Jyotirmoy Talukdar

Why a Section Of Apolitical Educated Voters in Assam Support Gaurav Gogoi

Exactly 15 years ago, I took my first sleeper train and left Assam. As I tried to settle into my bunk bed in a dormitory and blueline buses in the unfamiliar city without the sign of a seat in any Delhi University college, I found refuge in a canteen that sold the only kind of food that my limited palate was exposed to so far. Over the next many years, we knew the owner of the place as a dada, an Assamese equivalent of bhayya, who provided food and guardianship in a difficult city the contours of which you were only beginning to figure out.

Today, as I wait for my turn to vote later next month as a Delhi resident, Prabhat dada is guiding and advising another set of youngsters – not here but in Assam. As five constituencies in the state go to polls on Friday, April 19 he is encouraging youths in Jorhat to vote for Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi. “I am part of no political organisation. But I am openly asking people to vote for Gaurav Gogoi,” he says on the phone.

Indeed, whether he wins or not, one thing that Gogoi, the deputy leader of the Congress party in the Lok Sabha, can claim to achieve is this support from self-confessedly ‘apolitical’ people. On social media and in everyday conversations, people shying away from supporting a political side have expressed their opinions on why they think he should be sent to the Parliament by the people of Jorhat.

“To me, the answer to this question is very straightforward. We were never supporters of Congress in the past and nor are we now. Many others hold a similar view. What attracts us about Gaurav Gogoi is the quality of his thought, his personality, his eligible inheritance of his father’s (Tarun Gogoi) clean image, simple and engrossing forthrightness, his way of speaking and detailed study of the matter at hand,” said Daisy Talukdar, a conscious citizen who I spoke to after she endorsed the leader on social media, ruing how Assam does not ‘trust’ any other Congress politician at the moment.

Assam chief minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma also recently claimed, “This time, if I can bring all Congress candidates except one to the BJP, then what will be the benefit of voting for Congress? This is the credit. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the sun, and we are the moon.” The one who Sarma admits he will not be able to bring to BJP is thought to be none other than Gogoi.

Along with much of India, the people of Assam also took a more serious look at the MP after he introduced the no-confidence motion against the Narendra Modi-led government in August last year. In his fiery speech, Gogoi had, among other issues, focussed on Manipur and questioned the prime minister’s silence. He had also invoked Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s ‘raj dharma’ remark made during the 2002 Gujarat riots. People in the state appreciate it if their representative to Delhi can speak in Hindi and/or English.

Also read: Why Assam’s Dibrugarh Seat Is Not Easy to Forecast – Unlike What Himanta Would Have Us Believe

I have grown up hearing stories about Hem Barua’s erudition and oratory, and how they immensely benefited the state. Talukdar says this about Gogoi’s oratory skills, “Because he is extremely proficient in both Hindi and English, he can raise Assam’s issues strongly in the Parliament and has already been playing an active role. Eloquence, fitness, formal education – he is a bright personality in every aspect… As time changes, the possibility of Assam getting a prime minister from the land at some point in the future cannot be denied.”

Responding to the allegation that Gaurav Gogoi’s Assamese is not exactly advanced, Prabhat dada adds, “Many say that Gaurav Gogoi does not speak great Assamese… But is it important that he speaks correct Assamese? He is comfortable in English and Hindi, and the entire nation recognises him. It does not matter which constituency he is fighting from. What matters is that he must win.”

In Assam, it is after a long time that the youth is finding an icon in a mainstream electoral political party. “It looks like the youth can see in Gaurav Gogoi’s statements a reflection of their own thoughts regarding their country. As of today, the most popular politician among the community of apolitical educated youth is Gaurav Gogoi,” Talukdar observes.

Surely, Gogoi is doing something right that other opposition leaders would do well to heed and, probably, emulate.

“Will he win, though?”, I ask Prabhat dada. “Jodi EVM khelimeli nohoy, 70% confirm (If EVMs are not tampered with, he has 70% chances),” he responds, before hanging up, “Hobo de, pisot phone korim. Customer aahise mor (Alright then, I will call you later. I have to attend to a customer now).”

I have no intention to come between the customer and the food their restaurateur would serve. Because I know that in the spread, there will be some food meant for thought as well.

Jyotirmoy Talukdar is a senior writing fellow at the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University.

Four Decades of Nellie: Isn’t an Apology Due?

The Nellie massacre of 1983 killed thousands in Assam. In the larger Assamese society, the tragedy is either underplayed or justified.

Today, the Nellie massacre completes 40 years.

On the morning of February 18, 1983, thousands of Bengal-origin Muslims were massacred near Nellie in central Assam – not when the night was dark but when the sun was up. In the larger Assamese society, the tragedy is either underplayed or justified.

I decided to approach 13 individuals from the state with one question: is an apology due for Nellie?

“I have no direct answer to the question. Had it been committed by the government, the answer would have been yes,” says Professor Akhil Ranjan Dutta, a well-known social scientist in the country who has commented extensively on the region’s political past and present.

“The Nellie massacre was the outcome of chauvinism, propaganda and communal hatred. Those who committed it were also victims of the same ills. Imposing an election in such an emotionally volatile situation was a mistake on the part of the government. Will the government tender an apology? Not the incumbent government as the ruling party was not there during that period. If an apology had to be tendered, it would have to be by those who led the movement and subsequently formed the government, to be precise (the ex-chief minister) Prafulla Kumar Mahanta and his colleagues. Assamese people as a whole are not responsible as there were divisions within the Assamese society regarding the movement and its strategies.”

‘Deliberate memoricide’

For the scholar Angshuman Choudhury, though, such an apology should come, first and foremost, from the Assamese society at large.

“But to decide who or what the ‘Assamese society’ is can be a complex exercise in itself. In my view, it is the mainstream Assamese political, intellectual and cultural class that needs to face the victims of Nellie and apologise for the unimaginable violence inflicted upon them in the name of protecting their homeland. This does not, of course, mean that all of those who apologise directly took part in the violence, but that they were – and continue to be – active stakeholders of a certain body politic that enabled the violence either by commission or omission. They also need to apologise for the structural violence that followed the physical violence of Nellie – the systematic, and often, deliberate memoricide of the event, the refusal to talk about the perpetrators, and the pushback against those who tried to talk about the victims,” says Angshuman, who is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Both he and Dutta seem to agree on a point regarding the parties that led the governments in question – Congress at the state and the Union when Nellie happened, and the Asom Gana Parishad soon after it.

