Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract The conclusion sums up how the provincial Assam Mahila Samiti, a host of local samitis along with the feminist figure Chandraprava Saikiani, mobilized a gendered public in the Brahmaputra valley in colonial Assam. When compared to other major women’s associations in contemporary South Asia, such as the AIWC which was led by upper caste, upper-class women, Chandraprava Saikiani’s leadership of the AMS for more than five decades despite her socially compromised position as a mother outside matrimony and a lower caste woman is an exception, not just in the colonial times but even today. The mahila samitis created a space for women to express themselves through public speaking, picketing, protest marches, literary pursuits, performance of plays, and weaving cooperatives among others, thereby inflecting the tenor of the nascent public sphere. The conclusion also raises methodological questions such as the need for an interdisciplinary mode of enquiry while dealing with historiographical issues in recovering and rewriting a women’s association’s trajectory in colonial Brahmaputra valley. Finally, the book calls for a reviewing of the successful discursive production of Northeast as outside of the rubric of development, which is as much a legacy of colonization as a product of the sustainable political economy that Sanjib Baruah critiques as ‘durable disorder’ of our contemporary times. If individuals and sometimes collectives imagined these locales as having other futures, how are we to acknowledge and understand those alternative visions from our contested location?