Introduction
The day of 15 August 1950 had begun auspiciously for India. The country was celebrating the third anniversary of independence, and with the promulgation of the Constitution and the establishment of the Republic on 26 January, many considered that freedom had come in earnest. The mood was not so buoyant in Assam, India's easternmost state—its chief minister, Gopinath Bardoloi, had passed away on 5 August,Footnote 1 and the region was still reeling from partition riots in the spring.Footnote 2 Anticipation was in the air, nonetheless. In January, the Assam Rail Link, a railway track passing through the narrow land isthmus between Sikkim, Bhutan, and East Bengal, had been inaugurated. Severed by the creation of Pakistan three years before, the terrestrial connection between Assam and the rest of India had been revived. Meanwhile, in the barely administered eastern Himalayan regions that officially belonged to Assam, Indian authorities had just completed their first major infrastructure project, the Lohit Valley Road. Where previously only a dangerous hiking trail existed between the small town of Sadiya, in the Brahmaputra Valley, and Walong, India's last outpost near the Tibetan border, the two were now connected by road. Then disaster struck.
That evening, as celebrations were on the wane, a quake of 8.6 magnitude struck Assam, Tibet, and northern Burma.Footnote 3 Located in an area where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates collide, the region was no stranger to earthquakes. In the previous fifty years, it had experienced no fewer than ten powerful earthquakes, most of which had caused significant damage to property. The last one had taken place just a year before, in July 1949.Footnote 4 Yet one has to go back to the late nineteenth century to find an earthquake of comparable magnitude. For two minutes on 12 June 1897, another tremor of 8.3 on the Richter scale had shaken Lower Assam—killing some fifteen hundred people, levelling masonry buildings, blocking the roads, and damaging the courts, schools, circuit houses, and Christian missions that had marked the entrenchment of colonial presence in the region.Footnote 5 Tom La Touche, an officer from the Geological Survey of India, had toured the Goalpara District to evaluate the extent of the damage. In some places, he had noted to his horror that ‘[n]early all the houses [. . .] are half buried, up to the eaves in sand and mud which was thrown out from cracks in the ground, and it is a wonder that most of the people were not buried’.Footnote 6 The architecture of Shillong and other Assam towns had changed after the catastrophe: houses began to be built ‘in the Japanese way’—with a wooden framework and plaster walls—thought to be aseismic.Footnote 7
Yet if the 1897 disaster was bad enough, the 1950 earthquake was a cataclysm of even greater proportions. At the time, the latter ranked as the fifth biggest tremor ever recorded.Footnote 8 Newspapers likened it to a gigantic atomic bomb.Footnote 9 But on the ground, the situation rather resembled a tsunami being unleashed on Upper Assam. For no fewer than seven minutes, a length of time that must have seemed an eternity to the inhabitants, 41 tremors shook the earth. In these seven minutes, monsoon-gorged rivers burst their banks, and massive landslides blocked Himalayan valleys. Tremors then subsided. But the worst was yet to come. When these natural dams burst, the water engulfed the countryside, and rivers in spate changed their course.Footnote 10 Villages and urban centres were levelled, standing crops were submerged, transport and communications networks were shattered. In a short period of time, the physical map of northeastern India had been refashioned by a natural disaster.
This article explores how the earthquake and its aftermath participated in two other reconfigurations—that of Assam's political geography as well as its place within India's national imaginaries. In the process, it also suggests that changing representations of India's national space in the early independence period served to create and reinforce, rather than erase, new forms of marginality.
As events that seemingly strike people and places unpredictably and irrespective of political or socio-economic boundaries, natural disasters may not, on the face of it, be likely candidates for state-making and nation-building. Yet, while modern political history has little to say about natural catastrophes in contrast to man-made ones, a burgeoning historiography shows that such disasters are anything but apolitical.Footnote 11 Not only are they a ‘sudden, exogenous, and unexpected destruction of state capacity’,Footnote 12 but they also represent ‘breaches [. . .] in the normality of nature [which] given the often unconscious link societies make between the natural and socio-political orders, a breach in the common understanding of what nature is and does has consequences across other realms of thought and behaviour’.Footnote 13
Under the guise of a crisis, natural disasters actually offer an important opportunity to reorder society and build political legitimacy. Indeed, in Japan, ‘the opportunity [offered by earthquakes] to reorder society is unparalleled by any other historical event except perhaps war’.Footnote 14 Earthquakes did not just accompany the emergence of modern Japan in the Meiji era. Attempts to predict them, to manage their aftermath, or to create quake-proof architecture served as catalysts for nation-building, Japanese nativism, and establishing the presence of the state in society—to the point where Japan became ‘an emergency-oriented state’.Footnote 15 Viewed from another angle, the importance of a particular earthquake is socially and culturally constructed, rather than a mere function of its magnitude or the devastation it brings. Earthquakes had befallen Japan for millennia before it became characterized as an ‘earthquake country’ in the perception of foreign visitors.Footnote 16 And it is not just in ‘earthquake countries’ that natural disasters are invested with political and cultural significance. In India itself, the aftermath of the 2001 Kachchh earthquake in Gujarat led to a pitched battle between secularist and right-wing Hindu parties over Kachch's regional landscape and identity.Footnote 17 As the case of Assam shall demonstrate, the opportunity to turn earthquakes into ‘knowledge-making’ objectsFootnote 18 is particularly great in border spaces.
A variety of written archives help us reconstruct the aftermath of the Assam earthquake. Much of the material comes from the Home and External Affairs ministries, the latter being particularly involved in relief and reconstruction following the disaster, on account both of international donations and of its administrative responsibility for Assam's Himalayan tracts. Documents from the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) Secretariat, now held at the Arunachal Pradesh State Archive in Itanagar, complement this picture. Influential English-speaking dailies from western and eastern India—The Times of India, Amrita Bazar Patrika, The Statesman—as well as the most popular newspaper in Assam, the Guwahati-based Assam Tribune, constitute another mine of information, not just about the disaster but about its impact on representations of Assam. The private and published papers of key individuals and institutions—Nehru; Verrier Elwin, the former governor of Assam Sri Prakasa; and the Assam Pradesh Provincial Congress—provide the last major source of material.