“Many of the leaders of the Assam Movement are still alive and are members of the political fraternity and civil society in Assam today. They, especially, need to participate in this act of apology for allowing the dominant sentiments within their movement to be violently directed against a vulnerable ethno-religious minority. I also believe that the Indian state owes an apology to the victims of Nellie. It needs to apologise for not fully preempting the violence and also, abjectly failing to prevent it. The day’s government – ideally in Assam, but also in New Delhi – needs to do that on behalf of the state. I also believe that much like in the case of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, the Congress party, which was in power in the state and centre at that time, needs to apologise to the victims of Nellie for not doing enough to save them from the machetes, arrows and sticks that changed their lives forever. I hope Rahul Gandhi, if and when he marches into Assam as part of the Bharat Jodo Yatra’s second leg, does that on his party’s behalf. It would be the morally upright thing to do,” believes Anghsuman who has regularly written on the state’s ethnic complexities.

Also read: Backstory: The Paper Trail Behind the Assam Eviction Violence

Acknowledgement, dialogue, memorialising

Most of the people who I spoke to for this article emphasised on the need for reconciliation rather than an apology.

Aman Wadud, a human rights lawyer trained in the University of Texas and based in Guwahati, says, “The only way forward is justice and reconciliation. Not even one person has been punished for killing thousands of innocent people in Nellie. Although four decades have passed, there must be an attempt to punish the guilty, only such an attempt will pave the way for reconciliation.”

Bonojit Hussain, an independent researcher and activist, feels that the first step for such an exercise towards ‘truth and reconciliation’ is acknowledgement. “First, the acknowledgement that so many people were killed will have to come clearly. After that, the process for a dialogue, a sorsa, can begin. The third point is to institutionally memorialise the episode,” Hussain listed.

This is an argument which resonates with the author Mayur Bora. “A fitting memorial must be built for all the victims,” said Bora adding that they must also be treated as no less than martyrs.

Sanjoy Hazarika, who has authored multiple books on the northeast, wondered whether one can ask the question of apology 40 years later. “A new generation has come up and people need to live with dignity. It’s not the question of an apology but acceptance that a terrible thing happened,” Hazarika opined, stressing the need for counselling so that the affected families can finally lay the nightmares to rest.

“Their rights need to be respected and upheld, new livelihoods created, skills taught as many are still at a subsistence level.”

Larger implications

Just like Professor Dutta who was wary that the seeking of an apology will only help forces who have been propagating a theory of a ‘clash of civilisations’ – largely implying the BJP government – Professor Hazarika, too, asked, “Would it not open old wounds?”

Also read: Don’t Foresee Change in Immigrant Issue: M.S. Prabhakara on BJP’s Assam Win

Angshuman Sarma, an academic from Jawaharlal Nehru University and one who has worked closely with the Bengal-origin Muslims of Assam, also felt that the more urgent need is to create a space for a heterogeneous and harmonious society where ‘all communities have a dignified position and collectively work for real social issues’.

Sarma also asserted that not all Assamese people were complicit. “There always was a section of people, cutting across community lines, who not only advocated a pluralist society but also fought for it and gave their lives. Progressive people from Assam opposed the semi-fascist nature of the Assam Movement and had to sacrifice lives for it (including my maternal uncle),” he sighed.

The political scientist Nani Gopal Mahanta, also the education adviser to the Himanta Biswa Sarma-led BJP government in Assam, while condemning the massacre, remarked, “However, during 1983, at the peak of the Assam Agitation, there were a number of incidents in which people from all walks of life had to pay a heavy price. Assam is a unique mélange for ethnic mobilisation and identity movements which are both violent and non-violent. If we make a list of all armed violence (by ULFA, NDFB, BLT, etc), ethnic violence and ethnic displacement from 1983 to 2011-12, the list will be endless.”

“Who will forgive whom, who will be forgiven and who craves for forgiveness?” he asked.

Sanjib Pol Deka, an eminent writer of fiction in Assamese, tends to be of the same mind.

“Firstly, the killings of Nellie cannot be compared to the massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984, nor to that of the Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. Nellie and similar incidents were not related to the central leadership of the Assam Movement. Some communal forces with vested interests exploited the sense of insecurity and fear that had existed in the minds of the local people for 60-65 years because of unprecedented migration of Muslims from east Bengal to the Brahmaputra valley in the 1920s and perpetrated incidents like Nellie and Chaulkhowa. But who attacked the Bodos in Gohpur? What was the role of the state that imposed an election amid the tensed situation of 1983?” Deka too asked.

He maintained that all relevant issues like the suspicious ways of the right-wing, the role of the regime and the history of migration must be discussed so that such incidents can be prevented in the future.

‘Moving on’

Mirza Lutfar Rahman, a radio announcer and a storyteller who belongs to the victims’ community, said that “bhul swikar aru kshama” (conceding and apologising) can indeed be the right step to accelerate the process of the formation of a larger Assamese jaati (nation/identity).

Rehna Sultana, also from the community and an assistant professor of Assamese literature, minced no words in calling it ‘rather unfortunate in a democratic country like India’ that no perpetrator was convicted.

But, true to Sanjoy Hazarika’s observation that some may have ‘tried to move on’, Amin Nozmul Islam, a young singer, was more irreverent in his take. “I am not willing to give much importance to the question of apology,” he snapped.

How will the reconciliation be realised?

“In a multiethnic society like Assam, we require a transformative peace building exercise whereby Track II and Track III civil society initiatives could be undertaken for reconciliation and the peace process. A process rather than an event that will focus on listening to each other and carving a space for inter- and intra-group dialogue is the need of the hour. Even our universities and colleges could undertake such an exercise,” Mahanta answers.

Dutta, who recently published the book Hindutva Regime in Assam: Saffron in the Rainbow said that what one needs to understand is how this process takes place at the ground level. “How have the two parties – the perpetrators and the victims – re-built the relationship and how have they been co-habiting despite the catastrophe of the past?…How are they doing it, and why are they doing it? Meta narratives should not drive our actions. More than the external agencies, the wisdom and the aspirations of the people on the ground need to be understood and respected,” he noted.

Kaustubh Deka, a university professor of political science, sends his response on the issue in writing: “For a massacre of the magnitude of Nellie, no apology is perhaps big enough. People of this land, a section of the ‘Assamese’ to be precise, have been living under the unbearable weight of this apology for four decades now, expressed or unexpressed.”

As yet another February comes and goes, Deka would perhaps agree that this admission continues to remain more unexpressed than expressed. And that, precisely, is the lament.

Jyotirmoy Talukdar is a senior writing fellow at the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University.

As Space for ‘Andolanjeevis’ Shrinks, Assam DGP’s Rebuke of Protestors Is Not Unexpected

Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta’s admonition of those who applied for jobs in the police department and demanded results on time reflects the demand for a republic of assent.

In what is reminiscent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘andolanjeevi’ sledge, the Assam Director-General of Police Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta was recently seen angry with those who dissent.

Referring to candidates demanding results on time, the top cop commented, “Assam Police does not need (as its future members) people who are involved in unnecessary and illegal activities. Assam Police needs responsible, disciplined folks… Many in the police force are in hardship, their accommodation is poor and they have to tread the jungles for operations, have to stay there for days. Many sipahis don’t get their salaries for long periods due to various reasons.”

