sa–sanja .artin b@’le<dAav davrav–davis%O hobqanay
Riot production
I met Rombha, a middle-aged Bodo farmer from Phulbari, on a rainy day in Bodoland, a tribal autonomous region in the state of Assam, Northeast India, formed in response to the movement for a homeland by the Bodo tribe.[1] British policies of settling frontiers has left this region with a brand of divisive politics, pitting indigenous Bodos against communities perpetually marked as immigrants. Since the late 1980s, immigrant communities like the Adivasis—descendants of colonial tea plantation labour— became targets of violent “sons-of-the-soil” militants struggling for the Bodo homeland. As rainfall battered the tin roof of the roadside eatery we were sheltering under, Rombha recalled the time when such militants had massacred 62 Adivasis in December 2014.
In the aftermath of the massacre, Rombha remembered the palpably escalating tension between her village that is predominantly Bodo, and their Adivasi neighbours. Such incidents have been followed by retaliation—with Adivasi communities arming themselves over time—culminating in widespread inter-ethnic rioting in the past.[2] These incidents became triggers for rioting when taken out of context (that is, motives of militant groups were interpreted as motives ascribed to all Bodos) and incorporated within a narrative of timeless enmity between seemingly homogenous groups (Tambiah 1996, 192), to create a sense of ‘Bodo’ versus ‘Adivasi’. This process also included “framing and narrative encoding” of disparate contemporaneous or past incidents—from robberies and sexual assault to neighbourly fights over land—within this narrative of enmity (Brubaker 2002, 173).
This discursive ecology, sustained in circulating rumours, news, speeches and political mobilizations calling for revenge, displaces the “subjectivity of everyday life” (Das 2007, 118). In the indelibly multi-ethnic Bodoland, this displacement is an erasure of the ease of being-together—in spite of marked differences of language, skin, religion, culture—that not only allowed everyday friendships or relations of sharecropping and merriment, but also fights and scuffles that would occur without much escalation. This ease seemed to melt under what my interlocutors described, in Assamese peppered with Bangla and Hindi, as gorom (hot or fever-like) feelings or air. These feelings came with an overwhelming need to be angry, fearful or suspicious of someone simply by virtue of their ethnicity, as the narratives of enmity circulated to dredge up bad memories and compel people to hate the ‘other’ by default.
Pockets of resistance
Conversations with Bodo and Adivasi individuals, often poor subsistence farmers or daily wage laborers who had survived multiple riots since the late 1980s, conveyed a variety of critical stances on violent sons-of-the-soil politics that were incommensurable with the moral-political visions of their respective ethnopolitical and militant leadership. Further, amidst the talk of rioting would inevitably emerge stories of dissidence: where individuals or entire villages would refuse to participate in mob-violence, or surreptitiously work to foil attempts of militant or political elite to harm the ‘enemy’ community. These presented the riot as a state which, though desiring culmination in totalized warfare, was necessarily falling short due to pockets resisting the onslaught of gorom feelings.
Instead of asking how a riot is produced or made possible, these encounters directed me to inquire after the practices and norms that may regulate the seemingly chaotic spread of violence, and also limit the forms that violence may actually take during a riot. This essay is an instantiation of this line of inquiry where I explore how xadharon (ordinary), xoru (small) people or raiz (public)—keywords used by my interlocutors, across ethnicity, to index their subjugated and critically-distanced positioning vis-à-vis ethnopolitical and militant elite—may resist the spread of violence when rioting is ongoing or imminent. In doing so, I hope to illustrate what I mean by pockets of resistance in riots.
Time of the riot
The massacre of Adivasis in December 2014 was immediately followed by attacks on Bodo villages by mobs and militants identified as Adivasi, which, in turn, led to counter-retaliation from the Bodo side. Yet, even as rioting was spreading across the region, Rombha indicated that the Bodo residents of Phulbari (located at the very edge of Bodoland, bordering Bhutan) hoped that there would be no clash with their Adivasi neighbours. Precautions were taken regardless. At night, the women and children—along with the old and infirm—would gather around a designated house in the village centre, while men on protection duty kept watch along the perimeter.
After suffering another sleepless night—huddled in the bitter cold in makeshift conditions—Rombha went to her house for an afternoon nap. She woke up upon hearing two girls eating jujube from the nearby tree. As she joined them, they saw a man with a machete on his hip approach. Rombha recognised him as Sorai, an Adivasi from the nearby settlement.
Sorai seemed agitated and demanded to buy some home-brewed liquor. Realising that he was drunk, Rombha offered him jujube in the hope of distracting (and placating) him as the girls walked away. Now Sorai wanted salt to eat with his jujube, and coaxed Rombha to get it from her house. Fearing assault if she went indoors, she refused. Sorai bristled, and started swearing loudly and slashing at an adjoining house with his machete. Rombha got scared and shouted for help, and Sorai made a hasty exit.
When Rombha’s husband and other village men—who had gone across the Bhutan border to work at a construction site that day—returned in the evening, she explained what happened. The village headman contacted the Army encampment close-by, and a jawan arrived sometime later in a jeep.
