Homeland Insecurities: Autonomy, Conflict and Migration in Assam

Abstract

As a literary critic working in Northeast Indian Studies, I was delighted to read the following comment by social scientist Sanjoy Barbora in his monograph, Homeland Insecurities: ‘Fiction... is a good way to navigate the current bottlenecks around the autonomy movements in Assam, especially in their ability to hold claims for justice and demands for political pragmatism that excluded large sections of people there’ (75). My delight stems not from this valorisation of fiction alone, but from the fact that Barbora crafts a very nuanced and complex account of the political and social shifts in Assam in the last couple of decades through some powerful storytelling. Consider, for instance, his account of Siddhartha Patar’s travails in Chapter 3. Siddhartha was a young man from Morigaon who was duped by an agent and sent to work on a ship owned by an Iranian businessman. He was detained in a port in Iran for a substantial amount of time before being freed and sent back home. Pondering what makes young men like Siddhartha migrate out of Assam in search of employment, Barbora makes a striking observation: ‘The answers to such questions are, at best, staging posts for other equally contentious queries, giving one the impression that issues of mobility in Assam are rooted in a historical narrative that has little room for nuance. One of the reasons for this is the political weight that immigration lends to any discussion on civic issues in the state’ (85). Indeed, deploying both ‘longue dur ee’ ethnography and his extensive experience as a human rights activist, Barbora utilises nuanced storytelling to navigate the bottlenecks around two of the biggest issues that any Assam studies scholar has to confront: the issue of autonomy and the issue of migration. Both have seen tectonic shifts in the last couple of decades and Barbora’s timely monograph is an attempt to grapple with the scale of these changes. Two argumentative threads bind the five chapters and the conclusion. First, everything that he writes about has been ‘overdetermined by militarization of crucial spaces of debate and dialogue within civil society’ (1). Second, ‘a dense reading’ of localised issues in Assam ‘refract attention to larger universal changes across the globe’ (1). Chapter 1, ‘From Autonomy to Accommodation’, is both an introduction to the themes explored in the book and, as the ‘from–to’ juxtaposition in the title suggests, a temporal