“Does this mean they will protest?” the DGP asked, rhetorically.

The statement is quite interesting: it acknowledges the inadequate ways in which his department treats its subordinates, yet presupposes that the most natural response from these burnt offerings must be to accept. Or else, they will have to be ready to follow Tej Bahadur Yadav’s trajectory. The possibility of dissent does not exist. Hidden in this verbal almsgiving by the boss, instead, lies a different possibility – that of a recognition of his benevolence.

BSF soldier Tej Bahadur Yadav. Photo: Facebook

“Assam Police doesn’t need these men who protest for these reasons. Because, when they come, they will spoil Assam Police,” the top cop added. These utterances hint at the dangerous situation that the country is in – your background check must prove that you don’t dare to claim your basic rights not just after you have joined work, but in your entire life that preceded.

Also read: Slam Campaigns, Water Cannon, Lathicharge and Other Elements of PM Modi’s ‘Tapasya’

The protestors that the DGP was referring to were job applicants, not job-holding police personnel.

The question needs to be asked, if the DGP, as a Ramjas College student in the 1980s, had joined a Delhi University students’ protest and found himself blacklisted by the Union Public Service Commission, would he complain? Where would he be today?

New India: Fall in line or face consequences

The unfortunate statement must be seen as part of a series of such threats and opinions pronounced in the last few years. Beginning with Jawaharlal Nehru University and quickly spreading into many other educational institutions, the act of thinking is being actively discouraged. Any demonstration – public or private – of dissent is not just brutally quelled, but sufficiently humiliated so that fewer people dare to think critically the next time.

Also read: Narendra Modi Says Focus on Duties and Forget Rights, But He’s Let India Down on All 11 Duties

Professors are being routinely arrested without bail in sight. The MPhil degree has been scrapped. PhD seats are being drastically cut down. Because an environment of research, questions, theses, arguments, counterarguments must not be encouraged. It is a threat. It is in this light that the DG’s remarks must be read.

But he must also be told about a brilliant essay that his contemporary at Delhi University, Amitav Ghosh, wrote about the 1984 Sikh massacre. Ghosh recounted a passage from V.S. Naipaul where the latter describes a demonstration and how, despite longing to join the crowd and sympathising with their cause, he just observes it marching past. He realises that he is not someone who joins, but only watches with solidarity.

Writing about a protest organised against the 1984 pogroms, Ghosh writes, “I remembered the passage because I believed that I, too, was not a joiner, and in Naipaul’s pitiless mirror I thought I had seen an aspect of myself rendered visible. Yet as this forlorn little group marched out of the shelter of the compound I did not hesitate for a moment: without a second thought, I joined.”

One hopes that if not today, then after his retirement in a few months, Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, who after all made a national award-winning biopic of a dissenter, will also walk down the stairs and merge with the crowd asking real and urgent questions of the government.

Jyotirmoy Talukdar is a senior writing fellow at the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University.

Lakshmi Nandan Bora: A Stalwart Of Assamese Literature Who Will Remain Forever Young

As the editor of ‘Goriyoshi’, a monthly magazine, Lakshmi Nandan Bora guided and published a generation of writers in Assamese.

Lakshmi Nandan Bora is no more.

I met him only once, in 2009 or 2010, as an undergraduate student at the University of Delhi visiting the author’s home for an interview for Janma, an Assamese magazine that some of us used to bring out during those days. He spoke to us – kids of little consequence and importance – for hours with a warmth and intimacy that, later, not only reflected in the pages of the magazine but also kept us beholden.

Born in 1932 at Kujidah village in Nagaon district of Assam, Bora studied at Nagaon High School, Cotton College (Guwahati) and Presidency College (Kolkata). A physics major, he later went on to do his Ph.D in meteorology from Andhra University. For much of his career, LNB – as he was affectionately called – taught at Assam Agricultural University, Jorhat.

But it was for his pen that Bora was so widely loved. Asin Koina, Xei Xure Utola, Gopon Godhuli, Gouri Rupak, Kasiyoli Kuwoli, Dhrishtirupa, Debotar Byaadhi, Kothin Maya, Xehi Anuraag and Erabarir Leseri are some of his short story collections. Having published more than 60 books, the man was also duly and widely recognised by various awards that he won during a lifetime spanning 89 years.

In 1988, he won the Sahitya Akademi for his novel Patal Bhairavi. In 1996-97, he occupied the coveted chair of the president of Assam Sahitya Sabha. In 2008, he won the Saraswati Samman, instituted in 1991 by the K.K. Birla Foundation, for his novel Kayakalpa. Bora also received the Assam Valley Literary Award in 2014 and the Padma Shri in 2015.

As the editor of Goriyoshi, a monthly magazine, Lakshmi Nandan Bora guided and published a generation of writers in Assamese. His own first ever short story, Bhaona, was published in the Assamese magazine Ramdhenu in 1954. As the littérateur breathed his last yesterday morning, I remembered one of his short stories, Biswarup Darshan, published in Asom Bani (Bihu edition) in 2013. A simple yet heart-warming story about ageing yet outstaring age, Biswarup Darshan is a story about a protagonist who, despite getting old, enthusiastically teaches himself to remain contemporary and make friends with his grandchild, much like LNB himself.

In the story, Mintu is a school-going boy – not a dunce nor the brightest in class. His biggest point of irritation comes from being compared with his grandfather, Nikhilesh Pujari. As the story unfolds, we get to know that Pujari has lived an erudite and accomplished life. He was first-class-first in his discipline at Calcutta University and a Ph.D in English from London University.

Also read: Aruni Kashyap on Assam’s Rich Literary Tradition, Tejimola and Political Conflict

Later, the protagonist returned home to India and started teaching English as a professor, but gradually turned to history for his research interests and authored a three-volume history of Assam as well as a groundbreaking work on India’s past. But when his wife Sabita died two years ago, professor Pujari turned disconsolate and silent. That one of his two friends too died soon after, and the other met with an accident also worsened Pujari’s mental health.

It is at this moment that an unplanned discussion between grandfather and grandson kickstarts the former’s amazing journey towards computer literacy and an introduction to the Internet. Read in the fluent words of Bora, Nikhilesh Pujari’s story of transformation from despondency to euphoria feels true to life. “Moi xukhi. Mor jiyaai thokar haabiyaah bahise…” (I am happy. My longing to live has only grown…), the retired professor exclaims. The story ends thus, “In the loud applause and clapping of hands by the guests, Professor Nikhilesh Pujari could hear the rhythm of the world moving.”

Obits have called Lakshmi Nandan Bora sirotorun – forever young. That he was, as were his characters like this young-old historian joyfully discovering the cyberspace.

