A Contested Issue
Padam Nepal
QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY IN ASSAM: LOCATION, MIGRATION, HYBRIDITY by Nandana Dutta Sage Publications, 2014, 270 pp., Price not stated
July 2014, volume 38, No 7

The question of identity vis-à-vis migra- tion in Assam is a much debated, highly complex, thoroughly contested issue. The issue is enmeshed in the cauldron of contending views and is delivered differently by intellectuals, administrators, media, and various elements of the Assamese social structure, including individuals both natives and the migrants. The volume under review is couched in dense theoretical premises on the one hand, and, the lived experience of the author, on the other. The Introduction has six different yet organically linked sections: subject position: personal and professional; reading in location; the discipline and the location; responses to violence; rationale; and texts. The author discusses the personal and the professional subject position in the development of her arguments in view of the disciplinary practices of her profession, and her personal experience involving her hybrid identity, its covert or overt deliverance, both at home and outside and the (dis)comforts associated with such deliverances.

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