This article argues that the 1950 earthquake represents a significant juncture in the evolution of Assam into the seven states of ‘North-East India’—as the region is now known. On the one hand, the disaster and the relief measures that followed it carved out a space for the state and its Himalayan borderlands on Indian mental maps, where previously the region had largely been sidelined or considered an appendix of Bengal. By forcing a large-scale encounter between the Indian administration and the communities of the hitherto barely controlled Assam Himalayas, the same relief measures led to an unprecedented movement of state expansion in this strategic borderland. Yet, in the same process, the aftermath of the disaster fuelled stereotypes about Assam that would eventually further marginalize it within India and undermine its continued unity. The crystallization of the image of India's northeastern borderlands as a place irreducibly subject to the whims of nature and, even more importantly, incapable of taking care of itself (and, therefore, of taking care of its highland dependencies) would poison centre–state relations for decades to come. Imperfect and contradictory, the reordering of this borderland from a colonial frontier to a part of independent India's national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it.
Figure 1. India's northeastern borderlands. Source: The author.
India's mental maps redrawn
Just a week before the earthquake, the freshly departed governor of the state, Sri Prakasa, had mused at:
How few of us, educated men and women, know anything about Assam—and among those who know so little about this fair State, one is inclined to include the Assamese themselves. It is curious—but it is a fact—that Assam has played little part in our thoughts. It has nested quietly in its native hills and dales, and has neither cared to advertise itself nor have any others worried to do so for her.Footnote 19
Several factors played into Assam's relative invisibility, starting with its geographic distance from the rest of the sub-continent and its nature (from that sub-continent's perspective) as a ‘historically “transitional” region’.Footnote 20 Centred around the long, narrow valleys of the Brahmaputra and Surma Rivers, Assam also encompassed the eastern Himalayas, the highlands between India and Burma, and the hills on the northern edge of the Bengal plains. This was, and still is, an area of extreme cultural, linguistic, social, and ethnic diversity, whose ‘links with the imagined core of Indian history were less significant than those with other areas’, particularly Tibet, Bhutan, and the Southeast Asian highlands.Footnote 21 The two most spoken languages in the region, Assamese and Bengali, belong to the Indo-Aryan family, but they are native to the plains only; the mountainous areas that cover most of the region are characterized by an array of Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai, and Austro-Asiatic languages. This linguistic diversity is rooted in numerous migration waves, big and small, which have seen people of various backgrounds (Tai, Tibetan, Bodo, north Indian Brahmin, to cite but a few) move and settle across the region. Most of it is home to ‘tribal’ (Scheduled Tribes) populations. Islam and Hinduism prevail in the Brahmaputra and Surma valleys while the highlands are home to animist religions, small Buddhist communities, and, since the colonial period, Christianity.
Assam's status as a border space had only been enhanced in the colonial period, when it became the ‘North-East Frontier’ of India. The region had been among the last to be conquered by the British Raj, which had occurred only in a piecemeal and rudimentary fashion. Assam proper, that is, the Brahmaputra valley, had been ceded by the Burmese in 1826, but most of the highlands were not annexed until the last decade of the nineteenth century. Even so, the province remained loosely integrated, both internally and with the rest of India. Unlike the North-West Frontier, it was not considered of geo-strategic importance, and extensive portions of territory, particularly on the Himalayan slopes and the Patkai Hills along the Burma border, remained uncontrolled even in 1947. A panoply of exceptions to the rule of undivided colonial jurisdiction created an ‘internal frontier of British rule, not only a physical line but a demarcation of the various realms of transitional sovereignty’.Footnote 22 Only in the twin valleys of the Brahmaputra and the Surma did Assam come under strong colonial control. There, the region became a frontier for capital and labour, due to the phenomenal growth of tea production and, later on, of oil and coal extraction. As often as not, European planters held the reins in the face of the limited presence and ability of colonial authorities.Footnote 23 Soon, it had turned into one of the most profitable provinces in colonial India. And yet, both because this was a two-tier economy and because most of the proceeds accrued to Bengal—the province hosting the industry's headquarters—Assam did not benefit from this prosperity.Footnote 24 These economically unequal relations between Bengal and the northeast frontier might have played into a broader phenomenon: the tendency, at least among colonial administrators, to see and even treat Assam as an administrative and cultural appendix of Bengal.Footnote 25 As a result, the dynamics of global, uneven capitalist development enforced Assam's situation on the margins of empire and emerging national consciousness, as a place of extraction and political backwardness.Footnote 26
The Assamese intelligentsia that had emerged under colonial rule had long chafed at this absence of the region from India's mental maps.Footnote 27 Ever since Anundram Borooah in 1877, Assamese nationalists had tried to carve out a respectable place for Assam in Indian civilization by locating it within Vedic and epic geographies.Footnote 28 Some even attempted to prove that, far from being peripheral to it, Assam was in fact the cradle of Aryan-ness (the ancient kingdom of Pragjyotisha was, after all, mentioned in the Mahabharata).Footnote 29 Yet these attempts to subvert the ‘discursive hierarchy of Indian-ness’ had found little audience in the rest of India.Footnote 30 The partition of British India only worsened Assam's geographic and psychological isolation. With eastern Bengal going to Pakistan, the region was left hanging by a thread from the rest of the country: 99 per cent of its borders were now international.Footnote 31 Concluded nine months prior to the earthquake, debates in the Constituent Assembly had underscored for many Assamese representatives just how marginal their province was. Furious at the lack of knowledge and interest in Assam evinced by his colleagues and at Delhi's refusal to increase the funds allotted to his state, the former Assam prime minister, Syed Muhammad Saadulla, had bitterly complained that ‘the present [constitutional] set-up’ would return Assam to the status of ‘Cinderella of all Indian Provinces’.Footnote 32