Jyotirmoy Talukdar is a senior writing fellow at the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University.

Hany Babu Is Guilty — of Helping Students Develop an Interest in Language, Region and Culture

When I was an MA student, the Delhi University professor taught me how linguistic purism operates and is intrinsically connected to the construction and maintenance of a national identity.

I was eight when my grandmother died. For the next 15 days, the extended family reunited and huddled together in our house – the family’s ghai ghor (ancestral home) in the village where my grandmother lived and died. People called to commiserate with the family, my mother dutifully narrating to everyone the last moments in the life of the deceased. The cousins – all of them older than me – played rummy, and when asked, rode the Bajaj Super to the town to buy more mithais for guests.

It was one such nondescript afternoon when a cousin, born and raised in Guwahati, asked me to get a knife to cut some fruit. Not the nimblest myself, I beckoned and requested a neighbourhood friend to run the errand. He went to the kitchen but came back empty-handed. In standard Assamese, the word for the knife he was looking for is pronounced kaw-taari, and in the language spoken where we lived, it is kaatri. When my friend informed the cousin that the knife was nowhere to be found, everybody laughed. In his failed attempt to inform her in her language, he used a word for knife that existed in the vocabulary of neither: kaa-tawri. I don’t know how humiliated he felt and how he spent the rest of the day. But many years later, when I read Frantz Fanon, I imagined my friend ‘listening to himself speak and not trusting his own tongue, an unfortunately lazy organ, locking himself in his room and reading for hours—desperately working on his diction’.

It was as an MA student at Delhi University that I got a chance to study how linguistic purism operates and is intrinsically connected to the construction and maintenance of a national identity. The class size was notoriously huge, and professors had to use microphones to ensure audibility. But, for internal assessment, the batch was divided into small cohorts and each cohort worked with a professor for presentations and academic essays.

In one of the four semesters, I was part of a group mentored by Hany Babu and over the next six months, we read works written or edited by James Milroy, Lesley Milroy, Deborah Cameron, Janet Holmes, Miriam Meyerhoff and Andrew Simpson as we saw language ideologies slowly unsnarled in a classroom.

Everything that I learnt – how standardisation occurs, how super-linguistic identities are created and invoked, how sub-national regional identities based on a language sometimes impede the march of a national language and sometimes coexist with it, how grammatical correctness gets associated with behaviour, how scripts generate not just emotion but sometimes a distinct language – gifted me moments of epiphany where I could now explain to myself – and confidently question – so many events in history and in everyday life that I earlier accepted as indubitable realities.

Also Read: Elgar Parishad: NIA Arrests Hany Babu, ‘Pressured Him to Implicate Colleagues, Others,’ Says Wife

If it was not for a lasting association with Hany Babu that began at the Arts Faculty of Delhi University and continued until Sunday – when he spoke to me from Mumbai before his arrest by the National Investigative Agency, I would not learn to be proud of my mother language Kamrupi, use it without shame in public, and develop a lifelong academic and journalistic interest in language, region and culture.

If helping a student historicise his experiences of linguistic discrimination and educating him in a vocabulary to object is an offence, if emphasising that the impact of language policy has to be gauged based on the testimonies of subjects occupying non-hegemonic locations is an unlawful act, if asking whether the prioritisation of Hindi over other scheduled languages goes against the fundamental right of equality is a crime, Hany Babu is guilty and I am ready to testify.

Jyotirmoy Talukdar is a senior writing fellow at the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University.

In Assam, Syed Abdul Malik’s Ode to Composite Culture Is Being Vilified on Social Media

Jyotirmoy Talukdar translates the poem ‘Moi Axomiya’, which narrates in first person the tale of Muslim Mughal soldiers who fell in love with Assam’s beauty and decided to stay back.

New Delhi: ‘Moi Axomiya’ (I am Assamese), an Assamese poem by noted writer-poet-playwright Syed Abdul Malik (1919-2000) has been at the centre of an online controversy since Tuesday. In this poem, Malik, a Padma Bhushan recipient and Sahitya Akademi award-winning author, versifies the Mughal invasion of Assam and narrates how many Muslims who were part of the Mughal soldiery fell in love with Assam and its beauty and decided to assimilate with the Assamese culture by staying back. An ode to Assam’s composite culture, this poem finds itself in the middle of a shocking accusation that it is ‘fundamentalist’, ‘jihadi’ and ‘anti-national’.

A stanza from the poem where the narrator speaks in the voice of the invading Mughals and their plans has been quoted out of context and repeatedly shared on social media in Assam. This is not the first time in recent history that poems by a Muslim have been put under rigorous scrutiny in Assam. Slightly less than a year ago, the eminent author Hafiz Ahmed was vilified for writing a poem on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and as many as four FIRs were filed against him and a set of young poets. Ahmed was also mistakenly accused of plagiarism for the same poem.

A native of Naharoni in the state’s Golaghat district, Syed Abdul Malik did his BA from Cotton College and his MA in Assamese from Gauhati University. He taught Assamese literature at the Jagannath Barooah College in Jorhat until his retirement. A popular writer, Malik also presided over the Abhayapuri convention of the Assam Sahitya Sabha held in 1977.

Syed Abdul Malik’s Dhanya Nara Tanu Bhal, a biography of Assam’s Vaishnava saint Sankardev, published by Student Stores, Guwahati. Photo: The Wire

Malik, who wrote many short stories, plays, novels, travelogues, poems, children’s books, had won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1972 for his novel Aghari Atmar Kahini (A Tale of a Nomadic Soul). Another important work of Malik was Dhanya Nara Tanu Bhal (1987), a biography of Sankardev sprinkling on to the pages Brajavali, a language the revered 16th-century saint used to spread his Eka Sarana Dharma, a simplified religion based on Bhakti or devotion to Lord Krishna against Vedic ritualism. The dharma proved to be a significant unifying factor and bond between communities residing in Assam. Sankardev also had pupils from the Muslim community.

Considered a pioneer of biographical novels, Malik also wrote the life story of one of Assam’s cultural icons, Jyoti Prasad Agarwala in Rup Tirthar Yatri (1963-1965). Noted Assamese writer and parliamentarian Hem Barua once called Malik “an inspiring creator of character”, taking note of a great variety of characters he used in an Assamese novel.

Like Barua, Malik too dabbled in politics. Akin to many youngsters from the Assamese Muslim community, Malik had joined the Muslim League prior to Partition. Like most Assamese Muslim families, he and his family too didn’t move to Pakistan though, and stayed on in his homeland. In Independent India, Malik joined the Communist Party of India (CPI) and thereafter the Congress. He contested from the Jorhat parliamentary constituency as a CPI candidate in 1957 but lost to Congress’s Mofida Ahmed. In 1983, with the Congress’s support, he became a member of the Rajya Sabha.

