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Battles for the Golden Grain: Paddy Soldiers and the Making of the Northeast India–East Pakistan Border, 1930–1970

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Malini Sur
Malini Sur*
Affiliation:
Western Sydney University
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930–1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came to link cultivation and territorialization, state violence and food, and dispossession and espionage. I engage with the powerful symbolism attached to rice by colonial and post-colonial officials, border guards, and cultivators who were variously conceived of as peasants and adivasis, as they sought to settle, cultivate, demarcate, and govern new national boundaries in a radically changing landscape. This paper situates rice battles within current discussions on Asia's borderlands to show how rice established the border as a space for alterity and to expose the blurred boundaries between static peasants and mobile adivasis, and between cultivation and soldiering.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 804 - 832
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2016 

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References

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16 Nasir's image of Assam does not correspond to current political maps. What he conceives as the hills of Assam have since 1972 been located in the state of Meghalaya in Northeast India. Since 1971, Mymensingh has been a district in Bangladesh.

17 I conducted fieldwork in border villages in the states of Meghalaya and Assam (Northeast India) and Kurigram, Sherpur, Mymensingh, and Netrokona districts (Bangladesh). I carried out archival research in the Assam State Archives, Dispur, India; the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; the Heritage Archives in Rajshahi, Bangladesh; the National Archives of Bangladesh in Dhaka; and local archives in Mymensingh, and Netrokona.

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61 CR–2A1–1/51 (Mar. 1954), 279–301.

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65 CR 2 A 1–1/51 (Mar. 1954), 270–301.

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71 From Ali Asghar, Esq. I.C.S. District Magistrate Mymensingh to Assistant Secretary, Home (Political) Government of East Bengal, Mar. 1948.

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95 Ibid.

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98 Pakistan Observer, 3 Jan. 1964; and 4 Jan. 1964.

99 Ranikhong Church Chronicles, vol. 7, 1961–1970; St. Joseph's Chruch, Ranikhong, Netrokona, Bangladesh, 6 Feb. 1964, and 23 Feb. 1964.

100 Ibid., 29 Jan. 1964.

101 Chronicles of Birohidakuni Mission from 15 August 1955 to 1993, St. Elizabeth Church, Birohidakuni, Haluaghat, Mymensingh, 25 Aug. 1964.

102 Pakistan Observer, 9 May 1964.

103 P. V. Rajagopal, ed., The British: The Bandits and the Bordermen, from the Diaries and Articles of K. F. Rustamji (New Delhi: Wisdom Tree, 2009), 247.

104 Ranikhong Church Chronicles, vol. 7, 15 Mar. 1964.

105 Ibid., 19 Mar. 1964.

106 Sengrang N. Sangma, Bangladeshi Immigrants in Meghalaya (Kolkata: Ansah, 2005), 24.

107 Pakistan Observer, 29 Sept. 1964.

108 Interview with R. Rongdi, Netrokona, Bangladesh, 9 Jan. 2008.

109 Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3–5, 10, 132–34.