In the following years, Assamese nationalists expressed their concern over the unchecked immigration from East Bengal. The British were prevailed upon to introduce the Line System. Under this system, a line was drawn which segregated those areas where migration was allowed from the rest of the territory. A Colonisation Scheme was set up in 1928 to back up the Line System but the effectiveness of both steps was questionable. In an unpublished paper, Virender Singh Jafa, a former Chief Secretary of Assam, was to say5 that the ‘failure of both measures was evident as the immigrant settlers from East Bengal were in occupation of 37.7 per cent of land by 1936 in Nowgong District alone.’ In the space of a decade, the population of settlers from East Bengal rose from 300,000 to half a million or an increase of 200,000 from 1921 to 1931 in Nowgong.

‘The immigrant army has almost completed the conquest of Nowgong. The Barpeta sub-division of Kamrup has also fallen to their attack and Darrang is being invaded. Sibsagar has so far escaped completely but a few thousand Mymensinghias in North Lakhimpur are an outpost which may, during the next decades, prove to be vulnerable for major operations.’6 Those remarks by the Census Commissioner for Assam, C.S. Mullen, along with other pithy statements buttressed local fears about being swept aside by an invading tide.

This passage of Mullen’s report is perhaps one of the most celebrated in any study of Assam’s demographic crisis. The British official went so far as to say that the ‘most important event’ in Assam over the past quarter century ‘has been the invasion of a vast horde of land hungry Bengali immigrants, mostly Muslims from the districts of Eastern Bengal and in particular Mymensingh.’ He predicted that this influx would ‘alter permanently the whole future of Assam and to destroy more surely than did the Burmese invaders . . . the whole structure of Assamese culture and civilisation.’

Mullen declared that the first Bengalis that immigrated were officially taken note of in the 1921 census on a few pitiful islands in Goalpara. By 1931, the official said, more than half a million people had swept into Assam making the whole thing appear ‘like a marvel of administrative organization on the part of Government but it is nothing of the kind; the only thing I can compare it to is the mass movement of a large body of ants . . . it is sad but by no means improbable Sibsagar district will be the only part of Assam in which an Assamese will find himself at home.’7

Fifty years later, these concerns were reflected in similar language by the student activists of the 1980s, showing how little has changed in the Assamese psyche.

But how real are these worries?

To assess this, we will need to head back a little in time, to when a few years after Mullen’s dramatic declaration.