Then, on 15 August 1950, the earthquake struck. Fifteen hundred people lost their lives that day. Hundreds of thousands more were affected. Damage to property and land was immense: in Upper Assam, 1,671 villages over a 6,500-square-mile zone were inundated;Footnote 33 12,000 buildings, including 2,000 granaries, were destroyed in North Lakhimpur District alone, and urban centres lay partly in ruins, almost all their earthen buildings damaged.Footnote 34 In Dibrugarh, 90 per cent of the buildings would require massive repairs, including those of important companies. Fifty thousand of the town's inhabitants slept in the open, in the fear of constant aftershocks that could be felt as late as November. Standing crops were washed away, and transport connections severed—the section of the Assam Trunk Road between Khowang and Barbarua collapsed and was torn up over several miles, and many lesser roads were under water. Upper Assam was left with the wireless radio as its sole link to the outside world.Footnote 35
To make things worse, Assam's limited but vital industrial sector, concentrated in the area, was directly affected. At the heart of the oil and tea industry, the towns of Digboi and Doom Dooma lay in ruins, leaving three hundred families homeless.Footnote 36 The bridge on the Buri Dihing, essential to the transport of oil, had been washed away.Footnote 37 Erosion caused by both earthquakes and floods adversely affected the quality of topsoil, causing an alarmist tone to prevail regarding the future of the tea industry.Footnote 38 As for Upper Assam's food requirements, the procurement situation looked critical: fields and crops lay under several inches of water.Footnote 39 Provisional figures estimated the loss from the earthquake at a hundred million rupees.Footnote 40
A disaster of unprecedented brutality and spectacular nature had befallen India's northeastern borderlands. And ironically, it succeeded where the efforts and protestations of Assamese politicians had failed: in the weeks and months that followed the disaster, Assam suddenly turned into a tangible space for Indians across space, time, and social divisions. Official calls for help in the aftermath of the disaster served as a pedagogical introduction to the region. ‘Look at the map of India,’ said Nehru in an All-India Radio broadcast on 9 September 1950: ‘you will find Assam on the north-eastern corner bordering Tibet and China and Burma and Pakistan.’Footnote 41
This new interest in Assam found its materialization in post-earthquake relief efforts. Fuelled by unprecedented popular sympathy, relief began pouring in. Help in cash and kind was gathered from all parts of the country, harnessed through the Prime Minister's Assam Relief Fund and the Governor's Earthquake Relief Fund, and whipped up by constant appeals in the press and by organizations such as the Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC).Footnote 42 Public opinion was mobilizing. A doctor from Nasik suggested sending batches of Congress volunteer workers to Assam, laden with food, clothing, and medical supplies. A Parsi gentleman from Bombay advocated the issuing of stamps, whose sales would fund relief in Assam. Stressing that the poor and lower classes should also be able to offer their help, another reader urged postal and railway authorities not to charge for parcels sent to Assam.Footnote 43
Assam's plight echoed beyond India itself. A new era of international humanitarianism was emerging at the time, ushered in by the end of the Second World War and given added fillip by US–Soviet antagonism.Footnote 44 The earthquake stirred the international community into a frenzy of sympathy and humanitarian action. From Ethiopia to Lebanon, messages of sympathy poured in. From the available evidence, the aid given was plentiful and varied. Indian communities abroad—among whom it is unlikely that there were many Assamese—were among the first to donate. The Indian Association of Djibouti sent 5,000 rupees via the Indian Consulate at Aden. The Addis Ababa community also contributed.Footnote 45 Offers for relief poured in from countries such as Burma, Yemen, the United States, specialized agencies such as the Watnumull Foundation in San Francisco, and the United Nations.Footnote 46 Even the Government of Pakistan contributed 440 tons of rice from East Bengal.Footnote 47 Available government records do not give us an estimate of the funds thus donated to Assam, whether through Indian or international channels. But Dr Naik, a Gandhian activist working with the Bhils in western India who became an honorary secretary of the Earthquake Relief Fund, recalls that it collected approximately eleven million rupees.Footnote 48
The ‘discovery of India’ was therefore still taking place in 1950.Footnote 49 Nowhere was it more marked than for that part of Assam most affected by the earthquake—the Assam Himalayas or, as they were then known, the North-East Frontier Tracts. If the rest of India knew little about Assam in 1950, it knew even less about its remote and sparsely populated eastern Himalayan hinterland. Indeed, until the mid-1940s this mountainous, jungle-clad region bordering Tibet had remained largely beyond the concerns of colonial policy-makers themselves. Provided the local inhabitants did not raid Assam's valuable tea gardens (in which case they would be ‘pacified’ through military expeditions), Shillong and Delhi had seen little gain in interfering in a region that was neither profitable economically nor vital strategically (or so they thought). Though constitutionally part of Assam, most of the hinterland had therefore remained un-administered, separated from ‘settled’ parts of Assam by an Inner Line beyond which no one but frontier officials and a few government-approved visitors were authorized to travel. As for ‘the communities forced to stay beyond the Line’, they ‘were seen as belonging to a different time regime—where the time of the law did not apply; where slavery, head-hunting and nomadism could be allowed to exist’.Footnote 50 It was only during the Second World War, when the eastern Himalayan ‘Hump’ became crucial to Allied victory on the China–Burma–India frontline, that the Ministry of External Affairs decided to expand Indian presence in the Frontier Tracts. Even so, this expansion progressed at a snail's pace, the other Delhi ministries being less than convinced of the region's importance.
