Bihari rabri and Assamese tea

For those who have read Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves And A Bud and heard Bhupen Hazarika sing ‘Ek kali do pattiya, nazook nazook ka...

For those who have read Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves And A Bud and heard Bhupen Hazarika sing ‘Ek kali do pattiya, nazook nazook kaliya’ (a bud and two leaves, the soft, soft buds), this must be the moment of bewilderment. That Biharis, and northerners in general, have been part of Assam and Assamese society since British times is common knowledge. Their forefathers had migrated as indentured labour to run Assam’s rolling tea gardens.

Now when family after family of Biharis are being butchered in Assam and Assamese passengers are being attacked in trains passing through Bihar, decades if not centuries of cohabitation is being mocked at

and that, too, in the name of employment which is not just a scourge for the two states but for the entire nation.

In Assam, multiculturalism is perhaps the first thing every kid internalised as a first step toward adulthood. Being a Bengali brought up in Assamese environs and having Biharis as neighbours, I don’t count myself as an exception to this. As children, we used to adore the Jackie Shroff-like brawn of our Bihari milkman and got invited by Bihari neighbours for Chhat Puja, Raksha Bandhan and Diwali. A reciprocal invitation for Bihu, Makar Sankranti or Vijay Dashmi was never thought of as something unusual.

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It never struck anyone that thousands of Bihari push-cart pullers, or “thelawallahs”, milkmen, masons, barbers, cobblers, and others, would ever be a threat to anyone. Never was it ever imagined that one could feel insecure while boarding trains from Assam bound for Bihar. The Assamese would relish the rabri at Patna railway station as much as any Bihari would his morning cuppa of Assam tea, probably plucked by some of their own brethren in a nondescript tea garden.

In times of crisis, both communities had spontaneously risen to the defence of the other. Now have things come to such a state that we will have the Ranvir Sena fighting the ULFA? The age of sense has perhaps been left far behind. People of both states must have forgotten that Bihari teachers went to the remotest corners of Assam to teach in Kendriya Vidyalayas, just as the oil from Upper Assam, processed at the Barauni refinery, ran trucks in eastern Bihar. The followers of Bihari-babu Govinda in Assam was never less than that of Dr Hazarika’s fans in Bihar.

And now as the foot-soldiers of Mumbai’s self-styled messiahs rise, narrow-mindedness will definitely hit an all-time high in this country. What’s needed is perhaps some good old sense, some opening of hearts and minds. Some wisdom to perceive how petty interests can drown centuries of co-existence in the cesspool of mindless regionalism.