The dying legacy of ‘Makum’

Makum, a trinity point of three premier towns connecting Tinsukia, Digboi and Doomdooma is entombed with a historical legacy of Chinese community, whose population and bequest is fast dying away with the passage of time.
The name Makum itself means ‘meeting point’ in Chinese, where a community of Chinese people continue to reside even today, conjecturing their existence in the Upper Assam district of Tinsukia since Indo-China war era who were brought here in Assam as labourers to work in the tea gardens in the Singpho kingdom, which was close to the British ruled Assam.
It is an unfortunate story of dark wretchedness hidden under the layers of unclaimed history for the last 49 years. It is the history of the Assamese Chinese people, who were forced to uproot from their place of birth because of their Chinese origin.
Yes, they were Assamese Chinese people, an integral part of the Assamese mainstream society.
The British had brought a handful of Chinese people to work in Assam’s tea gardens in the 19th century. Several more who were poor and in need of work joined them over the years. The move over and final assimilation with the Assamese society was not an easy one, considering the different cultures, traditions and language of both.
As time passed by, a small village in upper Assam came to have the highest concentration of the community. It was called Makum, the Chinese term for “meeting point”.
While the Chinese community was slowly amalgamating with the people of Assam during their stay in the tea gardens, the 1962 war had reigned a period of the brutal reality of being homeless in their accepted homeland. After the war broke out, almost 2,000 people had become subjects of repression, state suspicion to the point of even labeling them enemies just because they lived close to the Chinese border, from where the infiltration was suspected.
The Indian government forcefully sent a majority of these Assamese Chinese people to an “observation camp” in Rajasthan. And after the war ended, more than half of them were sent to China. Many were separated from their families.
The horror and grief of separation from the land which they had adopted as its own to staying among the Assamese brethren, learning, speaking, eating, and celebrating festivals with the locals left a deep scar among the new generation with the remnants of the Makum community past still fresh even today.
Only a handful of the community survives in Makum. But their lives are testimony of the horrors inflicted by the post-war world and the authorities responsible for their plight with racial segregation infringement of personal liberty.

Author: Nandita Borah