As the Indian media started looking for the epicentre of the earthquake, a new awareness of the existence of the Frontier Tracts, and of their belonging to India, coalesced. Newspaper readers were apprised that the epicentre lay just across the Indo-Tibetan border, near the village of Rima—some eighty miles from a place called ‘Wolong’.Footnote 51 Between this border post and the plains of Assam lay a vast mountainous area called, readers were told, the Abor Hills and the Mishmi Hills, which apparently belonged to India. If such was the devastation in the plains of Upper Assam, what could have happened there? Rumours and suppositions were that the Brahmaputra River had turned black;Footnote 52 that entire mountain chains had vanished or collapsed;Footnote 53 and that uprooted trees from species unknown in India were floating down rivers in spate.Footnote 54
An evocative story emerged through the eyes of a figure seemingly belonging to the bygone colonial times—a British explorer. When disaster struck, the eastern Frontier Tracts hosted a singular couple: the ‘plant-hunter’, Francis Kingdon-Ward, and his wife. Famous for discovering the mysterious gorges through which the Tibetan Tsangpo turns into the Brahmaputra River in the 1920s,Footnote 55 Kingdon-Ward had decided to undertake another plant-hunting trip in the eastern Himalayas. Outsiders were normally not permitted into the Frontier Tracts, but his celebrity status and contribution to the knowledge of the region was such that Indian authorities had allowed him and his wife to proceed right up to the border with Tibet. Now in the midst of their ‘botanizing’ spree,Footnote 56 they had pitched their tent in the Lohit Valley, downstream of Walong, when they suddenly felt a ‘vibration so rapid [. . .] as to suggest the toll of kettledrums’. Soon, everything seemed to be ‘falling down an immeasurable shaft’:
Dark as it was, we could see the ridges silhouetted against the paler sky, with their fuzzy outline of dancing trees. The noise was terrific, petrifying, and long continued as whole hillsides, studded with pine trees, slid into the valley. These external clatterings quickly drowned the internal rumblings deep within the crust. But the strangest noises of all came at the end of the shock, when five or six consecutive explosions, all exactly alike, following each other at intervals of several seconds, were touched off. These muffled booms—they sounded like Ack-Ack shells bursting high in the sky—[. . .] were heard on the plain of Assam 150 miles distant, and in Myitkina (north Burma) 200 miles away.Footnote 57
Kingdon-Ward's presence in the very heart of the cataclysm provided an ideal storyline: the testimony of one who had seen it all. Originally printed in the Geographical Journal, the account's influence might be doubtful, had it not been for the high profile that the explorer had enjoyed in the Indian media since the 1930s, at least in the English-speaking press. The article came out in pamphlet form in India,Footnote 58 and it is not unlikely that this narrative of the earthquake and the frontier percolated to an Indian audience wider than the small circles of botany- and geography-enthusiasts.Footnote 59
In the process, the explorer's account may have helped to place not just the earthquake on the map, but India's northeast frontier itself. Far from merely describing the cataclysm, the plant-hunter systematically described the Lohit Valley and its tributaries—with a flurry of maps—before proceeding to a detailed analysis of the disaster's aftermath, and finally retelling his laborious escape from the shattered hills. In the first part of the account, the remote upper valley of the Lohit in the Mishmi Hills acquired a tangible geography (even as that geography was being wrecked); with the second one, an impressive picture of the power of Nature emerged (a picture revealed in several photographs); and the third added a classic ingredient to the construction of lasting impressions: a true adventure story.
In this illegible space made even more illegible by a natural disaster, and which yet was apparently India, events and cataclysms were happening that did not come to light, but nevertheless affected the lives of the people in the settled area. Through the trauma and sensationalism of a natural catastrophe, a fresh awareness of one of India's new corners was taking place. For the first time (and for a short moment), Indian authorities let journalists into the Frontier Tracts. The press reports, aerial surveys, and pictures published by the press were full of approximations, fantasy claims, and inaccuracies. Yet despite them—and perhaps partly because of them—they all participated in the carving of a niche space for the region in the minds of newspaper readers. Speeches like that given a week after the disaster by Jairamdas Daulatram, the newly installed governor of India, to mark the opening of the Governor's Relief Fund, were reproduced in the Amrita Bazar Patrika and other newspapers:
The State of Assam, rendered so beautiful by nature, has suffered a great calamity at the hands of the natural forces. One of the severest earthquakes in [the] world's history has rocked the hills and plains of India's North-East Frontier. The shock has been severest in the hills and upper half of Assam [. . .] The focus of [the] earthquake was just outside India's border and the brunt of the shock has had to be received by hills which shelter the valley of the Brahmaputra. [. . .] Communications in that tribal region were already non-existent. Those who lived or had to be on duty there as sentinels of the nation have been in the greatest danger and slowly news is coming in of what they have suffered.Footnote 60
The Frontier Tracts may have been less talked about, less thought about, less immediately accessible, yet it was they that provided Assam with physical shelter—albeit not an earthquake-proof one—and it was their inhabitants, and those serving among them, who were the security bulwark of the Indian nation.
Relief, rehabilitation, and state expansion
In other words, the 1950 earthquake accelerated the integration of Assam, and particularly its Himalayan borderlands, into representations of India's national space. This reordering had a material counterpart: by causing an important humanitarian crisis, the earthquake triggered an unprecedented expansion of the state's presence in the Frontier Tracts.
At first glance, the earthquake had been, like other modern natural disasters, a ‘sudden, exogenous, and unexpected destruction of state capacity’.Footnote 61 The catastrophe had befallen both the established administrative centres of the region and the fledging outposts in the hinterland. Post-earthquake floods were brutal for Sadiya and Pasighat, the only two settlements in the Frontier Tracts that hosted a substantial administrative apparatus in 1950. Though heavily damaged, Pasighat slowly made a recovery. Sadiya was not so lucky. The Dibang River had changed course, sealing the town's fate.Footnote 62 Eighteen months later, the administrative headquarters of the Mishmi Hills District were precipitously shifted higher up in the hills to Tezu, in the face of Sadiya's impending submergence.Footnote 63 Of this once ‘beautiful township’ and its ‘tree lined avenues [and] spacious bungalows’, remained only a melancholic trace: the ‘iron mast of a flag pole’ in the midst of the waters of the Dibang.Footnote 64
In the hills themselves, the situation was scarcely better. The signs that had hinted at the presence of the Indian state lay in ruins. At Theroliang, earmarked to be an important administrative outpost, ‘[e]verywhere the mountains were silver as lepers with shining white scars, a country of death. No vestige of bridge, bungalow, sheds, or terrace remained; only stones and stones. One would never have suspected that this valley had ever been inhabited.’ Even worse, the road through the Lohit Valley, meant to become the cornerstone of Indian expansion into the area, was partly destroyed. In some places, the river itself was now using it as its bed.Footnote 65
Fledging administrative expansion in the Frontier Tracts seemed to have been stalled at birth. And yet, precisely because there was so little state capacity to destroy, the earthquake could hardly have dealt an irreparable blow to the Indian presence. What had been lost were but the few signs that had hinted at the Indian authorities’ laborious expansion in the eastern Himalayas. Instead, by dramatically highlighting the existence of the region in the national and international press, the earthquake provided the Indian state with the opportunity to expand its presence locally. After several years of stunted development, the disaster whipped frontier administration into action. Far from being purely humanitarian enterprises, relief and rehabilitation became a testing ground for the state-building capabilities of the new Republic of India. The human suffering that the earthquake had caused turned into an opportunity to manifest the active, nearby, and positive presence of the Indian state to the indigenous inhabitants.
