History session does soul searching

DIBRUGARH, February 11: An attempt at serious soul searching was made at the history conference of the 66th session of the Asam Sahitya Sabha, currently on at the Sahityarathi Kshetra here these days. The conference was held on Friday morning. Inaugurating the conference, Jogendra Narayan Bhuyan said the Assamese society has been facing its toughest challenges since the days of the anti-foreigner agitation. He said the State's population saw in the last two decades of the just- concluded century phenomena which never existed earlier nor could be imagined . He attributed this chiefly to the largely insular and superiority complex-ridden "upper classes" of the Assamese society, saying this helped in building up resentment among the less fortunate sections of the society. Another "culprit" he has identified is the mushroom growth of "English-medium schools", saying these helped in creating a class of people which largely lacked societal sentiments and a concern for the downtrodden. He also found fault in the antiforeigner agitation in the State, as this gave birth to separatist tendencies among a section of the youth, forcing them to take up arms and resort to insurgency. This, according to him, has caused a severe strain on the Assamese people, hitherto culturally and socially unified with the larger Indian mainstream. He said the strain could be overcome just because the cultural links and the primordial Indianess was built up over thousands of years - a link that cannot be snapped by misguided sentiments of a section of the youth. Describing the foundations of the present Assamese society, Bhuyan said these have been meticulously built up by the preachings of Sankardev, Madhavdev, Ajan Pir and others over the last few centuries: "A society where there are many faiths but no fundamentalism, and many sections but no class divide." He noted that in the name of enforcing a regional language, the people of the State got divided into various linguistic groups. He also saw in this attempt the gradual fragmentation of the Assamese society, and stressed that language should remain as a medium to exchange thoughts, not create rifts among people. His greater concern was that adding fuel to this divide and separatist tendencies are a section of the State's media, and politicians, apart from the "general rhetoric" of some foreign hand and agencies stoking disturbances in the state. Bhuyan said the memorandum of 1894 submitted before the then Viceroy of India by a delegation from Assam, led by Jagannath Baruah, Kaliprasad Chaliha, Abhoy Charan Talukdar and Ramakanta Borkakoty, was an important document to give directions to the social and cultural fabric of Assam. Along with the opening of the Cotton College in 1901, the State underwent a lasting social change with Assamese intellectualism getting moulded. He recalled the other epoch making events of the State as the births of Lakshminath Bezbaroa, Jyoti Prasad Agarwalla and Bishnu Prasad Rabha, all of whom have left an indelible mark on the social fabric of the State. An upcoming historian of the State, Rajen Saikia of the Nagaon Girls' College, in his revealing speech, spoke at length on the causes which has brought Assam to an unmanned traffic junction. He said the State knew little of insurgency till about 20 years ago. Insurgency, instead of making a backdoor entry, came to us through the portico, but in disguise." He said that during the Assam agitation, those who did not support the movement were branded traitors by those leading the agitation, and that force was applied to muffle their voice. This gave birth to terrorism in Assam, according to him. He said the most reprehensible thing was that even the saner leaders of the agitation preferred to connive with the terrorism adhered to "maybe in the hope that the goal was important, not the means." Saikia said the greatest blunder of the Assam agitation was that the well-defined Assamese society nurtured a false sense of a lack of identity, and observed that this was a ploy by a section of the agitation leaders to stay put in their portfolios. He said this disinformation by the leaders led to the understanding of the identity question in a manner and thinking about it in an emotion-driven contrasting manner. This has also affected the definition of a person who is not an Assamese, he added. He said that those who took pride in declaring themselves as Assamese have now discarded the identity. This hatred has become cancerous, he said with deep concern. Shrutidev Goswami of the Dibrugarh University dwelt on the impact of narcotics on the Assamese society. In his president's address, Jogendra Nath Phukan regretted that tribal history of the region did not find much place in the deliberations. He also pleaded for re-introduction of geography and history as compulsory subjects till the high school level. He said if this is done, the students would get material to increase their self esteem. He reminded the audience that the present rift among sections of the society is due to lack of information about the Assamese society's traditional bonds.