Here is my loose translation of the poem ‘Moi Axomiya’ for the discerning reader to get a sense of Malik’s approach to and the thoughts behind the poem, and his immense pride in being an Assamese or Axomiya first.

I am Assamese

The day we left our place
Faraway in the west
Left our stately home
And journeyed east
So we did with august fervour
And sang of victory on the banks of the Luit river

We set foot on the green doob grass
And saw Assam had her own king and top brass
Her flag fluttered, free and sovereign
Tunes of triumph resonated, confident and keen

And, on that day, to show our strength we did will
The invincible Mughals shall gallop and take the wheel
Muslims will reign supreme
Assam will be ours, and Kamrup
Will be won by us – the Mughal troop.
As we debarked on Assam’s battleground
Where lush grass was to be found
The hengdang sword that in a bright afternoon shone
Was Assam’s own

Man or woman, each came to war for a free homeland
Full-hearted, not ones to retreat nor bend
The same Mughals who brought the Rajputs to their knees
Now stood listless before an army
That fed on mere water and hand-pounded rice

Victorious Assam sang paeans to liberty
And to a winning dignity
As the Mughals conceded to a worthier display
Of love for and loyalty to one’s country

The Mughals, defeated, looked around and saw Assam’s beauty
How it was a mine of love and of bhakti
Distant strains could now be clearly heard
As a free-minded Assam sang no holds barred

The Mughals turned back and glanced –
This is Assam, hills faintly visible in the distance all around
Each leaf luxuriant
The emerald grass tickles the feet as you walk
People here make sandals of ivory
And wash their feet in waters that glisten with corals

They wear bangles and toe-rings made of tiger claw
And play the pepa made with buffalo horn
The king builds temples with a sticky egg white and rice mortar
Their feet spall the gold on riverbeds
Pool barbs wear golden earrings
And the toads a precious stone
Here, sluggards successfully build a state road
New ‘sagar’s are dug in backyards,
And are built Rang Ghar and Kareng Ghar, pretty as paradise

A golden Assam it is
Where gemstones abundantly mingle with dust
Gold and silver are found aplenty
The sweet-toned songs can melt a rock
Is there another such Assam on earth, another Assam so beauteous?

Foreigners from a far-off land
Enchanted by another that resembled heaven
The Mughals were now a champion of Assam’s beauty
That day on, Ahoms are our kings
That day on, Kamrup is my nation

I live for Assam and die for Assam
The incense stick of life burns away here in this land
That day on, I am an Assamese from Assam
My dharma, my jaati, dearer than my soul

Amid Assam’s green foliage do I dream of happiness
I am Assamese until I am alive
And after I die
If I were to be born again
I would be born an Assamese here, carrying memories past

Assam’s nature has composed my language
My words, my songs
Birds and celestial performers
Stand still when they hear an Assamese song

Soon after my birth
I cried “Aai” (mother)
And when I die
My two lips will quiver, “jaao” (bye).

When I am up there in heaven
A bright place sans memories
If someone remembers my name
In Assam’s mellifluous Assamese
I will still comprehend, I will still recognize
And I will hang on her words
Even from the skies

I am Assamese in life
And in death
I am Assamese when alive
And when I die
It’s a peaceful Assamese death I crave

Jyotirmoy Talukdar is a senior writing fellow at the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University.

The Travails and Scuffles That Marked Akhil Gogoi’s Rise in Politics

Friends of Akhil Gogoi that had left him after bitter squabbles were, in fact, the ones most desperate to see him come out of jail and lead movements from the front.

After Assam peasant leader Akhil Gogoi was granted bail by an NIA court on Tuesday – much to the relief of lakhs of his followers – his friends expressed hope that he will soon be set free again.

I don’t remember the year. But it was a talk organised by Mukul Manglik and students at Delhi’s Ramjas College. The room was teeming with people, patiently waiting for the speaker to arrive. Once Akhil Gogoi finished his impassioned speech, a few young undergraduate Assamese students quietly left the venue, gathered back at the tea stall inside the Delhi School of Economics and collectively expressed their embarrassment at how poorly Gogoi spoke both in Hindi and English.

A decade later, I was sitting at my friend’s room in Guwahati asking him how, in those interim years, Gogoi had become the most favourite jailbird of successive governments in the state. “Nobody will speak to you now,” the friend told me as he sipped his tea, “All their numbers are switched off.” He was right. Leaders of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) that Akhil founded in 2005 and its student wing Satra Mukti Sangram Samiti – established in 2012 – were arrested one after the other as protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 gained momentum in the region.

Friends of Akhil Gogoi that had left him after bitter squabbles were, in fact, the ones most desperate to see him come out of jail and lead movements from the front.

Also read: Assam Rocked by Statewide Protests Demanding Akhil Gogoi’s Release

Molaan Laskar was expelled from the organisation a few years ago. Or he left of his own accord because he was “growing old and also needed to give time to art and culture”. The exact reason for his departure is now besides the point because when I began speaking to him one wintry evening in Assam, what sounded central was his happiness in being part of an expanding movement for basic rights like land and citizenship in a place otherwise dominated by the leviathanic politics of subnational identity and pride.

The founding president of the KMSS locates his sense of pride in the fact that when Akhil and others started a massive movement against the Citizenship Amendment Bill when it was first introduced, other big organisations like the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) and Asom Sahitya Sabha were caught napping. “When a team came for hearing in 2016, we all organised a massive rally. AASU, Sahitya Sabha, Sankar Sangha and others joined only later,” Laskar said, commenting on some of Assam’s most powerful groups.

In a recent video demanding Akhil’s immediate release, Laskar spoke matter-of-factly and said, “Sarbananda Sonowal had got Sourab Bora killed inside Dibrugarh University in 1986. Akhil Gogoi is not like these murderers,” referring to the widely-held suspicion that the current chief minister had a role to play in the assassination of the popular student leader.

File photo of Akhil Gogoi (right). Photo: PTI

In another conversation I had with him, Laskar harked back to police brutalities that had always accompanied KMSS activities. “It was 2011, the Congress government. They evicted hill dwellers around Guwahati and we organised a massive protest against this injustice. Longnit Terang (additional superintendent of police at that time) shot dead the teenager Ruhul Ali in front of my eyes,” said Molaan. “But it did not dampen our movement.”

His eight-year-long association with the organisation ended in 2013. “Xi beya pale (He was offended with me),” Laskar said referring to Akhil Gogoi, “I don’t want to speak directly about those things now. But I wanted to give more time to sahitya-sanskriti. He did not find it agreeable, probably. But I am working from outside the organisation. Particularly in the Nagaon district. In fact, my association with the Indian People’s Theatre Association has helped; we are vehemently opposing the CAA,”

Also read: Akhil Gogoi Was Arrested to Scare Us, Says AASU’s General Secretary

Papari Medhi, a National School of Drama graduate and a well-known actor in Assam recently performed her own adaptation of Antigone in a style that she calls Performed Conversations in Delhi. The play was a hit, despite coronavirus scare, because the story of an individual standing up to a tyrant is temporally super relevant. In a scene that obliquely talks about activists moving towards electoral politics, Papari’s character says, “Jate hai log, mera bhai bhi gaya hai” (People do take that route, so has my brother). Not many in a Delhi auditorium knew it was a reference to her own brother, the KMSS number-two turned-struggling-Assam-Congress leader, Kamal Kumar Medhi.