‘Relief’ and ‘rehabilitation’ had long become part of the colonial state's vocabulary in other parts of India. Since the late 1830s, famine management had constituted a significant source of state expansion and legitimization for the Raj, which had used it to expand infrastructure and reinforce its structures of governance in North India.Footnote 66 State responses to natural disasters had shifted from laissez-faire to greater state intervention somewhat later, between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries.Footnote 67 More often than not, however, such relief and rehabilitation intentions failed to translate in practice.Footnote 68 For the independent Indian state—whose birth had been accompanied with the influx of millions of partition refugees—relief and rehabilitation played an even more important, and indeed constitutive, part in state-making and nation-building.Footnote 69 The successful management of refugee rehabilitation was vitally important to the Nehruvian state, both to stabilize itself after the turmoil of partition and to assert its greater legitimacy vis-à-vis the colonial predecessor.
Frontier Tracts authorities were authorized to incur two million rupees worth of relief expenditure for the 150,000 and 75,000 people affected in the Abor and Mishmi Hills respectively. The Health Ministry made a further donation of Rs. 19,500,000, and the Assam Government offered surplus clothing. Another Rs. 2,700,000 were obtained from the public, as well as further contributions from several countries and organizations.Footnote 70 The importance of this expenditure—both in terms of the Frontier Tracts’ sparse population and their previous budgets—signals the efforts made by local authorities to shape contact with populations of the interior in a positive way.
As far as the people of the mountainous hinterland were concerned, such earthquake relief was often the first encounter with ‘the sircar’ (the government). For some, this took the shape of a ‘metal bird’ (a plane) dropping much needed salt, tea, or blanket supplies from the sky; for others, that of an officer calling them to the new administrative centre to supply them with these same items, as well as kitchen utensils or agricultural implements.Footnote 71 Many people from the farthest reaches of the Siang Valley came all the way to Pasighat to obtain relief commodities from the government, which they then distributed locally.Footnote 72 Meanwhile, district officers were deputed to tour the affected areas, and various departments in the Agency were instructed to employ tribal labour to inject cash into the economy.Footnote 73
There is little doubt that local Indian authorities took the opportunities afforded by the earthquake seriously, not just in the eastern part of the Frontier Tracts but throughout the region. In Tawang, near the Bhutan border, far away from the earthquake's epicentre, the administration helped repair the Buddhist monastery, showing their endorsement of the values and symbols of local Monpa society and cementing their burgeoning alliance with monastic authorities.Footnote 74 Finally, the aftermath of the earthquake offered an opportunity to focus on a key strategy for winning the tribes over: the provision of medical help.Footnote 75
These initiatives were not always an immediate or unequivocal success. Their organization was difficult given the rugged terrain and the lack of administrative presence—several areas were still terra incognita Footnote 76—and cases of mismanagement of funds were reported.Footnote 77 Moreover, some people came to regret coming down to the plains to collect relief: members of the Ramo and the Pailibo tribes, who live at high altitudes in the upper reaches of the Siang Basin, contracted malaria during their sojourn at Pasighat.Footnote 78 Despite these failings, relief and rehabilitation did succeed in two key state-building dimensions. To begin with, they brought the Indian state and frontier populations into unprecedented contact, including from remote areas. They also changed the pattern of interaction between the two, colouring it in a positive light. Under colonial rule, state presence on the frontier had largely been defined in coercive terms: military promenades and punitive expeditions. By contrast, the aftermath of the earthquake recast the state as a (potential) provider of tangible goods and benefits.
The unprecedented encounter between the Indian state and local society enabled by post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation eventually paved the way for state penetration into NEFA. Whereas in 1950 only two outposts had been opened, nine more were founded the following year. In early 1951, an Assam Rifles patrol was sent to take official possession of Tawang, where Tibetan and Indian officials had jostled for control for years. The takeover was ostensibly linked to ‘earthquake relief measures’.Footnote 79 This new dynamism was not limited to the strategic corridors of the Lohit valley and the Charduar–Tawang route. For the first time, frontier authorities launched expeditions in the country of the Ramo and Palibo tribes in the Abor Hills, and to Gusar in the upper Subansiri. A year later, a series of Assam Rifles outposts and administrative centres were opened in these newly explored regions. Pangin, Mebo, Maryang, Damro, and Mechukha were the most important of them. By 1952–53, the whole frontier—or NEFA, as it was becoming known—was targeted for administrative expansion.Footnote 80
By then, the drive for an increased state presence no longer stemmed primarily from the earthquake's consequences, but from another sort of tremor: the annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China. Tawang's Tibetan abbots, whose links to Lhasa monasteries had become a liability, were gradually replaced by Monpa clerics.Footnote 81 Fears about China did not translate into the militarization of the Indian presence in the Frontier Tracts, however. By smashing down the topography of the Lohit Valley—the easternmost major trade and human corridor between India, China, Tibet, and Burma—the earthquake had also reinforced a false sense that the Himalayas formed an impassable natural frontier with Tibet. India seemed protected from a large-scale invasion. Therefore, the authorities’ key concern from then on lay rather in convincing frontier communities not to look in China's direction.Footnote 82
Attuned to the risk of an increased Chinese presence in the region long before 1950, officers in the Frontier Tracts had advocated securing the loyalty of their inhabitants through development facilities ever since the Second World War.Footnote 83 The earthquake finally gave them the increased development and welfare budgets that they had long demanded. Between 1952 and 1953, a community project was established in Pasighat to resettle Pasi, Minyong, and Pangi evacuees from the interior, rehabilitating them in ‘model villages’ where the practice of wet-rice cultivation was introduced.Footnote 84 One year later, in late 1953, Indian authorities brought in a self-taught anthropologist, known for his strong advocacy of tribal culture and rights, to work on NEFA. His name was Verrier Elwin. Unlike existing frontier officials, Elwin benefited from a high (though not always positive) profile in the Indian media and from a close relationship to Nehru.Footnote 85 His task would be to provide a rationale for the Indian state's expansion on the frontier—a welfare and development-centric strategy of incorporation that would let the tribes develop ‘according to their own genius and tradition’ before joining India.Footnote 86 Yet while it is tempting today to correlate NEFA's incorporation into India through tribal developmentalism solely with Elwin, the elements of the ‘philosophy for NEFA’ had been established on the ground at least three years before his appointment—and it is through post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation efforts that they had been launched.
