The colour of fringe histories

It often seems as though the regional in the SAARC acronym is oddly devoid of a history, other than the one prescribed to it by the dominant memories of its constituent states. It is as if SAARC's representatives are little more than what the tourism and finance departments want them to be: good, postcolonial folk with an urge to forge economic growth. There is little room, therefore, for places within the region that have discordant histories. Places that do not conform to pliable pasts often find themselves pushed outside discussions on regionalism in Southasia. Thus, SAARC constituents would like to view the entire Southasian region within an antiseptic security lens, where incompatible noises and memories are not part of the 'region-making' process. Northeast India, with its colourful and chaotic history, is such a place. In contemporary discussions, the region is portrayed as a place full of malcontents of various ethnicities.

The presence of renegades of different ethnic origins in a particular region is also a sign of a distinct kind of cosmopolitanism. Such figures point towards a corresponding set of events and processes that draw people and material into a particular area. Below are two incidents that took place in the Northeast during the 1940s. These are not ordinary events, as we will see. They are incidents that could have only happened in places where peoples and politics were bursting at the seams with contradictions and expectant possibilities.

On a cold January morning in 1946, a disabled Chinese soldier, decommissioned from the 38th Chinese Division, was found dead  with several stab wounds near an unused ammunition dump in Tirap, near the town of Margherita in eastern Assam. The police report stated that the deceased had lost his legs in combat in Burma, and had since built a small hut near an ammunition dump controlled by the US Army at Tirap. The American soldiers would give the disabled man their tinned rations out of charity, while he went about collecting food and unused ammunition, which he then sold to his Chinese compatriots from the Kuomintang tank division stationed nearby. The deceased was said to have been antisocial and without many friends in the area. Local people reported seeing three unknown Chinese soldiers enter the hut on 24 January 1946. The following day, an American soldier, on his way to the dump, came by the body of the Chinese soldier, who was holding a US-issued army pistol with three live rounds still in the cartridge.

The same police report, now lodged in a file at the former India Office Collection, housed with the British Library in London, tells a delightful tale about a case of swindling, reported by a Silchar police station during the same year. An individual claiming to be an American assistant manager of a local tea plantation had persuaded a leading merchant in town to part with goods worth a bit more than 150 rupees, on credit. Weeks later, when the bill had still not been cleared, the merchant approached the manager of the estate, only to be informed that there was no such assistant manager. A case of swindling and fraud was registered against the missing individual.

The noisy entrepot
There is a reason to reiterate such disconnected incidents from the not-so-distant past. They happened in places that are now inextricably associated with remoteness and backwardness. One has to be reminded – albeit via colonial police records – that areas now considered to be 'remote' were once the loci of all kinds of traffic, which shaped politics and history in the region. Margherita, for instance, was the staging point of an audacious effort to build a road from Assam to China. Workers from the tea plantations were coerced into constructing roads and bridges all along the inhospitable eastern Himalayan range. Their European managers were temporarily transformed into volunteers for a 'just war', to keep the Japanese away. To this day, several planters' clubs in eastern Assam bear plaques commemorating the contributions made by whiskey-swigging planters to this war effort. In 1946, it was hardly uncommon to find the effort reflected in the presence of an unlikely crowd of persons – swindlers, war veterans and others – for whom the region was the obvious place to settle down for a breather.

The region known today as the Indian Northeast formed a distinctly cosmopolitan part of Asia of the 1940s, with an assorted range of people coming together in the course of a violent war. But this is a history that has been excised from the bureaucratic niceties that make up the current contract between the different Southasian states. In its scheme of things, SAARC has no space for complexities, since it is a conglomeration of states that have eyes and ears only in their capitals and commercial cities.

Should this sound provocative and truculent – coming as it is from a resident of the Northeast – one only needs to look at the manner in which neighbouring sovereign states, such as Bangladesh, interpret their relationships with the region. If one were to take maps seriously, it would seem as though Bangladesh is one country that could do much to make the Northeast more visible, in terms of history and politics. Unfortunately, it does not do so. Bangladesh, like other SAARC constituents (with the sole exception of a transforming Nepal), thinks in terms of dominant ethnicities and majoritarian histories.

What would be the consequences of acknowledging the existence of such colourful and chequered histories, along the fringes of SAARC's boundaries? For one, it would disrupt the neat historical narratives of colonisation, decolonisation and national liberation. It would force Southasians – as people, not as citizens of particular states – to come to terms with the connectedness and contentiousness of the past. It would compel one to ponder the fact that the area of the eastern Himalaya was as much a natural wandering space for Han Chinese speculators as it was for Bengali peasants, Nepali soldiers and Marwari businessmen.

This ought to remind bureaucracies that SAARC is the outcome of 20th-century wartime decisions that could have gone in entirely different directions. Pretending that we are modern, immutable and rational states, by conveniently deleting our messy fringe histories, will leave SAARC a colourless bureaucratic sorting office, rather than a noisy frontier railway platform, with peoples of different hues exchanging their tongues and histories.

~ Sanjay Barbora works with Panos South Asia, and his research work is supported by NCCR North-South. He is based in Guwahati.