Rombha continued: “The first thing the Army [the jawan] asked— ‘What are you doing with all these machetes and knives?’ All these ulta-palta [upside-down] things they ask na?” Her rhetorical question indicated the unease or ambivalence towards the security forces, who despite being ‘protectors’ in crises are feared due to impunity granted by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (cf. Baruah 2020, 161-168).
Next, “He took all our machetes and loaded them in his jeep. He asked what happened? I said he [Sorai] came like this and did this and that—he caught Sorai! I thought what he [the jawan] will do to him later?” With a look of concern, she trailed off. Sorai did not ‘disappear’ but was released from detention when he “came to his senses.” Even after many years, Rombha shared, when Sorai sees her in the weekly market, he still averts his gaze.
Avoiding conflict for now
In December 2014, Phulbari avoided a clash with their Adivasi neighbours partly due to luck, for if Sorai had met “hot-headed” men—quick to anger or gun-yielding militants—that afternoon, he would have been beaten-up or killed, causing retaliation from the neighbouring Adivasis.
Yet, despite condemning Sorai, Rombha—aware of dynamics that produced such gorom feelings—refused to invoke the narrative of Adivasi men sullying the honour of Bodo women. This narrative, propagated after the discovery of corpses of women dressed in Bodo dokhona near an Adivasi village in 1996, had previously enabled militants to organize widespread riots against Adivasis.
It is also significant that Phulbari’s headman approached the security forces instead of armed militants or mobilising villagers to search for Sorai. During such fraught times, seeing a group of Bodo men approaching their village, Adivasis may have pre-emptively attacked out of fear. This would have caused rioting in the locality, making it yet another site engulfed in the spreading ethnic clashes in December 2014. Several other factors could have also contributed to the locality avoiding rioting in 2014: peace marches organized by civil society, for example, or the rapid declaration of curfew and deployment of armed forces by the state (cf. Mann 2005, 482).
On the flipside, localized attempts by ordinary people to resist conflict may be completely ineffective if militants or mobs from other areas entered the locality to compel or variously incentivize participation in violence. There is also no guarantee that, in the future, Sorai’s violent actions would continue to be talked about by residents of Phulbari in a way that does not reproduce the narrative of ‘Adivasi’ aggression towards ‘Bodos’.
Conclusion
What went on in Phulbari demonstrates how xadharon (ordinary), xoru (small) people or raiz (public)—having endured many riots—resist what is demanded by gorom (hot) feelings, arguably produced in service of divisive ethnopolitical and militant agendas seeking a homeland purified of the ‘other’ (cf. Kimura 2013; Tambiah 1996). These actions and aspirations of ordinary people indicate pockets of resistance that may be tentative, fragile, unpredictable, non-aggregable and fugitive—and thus not easily seen or talked about. Yet it is in these pockets that we may perhaps find—and support the work of inculcating—ways of being-together that are at odds with modes of life engendered by dominant socio-political imaginaries (Povinelli 2001).
[1] jnjaiq sodob%O Aa’ isnayjanay jaiq%O bujayno qa%ay gusu;W bahaydo’ – ibidno hair sodoba jaiqinf[ay derisn ibsay%iqin goho gona’ subu’ hanja%O bujaydo’ –
I use tribe as a shorthand for Scheduled Tribe while ethnicity signifies a larger (conceptual) category representing communities of belonging and electoral mobilization. Names of interlocutors and their village name has been changed.
[2] %onano moNnay bayidBla be bayid davrav–davisin smav Aaidbaisforinya ba’isn %ha jabodo’ –
From anecdotal evidence, Adivasis have faced more losses than Bodos during such clashes.
References
Baruah, Sanjib. 2020. In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast. Stanford University Press.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2002. “Ethnicity without Groups.” European Journal of Sociology 43 (2): 163–189.
Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. University of California Press.
Kimura, Makiko. 2013. The Nellie Massacre of 1983: Agency of Rioters. Sage Studies on India’s North East. Sage.
Mann, Michael. 2005. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge University Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2001. “Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 30: 319-334.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 1996. Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. University of California Press.
Featured Image
2015, 2016, Aaro 2018 Aav qa’nay smav kkra&ar Aaro icra’ Aonsolin gaim–shr jravbo šNjur Aaro laš$in %uniqyaforav ilrnay nunomono ― “b@’le<dAa b’rforin igib monqay” Aaro “Aasam%O 50-50 bo%avna’gO”- ilrigirAa %ebnay savgair –
Slogans like ‘Bodoland is Bodos Birth Right; Divide Assam’ covered walls and electricity poles across rural and urban areas of Kokrajhar and Chirang during visits in 2015, 2016 and 2018. Photo by author.
Acknowledgements
The author expresses gratitude to Zubaan Trust and Sasakawa Peace Foundation for funding visit in 2018; the ant for facilitating conversations; Jeetumoni Basumatary for her excellent translation; Catherine Fennell and Vanessa Agard-Jones for critique and guidance; and Malini Sur and Liam Magee for their engagement and peer review.
Disclaimer: Translated into Bodo by Jeetumoni Basumatary. Issues journal shall not be responsible for any inaccuracies or errors, both direct and indirect, in the translation. If any questions arise concerning the accuracy of the information presented by the translated version, please refer to the English content of the same.
