Rites of Passage

by Hazarika Sanjoy

This book is a serious study of the situation in the Northeast— and that includes Bangladesh. And no better man could have been found to write about the area and its people than Sanjoy Hazarika. What sets the book apart is its focus on migrants not as just numbers but people for whom border crossing is an inevitable necessity.

Genres: India

368 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2000

Reviews

[Anshuman Swain · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded down to 3

A very informative book about Bangladeshi migrations into the Indian northeast region. The author's travels and interviews with people in different parts of NE India (especially Assam) and Bangladesh gives a humane feel to the problem and possible solutions. Although now a little old, the book provides a varied and nuanced approach to perceive the situation.

(PS: I felt that the book was a bit more meandering than needed.)

[Jake · Rating 1 out of 5]

During my master’s I read wonderful paper called ‘categorical fetishism’ and it looked at the desire by some, such as the media and policy makers, to categorise migrants in very binary ways. For example refugees or economic migrants, as Hazrika does at the end of this book. Of course this is a massive simplification of what it is to be a refugee and an economic migrant, one can be both and neither. I have coined the pejorative term for this sort of poorly researched book, that is ‘journalist books’. Hazarika starts his argument with a relatively balanced introduction, but you quickly find he has an argument to make, limited flawed evidence and a list of suggestions. Unlike some journalist books I have read recently this one isn’t even particularly well written or edited.
A major flaw of the book is Hazarika returns to Malthusian logic of over population throughout the book. He acknowledges in the final chapter and one of the earlier chapters the flaws in Malthusian thinking, however his retort well there isn’t enough land and biologists point to reducing wildlife. Yes, great send the critiques of Malthusian thinking to the bin then? No, critiques of Malthusian thinking engage in exactly this topic. Land in itself is rarely a constraint on the population it is the politics and economics of how land is distributed and how value is extracted from that land, not the population in itself. Just as the human impacts on nature are not the poorest masses extracting too much, so much as globalised systems that destroy, extract and produce at the expense of nature. In somewhere like Bangladesh one can look to shrimp farming, readymade garments and ship breaking as examples of ecologically destructive practises that destroy nature and aren’t predicated on a massive population. Unsurprisingly, Hazarika’s argument falls flat.
While the Malthusian strain that runs through this book is problematic, Hazarika also fails to really dig into migration and it’s effects. He looks at the migrants in an anecdotal sort of way through his conversations with them and some cigarette packet number crunching. But he doesn’t really look at the communities they form across the borders, their economic activities and the effect of these activities in any way that he could meaningly generalise from. He seems oddly obsessed with the political, hung up on whether illegal immigrants might be voting, and the xenophobic political movements that have risen in the region. I worry that his failures to empirically explore in some depth the issue of migration hands a win to the xenophobic political movements more than this book actually helps anyone increase their understanding of migration in the region.

This is a book I don’t think adds much for any one, even a particularly specialist reader. One to avoid.
Some further complaints:
1. He mistranslates terre des homme, the name of an NGO, as People without land, when it actually means People of Land,
2. His references are a mess, at one point he quotes his previous book as being the source of a quote by Gandhi in a speech. There are of course ways to quote a speech, just Hazarika doesn’t need to use them for some unknown reason.

Some better books on the topics covered in this book are as follows:
1. The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia and Identity and Experience at the India-Bangladesh Border: The Crisis of Belonging which look at the lives of people living on the Bangladesh India border,
2. Stateless in South Asia: The Chakmas between Bangladesh and India which looks at the migration of ethnic minority communities to India from Bangladesh as refugees,
3. Paper Citizens: How Illegal Immigrants Acquire Citizenship in Developing Countries which looks at the ways that migrants use documentation, with some focus on South Asia.
4. An Endangered History: Indigeneity, Religion, and Politicson the Borders of India, Burma, and Bangladesh which looks at the histories of indigenous populations on the borders of bangladesh and India.

[Nibir Deka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strangers on the mist was more of political history fused with ground reportage. This book goes more into data plus the ground situation. Good chapter on Nellie Situation which explored the rumour mongering, ethnic narrative of the episode. Also, the data on Bangladesh migration with through studies was relevant to understand the current context. The best part of the book is the narrative style writing of Sanjoy Hazarika.

[Er. Alam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book to understand the dynamics of immigration in Assam and India as a whole.