Photo by Aniketh Kanukurthi on Unsplash

Assamese film poster

অসম দেশৰ বাগিছাৰে ছোৱালী

ঝুমুৰ-তুমুৰ নাচি কৰো ধেমালি

চম্পা নহয়, মোৰে নাম চামেলি

.

Oxom dexor bagisare sowali

Jhumur-tumur nasi koru dhemali

Champa nohoi, mure naam Chameli 

.

I am a girl from the tea gardens of Assam

We have fun by dancing jhumur

Not Champa, my name is Chameli.*

Book cover

These lines are the refrain of the immensely popular song “Oxom Dexor Bagisare Sowali”/ “A Girl from Assam’s Tea Gardens” from the classic Assamese movie, Chameli Memsaab, of 1975. Written and composed by Bhupen Hazarika, who is widely acknowledged as the voice of a modern, cosmopolitan Assamese identity, the song combines lyrics in Assamese and Bagania, spoken by Adivasi plantation workers, and crystallizes ideas of Adivasi identity and a romanticized notion of the colonial tea plantation in the female Adivasi body. The relatively lesser known short story by Nirode Chaudhury from which this and other movies in Bangla and Hindi were adapted shows how literary concerns interacted with notions of ethnic identity in the vernacular literary sphere of Assamese, generating ideas of cultural normativity that have been crucial in Assam’s political landscape in the postcolonial period.

The story follows the curiosity of the first-person male narrator, a young schoolteacher and aspiring writer, regarding the mysterious death of an Adivasi woman, Chameli, who married the British ex-manager of the plantation and became known as Chameli Memsaab. His multiple attempts at cultivating a writerly persona are key in establishing the caste Hindu narrator as the culturally normative modern Assamese subject and the Adivasi as his ‘Other’. His writerly gaze fixes the Adivasi workers in the story as ‘jongli’ or wild and savage, and they are portrayed as native to the serene plantation, thereby erasing the long histories of colonial ecological transformation and migration of indentured labour drawn from a variety of Central Indian tribal communities (Behal). This has the paradoxical effect of simultaneously establishing the Adivasi workers as geographically rooted in the plantation across time and casting them as separate from the ‘standard’ Assamese cultural identity.

Binita Borgohain as Chameli in the song “Oxom Dexor Bagisare Sowali”.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOqwqUac9NU

The relationship of literature to identity concerns is directly brought to the fore when one of the narrator’s friends suggests that he engage in a romantic affair with an Adivasi ‘girl’ as inspiration for writing thrilling fiction. He retorts instead: ‘Yes, I used to write stories, I do so even now. But why do I need this tea garden for that? People say that nowadays in Assamese literature a piece of work doesn’t qualify as literature if there is no raciness in it. I don’t belong to that group of people’ (8, emphasis mine). The word ‘raciness’ is used here in English, albeit in the Assamese script. Although some might argue that the prolific Chaudhury was a ‘racy’ writer himself, here he distances himself from the ‘cheap’ expectations of Assamese pulp fiction readers by using the English word with disdain. The multilingual meta-textual moment reveals the overlap between English and Assamese reading publics and that critical distinctions within the literary field are generated through a negotiation of the dynamics of ethnic cultural legitimacy, particularly as they play out on the female Adivasi body.

As ethnicity continues to dominate the political discourse of Assam, “Chameli Memsaab” shows that vernacular literary cultures are not merely incidental or representative of political opinion but, to borrow from Bourdieu, are complex, autonomous fields of  production and negotiation.

*All translations are mine.