“Cholo, cholo, Asom
jai
Emonmathikothaonapai.”
“Come, come, to
Assam we go
Soil such as this
nowhere will we know.”
In Dhubri, elders still recall the echo of
Maulana Bhashani’s slogan. A political mobiliser of great standing among the
downtrodden Muslim peasantry of pre-Independence Bengal, he coined the slogan
in the 1930s to call forth his followers to populate the sandbank islands of
the lower Brahmaputra valley.
His unique blend of Islam and socialism inspired his polity to rise up
against the Zamindari system and demand land rights, and went some way to aid
the Raj’s own policy of moving populations from congested East Bengal to the
land-rich and sparsely populated Brahmaputra valley. Families of
cultivators began to arrive in hordes to parts of Assam such as Dhubri, Nalbari
and Barpeta, soon causing alarm among the locals. Debates in the Assam Assembly
from the 1930s and 1940s regarding matters of identity, language and most of
all, resources, sound remarkably similar to the ones today.
My own curiosity about the sandbanks, or chars, as they are locally
know, was piqued when I went to Assam in 2012 to document the aftermath of the
ethnic strife between members of the Bodo tribe and Bengali Muslims, that
claimed over 100 lives and displaced nearly five lakh people. An air of
xenophobia pervaded the air, with the bogeyman of the Bangladeshi illegal
migrant surfacing on TV debates and living room conversations, even though ground
realities pointed to something very different.
I realised that memories and fears from 80 years ago were still very
much alive in Assam, and to understand the story fully, I had to go to the
source. My work led me to the archipelago of sandy islands that lie on the
widest stretch on the course of the Brahmaputra where the Indo-Bangladesh
border lies unfenced over a six-kilometre stretch of fluid geography.
The peasant communities that live on the chars are at the centre of my
photographic survey. Their interaction with the riverbank town of Dhubri, and
onward with the rest of the state provide clues to some of the woes of the
region. In 2012, their relatives and friends came under the crosshairs of Bodo
militants that periodically terrorise them, driven by a zeal for autonomy
shared less and less by their own people. The island dwellers on the other
hand, itinerant for generations, owe their allegiance to land alone, regardless
of nation states and borders.

Unplanned urban
development in Assam’s capital, Guwahati. The city sees seasonal migrants from
the chars who form the backbone of its construction industry.


An Indian Army structure lies nearly submerged in the floodplains of Dhubri during the monsoon season. The plaque on the building reads “INDIAN ARMY SADBHAVNA—We care for our people”.



A statue of Subhas
Chandra Bose, at the town centre, Dhubri.

Memorial for Syama
Prasad Mukherjee, who founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the precursor to today’s
BJP at the BJP office, Dhubri.

A cadre of the
National Democratic Front for Bodoland (Ranjan Daimary). The militant outfit
has been in a ceasefire agreement and engaged in peace talks since 2012. But
other splinter groups have been responsible for disturbances in the state.


Residents of the
neighbouring islands of Takimari and Patamari huddled together on a country
boat, on their way to the weekly market in Dhubri town four hours upstream on
the Brahmaputra.

Bodo supporters of the
BJP at a Narendra Modi rally in Mangaldoi, Assam, during the run-up to the 2014
general election. Sections of the Bodo community who harbour hopes of statehood
along identity lines pledged their support to the BJP due to the party record
of forming breakaway states.


Older children from
Patamari have to change three boats and cross two islands to get to their high
school as their village only has a primary school. Contrary to popular opinion
about them in the rest of Assam, the residents of the chars are
enthusiastic about education for their daughters.

An elderly resident of
Takimari, a frontier island village of India that lies on the six
kilometre-long, unfenced border with Bangladesh. He helped ferry refugees
fleeing the war in erstwhile East Pakistan in 1971 to safety.