Medhi, however, is not the only prominent face that Gogoi lost because of his disrelish for electoral politics. Bhaben Handique had been associated with Akhil Gogoi since 1995 thanks to an editorial on the latter published in the weekly Asom Baani. “I had read that an activist called Akhil Gogoi refused a bait of 11 lakh rupees from Hiteswar Saikia (the then chief minister) and this perceived impudence saw him being framed in a case of dacoity. I was a student at Dhemaji College at that time, and was left bloody impressed. In ’97, I joined Cotton College in Guwahati but dropped out soon and thereafter left for Dhakuakhana. When I was back in Cotton the next year, I became a part of the Cotton College Study Circle and its magazine Satrobarta,” reminiscences Bhaben, who brought an end to this association in 2013 and joined the Aam Aadmi Party.

On his way, he worked with many people: Santanu Borthakur, the writer and lawyer who represents Akhil in most cases even today, Joydeep Baruah, now an associate professor at the Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development and Arindam Borkotoki, editor of Nibedon and former editor of the monthly Prakash who also teaches English at Anandaram Dhekial Phookan College in Nagaon.

As Handique he mentions these illustrious comrades, he sounds grateful for his agitational journey. When the Tengani eviction happened in 2002, he was one of five people who had travelled there to see and understand what was happening. “We were led there by a romantic, revolutionary surge, did not intend to stay back until we saw how bad it was,” said Handique. The four others who were part of this first batch of activists engaged in rescuing Tengani dwellers were Akhil Gogoi, Soneswar Narah, Manoj Tamuly (also Akhil’s brother-in-law) and Bhasco De Saikia, the current president of the KMSS and then a first-year student in Debraj Roy College in Golaghat where Geetashree Tamuly, Akhil’s wife, taught Assamese.

Also read: Interview | Akhil Gogoi’s Wife: This Time, His Arrest Felt ‘Somewhat Different’

“Yes, I was baideo’s student,” Bhasco confirms when he meets me after his day’s work at The CrossCurrent, the channel that I call the Assamese version of The Young Turks minus a Cenk Uygur. He also talked about the almost forgotten hunger strike that three KMSS members began and sustained for 19 days in 2016 in protest of the CAA. “This is second only to Mahatma Gandhi’s 21 days,” Bhasco said before adding, “but no media took notice.” When I asked him about so many young leaders getting arrested, the president pointed out that the student body affiliated to the KMSS was raised only in 2012, and the FIR implicating its president Bittu Sonowal and others refers to events in 2009 when these student leaders were teenagers.

Ask Samujjal Bhattacharya, the numero uno in the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) what he thinks of the indiscriminate arrests and detentions of activists from the KMSS and he would artfully descend into whataboutery. “They are many others who have also been arrested. We demand that all be released,” said the leader who holds sway both over the state and the public.

“AASU boys have also been targeted. Just that it has not received as much publicity.” Bhattacharya said, insisting that it is not any particular organisation, but the (anti-CAA) movement that has invited the government’s displeasure. All their leaders are behind bars, could it be because they incited violence, I asked him directly. “Moi najano (I don’t know)” is all he said in response before rising to speak to others waiting for him in the room at Swahid Bhavan where he routinely ministers to people visiting from far-flung areas.

Bhaben Handique (extreme left) after visiting Akhil Gogoi in Guwahati Jail. Photo: Bhaben Handique/Facebook

“When Arvind Kejriwal toured Assam to explore a proposed political party born of the movement against corruption where Akhil was a part, he roamed around in my Alto,” said Bhaben Handique, “I had translated Arvind’s Swaraj (2012) into Assamese. I also wanted to start a publishing house.” Handique believes that these decisions contributed to the fissure between him and Akhil.

“I made a mistake actually. If I spoke directly to Akhil-da, things would get sorted. Intermediaries intervened. Anyway, I will not return to the fold, not to the mass organisation. If he envisions a political party, though, I would again be an ally,” Bhaben told The Wire. As we started to wind up, the leader who joined AAP in 2013 and left it on the day Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan were expelled in 2015 decided not to reserve judgment on Akhil Gogoi’s political stands, “He hasn’t walked his steps in tandem with demands of the time. If he took a stand in Assam like Arvind did in Delhi – not necessarily by joining the AAP – we would not be in a BJP-ruled state today. Also, as a political leader, he would not be jailed like this, and the movement would not be tos-nos (destroyed),” he said.

Handique concluded with an apparent reference to how the movement against the CAA was blunted the moment Gogoi was thrown in jail. I was reminded of what Molaan Laskar had said to me earlier, “I think it was with an aim to weaken the movement that the KMSS was sidelined and the AASU was filliped.”

Also read: We May Contest the 2021 Assam Assembly Polls: Peasant Leader Akhil Gogoi

Back in my friend’s room in Guwahati, I asked him to name one thing he had learnt from Akhil Gogoi. “That democratic movements can successfully be carried out in villages far and wide was Akhil’s teaching. I would not imagine a massive movement for people’s ration or a struggle against a hike in city bus fares from one rupee to one and a half under the leadership of the AASU or the AJYCP (Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chatra Parishad). There was a time he struck a chord with all non-elites of the state by doing things like cycle rallies and podojatras (processions),” he says.

Jyotirmoy Talukdar is a writing tutor at Ashoka University. He freelances for various publications in English and Assamese.

For Bengali Muslims Whose Names Are in the NRC, the Struggle Isn’t Over Yet

Members of the All Assam Students’ Union have filed lakhs of indiscriminate objections on the inclusion of names that sound Bengali Muslim in the final NRC draft.

When, on November 15, 2018, I was explaining plagiarism and citation to a student, I received a hurried phone call from one of my friends in Assam. As soon as the one-on-one ended, I opened my social media newsfeeds and realised why my friend was in such a flap.

An upcoming event at my university titled ‘This Revolution Too Will Not Be Televised’ where, the poster claimed, the speaker would talk about “how the Bengal-origin Muslim community in Assam is fighting bigotry, xenophobia and social exclusion through poems and songs” was doing the rounds of the internet not in a way we had intended it to. People accused the event of ‘demonising’ the Assamese community and asked for it to be called off. A few opined that the speaker was selling his religious identity for some quick fame.

