The Assam Agitation was a six-year long movement (1979-85) led by a students' organization that had far-reaching social and political implications in Assam. The main goal of the movement was a demand to stop the illegal immigration of foreign nationals to Assam mainly from the neighbouring country Bangladesh, to prevent their participation in the electoral process and to deport all foreigners living illegally in Assam. The Assam agitation and the contested memories that are a part of its legacy remain at the heart of the social and political debate in Assam today. In this study, I choose two texts written in Assamese: Rita Chowdhury's novel Aei Samai, Sei Samai and a volume of short stories and novellas, Pura Gaont Pahila Bahag (1987) to see how this event has been memorialized in different ways in literature. I look at how these texts redefine and highlight competing notions of identity and nationalism; whether memory creation through aesthetic productions can act as an enabling force and if so, in what ways; how ethical rethinking and remembering may point towards newer possibilities. I examine how the "multiple fracturing" (in Andreas Huyssen's words for representations of the Holocaust) of the memory of the agitation may prevent the freezing of memory and as Marianne Hirsh remarks in the essay "Connective Histories in Vulnerable Times" (2014), "galvanize memory in the interest of activist engagement and social justice".
Keywords: Assam agitation, memory, identity, nationalism, fracturing, enabling
