Citizenship, Inheritances, and Borderlands: Assam’s Entangled Histories

Abstract

Borders in popular culture are often imagined as precise demarcations of a nation state’s authority, which are to be patrolled and maintained sacrosanctly. Yet, the borders themselves do not exist within an uncontested space, and their effectiveness is contingent on how the border is internalised in a borderland. Unlike borders, the specific histories of these territories are often ignored in the nationalist project of spatialising time (Alonso, Annual Review of Anthropology 23:379–405, 1994). This creates a dissonance between the perception of a border within the popular discourse and the reality of borderlands. The prominence of borders within the public discourse, according to Van Schendel (2004), creates a situation where we know much more about how states deal with borderlands than how borderlands deal with states. The primary objective of this chapter is to move beyond the statist gaze and understand how the diverse communities living in the borderlands interact and adapt to the state’s gaze and how these specific interactions generate unique and adversarial articulations of citizenship not only vis-a-vis the state but also each other. This would allow us to further understand how the presence of a border fundamentally affects/amplifies social and political fault lines between the communities residing in borderlands, which predate the existence of the state itself. Within such an analysis/framework, we discuss how the historical and relative hierarchies of the borderlands affect the genealogy of the citizenship discourse in borderlands. For this purpose, we look into how the citizenship discourse has developed in the state of Assam, situated at the India-Bangladesh border. The rationale for selecting the present-day state of Assam relates to its unique history due to which it has come to house diverse groups of communities, each with its specific culture and history. Additionally, the manner in which the territorial characteristics of this state were defined, both during colonial and post-colonial periods, created a province, which in essence, was an amalgamation of unique and diverse regions. Lastly, the manner in which popular social movements have developed in opposition to perceived illegal immigration from the neighbouring country of Bangladesh (erstwhile East Pakistan/East Bengal) in Assam provides us with a fertile ground for analysing how the entangled inheritances of a current borderland affect legal narratives of citizenship and belonging.