The clamour, led by powerful Assamese nationalists, businessmen, columnists and bureaucrats, quickly reached the higher-ups at the university who, thankfully, allowed the poet to read the poems he was carrying, all of which expressed a shatterproof desire to be called Assamese.

A month later, in December, the mighty All Assam Students’ Union, popularly known by the acronym AASU and led by Dr Samujjal Kumar Bhattacharya, was preparing lakhs of applications objecting to the inclusion of the Bengal-origin Muslims of Assam in the National Register of Citizens.

Notice received by Mokibul Islam.

The NRC, first prepared in 1951, is being updated in the state with the aim of identifying undocumented immigrants. After a meticulous and rigorous process where the applicants submitted a series of documents, the complete draft NRC published on July 30, 2018 includes 2.89 crore people. But, for many among them, the ordeal that began at their birth as a Miya – the slang for a Bengal-origin Muslim in Assam – was far from over.

Indiscriminate objections

“We had received 55 objections till December 30, a day before the deadline. On the next day, at about 2 pm when I lazily went out for a cup of tea, my colleague from the objection and draft display office phoned me and asked me to rush back. I reached ADC (Additional Deputy Commissioner) sir’s room to see a group of boys – some of them familiar faces from the town – place what looked like thousands of objection forms in a mountainous pile. I said it was impossible to count so many objections and acknowledge their receipt since it was already 3 pm. We settled for a coarse-grained approximation until the office managed to count all the submissions the next day,” an NRC official recounted to me.

Also read: Meghalaya HC Sets Aside Former Judge’s Order Suggesting India Become a ‘Hindu Rashtra’

That indiscriminate objections have been raised against a particular community is a fact that, fortunately, no side has denied. When I contacted Bhattacharya for his opinion on the nearly 2.5 lakh objections, almost all of which were identical and submitted on the last day, he said there should have been more. “Is the process of claims and objections illegal?” he asked me.

It certainly is not. But the situation where most of the objectees are religious and linguistic minorities is alarming in a secular and democratic country. He said some khilonjias (indigenous inhabitants) have also received notices and he is sorry about that, and remedial measures have been taken. To the migrant-origin objectees who have all their papers in place and have travelled miles to attend a hearing where the objector is absent and the proceedings go on ex parte with the disposing officer (DO) often donning the hat of the objector, the student leader has a clear message – some of you are Bangladeshis. “The number of Bangladeshis cannot be so small, after all,” he tells me.

The many objections submitted on the last day have some things in common: the address of the objector is mostly incomplete; the ‘ground for objection’ reads the same – word for word – in thousands of such objections; no supporting document is attached (in the aforementioned case, the official told me that all the 55 objections submitted till that afternoon had supporting material attached, while the “thousands lugged in a van by the boys” did not. Some of them did not even sign, he said); and, most importantly, the objectors are almost always absent.

An objection form with three objections that are same in thousands of forms, with no supporting
documents whatsoever. The ‘ground for objection’, in translation, reads:
1. The data provided by the applicant is not legitimate.
2. The data is not legal.
3. The family tree is incorrect.

“We began disposal of objections on May 6. Not one objector has produced himself at the hearing. I am still waiting to meet one,” said a DO. I asked Bhattacharya, the undisputed overlord of not just AASU but of Assamese sub-nationalist politics itself, why his boys are not present, if they are confident that the accused are, in fact, doubtful citizens. He said this is because there is a threat to their lives if they come to the fore. The real and simple reason, however, is a physiological impossibility: how can the same person simultaneously attend hundreds of investigations he proudly let loose?

The role of the DO in such ex parte proceedings becomes extremely responsible and crucial. Mahidul Islam, a teacher from Mandia under Baghbar circle, whose father’s name figures on the NRC of 1951 and who has a voter identity card, a PAN card, a driving licence, an Aadhaar Card, a bank passbook, an insurance policy, land documents and degree certificates, took leave from the government school he teaches in and reached the hearing in time. The DO interrogated him without putting a word on paper.

“I requested him to at least make a note that the objector is absent in the hearing. He refused to do that too, saying that he may show up at some other time,” the teacher, who left the DO’s office anxious and unconvinced, told me on the phone.

Going by names

Since Assamese nationalism has historically been staunchly linguistic, the Muslims in Assam are not one entity. The Assamese-speaking ‘indigenous’ Muslims have traditionally sided with all projects of linguistic regionalism like – but not limited to – the Assam Movement (1979-1985). The movement as well as the ideological project has one single enemy: the Bengal-origin Muslims of Assam, most of whom speak non-standard variants of Bengali and Assamese at home and are economically impoverished. They are what the Assamese-speaking population popularly refers to as Bangladeshis or Miyas.

The process of objections gives this political history of Assam a comic twist. How were the Bengal-origin Muslims and Hindus identified and reported en bloc? The potential objectors sat down with the complete draft NRC and jotted down the Application Receipt Numbers (ARN) of all the names that were either Muslim or bore an ethnic Bengali surname.

Also read: The SC Is Exceeding Its Brief as the Apex Judicial Organ in the NRC Case

The result of this exercise was sometimes funny. Quite a few ‘indigenous’ Muslims and some Hindus with specific surnames also woke up to notices under the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003. “A man from my village, a politically smug Kalita (an Assamese caste), came to the DRCR (District Registrar of Citizenship Registration) office one day. Surprised, I asked him what happened. He said he had got a notice too. It took me some time to realise that he had a confusing surname – Roy,” a DRCR functionary told me about one such incident.

Another among numerous such cases is Kalimuddin Ahmed. Kalimuddin was an AASU leader during the Assam Movement and continues to lead the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) – the political extension of the student body – in Tamulpur district. However, Ajay Bodo, AASU president of the same district, had Kalimuddin as one of his 250 targets as he was readying his cyclostyled objections.

Finding ways to respond

Do you miss Lakiful’s leadership in such times of unprecedented struggle, I found myself asking Taison Hussain, president of All Bodoland Minority Students’ Union (ABMSU) for the district, referring to the popular leader who was assassinated in 2017 in broad daylight. With escalating religious victimisation, I met more and more people talking about the void left by Lafikul Islam Ahmed.

Kamal Kumar Medhi, a Congress leader from the state who I contacted, called it AASU’s last-gasp attempt. “It remains a fact that not many Bangladeshis have migrated illegally after 1971 – the cut-off date for enrolment in the NRC. If this gets officially proven for once and for all, where will AASU’s legitimacy and bread-and-butter lie after the publication of the final NRC on July 31?” he asked me rhetorically.

Also read: The Death of Amrit Das and the Search for Foreigners in Assam

With no local and national media reporting this frightening development half as much as they did the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, I decided to travel to some areas with a considerable Bengal-origin Muslim population.

