The social, demographic and political tensions spawned by this problem are too deep to gloss over or to seek quick-fix solutions like ‘throwing’ foreigners out. Some extreme, parochial groups take refuge in the Italian political philosopher Niccolò de Bernado Machiavelli, without knowing that it is him that they quote. Many ideologues of the extreme right-wing who accuse Bangladesh of trying to swamp the North East and take it over demographically, and thence politically (not to speak of economically), indirectly quote Machiavelli when they raise these fears. The Italian had declared in the sixteenth century that ‘sending immigrants is the most effective way to colonize countries because it is less offensive than to send military expeditions and much less expensive.’ It is doubtful if there is an active ‘conspiracy’ to Bangladeshize Assam and the North East, as some would have us believe. There are different reasons why people are moving and triggering the fears, hopes and concerns that they do. The fundamentalist surge in the lower districts of Assam is one of the factors for worry, but not the only one.

We need to look at the issues dispassionately and find out what solutions will work. Can anything be resolved given the complexities of the issues? During the course of our fieldwork, my researchers and I met extremely pragmatic people on either side of the border. They knew what they wanted, how it could be achieved, but they had little hope that political leaders could do it. They saw the benefits of local choice, local decisions being translated into national and regional realities. Their views as much as, if not more than, those of scholars, social theorists, politicians and officials must direct policy-formation.

Rites of Passage seeks to record and affirm their voices, besides my thoughts, and to span boundaries in a leap across disciplines, and a vision born of history.

Chapter Two

Mahesh: Encounters of the First Kind

The first ‘migrant’ I met was Mahesh, our bandy-legged cook who was fond of going ‘O mai go!’ whenever he wanted to emphasize a point. Stretched a bit, it could sound like ‘O, my God.’ But translated from Bengali into English, this means ‘Oh, my mother!’

Mahesh Chandra Das was born in Sylhet, a Muslim-majority area of the then East Pakistan that was dominated by Bengali speakers. This chunk of territory had, even before Partition, voted to be part of the separate Muslim-majority provinces, instead of staying with Assam. To this day, there are Sylhetis who like to talk about their close connections with Assam and especially with the former capital of Shillong, where many went to school—even after Partition.

Nostalgia is a hopelessly all-encompassing vice; and it is hopeless, because it constructs a world that is never a ‘now’ but one that ‘was’ or ‘could have been’.