Nibir Deka

Putting a stop to the pursuit of boys!

An incident cannot define Barak and the Brahmaputra Valley. What happened with the Bihu troupe in Sribhumi is condemnable. They had reportedly been invited to perform during a Durga Puja programme organised by a local, and members of the troupe were allegedly assaulted. There are also allegations that the confrontation began over Assamese songs being performed and that Bihu instruments were damaged. The exact circumstances are still under investigation. If it is established that artistes were attacked simply for performing Bihu or singing in Assamese, there should be strict punishment. There can be no justification for inviting artistes as guests and then attacking them over their language or culture. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has already asked the Assam DGP to take immediate action. Assam Police says a case has been registered at Sribhumi Police Station, 13 people have been arrested and forwarded to court, while efforts are underway to identify others involved. Let the law take its course. But there is another conversation Assam needs to have. For years, we have kept a tense line between the Brahmaputra Valley and Barak Valley, often in the name of Assamese and Bengali. The history behind it is complicated, and every time something goes wrong, we seem ready to turn an individual crime into an identity question. That is dangerous. The Sribhumi incident cannot become a certificate of character for everyone living in Barak Valley. The same mistake we made when we defined the whole of Karbi Anglong by the horrific lynching of Abhijit Nath and Nilotpal Das in 2018. Two young men were killed by a mob following rumours that they were child abductors. The crime was horrific. It did not make an entire civilisation guilty. The same principle must apply today. While writing this, I spoke to friends in Sribhumi. Some of them had been looking forward to watching the Bihu performance. Assamese songs, including songs associated with Zubeen Garg, were already part of the atmosphere before everything went wrong. That is also Barak Valley. There is an alienation around Silchar and Barak Valley among many people I know in the Brahmaputra Valley. I have felt it in conversations with friends and peers. But spend enough time there and many of those neat divisions begin to disappear. I have known families in Barak Valley buying Mekhela Sador as Durga Puja gifts and that trend is risng more. I have seen Assamese cultural elements enter weddings alongside local traditions, especially the Assamese Bihu Dhol along with Dhamail traditions. Zubeen himself spent part of his childhood in Karimganj, and used to share his fond memories there. Both Brahmaputra and Barak are fertile alluvial valleys. But, that's not the only similarity we have. Our everyday ambitions look familiar across both valleys. So does our relationship with music and our collective struggles with floods. Assam has moved too far to return to a permanent Assamese-versus-Bengali argument every time an ugly incident takes place. Punish the people responsible for Sribhumi. Find out exactly what happened. If the attack was motivated by hostility towards Assamese language or Bihu, deal with it firmly. But do not turn 13 accused people into a judgement on an entire valley. Barak is also Assam. One incident cannot, and should not, erase years of goodwill between people who have far more in common than we sometimes allow ourselves to see

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The mysterious death of a girl made me think about a Guwahati we rarely talk about The tragic death of Himasri Boro, a 20-year-old girl from Guwahati, has shocked Assam and attracted national media attention. Her body was found near a railway track in Andhra Pradesh on October 6, under circumstances that remain the subject of a police investigation. As of October 12, investigators are still examining how she died. The Chief Minister has met her family and assured them of justice. When the news first broke, I was doing what I do almost every day, filing a news story. I was reading through the details when I came across the name of her locality. Chapaidong, Bonda. My heart skipped a beat. For most people in Guwahati, Chapaidong or Bonda would probably be unfamiliar names. They are unlikely to feature in your conversations about the city's development, its nightlife, its traffic or the latest café that has opened. But I know these places. And they have a world of their own. Bonda and Chapaidong are among those rural suburbs of Guwahati that have somehow managed to retain much of their old character despite the city expanding around them. These localities have a mixed population of indigenous communities, particularly Bodos, Karbis and caste Assamese families. Until relatively recently, these places were poorly connected to what residents considered the main city. Even today, if you speak to an elderly person from these areas, they might tell you that they are going to Guwahati when they are merely travelling to Narengi, the nearest major urban locality. Technically, they are already in Guwahati. But geography and belonging are not always the same thing. Over the last decade, things have changed considerably. Rising property prices have persuaded many families to sell their ancestral land. New residential developments have appeared, outsiders have moved in, and businesses have discovered that these areas offer something increasingly difficult to find elsewhere in Guwahati: land. The city has been arriving here, slowly and rather expensively. Yet, if you visit these localities on the eve of Magh Bihu, you will discover something rather beautiful. And that brings me to something I have been thinking about for a long time. George Orwell famously wrote in Animal Farm that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. I think Guwahati has developed its own version of that philosophy. All suburbs are equal. Some suburbs are more important than others. For decades, the popular narrative of Guwahati has revolved around its established neighbourhoods. Silpukhuri, Uzan Bazar, Bharalumukh, Panbazar and, eventually, the expanding residential and commercial centres of the city. Studying in an educational institute based in Panbazar would earn you leverage to enter high society. Sportsmen from "good" neighbourhoods will have better selection rate in trials. These were the places where the institutions were located, where the influential families lived, where businesses operated and where the conversations about Guwahati largely originated. As the city expanded, more neighbourhoods became connected to this urban ecosystem. But our collective imagination of Guwahati has not expanded at the same speed. Take Chapaidong, for instance. When was the last time you heard a meaningful conversation about the aspirations of young people living there? Perhaps you might come across a landslide report buried somewhere on the Guwahati page of Asomiya Pratidin. Or a story about a road, an accident or some local dispute. Otherwise, these places barely exist in our public conversations. And yet, Chapaidong is as much Guwahati as Ulubari or Rehabari. Which brings me back to Himasri. From what has emerged about her life, she was an aspirational young woman who loved dancing and was preparing for government examinations. I find that detail particularly heartbreaking. Because she sounds like any other young girl from Guwahati trying to figure out her future. She could have been studying at DPS or St Mary's. She could have been somebody you met at a coaching centre, somebody making dance videos, somebody discussing the next government recruitment examination with her friends. She had her own ambitions and an entire life ahead of her. That life has now been cut short. A few years ago, I started a sports community in Narengi. It has brought me into contact with children and young adults from several surrounding localities, including some of these less-discussed suburbs. And I have often found myself troubled by how limited their exposure to the world outside their immediate neighbourhood can be. I remember meeting boys whose greatest ambition seemed to be buying a motorcycle, riding around their locality and acquiring a certain amount of neighbourhood swag. Probably also play the local football tournament where they win 500 Rs if they win the final. Now, I have nothing against motorcycles and football. But what bothered me was the apparent absence of ambition beyond that. Many of these youngsters have completed their degrees. Yet, when you speak to them, you realise how little their education has prepared them for the employment market. For some, app-based delivery and other gig-economy jobs become the most accessible way to earn money. And I think this is one of the most uncomfortable aspects of urbanisation that we rarely discuss. We celebrate the expansion of a city through roads, flyovers, shopping complexes, real estate projects and rising land valuations. This transformation, I reiterate, is important, and I am not a nostalgia hangover Bhorolok. But the fact that a young woman from Chapaidong had to become the subject of a national news story before many of us encountered the name of her locality says something about how selectively we imagine our city. Guwahati cannot continue to be imagined only through the neighbourhoods that have historically dominated its institutions, its economy and its conversations. Because it should not take the death of a young girl for the rest of Guwahati to discover that her neighbourhood exists. And perhaps Orwell would have recognised our city rather well. All suburbs are equal. Some suburbs are simply more Guwahati than others.

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