One such place was Kajiamati, an off-the-map village situated at some kilometres from Barpeta Road. A public awareness meeting was underway. The nervous villagers – all of them visibly poor Muslims – huddled together to listen to two of the more-educated men from the community, Shajahan Ali Ahmed and Abdul Kalam Azad, and understand how to go about the objection process on the day of hearing.

Jaharuddin Ahmed, one of the villagers, said that one Jagadish Pathak objected to his enrolment in the NRC. “There is no Jagadish Pathak in my village, nor do I know anyone by that name,” Jaharuddin complained. One after the other, the inhabitants of Kajiamati detailed their tribulations.

People in Kajimati near Barpeta Road attend a public awareness meeting for objectees. Credit: Jyotirmoy Talukdar

Shajahan, who works with the Association for Protection of Indian Citizenship Rights, rose to speak. “Aapni ki ei desher naagorik noi? Aapni ki Bangladeshi? (Aren’t you a citizen of this country? Are you a Bangladeshi?)” he asked the crowd. They roared ‘no’. He broke the legal process down for his unlettered audience, who heard him in rapt attention. The children, a lot of whom have notices in their names, frolicked on in the background as their parents looked high and low for a way to bring them up beyond the boundaries of a detention camp.

When I accompanied Shajahan to the town, dusk was setting in. He broke his fast with a cold drink and sighed, “We demanded the NRC and had full faith in it throughout. But it turned out to be a waste of Rs 1,200 crore, supervised by Prateek Hajela with Samujjal and Himanta (Biswa Sarma) as his accomplices.” Are you saying this off the record, I asked. “No, no,” he flung back but with an assured smile, “Everything I say is on record. We have nothing to lose. Lafikul was shot dead because he spoke truth to power. Please also ask if the chief justice of India is complicit in this waste.”

Jyotirmoy Talukdar is a writing tutor at Ashoka University. He freelances for various publications in English and Assamese.

Remembering Ratan Lahkar, Who Extended the Boundaries of Mobile Theatre in Assam

The famed producer, formidable actor and founder of Kohinoor Theatre, a leading mobile theatre company of the state, compelled all classes to pay heed to this unique theatre form.

Ratan Lahkar (left) talks to Achyut Lahkar, who founded the mobile theatre industry in 1963 with his Nataraj Theatre. Credit: Ananta Mohan Sarma

In 2010, when the National School of Drama (NSD) invited Kohinoor Theatre – the troupe representative of Assamese mobile theatre – to stage three plays at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), I was an ignorant but pushy college kid who accompanied his professor for an interview with the producer.

Despite hailing from the same region, I would meet the much-revered Ratan Lahkar, the owner of Kohinoor Theatre since its inception in 1976, during rehearsals at IGNCA. I came away from the interview in a state of moderate shock, Lahkar was everything that one would not expect a famed producer, actor and social activist to be.

Even on camera, he uninhibitedly spoke in boisterous Kamrupi – the non-standardised variant of Assamese. Being tactful and subtle with his responses was simply not his way and he would typically be found reprimanding and restlessly correcting his actors, which, as seasoned actors would tell me later, was what the much loved Ratanda essentially was – a man who never feigned.

A few years later, when I met him at his house in Assam in connection with a story that I was working on, Lahkar, clad in a gamosa, beckoned to his son to fetch the albums and fondly showed me monochromes from the earliest productions – ‘Ganga-Jamuna’ (1976-77), ‘Tejimola’ (1977-78) and ‘Cleopatra’ (1982-83), among others.

‘Cleopatra’, an adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s novel, is notable because it paved the way for Bhramyamaan theatre in Assam to exhibit unknown, exotic ‘foreign’ stories, as Kishore Kumar Kalita’s Bhramyaman Theatarar Itihas (A History of Mobile Theatre, 2011) also suggests.

Plays like ‘Titanic,’ inspired by the James Cameron movie and first staged in 1998 with heavy use of technology in both rural and urban shows, became blockbusters throughout the state and in numerous places, popular demand impelled the troupe to run three shows each day instead of the scheduled one.

Kohinoor was pioneering also because, until its launch, the audience for Bhramyamaan was primarily confined to a particular class of people – the lower and the lower-middle – from the greater Kamrup region.

“Before Kohinoor, mobile theatre was not able to knock on the doors of the middle and upper classes. Kohinoor extended Bhramyamaan’s boundaries and took it to all strata of people… [It] compelled the intelligentsia to pay heed to this unique theatre form for the first time, also because a tradition of Assam’s famous litterateurs writing plays exclusively for Bhramyamaan began,” writes Kalita.

Even in college competitions, Lahkar believed in breaking new grounds, his classmate and now a retired professor from Cotton College recalled in a telephonic conversation. Having completed his Intermediate of Arts from Bajali College in 1960, Lahkar joined Cotton College for a BA in Political Science and stayed at New Hostel – now Seetanath Brahma Choudhury Boys’ Hostel – where he prepared his plays in which he himself usually enacted comic roles.

He moved to the University of Saugor – now the Dr. Hari Singh Gour University – in 1964 to complete an MA in Political Science, and returned to join Purbajyoti Theatre group, run by Karunakanta Majumdar and headquartered in Hajo, as a full-time actor.

It did not take long for him to garner fame. His performance in the role of a differently abled person in the Assamese translation and adaptation of the 1956 Bangla play (written by Santosh Sen) ‘Erao Manush’ made Lahkar something of a celebrity.

From 1966 to the launch of Kohinoor by him and Krishna Roy, Lahkar ruled the roost as a formidable actor in the Bhramyamaan world.

When news of his death on Sunday, January 29, at the age of 77, came, I browsed through my bookshelf to find his authorised biography Long March (Writers’ Forum, Assamese, 2013) by Alex Figo and Purandar Patgiri and nostalgically reread the chapter where he talks about his trip to Delhi. “I remember one of those days particularly well. The final match of the IPL season was to be played that evening. The venue started teeming with people, and the National School of Drama director Dr. Anuradha Kapur quipped to me, ‘You clearly beat the IPL’,” said Lahkar to his biographers.

One of the people instrumental in facilitating Kohinoor’s triumphant show in Delhi was the NSD production manager Parag Sarmah, born in Assam’s Kaliabor and himself an NSD graduate. I closed the book as I remembered I had to rush for a production at the Sammukh Auditorium in the institute where diasporic Assamese kids were to perform in a play directed by Sarmah, in an attempt to introduce them to their roots and heritage.

It was an adept adaptation of poems by Navakanta Barua, one of Assam’s tallest literary figures. The child actors were whip-smart, and the auditorium was swarming with people for both shows.

The visions and dreams of Assam’s beloved Ratanda looked anything but dead even as the chief minister announced that his last rites would be performed on Monday, January 30, in full state honours.

Jyotirmoy Talukdar recently completed an MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi, New Delhi. His areas of interest are Dalit studies, sociohistorical linguistics and disability. He freelances for various publications in English and Assamese.