Black Saturday left a scar in every heart

The rains this monsoon were just a little more than adequate, which itself is considered a blessing for Assam’s Rs 3,000-crore tea industry.

The rains this monsoon were just a little more than adequate, which itself is considered a blessing for Assam’s Rs 3,000-crore tea industry. After a hard day’s work in the plantations, the evenings in the labour lines resound with the rhythmic beat of the madal and the singing of jhumur with both old and young joining for the dance by the same name. And if it’s a weekend, the dance and music go even beyond midnight.

But this winter things have suddenly changed. For, there is no merry-making or beating of the drum. It’s only the heart that is pounding, pounding with anger, after miscreants assaulted and stripped a young girl of the community in broad daylight in Guwahati, hardly a kilometre away from Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi’s office. There is anger in the air and distrust.

The migration of the Adivasi community, more popularly known as the tea tribe in Assam, dates back to the mid-19th century, when the British began setting up tea plantations in the Brahmaputra Valley after Maniram Dewan, an Assamese noblemen, took Robert Bruce of the East India Company to the house of Beesa Gam, a Singpho tribal chief to taste a cup of Assam tea. That was in 1824.

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As the tea industry developed a large number of labourers, mainly tribals from Chotanagpur, South and the then central Provinces, were brought in.

Living conditions of tea labourers are not so satisfactory even today. In October, around 100 of them died in just two districts (Jorhat and Golaghat) due to an outbreak of diarrhoea, with the state government pulling up tea companies for not providing safe drinking water to the people.

The “coolie-catchers”— as the labour contractors were called — not only lured poor tribals by various means, but also resorted to kidnapping, and forceful thumb impressions on contract papers. No doubt a popular jhumur song sung by people of the tea tribes goes this way: “sardar bole come, come/ babu bole dhore aan/ saheb bole libo pither cham/ o’ bideshi saab/ phaaki diya anilo assam” (the sardar said ‘come, come’, the babu said ‘bring them by force’/ the British saab said, else will peel off your skin/ we were brought to Assam with false promises).

But a few from the same community were encouraged to colonise in the then Goalpara district of Assam when Sir Steuart Colvin Bayley was Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal from 1879 to 1882. These Adivasis are not tea labourers and are today spread across the state mostly as farmers.

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“Today we are inseparable from the Assamese society. We do not want a separate homeland. We only want recognition as Scheduled Tribes,” says Justin Lakra, president of the All Adivasi Students’ Association of Assam (AASAA).

“The first Assamese woman martyr of India’s freedom struggle was one Moongri or Malati of Darrang, who belonged to an Adivasi community. She was killed by government agents in 1921 for trying to build up the freedom movement among tea labourers,” said Guwahati-based scholar Dipti Sharma.

But Saturday’s incident has blurred everything else and has left a deep scar in every heart.