Debating ‘Bongals’: Historicizing Notions of ‘Foreigner’ and Citizenship for Contemporary Assam

Abstract

Recent passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill, 2019 and the agitations and public debates around it in Assam have reinvigorated the foreigners issue in Assam, a frontier province in post-colonial India. While there is little doubt that creation of post-colonial states in the Indian subcontinent caused extreme violence, displacement and agony, few scholarly works that have located this tension within the larger debates of partition-citizenship interface. Thus despite sustained scholarships emerging on the history and politics of Assam, citizenship question remains a marginally explored area. Though some scholarships in recent times have tried to redeem this gap, but their engagement with contested citizenship in Assam remained limited, largely determined by ethno-linguistic and cultural factors and religious antagonisms. It is important to recover these experiences of Assam both in its longue duree perspective and its recent dimensions, more so in light of recent legal exercises such as the updation and in fact the creation of the National Register of Citizens in Assam and the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 through the creative re-reading of contemporary printed texts, parliamentary debates reports and court judgements. The paper seeks to undertake a preliminary attempt at such an exercise.