Les Gurung- A Cultural Journey into Sadiya Assam

March 2014

We arrived at the New Tinsukia Station on the 20^th of this month. Manoj who is my sister in law’s husband was accompanying me to the one and half day trip to Sadiya in the Eastern Upper Assam district of Tinsukia. Manoj has relatives living in Sadiya. He was taking me to the Gurung settlements of Pathi Pathar and Gurung Basti in Chapakhowa town of Sadiya. After travelling for more than three hours on the kuccha road we arrived at the Saikhowa ghat at the bank of the Brahmaputra. A fifteen minute sail on the ferry with a heavy load of passengers and goods got us on the opposite bank where a relay bus was waiting to take us to the town of Chapakhowa.

Awaiting departure at the Saikhowa Ghat in Sadiya , Assam

The Gurungs I encountered in Sadiya had all the anthropological DNA of the Gurungs I had encountered in Lamjung Nepal. Yet, at the same time they had developed other unique cultural traits different from the Gurungs of Ghalegaon and Ghanpokhara in Lamjung where I had been this January. The main reason for undertaking the trip was to understand the relationship between tradition and identity which is a part of the research work i am currently engaged in.

A mobile saloon by the banks of the Brahmaputra 

Sadiya and Tinsuka in general like many parts of the region is badly affected by insurgency. Insurgency operations have been active since the last three and half decades. The dense forest cover and the ease of access to international borders have made it a fertile ground for insurgency operations in the conflict torn region of northeast India. The undulated solemnity of the Brahmaputra  is tragically eclipsed by the tragedy and violence of the battle for identities. The centre in Delhi in 2012 had been by the Union Rural Development industry to declare the Upper Assam districts of Tinsukia and Dibrugarh to be declared as “Left Wing Extremism” affected areas. 

The following is a descriptive account of the one and half day trip to Sadiya in Tinsukia.

The barren back of the Dhaba opens up  herself in Sadiya, Assam 

We rode for more than three hours on the airtight bus cabin to arrive at the ghat. The road was dismal. The last time they had a black top road this side of Tinsukia, I was informed by my cab driver, was back in the days of Mrs. Indira Gandhi . One of the autodriver on our way return from Sadiya was suggesting that it be inducted into the Guineas Book of World Record. I thought to myself he couldn’t be too far off.

Arriving and unloading at the ghat in Sadiya,Assam

A Ferry Tale from Sadiya, Assam 

We halted at the ghats of the Brahmaputra as if to give a twenty minutes breather for our jostled backs and buttocks. A fifteen minutes ferry ride used for both passengers and cargo got us on the opposite bank where a relay bus took us beyond the ghat and towards the main town of Chapakhowa.

The sight of Tata trucks and Lories floating atop, with goods and cargos along with us in sail. That shimmering and corrugated river flow that even with the decrease in water level at this time of the year appeared solemn and imposing. There I felt a deep connection with the river as if I had sailed across the water . Perhaps in a dream or past life. 

High way to the Future, Sadiya , Assam.

    

Getting ready for an early morning school in Munu's sister in law's at Chapakowa, Asssam

We took shelter in Munu’s sister in laws for the night. We could not meet his sister as she was away with her husband in Tezu on the other side of the border in Arunachal engaged in some business. Time was not on our side and quickly got down with our work with the interviews in Pathi Pathar and Gurung Basti- two localities which has sizable Gurung settlements in Sadiya.   

Munu at his relatives place with a child all smiles for the lens 

I met Jeetu first. A hotel receptionist in Jayanagar Bangalore, he was back here in Sadiya on leave. He did not speak the Tamu Kyi, had never worn the bhangra(traditional Gurung dress) until a couple of years back and had been to Nepal just once before. Jeetu was exceptional in many respects not only because  he was employed in a metropolitan city and spoke fluent Kannada but unlike many of the Gurung people here had actually been to Nepal.  He was shortly on his way to Bangalore again unconcerned about the Lok Sabha polls on the 7^th of next month. the whole community was warming up for the elections as voter ID cards had just arrived . Women were riding up in their bicycles to the nearest stationeries to get their cards laminated and xerosed. Jeetu seemed indifferent to all this and confirmed he neither had the intention of going back to Nepal nor suffered from the pangs of yearning for his ancestral native land.

Jettu (extreme right) )with some of his friends on the morning of their departure to Bangalore

If one looks beyond the Gurung ethnic geography in Nepal in countries like India one will find that there are healthy Gurung diaspora settlements with a majority of them in the Northeast region. Most of the people are well settled as citizens and working in both the public and private spheres of the economy. One also finds considerable contiguity, exchange and variation in the culture of the Gurungs, not to mention adoption of other customs and traditions.Most of the Gurungs in Sadiya speak the lingua franca Assamese, Nepali as their mother tongue while their children now go to English medium schools. The simple but important fact that they take their meals thrice a day,  their architectural sensibilities and material culture illustrate how adoption and exchange is as important a factor as  preservation and conversation of tradition and culture. In a way culture is difficult to imagine without its reconfiguration. Yet at the same time the Gurungs that I met here seemed to strictly adhere to their exogamous clan heritage and saw that intermarriages between couples belonging to the same clan remains unapproved. The retention of this customary practice is an important condition for membership to the Gurung community. Back in  Sadiya my initial name did not matter so much as the clan I belonged to . That was often the first thing I would be asked for.  

