Khilonjiya: The Changing Terms of Belonging in Assam

In Assam’s political vocabulary, khilonjiya, usually translated as “indigenous” or “native”, is invoked constantly but has never been formally defined. Over the decades, civil and political society have tried to pin it down; even the Assam Legislative Assembly sought a formal definition. Each effort ran aground on contradictions. In the prevailing legal-ethnic frame, khilonjiya is not merely undefined; it keeps proving undefinable. That failure is instructive: it mistakes a lived, relational practice for a fixed legal category.

One way to think about khilonjiya afresh is to stop treating it as a fixed lineage and treat it as a relationship. Belonging, in this view, was sustained (or eroded) through how people lived with Assam’s land–water commons and the institutions tied to them, and, in that light, asking “who can become khilonjiya?” becomes as important as asking “who is khilonjiya?”. The answer has shifted, from the colonial period through the postcolonial decades to the present, shaped by socio-political context and by modes of incorporation.

This essay doesn’t adjudicate legal cut-offs; it asks how belonging has been made and unmade in everyday life.

By “lifeworld” I mean the everyday web that ties households to soils, chars, embankments, wetlands, forests, markets, and social institutions. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the colonial state transformed Assam’s lifeworld by bringing in different groups under different terms. The most far-reaching change came with the organised migration of East Bengali peasants into the Brahmaputra Valley under the Wasteland Settlement Rules and, towards the fag end of colonialism, under “grow more food” campaigns. These settlers practised market-oriented, revenue-maximising cultivation, especially in chars and low-lying floodplains. This was an encounter between two modes of production: the incoming one emphasised input-heavy permanent cultivation for the market; the existing subsistence-commons system combined seasonal agriculture with grazing, fishing, and wetland use. The scale of migration, land-tenure changes and hydraulic intervention in the floodplains often displaced older commons institutions. This broad reading of settlement history highlights a structural shift, even as local experiences varied.

In the same period, the British brought Tea Tribe/Adivasi communities from central India under indentured conditions to work on plantations. They too were outsiders to Assam’s pre-existing lifeworld, but their incorporation was different: as indentured labour they did not enter as autonomous cultivators competing for village land and commons, but as workers in enclaves controlled by planters. While plantation agriculture had its own impacts on land and forest, it did not, in the same way, set them up as direct rivals for floodplain commons.

Other groups arrived in smaller numbers. Marwari traders from western India entered Assam’s commercial centres, building networks in finance and wholesale trade. They were few in number but played a prominent role in expanding market exchange and credit systems. Individuals like Jyotiprasad Agarwala, born into a Marwari–Assamese family, became deeply involved in Assamese cultural life and are celebrated as quintessentially khilonjiya. But as a collective, Marwaris were, and still are, perceived in popular discourse as outsiders because of their dominance in trade and credit networks.

Independence did not erase these distinctions; it reshaped them. As Assam’s political movements redefined khilonjiya in sub-nationalist terms, different groups were positioned differently in popular discourse. Tea-Tribe/Adivasi communities, still largely on plantations but gradually settling in rural peripheries and towns, were increasingly seen as part of Assam’s ethnic mosaic in much of political and popular discourse. Everyday discrimination and economic marginalisation persisted, but their belonging was rarely questioned in the way it was for others.

Belonging is not a bloodline; it's a practice.

East Bengali peasants, by contrast, were at the centre of growing political friction. Partition, refugee movements, and later cross-border migration blurred the lines between pre-and post-1947 and pre-1971 arrivals. Life on the chars and floodplains involved market-oriented cultivation, and against a backdrop of demographic growth, recurrent bank erosion and displacement; as homesteads were lost to the river, families rebuilt on higher or “government” land and met fresh accusations of encroachment. These dynamics fed the perception that they were constantly reshaping ecological and political landscapes. The language used was ethnic, even when the drivers were structural. This cut across religious lines: Hindu Bengalis in towns and commercial hubs also faced suspicion as outsiders, though often less intense than that directed at Muslim peasants.

Through the later decades, Marwaris often remained perceived as outsiders collectively, even as individual families integrated deeply into Assamese public life. During this period, khilonjiya was mobilised as a sub-nationalist claim tied to land and language, especially during the Assam Movement from 1979 to 1985. But the underlying criteria for who could be included were still shaped by earlier modes of incorporation.

In today’s discourse, the same patterns persist, though they are refracted through new political alignments. Across the ideological spectrum — from chauvinist strands of jatiyatabadis to the Left to tribal organisations — khilonjiya is used as a marker of belonging. Yet it remains undefined, leaving space for selective inclusion and exclusion. The Tea-Tribe/Adivasi communities are broadly accepted as khilonjiya. Their historical position as indentured labourers, rather than land competitors, continues to shape perceptions. They have also built political organisations and negotiated representation within Assam’s institutions.

The Miya Muslim community, descendants of East Bengali peasants, remains largely excluded in popular discourse despite generations of settlement. In official censuses, most declare Assamese as their mother tongue, aligning with the dominant Assamese linguistic identity, though Bengali-origin dialects continue to be spoken in homes and community spaces. Visible socio-religious differences, language background combined with a persistent association with land competition keep them marked as “outsider.” Yet there are Miya families and individuals who, through various social processes, have become indistinguishable from other communities within the mosaic of Assamese identity.

A counterfactual can clarify the logic at work. If, in the colonial period, it had been Naga or Mizo communities rather than East Bengali peasants who migrated in large numbers to the plains, their trajectory might have been different. If they had entered without enclosing floodplain commons or displacing existing patterns of cultivation, they might well be considered khilonjiya of the Brahmaputra Valley today. This counterfactual is not about judging any community; it underlines that the core variable has been the mode and consequences of incorporation.

Seen across this timeline, khilonjiya inclusion depended less on ancestry or any single fixed rule, and more on a combination of factors. It rested on whether everyday practices sustained, rather than displaced, wetlands, seasonal rhythms, and commons institutions; whether incorporation was gradual and small-scale, allowing existing systems to adapt, or rapid and concentrated, backed by state or market power; and whether newcomers engaged through institutions accountable to existing communities or bypassed them altogether.

Defining khilonjiya purely in ethnic or legal terms misses the lived substance that has made the word meaningful to its claimants. Belonging in Assam was built and tested in the everyday arenas where land, water, labour, and institutions met. When newcomers — whether East Bengali peasants, Tea-Tribe/Adivasi communities, Marwaris, or others — entered through those arenas in ways that strengthened shared life, the boundary of khilonjiya could open. When entry happened by enclosing or bypassing those arenas, the boundary hardened. Treating khilonjiya as a relational process also challenges the nationalist tendency to treat belonging as a closed question settled once and for all. It points instead to the possibility of more than one pathway into full and equal membership — pathways that, if grounded in dignity and consonance with the lifeworld, need not lead to conflict in future

In the present, reframing khilonjiya in this way allows us to move from asking “who came first?” to “how do we live together without eroding what remains of the commons?” That shift does not end conflict, but it grounds it in the terms of everyday life — where belonging in Assam has always been decided. I take up concrete, institution-level pathways for such belonging in a follow-up essay.

Bonojit Hussain is a full-time farmer and independent researcher based in Baridatara village, Nalbari district, Assam.

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