Page 80 - Changing Living Spaces

Haruhisa Asada

tered over vast plains. Therefore, securing a population to cultivate the
vast land has always been a challenge to effective state building.
British colonial rule in Assam began in the mid-nineteenth century.
During the colonial period, the British administration brought various
ethnic groups from different parts of the Indian subcontinent to work
in the sparsely populated wastelands of Assam. The newcomers includ-
ed Bengalis, Nepalis, and other tribes who arrived in the late nineteenth
century. Given the growing need for revenue during this period, the colo-
nial administration expressed a desire to promote jute cultivation in the
rich alluvial areas of the Brahmaputra Valley (Saikia 2011, 326–7). Since
local farmers lacked sufficient skills and motivation for jute cultivation,
the Assam administration argued that the best available alternative was
to bring in farmers from East Bengal. In addition, Bengali jute mills put
pressure on East Bengali farmers to grow jute in the Brahmaputra Valley.
The majority of these newcomers were Muslim peasants.
Rapid reclamation by Muslim peasants was initially welcomed by
Assamese Hindu elites (Saikia 2016, 87). In the following decades, the
wealthy Assamese farmers, merchants, and absentee landowners de-
rived enormous profits from the settlement of the immigrant peasants.
However, this situation did not last long. Assamese nationalists, legisla-
tors, and the press disapproved of the immigration of Muslim peasants
and their rapid reclamation, fearing that the land of the native Assamese
would be seized by them. While revenue officials in Assam claimed that
no surplus land was available for new settlements, the Assam Muslim
League Ministry decided in 1943 to open surplus reserves to immigrant
peasants under a scheme called the ‘Grow More Food’ campaign.
Until the mid-twentieth century, when the state’s population began
to grow significantly, there were fewer problems between Hindus and
Muslims or different ethnic groups in the region. However, in the late
twentieth century, as population density increased in the Brahmaputra
floodplain and cultivable land became scarce, social problems such as con-
flicts between different ethnic groups and political movements for auton-
omy by ethnic minorities began to emerge. The state-wide anti-Muslim
immigration movement in the early 1980s (Baruah 1999; Dutta 2012) and
the Bodoland movement that violently demanded the independent state
of the Bodo tribes in the 1990s are two notable examples (Basumatary
2012; Saikia 2015).
Social unrest in the late twentieth century hampered the economic de-
velopment of the state. Even today, Assam has no significant industry,

78