Question

Non cooperation movement phases in assam?

Answer 1

As one goes down the annals of Assam’s history, it’s truly numbing composite culture hits hard on the face. 150 years ago, people knew how to integrate and sustain complex, heterogeneous, plural and composite polities.

We had left Part II of this series at identifying the unusual nature of Bodo peripatetic sovereignty embedded deep in the tribe’s economic practice. In India, the initial British East India Company (BEIC) policy in Assam and the NE region was to subjugate different tribes with different treaties—and create identity politics through encouraging separatist tendencies—so that convergence for a common purpose between people of different ethnicities and religions becomes impossible.

1857: Blow to British Rule in Assam

Yet, the 1857 war in Assam gave the first blow to the western-British strategy of separatism. It all started with the case of Usubar, Laochiklang and Maali Sikhla, the three Bodo warriors of the Darrang-Kokrajhar area. Usubar used to trade in hides with Bengali dealers. It was on one of his visits to Calcutta in April 1857 when he first heard of the hanging of Sepoy Mangal Pandey at Barrackpore.