The census of India, a colonial introduction, has been a political and life-altering text. Census data shares an intimate affinity with the rise of narrow political claims that produced contestations of citizenship and vernacular nationality questions. In the state of Assam in Northeast India, the nationalists—which include the literati, vernacular press, and the middle-class—manufactured what I call enumerative anxieties, increasingly since the early decades of the twentieth century. The contemporary question of the “foreigner” in the region is tied to questions surrounding enumerative anxieties that gave impetus to imagined fear, chauvinism, and social othering of the foreigner figure called the “Bangladeshi.” This talk will attempt to paint a portrait of this figure, particularly how it has been constructed over the years. The most recent construction of the foreigner figure is the new category of the ochinaki manuh, or the unknown/unfamiliar person. This identification/categorization reduces a citizen and a native to being a stranger in their own locality and domicile. The cunningness of this categorisation lies in the fact that the unknown and unfamiliar person, the stranger, is actually arrested with an array of caricatures, clichés, and stereotypes. The talk shall unpack the social life of the “foreigner” in Assam with their attended strangeness vis-à-vis the history of regional nationalism, enumerative anxieties and their role in editing Indian citizenship.

About the Speaker:

Suraj Gogoi is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode. He is a cultural and political sociologist whose research lies at the intersection of law, citizenship, violence, nationalism, food and minorities in South Asia. His forthcoming book explores the emerging questions of citizenship, nationalism and minority in Northeast India. Moreover, his public facing scholarship regularly addresses the various social, political and ethical concerns of India.