(Re)Shaping Self-Image and Image of the City: An Ethnographic Account of Displacement of Tribals in Guwahati

Why is it often that creating space for new urban order means pushing back those at the social and geographical margins of the city further towards the peripheries? How do these marginalized communities perceive, experience, and respond to urban development and change followed by critical, and on top, even ordinary life events? How do the self-image and image of a city take shape following internal displacement? These are some of the central themes of this paper which focuses on exploring how the city of Guwahati, the gateway to India’s north-eastern states and the continental gateway to Southeast Asia, has been witnessing urban infrastructural development and expansion through the eyes of its original inhabitants; primarily two largest tribe residing here, the Bodo- Kachari and the Karbi. The paper employs an ethnographic approach to understand spatial segregation, often marked by land dispossession and displacement, loss of livelihood and habitat leading to major ecological changes in the city space by looking at the everyday life of these tribal inhabitants and documenting their life histories to understand their belongingness with the city. Following a critical event of the state capital shift from Shillong to Guwahati in 1972, the latter, the present capital of the state of Assam, witnessed a mass displacement of the plains Karbi Tribe. The loss of physical land, social connection, community relations, and their interplay is a staggering way to discern memory. The objective of this paper is to relook at past events and acts through which the city has emerged and the State’s role in terms of inclusion and exclusion to understand the social realities in the present.