An elderly Gurung women and her grandchild with gesture suggesting a question mark in Pathi Pathar, Assam

A photograpgh of a census form circulated by the All India Gurung(Tamu) Buddhist Association

The Gurungs like a majority of the Nepali population in Assam fall under the OBC category. The OBC category is one of several official classifications of the population of India, along with Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SCs and STs) used by the Government of India  .I later discovered that this classification had been a source of contention here as well.  The Gurungs,for example, in Sikkim, Darjeeling and parts of Siliguri have been demanding unsuccessfully for a ST(Schedule Tribe) status.  In this regard I met Rudra Gurung president of the Gao Panchayat Chapakhowa in Sadiya. He is also the district level president of the ‘All India Gurung(Tamu) Buddhist Association’ (AITBA) which has its headquarter in Siliguri. He informed me that on the 16^th of January this year AITBA members from West Bengal,  Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and others states from the region had gathered in Sunpura some few km. from Chapakhowa to attend a conference titled ‘Dharma Sabha’. Mr. Rudra Gurung informed me that the conference focused on creating a Tamu ethnic awareness among the Gurungs in the country and the demand for ST category to replace the present OBC category under a which majority of the Gurung diaspora in India fall. The AITBA has proposed a countrywide census in order to determine in numbers the population of Gurungs settled in India.  Rudra Gurung had raised some doubts over the Buddhist orientation of the organization  since the Gurung people in Sadiya also in many parts of the Northeast have traditionally depended on the Bahun upper caste Hindu Nepali for religious  indoctrination, instruction and ritual service. However, with growing ethnic consciousness among the Gurungs brought about by modern educated Gurungs and organisations like the AITBA, there is a shift in the way the past is interpreted and perceived.  

I met MacMahon Gurung the next morning in Sunpura and the final day of my trip here; a retired school headmaster from a government high school in Sunpura  and an influential member of the AITBA, Tinsukia division. As I was jotting down his name on my notebook he would share with me the story behind his Anglic name. A senior officer in the Assam Rifles had suggested his name to his father who was posted in the McMahon Line during the Indo-China war.   And so for the rest of his life his name would become a signifier of an arbitrary boundary whose lines are again becoming a source of consternation between the two Asian giants.

Mr.Macmanhon at his residence in Sunpura, Assam

I took my eyes off the lines on his forehead. They had been pegged there as if I had been transported to the frontier side and was now looking at the deep fissures which make the Macmahon Line. I wanted to stay with on the story but perhaps it was not the right time. Anyhow, time was not on our side so I began my probe again into the issue of ST status for the Gurungs that the organization was demanding. He opined that the Gurungs were originally Buddhists and therefore fell outside the Hindu caste order thus making their claim for a “tribal” status even more legitimate.

A monastery under construction in Sunpura, Assam 

I also inquired with him if this political desire for the legislation of ST status was in consideration of the growing culture of ethnic identity movements which has rocked the region in the last two to three decades. He felt that the xenophobia for the Bohira Gata In Sadiya (a term spoken in Assamese to describe outsiders from the state) was reserved at least for now for the people of Bangladeshi origin. However, in the 1980’s during the Assam Andolan movement a wave of reverse migration of Nepalese had been witnessed . But he added that 90% of the Nepalese in this incident had belonged to the upper Bahun caste who still maintain close kinship ties back home in Nepal. Mr. McMahon’s family first moved here in Sunpura in 1956 and was one of the first Gurungs to settle here. Today a total of fifteen Gurung households permanently reside in Sunpura. 

It was not only the difficulty of procuring a Nepali Nagrita (Nepali Citizenship) and the severance of genealogical ties back in the native country but also positive acculturation that made people like Macmahon Gurung and others to negotiate the differences in their culture and tradition with land and people foreign from their own. It is a phenomenon which most anthropologists and social scientists fail to take cognizance.  Perhaps out of a sense of anxiety and pressure to maintain a certain epistemological paradigm. But the fact is that people with different historical and cultural tradition can come together to articulate a collective identity somehow remains unacknowledged in contemporary discourses on culture and identity. 

Sailing back from Sadiya towards another journey home 

Who I am is determined by the past and the memories that constitute it.  My cultural identity as a Gurung is only one aspect of my beingness in this world.  I am a Gurung but that it is not all I am . There is a fundamental problem with identity assertion political movements based on cultural and historical experience.  Our cultural identities are projected as if there is an authentic universe of self reference which can be identified as Gurung culture. Memory and the past under this political arrangement have to be defined first. The manner in which the past is interpreted and perceived is the difference between one regime to another, one political party from another and perhaps between man and man. Where the authority of the pye is principally sought for in Nepal for the assertion of Tamu ethnic people, the cultural identity of the Gurung people in Sadiya, it seemed to me, were shaped by their encounter, interaction and their collective experience with land and people different from their own. In a sense that was what made them who they were- Les Gurungs.