Fluid identities

Mumbai: The recent lynching of Syed Sharifuddin Khan, a man accused of rape, in Dimapur, Nagaland, raised several uncomfortable questions. One of these was whether the man would have suffered the fate he did if he had not been wrongly identified in local news reports as an “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant”.

A “what if” is always a hard question to answer. However, what has happened in living memory can be stated with a fair degree of confidence.

In India’s Northeast, starting with Assam in 1960, there have been waves of ethnic cleansing in which Bengalis were the principal targets. The violence spread to Meghalaya in 1979 where local organisations, led by the Khasi Students Union, organised violence that targeted anyone who was not a tribal. The principal targets of attacks were the Bengali and Nepali-speaking minorities. All Bengalis, including those born and brought up in Shillong, were targeted as Bangladeshis.

Horrific crimes were committed against Bengalis, both Hindu and Muslim, in various places across the Northeast. The single worst instance of this was the Nellie massacre in Assam, in which according to official figures, 2,191 people were slaughtered in one night. Thirty-two years have passed, yet not a single person has been convicted for those murders till date. The shrill cries for justice that rise at the mention of Gujarat 2002 are not, and never have been, heard at the mention of Nellie 1983. No minister or politician became a figure of hate after that massacre.

In Shillong, 1987 was a year the curfews lasted longer than usual. Schools and colleges remained shut through the year. I don’t remember if it was that year or some other year — because violence was an annual occurrence — that Gauri Dey, a married woman, was dragged out of her home, gang-raped and killed by having a stick forced into her. There was no 24x7 television in those days, and no Internet. You won’t find a documentary calling her India’s Daughter. You won’t even find a story on Google. The story never got out. No one was ever convicted for the crime.

The attacks on Bengalis and Nepalis, marked as “foreigners”, was xenophobia driven by racism. The creation of Bengali as a foreign race in Northeast India is a product of colonial effort. Professor David Ludden, a noted historian from New York University, in an academic paper published in 2003 — The First Boundary of Bangladesh on Sylhet’s Northern Frontiers — wrote about the separation of the Bengali and Khasi lands and identities. Around 1780, this was the position according to him: “North of the Surma, northwest of Sylhet town, ethnic communities of frontier settlers, called Bengali Khasias, had arisen from alliances between mountain Khasias and lowland Bengalis; and they had once respected Mughals and Nawabs, inside the jaghir of Omaid Reza, yet remained independent of Company Raj”.

The East India Company sought to extend Company Raj. It was this process that produced new boundaries and created impermeable barriers between the Bengali, Khasi and Jaintia identities.

Ludden wrote in his conclusion: “Before 1790, northeastern frontiers of Bengal remained as open to mobility as they had been during Mughal times and before… In 1790, British military victories in lowland forest frontiers of northern Sylhet and Khasia military victories in the mountains above combined to produce the first boundary in the region that endeavoured specifically to restrict mobility from one side to the other. This political boundary became a social boundary on both sides.”

Jaintiapur, the erstwhile capital of the tribal Jaintia kings, is now in Bangladesh. There are still Khasi, Jaintia, Assamese and Manipuri populations on both sides of the Bangla border. In other words, there are Manipuri, Khasi, Jaintia and Assamese Bangladeshis.

The Assamese language itself is very similar to Bengali. So is the script. The religions are shared, with local variations. The food is similar. The name Kamrupa, which is now associated with Assam, refers to a kingdom that once covered large areas of West Bengal and what is now Bangladesh. At different times extending even up to the 20th century, East Bengal and Assam remained under the same administration. Shillong was the summer capital of both.

However, all this is forgotten. The land and people have always existed, but a border drawn on a map less than 70 years ago by an Englishman tore the social fabric in irreparable ways. The resultant violence caused amnesia about history.

Talk among tribal groups these days, and for many years before, has been about purity of blood. Filmmaker Wanphrang Diengdoh’s documentary, Where the Clouds End, shows a leader of the Khasi Students' Union making this point. It also shows the existence of rituals by which men of other ethnicities who married Khasi women could be inducted into the tribe.

The idea that ethnic identities are written in blood is actually one of the most pernicious and incorrect ideas in existence. That people can change religions is known. That they can also change linguistic and cultural identities is forgotten. A Maratha can become Tamil, for instance. There is a good example: Rajinikanth. The superstar’s real name is Shivaji Rao Gaekwad.

Even group identities can change over time. The Assamese and Bengali identities are composite identities that have come into being because of the merging of group identities. The Ahoms of Assam came from what is now Myanmar. They adopted the local language, religion and culture to become Assamese. On the other hand, the Koch, who had a major role in Assamese history, are now mainly Bengalis.

The case of the Bengali Muslim man who was lynched in Dimapur is linked to all this. He was married to a local Sema Naga woman. There have been many cases of Bengali Muslims marrying Sema Nagas in recent years, and there is now a community called the Semias who are of mixed parentage.

There is a real fear among communities across the Northeast of being demographically marginalised by those much more numerous than them. The complex personal dimensions of this particular story apart, there is also a web of complex social and political issues. It is possible that the lynching may not have happened if there was no Semia community, or if tribalism and the idea of land being linked to identities based on blood was not so strong in Nagaland.