The realm of nature's chaos and man's mismanagement
A devastating natural disaster had served to reorder India's mental and political maps, stretching them in an unprecedented way to encompass its north-eastern borderlands and seemingly secluding them from their Tibetan hinterland. Yet while the earthquake and its aftermath contributed to independent India's early state-making and nation-building processes, they did so in a way that, instead of paving the way for Assam standing on an equal footing with other regions, led to the entrenchment of the region's marginal status within the country.
To begin with, representations of Assam in the major English papers outside the state did not take on truly positive tones. Official and press reports in the aftermath of the earthquake cast it as a region martyred by natural forces—forces so powerful that they could re-shape the crust of the earth in a whim, and even swallow up the very Dibrugarh house that had hosted India's prime minister a month before, during his visit to Assam.Footnote 87 The official report drafted by the Geological Survey of India after the earthquake left no doubt about this:
Assam is literally known as the home of earthquakes [. . .] This region is the most unstable in India; it lies along the main boundary fault line along the foot of the Himalayas and the eastern Assam ranges, and has been the scene of nearly a dozen major earthquakes during the last century.Footnote 88
Nehru pointed out that other Indian regions regularly suffered from natural catastrophes, and that they ‘[were] all in the same boat. Each [. . .with] a tale of woe to tell’.Footnote 89 Yet none of the floods experienced by other regions—even Bihar and its ‘sorrow’, the Kosi River—could be compared with riparian tsunamis rolling down the Himalayan slopes, or with rivers simply bursting from their riverbeds to carve out new ones through the midst of a busy town. As the Assamese politician Hem Barua put it twelve years later, in a speech on flood control on the Brahmaputra: ‘[i]n Assam, Nature's war is a perpetual affair’.Footnote 90
‘Nature's war’ proved an influential theme in Assam-related news and discussions after 1950. This was particularly the case in the summer months, a season when floods seemingly adopted a metronome-like regularity year after year.Footnote 91 Some years were particularly devastating. In 1951, floods turned Upper Assam into ‘a vast sea of water’.Footnote 92 In 1954, the Amrita Bazar Patrika even reported that the major town of Dibrugarh was about to collapse into the Brahmaputra.Footnote 93 Consequently, flood control figured prominently in Lok Sabha discussions on Assam. Two years after the earthquake, Nehru announced that a central team of officers deputed to report on the state's immediate and long-term problems had recommended the establishment of a River Investigation Division, a four-mile-long stone revetment to save Dibrugarh, massive embankment and drainage works, and a contour survey of the entire state.Footnote 94 This did little to appease doomsayers like Kingdon-Ward, who warned that ‘[i]f all [the factors causing the floods] were adverse in any one year, the results might be catastrophic—so much so that Lakhimpur might become un-inhabitable, and the head of the Assam Valley converted into a vast swamp’.Footnote 95
This recurring characterization of Assam as a region living in the rhythm of natural catastrophes was part of a long line of representations of the Brahmaputra Valley and its hinterland. Early colonial encounters with Assam had marked it out as the home of diseases—not just malaria but also the kala-azar, a mysterious but devastating epidemic that left the countryside depopulated.Footnote 96 The trope of a singularly unhealthy province lived on in other forms, such as unsavoury accounts of rat plagues, rodent invasions that followed the periodic flowering of certain bamboo species and could destroy the entire food supply of highland communities.Footnote 97 Not all representations of Assam were negative, however. Exotic tales of shikaris (hunters), in particular, formed a strong part of the imaginaries attached to the province.Footnote 98 Between April and June 1952, The Statesman dedicated but one article to Assam—and that was in the form of a one-page photo reportage romanticizing Assam as a hunting ground for the rhinoceros.Footnote 99 But all these narratives had one thing in common. They mapped out Assam as a space that was, for all the wealth of Digboi and Margherita's tea plantations, the realm of Nature rather than of men.
This was particularly evident in the ways in which the memorialization of the earthquake cast the Himalayan Frontier Tracts primarily as a physical space, silencing its complex human landscape. Kingdon-Ward's description of the Lohit Valley in the aftermath of the disaster, for instance, made just one allusion to the region being an inhabited space (‘well preserved terraces’), and consequently also failed to mention the human and material losses it had suffered.Footnote 100 Only the small administrative presence and a stranded Assam Rifles party were mentioned. Descriptions such as these served to memorialize the Frontier Tracts as a space largely empty of human presence, only disturbed by the advance (or here, the epic struggle) of the Indian administration.
A similar narrative slant is in evidence in official accounts of the disaster and subsequent relief and rescue attempts in the Frontier Tracts. One particularly dramatic episode was the daring rescue operations at Nizamghat, upstream of Sadiya. Immediately after the quake, this small settlement inhabited by the Adi (Abor) tribe lay completely cut off from the world. Less than a year later, the Dibang River, still reeling from the disaster, changed its course. In a matter of hours, a new channel had appeared. Nizamghat was encircled. The new island would soon be submerged; yet the current was so strong, and the weather so appalling, that any rescue by boat was impossible. Assisted by local planters, frontier authorities put together a daring mission to rescue the inhabitants from the now fast-disappearing island.Footnote 101 Vividly retold immediately after the end of the operation in an official press conference, the struggle to save Nizamghat's population is striking for its focus on the plight of the administrative staff marooned on the island and the heroism of the rescuers, at the expense of the experiences of the tribal population of the Nizamghat area.
