The Bodo Movement and Situating Identity Assertions in Assam

The Bodo Movement has been the most stringent tribal movement in contemporary Assam. This movement had seeded in the colonial times but intensified into a radical political, cultural and extremist assertion in the 1980s. The Bodo movement draws its sources from the ostensible feeling of discrimination, deprivation and injustice experienced by the Bodo community in Assam. During the campaign in order to attain political, economic and cultural suzerainty, the leaders of the Bodo Movement emphasized that the Bodo people are ethnically different from rest of the people of present-day Assam and hence entitled to political entitlement in the form of a separate state—Bodoland. The paper traces the Bodo movement and examines how the plethora of the contemporary identity assertions in Assam is intertwined.