Who am I?

In my attempt to seek refuge in the thought of being a Bengali, I am not quite sure if I have imagined my community, my conviction is challenged every time I am faced with a dilemma as is prevalent of the times. These are trying times, a time when the entirety of the Citizenship Debate is under consideration. These are times when even the most logical, moderate and learned mind become polarized into asserting what they think is right or wrong but writing this particular piece, I guess I am doing the same too.

Mine is an existential crisis which I believe is a product of my readings and contemplation of the concept of Imagined Communities (1986) by Benedict Anderson. Anderson has been able to make me question the concept of ‘the community’ and this is perhaps the reason why I fail to understand a very learned friend of mine when he/ she/ it (let’s try to keep it gender neutral for concerns of anonymity) says, reacting to the observance of the ‘birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore’ – “In sabka list banao, In sabko ek jagah mein dalo aur sab ko organ donor bana do” – roughly translates to “make a list of all the people present in the function, put them all in one place and make them all organ donors”.

For me, the veracity of this particular statement is very disturbing and as such I shared my concerns with my friend in an intellectual and yet redundant deliberation that followed the particular statement but the end of it all when he/ she/ it left reasserting that “mera bas chalet oh main in sabko ek jagah dalke organ donor bana doon” (If it was up to me, I would put them all in one place and make them all organ donors), I knew I had failed.

The context in which my friend had demanded of a list being made, keeping in mind a list of people observing the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, it is a list of Bengalis which he/ she/ it had demanded (Rabindranath Tagore being associated with the Bengali identity). I am not sure, if I am a Bengali but there are certain innate features in my cultural conditioning that makes me associate with the particular identity. This issue though, I think is not just about being a Bengali but about being human. It is said that people are the products of their experiences and as such I guess, was not surprised. More than my failure to convince my friend, I am disturbed about who I am and if I have any rights anywhere. Am I human enough to possess any rights after all?

Being a Bengali (which I thought I was and because I couldn’t possibly be any other) and growing up in Shillong, I was rather alienated from what I could comprehend as ‘my people’ of even be proud of it, which I have come to terms with, is essential to instill a sense of belonging within a particular community. Being of Shillong (at least I was born and brought up there), there was and still is a particular word associated with Bengalis – they are called the ‘Kharbang’ – ‘Khar’ from the word ‘Dakhr’ meaning ‘outsider’ and ‘bang’ meaning ‘Bengali’ and so combining the two – ‘Outsider Bengali’ and even after spending my entire childhood in Shillong, I don’t think I will be rid of this tag of being ‘the kharbang’ but I guess that’s okay considering that we only settled (my family) there in the early years after the independence of India and I am a Bengali and as such Shillong is not my home, it is elsewhere. So where is this elsewhere?  

Tracing back to my roots, my ancestors (at least of whom I know) belonged to the Barak Valley in Assam and this I am talking about eternity or at least the known history of the family going back to many generations. I still have my relatives and ancestral properties there – so I guess I do belong there but then again just because all this lineage is in Assam, am I Assamese?

The Assamese identity is an all-inclusive word for the various groups of people living in Assam and this constitutes at least 30 ethnic groups of people that call Assam their home and by virtue of that are considered Assamese. In an article in the Business Line titled “Who is an Assamese?” Sanjoy Hazarika quotes the Assam Sahitya Sabha in defining the Assamese identity - that Assamese are those who, “irrespective of community, language, religion and place of origin, accept Assamese as their mother tongue or their second or third language”. This definition is a widely debated one and at most we can agree that the Assamese Identity is an ambiguous one with multiple definitions none of which have been operationalized yet. As far as I am concerned, the Assamese identity is therefore an all-encompassing imagined one and if as such is the case it is not wrong for me to declare myself as an Assamese but will I be accepted as an Assamese?  

My intellectual yet redundant deliberation with my very learned friend has made me think otherwise. The underlying belief that my very learned friend displayed, of the illegitimacy of all Bengalis in the Barak Valley of being Assamese by virtue of simply holding on to the Bengali identity within the ambit of the Assamese one, was visible from the mockery that followed after I traced my own identity back to the aforementioned one.

The Bengalis have a history of not being included in the ambit of the all-inclusive Assamese identity. Prashant Jha in the chapter on “The H-M Chunav” from the book “How the BJP Wins: Inside India’s Greatest Election Machine” (2017), mentions that it is only recently that the hatred towards the ‘Bongali’ as ‘the other’ has shifted to the ‘Muslim Mia’. This statement lends evidence to the historical marginalization of the Bengalis in Assam.  The Language Movement of 1961 in Assam against the imposition of the Assamese Language and violence against the Bengalis in the Brahmaputra Valley also proof of the tensions between the communities.

With my limited knowledge, which is also not substantiated with substantial personal experiences except for the one that is discussed at the beginning of this piece - of my friend demanding the list of Bengalis to turn them to unwilling organ donors, I am pretty sure I don’t belong to the Assamese identity either. Although the Assamese identity is one which is basically a term associated with the ‘sons of the soil’ of Assam yet the question is am I a step son to deserve the treatment meted out to me?    

So, I guess I am a Bengali after all with my home only confined to the political boundary of West Bengal (the state with which I have no relations whatsoever), at least that was what my very learned friend in the intellectual yet redundant deliberation expressed. I am again not sure, for another very learned friend of mine who is from West Bengal, in good humor completely disregards me being a Bengali. For this friend of mine I simply do not meet the requirements of the ‘Imagined Identity’ of Bengalis which he/ she/ it has inculcated through the very personal social experience. So, I guess I will never able to resolve my existential crisis or even find an answer to the very simple question of – “Who am I”?