When no traumatic, newsworthy events such as floods and landslides surfaced, the smattering of Assam-centred articles that percolated in the English-speaking press beyond the region emphasized the picturesque aspect of its ‘hills and vales’, and the sheer excitement of hunting tigers or rhinoceros in its meadows—thus ensuring the permanence of northeastern India's image as a jungli place: savage, separate, and inferior.
The earthquake also served to vindicate an idea of Assam that had begun to take root in the preceding years: the idea of a province incapable of taking care of itself. Considered of secondary geo-strategic importance until the Second World War, when it became a key frontline against Japan almost overnight, Assam was progressively acquiring a new status as India's strategic frontier, both against East Pakistan and against China.Footnote 102 Moreover, provincial authorities were trapped in a dire financial situation, worsened by the transfer of its richest district, Sylhet, to Pakistan and the loss of most of its trade and communications networks after partition. Hence, Assam quickly became characterized as a ‘problem province’—a derogatory label stamped in during Constitutional Assembly discussion on state finances. Ten days before the earthquake, Sri Prakasa had penned an article that stressed that ‘the place [was] bristling with problems’, from defence and under-developed natural resources to geographical isolation and divisions between hills and plains.Footnote 103
The earthquake contributed to the entrenchment of the ‘problem province’ label. While immediate relief flowed relatively easily in a context of emergency and public sympathy, discussions between central and state authorities regarding long-term relief and rehabilitation were much more protracted. The Assam government drafted a Rs. 37,956,200 long-term plan which, in view of its depleted finances and the scale of the disaster, required extensive central involvement: a three-year grant of Rs. 34,728,500 and a two-year loan of Rs. 3,227,700 repayable in twenty years.Footnote 104 But in the post-partition context—where refugee rehabilitation and economic disorganization made financial retrenchment the order of the day—such demands were not favourably looked upon by the centre. In fact, they aroused suspicion, as the Assam government was simultaneously resisting Central and West Bengal demands to share responsibility for the rehabilitation of East Bengal refugees. Such suspicions were likely heightened when sections of the Assamese press urged the state government to use the devastation and landlessness caused by the earthquake as grounds to refuse to accommodate partition victims.Footnote 105
The issue of earthquake relief soon became acrimonious in the central Legislative Assembly. Rohini Kumar Chaudhury and other Assamese representatives accused Delhi of dithering instead of sending financial help to Assam.Footnote 106 Junior members of the central government, meanwhile, chastised Assam for (apparently) blaming others for its misfortune.Footnote 107 The Calcutta- or Delhi-based papers soon followed this with accusations regarding the passivity of Assam's authorities. The latter were blamed in half-veiled terms for creating a frenzied atmosphere on the basis of wild claims and speculations:
National thinking as to recent tragic events in Assam can profit by some mental re-adjustment. There is no gainsaying the gravity of the havoc [. . .] But the severity of the disaster as pictured by State spokesmen and represented by the radio and the press does not fully accord with reality. The generality of these reports will have one believe that the very earth had risen in nature's wrath, that entire districts are missing. Volcanoes are reported to have revived after centuries of dormancy [. . .] There is a leaven of truth in some of these statements; but the overall picture is out of focus with the facts [. . .] The Government machinery has shown neither the resilience nor the stamina one would expect in a region so prone to natural calamity. Control and co-ordination are conditions that are absent on the governmental plane. Shillong [the provincial capital] appears to deplore the disaster; but has done little positive to meet it. There is an all-too great dependence upon the District Officer already swamped under diversified tasks few are able to tackle [. . .T]he will and the capacity to rehabilitate the afflicted people and the affected area are greater essentials to recovery than the means [. . .] The future, therefore, turns on the heights to which the leadership within the State can rise in this crisis.Footnote 108
Critical assessments of governmental apathy were all the more credible as, ever since colonial rule, the primary stereotype of the Assamese as a people was that they were easy-going and nonchalant (if the observer was in a compassionate mood) and lazy and criminally indolent (if she or he was not).Footnote 109 ‘Yours is a land for gods to live in,’ declared Vallabhai Patel in a speech during a visit to Shillong in January 1948, before adding: ‘Get rid of your enemy, which is laziness.’Footnote 110 Such stereotypes of Assam as the land of lahe lahe (slowly-slowly) had likely been strengthened among India's nationalist circles by the fact that the only Assam-specific policies of the Indian National Congress during the freedom struggle were anti-opium resolutions.Footnote 111
This rather harsh view of Assam became anchored in the highest reaches of the Indian state. In a letter to the chief ministers in October 1950, Nehru noted that ‘[t]he earthquake and after have shaken up Assam. At the same time, I believe, it has done good in the sense that it has roused up the people of Assam and made them realize that it is up to them to pull their province up’.Footnote 112 A year later, his opinion had become even harsher. There is no mistaking the tone in this letter dated 4 August 1951 to Bishnuram Medhi, Assam's chief minister:
I realise that [your food situation] has suffered greatly from recent happenings in Assam. I feel, however, that your Government is not relying on its own resources as much as it ought to. We have become rather slack because we think that foreign food has come or is coming. This is a very dangerous attitude of mind [. . .] After all Assam had a big surplus a year ago. There is no reason why it should become so terribly deficit as is made out, in spite of floods, etc.Footnote 113
Thus, while relief coming into Assam from all around India and beyond heralded a certain consciousness of the region as part of the national space, worthy of sympathy and assistance, the aftermath of the earthquake also reinforced stereotypes that would structure centre–state relations for decades afterwards. On the one hand, the Government of India's attitude was experienced in Assam as abandonment. Reinforced by the continued under-development of the region and the memory of the 1962 Sino-Indian war,Footnote 114 the ‘step-motherly’ figure of the central government is still deeply rooted in the Assamese mental soil.Footnote 115 On the other hand, the stereotype of Assam as a problem region—a state incapable of taking care of itself—was seemingly vindicated. Mutual incomprehension between centre and state would only increase over the course of the 1950s, notably as a result of a worsening independence war in Assam's Naga Hills District.Footnote 116
