non-indigenous” people, and, of course, the entire Marwari community of Sivasagar ought to tender an apology. On August 20, 2024, a group of Marwari persons, men and women, knelt on stage and sought a public apology, with a Cabinet Minister in attendance.
A Marwari dance group performs the traditional bhavai dance at an event in Tezpur, Assam. | Photo Credit: PTI
Over centuries the Marwari community has become an intrinsic part of the Assamese cultural fabric. And yet it takes but one incident to upend all that. Otherisation can be swift and brutal.
A view of Dimapur Central Jail, Nagaland. | Photo Credit: Ritu Raj Konwar
But I Am One Of You: Northeast India and the Struggle to Belong is replete with instances that show that the Sivasagar incident is no one-off. Be it the lynching of Syed Sharif Khan, accused of raping a tribal woman, by a mob that broke into the Dimapur Central Jail in Nagaland in 2015 or the exodus of Bengalis from Shillong in the 1980s, the ‘outsider’ remains hostage to the whims of the ‘insider’.
The obverse is well-trodden territory, of the ignorance of ‘mainland’ Indians about the eight States, or their singularly infantile coinage of ‘Chinky’ for denizens from the region. To that, writer and academic Veio Pou asks: what does an Indian look like?
Protestors in Aizawl holding placards against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
Role reversal
Where ordinary citizens might be ignorant, the omniscient state leveraged its knowledge no better. Journalist Ranju Dodum points at Chakmas from East Pakistan being moved to Arunachal Pradesh. “Tribes that have lived with each other for centuries have been forced to change their ancient ways to accommodate settlers because someone in Delhi said so,” he writes. The Mizoram experience was infinitely worse — Margaret Ch Zama, whose father C. Chhunga went on to become the first Chief Minister, describes the depredations she witnessed as a schoolgirl during the IAF’s aerial bombing of Aizawl in March 1966.
Students sitting on protest against the cancellation of residential proof certificate (RPC) at Jantar Mantar, organised by Arunachal Pradesh Chakma Students Union and Arunachal Pradesh Hajong Students Union, in New Delhi on Sunday. Photo: Sushil Kumar Verma / The Hindu | Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA
The volume’s editors present a carefully curated selection of essays, but it’s the ones that shine a light on the role reversal within the Northeast that haunt. That’s perhaps because of the qualitative difference. While systemic and societal biases remain in India, the administrative machinery doesn’t lean towards the accused; however, nativist sentiments going beyond legitimate constitutional protections are often stoked by the powers that be in the eight States. For every ‘Chinky’, there’s a dkhar, vai, bohiragata or mayang — Khasi, Mizo, Assamese and Manipuri terms for the outsider. It’s terms Bengalis, the Muslims among them more in these changed times, and Gorkhas encounter across the region as an invisibilised presence.
A market run entirely by women, in Imphal, Manipur. | Photo Credit: AP
However, the insider could easily turn outsider in a slightly wider geographical expanse: Indira Laisram, a Meitei from Cachar in Assam, felt more at home in Shillong and was looked at as ‘somewhat different’ by her Manipuri ilk. Or one could grow up right in the heart of Imphal, as Anis Iraqi, a Meitei Pangal or Manipuri Muslim, tells author Teresa Rehman, but feel like the ‘other’. Then there are outsiders on the inside such as the Bodos of Assam, whose fate Rashmi Narzary describes is of “being peripheral at the periphery”, lesser citizens within their home State.
Bodo cultural troops perform at a celebration in Guwahati. | Photo Credit: Ritu Raj Konwar
Personal grief
Two of the most poignant pieces in the collection come from Shillong. In ‘Am I the Insider or Outsider or Both’, Patricia Mukhim illustrates how nativist sentiments compensate for the governance deficit and wanton plunder of natural resources. She makes it personal, reasoning that the hostility she faces from sections of the dominant class for speaking up for non-tribals is because of her mixed parentage.
Artists performing the traditional Bodo community dance ‘Bagurumba’, in Guwahati. | Photo Credit: PTI
For Vatsala Tibrewalla, it couldn’t have been anything other than personal. The non-tribal, non-Catholic ‘Shillong Girl’ lived through childhood years of extortion, killings and the systemic narrowing of avenues even as her family stoically refused to think of the city as anything other than home. Faced with a similar predicament in Kohima, several business families exited in the late 1980s.
Editors Samrat Choudhury and Preeti Gill pinpoint identity, belonging and the insider-outsider dialectic as leitmotifs. A piece addressing the Meitei and Kuki-Zo fault lines is a curious omission by that yardstick. The anthology title could be read either way, of Northeasterners appealing to the mainland sensibility or Indians asking for acceptance in the region. Try the latter.
But I Am One Of You: Northeast India and the Struggle to Belong; Edited by Samrat Choudhury, Preeti Gill, HarperCollins, ₹599.
Published - April 11, 2025 09:00 am IST
