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Impact of Immigration in Colonial Assam JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 05, 2020 IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION IN COLONIAL ASSAM Dipu Sarmah Research Scholar, Department of History, Dibrugarh University, Assam, India Abstract Assam is a land of fertile soil and the state is known for her natural resources. Due to the reasons, a large number of people from within and outside the country were attracted and immigrated to the state. So the concept of immigration is not a new phenomenon in the context of Assam. But it was occurred in large scale under the influence of the interest of colonial government, which carried a serious threat to the society, polity, economy, linguistic pattern etc. in colonial Assam. In this paper an attempt has been made to understand the various impact of immigration in colonial Assam. Keywords: Immigration, immigrants, Assam, land, etc. 1.INTRODUCTION The term Immigration is not a new concept for Assam. Prior to the British rule Assam was reigned by the Ahom rulers for long six hundred years. But owing to various reasons during the British rule Assam turned into an open place for the outsiders. Britishers encouraged people involved in different occupation to immigrate into Assam removing all the pre-laid rules and restrictions during Ahom dynasty. Under the British rule the administration, developing tea and other industries required a huge numbers of workers towards which local inhabitants were reluctant. Consequently there was an influx of thousand of persons into Assam. The state was totally open for the immigrants. In this write up an effort is taken to discuss about the noteworthy immigrants to Assam during colonial rule as well as the impact of the immigration. 2.Objective The paper aims to study about the noteworthy immigrants to Assam during colonial period and the impact of immigration during the British rule in Assam. 3.Methodology The paper is primarily based on books and scholarly articles in journals. The information presented here is secondary information collected from the sources mentioned above, along with the use of the internet on occasions.The present study is carried out on descriptive mode of analysis. 4.DISCUSSION The British colonial government needed a significant amount of employees to run their administrative machinery immediately after their occupation in Assam. But lack of such skilled workers they started to look for such employees from outside the province which ultimately opened the door for the immigrants into Assam. The name of Robert Bruce, a Scottish explorer is remembered as the pioneer in the field of discovery of tea in Assam. He first noticed tea like plant growing wildly near Rangpur during his visit to the place in 1823 where he met up with Bessa Gam who was the local Shingpho chief. Bruce made an arrangement with him to collect samples of tea leaves with seeds to examine them scientifically. But unfortunately he couldn’t fulfill his plan as he passed away a few years later. But later on his brother, Charles Alexander Bruce collected the sample and a few of these leaves to the botanical garden of Calcutta for proper examination. Hence it had been proved that the quality of the tea sent to them carries equal quality with the tea found in China. Subsequently, the plant was officially classified as a tea variety and named Camellia Sinensis var. Assamica. In 1834, the company government shaped a committee including 14 members under Gordon to survey the places excellence for the tea cultivation. When tea cultivation proved successful in Assam, the then government formed the Assam Company in 1839 to accelerate the tea cultivation in several parts of the state. Later on, the Jorhat Tea Company (1858) was also established and the cultivation of tea was continuously extended at a high magnitude. Expansions of tea industry influenced mainly three sides’ viz. land system and taxation, labour import and the population structure. However, the rapid popularity of tea as a refreshing drink in Europe and America resulted in quick extension of the 2451 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 05, 2020 tea industry by the British merchant in Assam. But the planters faced certain problems of labour force as the local people were not interested to work in the tea gardens. So they started to import a large number of labours from the Bihar, Orissa, Bengal, Central Province, United Province and Madras. (Barpuzari, 48) These labors were expert in cultivation activities and had contributed significantly to the rise of the tea industry in Assam. Migration of the tea labors was continued which reached 76,041 alone in Sivasagar district during eighties. This led to the unexpected population growth of the state which resulted in the huge demographic change of the state. Many of the persons who came to Assam to work on the tea gardens afterward settled down as a cultivator and so helped to bring under the plough its vast area of fertile waste land. (Gait, 356) In early years they were just confined in their culture. But later it was turned to their assimilation with the Assamese culture as they were staying away from the homeland. The development of the coal and oil industries was the most significant legacies of the British rule in Assam. It is mentioned in the old Gazetteer of Lakhimpur that Lt. Wilcox of the 46th Regiment Native Infantry observed coal in Barhat and Supkhong in 1825. On the representation of David Scott, the Agent to the Governor-General, North Eastern Frontier, Mr. Bruce mined 5000 mounds of Coal and send to Calcutta to examine the quality of the coal. Later on, the coal reported to be equal to the British coal and stated the best ever found in India. The first geological reference on coal resources of upper Assam was made in 1865 by Mr. Medlicott of the Geological Survey of India (Barpuzari, 302). Thus coal mining was initiated by Medlicott in 1869 and 1874. Opening of the new coal fields also led to the immigration of various category people from outside the province as labours and other activities. Similarly to the tea industry, the coal industries of Brahmaputra valley were also labour oriented. To maintain all activities related to the industry they needed skilled educated labour force. Initially, they managed to run the mining with the labour supplied by the Assam Railway and Trading Company under the contractors. But most of the locally available workers were not familiar with the sophisticated machinery works. So to fulfill the requirements of the coal mining in Upper Assam, the government invited labour force and inducted professionals for making industry, tradesmen, etc. from places like Bengal, Nepal, Punjab, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (Sen, 34). The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed an all-round increase in industrial activity in the country. Development of the coal mining industry in Assam brought a quick change in modernization of technology and gave a way to industrialization in the state which provided strength to the growth of economic stability. Continuous influx of the employees of the mining companies influenced the socio-cultural scenario of the coal belt areas of Upper Assam. The population of this area was rapidly increasing. Different migrants and immigrants came from outside of the province leading to the formation of a composite society in the industrial regions. The local inhabitants of Assam were not familiar with the administration introduced by the company government. They were illiterate in English and they could not access the newly introduced administrative activities. So the pre-British officials of Ahom court started to lose their importance in the colonial government. Instead, the company government imported a large number of educated Bengalis to conduct the administration of Assam. However, the Bengalis came under the British touch before around seventy years from their occupation in Assam. During this period they almost gained familiarity with the British Administrative system which helped them to take the various job under British rule. As a result, a large number of Bengali people migrated to Assam to help the British in consolidating their power in Assam. The employment opportunity of the Assamese people was gradually decreasing by the appointment of the educated Bengalis in the administrative activities of Assam. Maniram Dewan, the first Assamese tea planter and a representative of Assamese aristocracy protested and complained in his petition to A. J. Moffat Mills against the appointment of the inhabitant of Marwar and of several Bengalis from Sylhet as mauzadars when many respectable Assamese were already out of employment (Sharma, 290). One of the most significant results of the Bengali immigration was the language problem in the 19th century Assam. In 1836, the British rulers imposed Bengali as the court language as well as the medium of instruction in Assam, which was not the mother tongue of the Assamese people. This topic posed as a serious issue among the people of the state for the next many years. After a series of protest colonial government resuscitated the Assamese language in Schools and offices of Assam in 1873. The contribution of Christian Missionaries towards the language issue of the 19th century is widely acknowledged. Marwaris (inhabitants of Marwar), the community known for their trade and commercial activities started to immigrate to Assam in the early part of the Colonial Rule. Prior to the establishment of the British rule in the state, some traders of this 2452 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 05, 2020 community had already occupied trading activities in western Assam. In the absence of any local competition, they found a plain way to monopolize trade and commerce in the state.
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