‘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.

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.