The Motoks are a sub-group of the Bodo family and dominated the region in Upper Assam near the business town of Tinsukia in medieval times. Their capital was Bengmara, the site of Tinsukia town today, and their lands were rich and fertile. After Assam was annexed to the British Empire, many young British entrepreneurs and other from the middle and lower-middle class, in search of quick money, descended on Assam and the Duars in neighbouring Bengal to tap profits from a new industry—tea. The Chinese monopoly of tea was to be undercut if British commercial interests were to survive and do well. And this economic battle was fought in the plains of Assam where vast tracts of land was brought under tea plantations.

British companies and planters took over large parts of land in the Tinsukia-Dibrugarh area. The Motoks who were dispossessed received little or no compensation in return.

More than a century later, the revenge of the Motoks was felt most sharply by the tea planters and companies which continued to sit on these lands and extract large profits from them. In the 1980s, a powerful new political group was rising in Assam, one that demanded independence from India and also which extracted huge amounts of money from the tea industry—refusal to pay could mean kidnapping or even death. Unused to dealing with this new situation, most tea companies took the safe way out and paid up.

It was only later when they analysed the profiles of leaders of this militant organization, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), that government officials realized that several of ULFA’s top men were Motoks. They included Paresh Baruah, the commander-in-chief of the organisation and Anup Chetia, the General Secretary of ULFA. Both were from the same village near Chabua air force station in Dibrugarh and had married sisters. Without articulating a historic fact and perhaps even without realizing it, the Motoks in ULFA were avenging the past.

If the Motoks have one set of grievances, further south, in Nogaon district, Central Assam, another older community, the Tiwas, a sub-group of the Bodo-Cachari race, have been deeply angered by dispossession.

Nogaon is a rice bowl located in the very heartland of Assam. Indeed, it falls almost directly at the centre of the entire North East. Its summers are blisteringly hot but its winters are pleasant. It is watered by a few small rivers, the Kolong being the dominant one.

My brother and I spent our winter vacations from school in Shillong at Nogaon, then known as Nowgong. The latter, I think, has a better ring to it. It used to take nearly five hours in my father’s black Ambassador which had succeeded the cute but tiny Morris Austin in Shillong. The Ambassador was replaced by a white Fiat a few years before my father’s death.