For most of the years between 1937 and 1946, Mohammad Saadulla of the Muslim League held office as Assam’s Premier. In July 1941, his party announced a Land Settlement Policy which opened up the region to immigrants, allowing them to settle on government land anywhere in Assam and enabling them to seize as much as thirty bighas of land and more for each homestead. Four years later, Saadulla was to boast in a letter to Liaquat Ali Khan, then Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s chief aide and later Premier of Pakistan, that, ‘In the four lower districts of Assam Valley, these Bengali immigrant Muslims have quadrupled the Muslim population during the last 20 years.’

Saadulla claimed that all this was part of the war effort: that as a good and reliable ally of the British, he was doing his best to meet Allied needs for food. But Lord Wavell, the then Viceroy, was not taken in one bit.

Wavell remarked cynically, ‘The chief political problem is the desire of the Muslim Ministers to increase this immigration into the uncultivated Government lands under the slogan of “Grow more food.”’ But what they really wanted was to ‘Grow more Muslims.’8

In the space of a few years, the profile of the migrant had changed: from sharecroppers eking out a survivalist existence, they had become land owners who had set up their own farms, leading a settled, pastoral existence. By Saadulla’s own admission, those four lower districts had seen a massive inflow of Muslims from East Bengal. These were the old undivided districts of Goalpara (which included Dhubri), Kamrup and Nowgong.

This was to be the pattern for future migrations.

Chapter Seven

A Place Called Home

The history of the world is migration. Our forebears have come from elsewhere, settled in the place we know, or knew as home and we have moved to newer homes and homelands, raising families and shaping careers, making choices and developing the societies in which we live and work. At the same time, we maintain connections with those individuals, communities and larger societies to which we are tied by bonds of loyalty, be they ethnic, linguistic, religious or nationality.

The pace of migration has quickened with each passing year, more and more people being drawn to developed countries, as well as to places with better conditions even in underdeveloped lands. The pull of technology, economic growth, global communications as compared to illiteracy, unbridled population growth and falling living standards in the many underdeveloped nations continues to force this inexorable march of the wretched of the earth—though often these communities count among as the most resourceful and dynamic.

Those who live in the ‘second half’ of our world see the opportunities in any place, near or distant, as providing a breathing space, a chance to live and survive—and who knows, even prosper.

‘Recent profound changes in the world political and economic order have generated huge movements of people in almost every region,’ says Nicholas Van Hear of the Refugee Studies Programme at Oxford University.1