Paper short abstract:

In the late 1970s Assam in India's northeast saw a students’ protest against foreign influx.A parallel armed-struggle by ULFA demanded Assam's sovereignty from India. Thus,Assam's intellectual and political history elicited a discourse of dissent defining the marginality which Northeast India grapples with.

Paper long abstract:

Since the seventies of the last century, India's northeast witnessed various armed conflicts , across the region, creating a rebel country outside the national imaginary. Its strategic geopolitical location apart, this part of India remains underdeveloped and is perceived to be not only marginal but violent and "disturbed". In Assam the influx of foreigners from across the borders was a reason for heightened anxiety both demographically and culturally, and a mass civil uprising in the late seventies, led by students stirred a political and social unrest that snowballed into an armed struggle in the next two decades. ULFA, a self styled guerrilla group declared war against the Indian state and fashioned a movement aimed at retrieving Assam's precolonial grandeur and 'sovereignty'. The rhetoric of revolution and the overwhelmingly sub-nationalist sentiments spawned in the wake of these protests led to a climate of dissent in Assam in which a new discourse of alternative narratives proliferated, the subsequent disenchantment with ULFA notwithstanding. Literatures, pamphlets, political reportage and the media largely expressed a lineage of alienation from the nation-state. This period remains in the archival memory of the northeast a fractious moment of resistance and simultaneously, one in which relations with the Indian state got realigned. This paper seeks to understand the politics of rebellion and the historical significance that ULFA's conversations with the nation assume for posterity, even at this present juncture when it is in peace negotiations with the government.