As far as the Frontier Tracts (officially renamed NEFA in 1954) were concerned, the earthquake and its aftermath became a stepping-stone in convincing the centre of the inadequacy of ever integrating the region within Assam—a scenario envisioned by the Indian constitution. Initially, the earthquake had been an occasion for provincial authorities to retain a foot in the Frontier Tracts: in the aftermath of the disaster, both relief expediency and the need to assuage Indian public opinion made it difficult for the NEFA administration not to resort to the Assam Government's assistance. Assamese leaders, starting with Bishnuram Medhi, had jumped on the opportunity to visit the affected hill areas and meet the local populations. They also arranged for relief to be provided to affected Adis (Abors) at Dibrugarh.Footnote 117 The appointment of an Assamese, S. N. Hazarika, as secretary of the Relief and Rehabilitation Committee at Pasighat in the Abor Hills, may have represented another success.Footnote 118
The collaboration between frontier administration and provincial authorities did not last. As 1951 waned, the NEFA administration gradually closed the door momentarily kept ajar. Inner Line regulations were once again strictly enforced, causing non-governmental organizations and the Assam government to lose physical access to the frontier. State expansion in the eastern Himalayas continued throughout the 1950s, but with an administrative cadre increasingly separate from Assam's bureaucracy, and the provincial government saw the governor and his Adviser's Secretariat becoming increasingly reluctant to keep them informed of developments in NEFA. It would take longer for the eastern Himalayas to be detached from Assam and turned into a separate territory in 1972, and longer still to become the State of Arunachal Pradesh. But after 1950, internal discussions within the NEFA administration show less and less evidence of any will to bring about the merger of the frontier with Assam.Footnote 119
Herein lay all the ‘ambiguities of catastrophe’.Footnote 120 Even as the earthquake helped to carve out a niche space for Assam and its Frontier Tracts in India's national space, this reconfiguration in parallel entailed that the British Raj's ‘old imperial frontiers’ became naturalized within this Indian national space,Footnote 121 keeping them hierarchically inferior to, or at least on another plane from, the rest of India.
Conclusion
Six decades later, the Assam earthquake remains a vivid memory for many inhabitants of Guwahati, Dibrugarh, or Pasighat. On the roadside or on building walls, ubiquitous billboards advertise different cement brands. To convince people to build their home in pakka (sturdy) material, they sometimes caution against another 1950-like earthquake. Meanwhile, people have settled again in the watery landscape where the Siang, Lohit, and Dibang rivers meet to form the Brahmaputra. A new township, Chapakhowa, has emerged. Yet the Sadiya of old has not been forgotten. Submerged it may be, but the former town still gives its name to an administrative subdivision in Tinsukia District, and the ferry crossing is called Sadiya Ghat.
Nor has the image of northeastern India as a ‘problem region’ died out. If anything, it has become even more dominant. The region is now divided into seven states, of which Assam is but one. The mention of ‘North-East India’ evokes a series of overwhelmingly negative images—the seemingly vicious circle between what the Indian state calls ‘insurgencies’ and its own heavy-handed response to these militant movements; fraught ethnic and linguistic relations, fuelled by land and migration issues; intractable under-development despite plentiful natural resources; and, finally, a national security nightmare as a region sandwiched between Bhutan, China, Burma, and Bangladesh.Footnote 122
In its attempts to delineate North-East India's spatial, political, and psychological marginality within India, scholarship has given pride of place to the genesis and trajectory of its various autonomist and independentist movements, and to Delhi's counter-insurgency strategy.Footnote 123 What is suggested here is that, beyond overtly ‘political’ events like partition or armed militancy, multiple historical contingencies contributed to the transformation of old colonial Assam into North-East India. The aftermath of the 1950 earthquake is one such contingency. It may be that the accidental symbolism of a disaster striking India on its independence anniversary heightened reactions to the Assam earthquake. Yet its impact should also be read in the context of the early 1950s. A new development and modernization paradigm—embodied in the freshly minted constitution—was then taking root in India, sidelining alternative imaginings of the nation while justifying increased state involvement in society and economy.Footnote 124 Relief and rehabilitation were a crucial channel for that involvement.
How then can the disaster's legacy help us understand the construction of locality and marginality in a border space? Many works discuss the role of the British Raj in fostering this isolation—for instance by ‘objectifying the geo-body of India's North-East’.Footnote 125 Some also point to the devastating effect of partition in turning post-colonial Assam into a landlocked region. Both observations hold true. Yet independence might not be the only significant disjuncture for the region. While the geographic contours of today's North-East India mark it out as a ‘geo-political accident’ resulting from partition,Footnote 126 the re-fashioning of the region's geo-body in this transitional period did not stop there. The earthquake became an opportunity to discover an area that was considered a ‘frontier’ in ‘the Indian “civilisational narrative”’ (from that narrative's perspective).Footnote 127 And the resultant trauma reminded many people that, even after partition, part of India's territory still lay beyond the confines of East Pakistan.
Furthermore, the Assam earthquake underscores that, rather than the product of top-down, well-planned strategies, state-making and nation-building are often reactions to extraneous events or crises. In turn, this means that state-making and nation-building are much more differentiated, convoluted, and contradictory processes than generally thought—all the more so at the periphery of large, diverse polities like independent India. Northeast India reminds us that the post-colonial as a historical process ‘looks necessarily clumsy, complicated, and inherently incomplete (that is, fragmentary)’.Footnote 128 It is not merely that imperial processes—with their hierarchical underpinnings—continue to exist within nation-state projects such as those of India:Footnote 129 it is very much the reproduction of imperial structures of power and hierarchy that enables some border spaces to become part of a national space.
