Research methods

3.3.1 Participant observation

Vered Amit points out that participant observation, perhaps more so than any other form of research, is unique in that the relationships formed by the researcher are the “primary

vehicles for eliciting findings and insight” (Amit, 2000, p. 2). This was especially relevant to the phase of fieldwork before the elections, where the multiple meetings, rallies, politicians

on the election trail, and speculation about voting behaviour at every tea shop lent itself easily to this method. My intent was to conduct participant observation in a variety of

different settings, shaped by the access I was able to get at local village-level committees and political parties. During the elections it was fairly straightforward to secure contacts, and through gatekeepers, gain access to the political parties in campaign mode. On multiple occasions, the gatekeepers in particular made it a point to take me around on the campaign trail, introduce me to candidates, and keep me posted about election-related events, thus enabling a series of spaces and events at which I was able to undertake participant observation.

During the main fieldwork, however, doing participant observation proved more challenging than I had anticipated, particularly as the traditional “spaces” to observe interactions between different street level bureaucrats and political operatives proved harder to pin down than I had thought. Most village level operatives, for instance, did not have formal office spaces in which they all congregated, functioning instead out of hybrid home-office spaces that were reserved for purposeful interactions such as one-on-one meetings. While many of my

conversations did take place in these spaces, often the presence of others ended up combining interviews and participant observation in a hybrid form of conducting research, driven by the situation of the participants themselves. Amit is also right in pointing out the contradictions of participant observation as a method, in the way that it presumes the “field” as it already exists, whereas it is in fact constructed through the process of fieldwork itself. Challenging these notions of fieldwork also leads to a re-examination of what constitutes the method of participant observation in the first place, and whether it too must become more flexible as the notion of a localised, collective field dissipates (Amit 2000).

The main party office, in Kokrajhar, was the occasional site of some meetings, but never anything regular or predictable. Some constituency-level events were sometimes organised by the party and took place in external venues, such as in a park or by the lake in the form of picnics, and I attended many of these, where I was largely an observer, though I did

participate in the informal conversations and networking. The fluidity of these structures meant that I relied more on direct interviews and conversations than on classical participant observation. However, while it led to me adapting my research methods, learning about these ever-shifting locales and roles also provided invaluable insight into the working of this

system on the ground, the spaces they chose to exist (or not) in, and the actors that drove these choices. These insights are explored in more detail in the empirical chapters that follow. As Li observed during her covert and overt research with female gamblers, participant

observation is fraught with ethical concerns, about how to represent oneself and one’s work, and where to strike the balance between participating and observing (Li 2008). As she finally decided, however, being open about her identity as a researcher, while alienating some participants, nonetheless struck the right ethical balance, and also placed her in a position where she did not need to “participate” intensively (as a gambler) to be able to gain insight. Despite the potentially sensitive nature of material that could emerge in an exploration of the relationship between conflict and governance, I too chose to be candid about my status as a researcher at all times.

3.3.2 Interviews

The primary means of data collection that I employed were semi-structured and unstructured interviews. Especially as questions of governance and state practice were at stake, it was the best route to engaging key informants such as higher ranking officials in the Bodoland Territorial Council, administrative officials in the various departments, as well as politicians and members of the Territorial Council or Legislative Assembly. In addition, given the constraints to participant observation outlined above, purposeful conversations in the form of interviews served as an important source of data.

Unstructured interviews allow participants a greater degree of control over the narrative, especially where the topics discussed are sensitive in nature (Corbin and Morse 2003). This does not imply, however, that the researcher has no power in this situation. As Rapley has pointed out, interviews are inherently social encounters — they are produced as much by the interviewer as the interviewee (Rapley 2001). Even open-ended interviews, seemingly guided more by what participants reveal voluntarily, can also be prompted by the ways in which the interviewer appears to practise neutrality, or maintain silences, for instance, which prompt respondents to go into detail. My main objective in using unstructured and semi-structured interviews as a method was to allow issues like citizenship, state practice, and the access that different communities had to various aspects of governance to emerge as much as possible

from the context itself. Rapley is correct to argue that all knowledge produced during an interview is specific to the context of the interview, and that analysis of such data must consider the idea that what is available is only one version (Ibid.). Far from arguing that this is a reason to abandon the method, however, he argues that it is in fact a reason to make the analysis more transparent in its context, and produced by a specific interaction (Ibid., p. 319).

3.3.3 Archival work

I worked in two archives in India during my fieldwork — the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi, for one month in August 2016, and the Assam State Archives in Guwahati, for a month in September 2017. While Delhi is also home to the National Archives of India, conversations with other scholars of Assam seemed to suggest that Nehru Memorial is a better source of material for the Northeast. It hosts “one of the largest collections of private and institutional papers of leading Indian nationalists, industrialists, politicians, political parties, and associations in the country”, to quote a scholar on an archive review website (Dissertation Reviews 2013). On the Assam State Archives, scholars of Assam have noted that the archives have recently been revamped and are now extremely well-organised and easy to use. Scholars have “access to 266,000 government files reaching back all the way to the earliest phase of colonial rule in north-eastern India, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century” (Dissertation Reviews 2014). In both archives, I was looking at papers and

collections from pre- and post-Independence India. Interesting material emerged particularly on aspects of immigrant labour from erstwhile East Bengal, policing of unrest in Assam, anxieties about Indian federalism, the status of Plains Tribes (like the Bodos) in the 1960s, and issues around the governance of tribal land.

The short periods I spent at these archives (with most of the time being dedicated to fieldwork) meant that these documents paint only a partial picture, and mostly add to supplement arguments I make otherwise. Francesca Moore has written about the partial nature of archives themselves, and how they represent only selective aspects of history, from which the researcher must be as attuned to silences and absences as to the material at hand (Moore 2009). In this way, the archive itself it representative of a certain power dynamic. I found this to be the case in my search in the archives. So for instance, while documents about immigration and the panic around refugee influx in the wake of India’s partition abound, very

few documents are available about the Plains Tribal Council of Assam, an organisation of tribal leaders campaigning for separate statehood in Assam. In some ways, their relative absence in the archives of this period (the 1950s and 1960s), goes on to mirror their

complaints about being erased from the Assam movement of the 1980s, and the emergence of another rebellion, in the form of the Bodoland movement, in the late 1980s as a response to this, among other things.

3.4 Positionality

In Kokrajhar, I was a woman, a non-tribal with a Hindu name, and an outsider from Delhi, a place that itself has a complex and often antagonistic centre-periphery relationship with Northeastern India (Baruah 2005b, 2007). Each of these aspects of my identity had an impact on the fieldwork, often contradictory in nature. Being a woman and a researcher had the dual effect of closing off access to certain people and places, while opening up others (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007). While it added some additional uncertainty about safety in the field, it also made me less seem threatening, and thus more likely to access official spaces, as the

anthropologist Nayanika Mathur also found in her ethnography of bureaucrats in the state of Uttarakhand, India (Mathur 2015). Being an outsider and a woman simultaneously sometimes placed me in odd situations with the women in the field. On some occasions, my “outsider”, and probably differential class status made me one of the “men”, I could sit and eat or drink tea with them, while very often women were the ones preparing the tea or food, a fact which made me deeply uncomfortable. On other occasions, it also gave me access to women in the community, the ability to sit down and have a discussion with just women members in a particular group (with a woman other than my research assistants serving as a translator, if needed). Sultana observes that other markers of class difference — watches, notebooks, one’s style of dressing, and so on can also set one apart from others in the field, and place oneself in specific categories of hierarchy (Sultana 2007).

There has been an increasing self-awareness among geographers about how the politics of research is affected by the institutional and geographical positionality of academics,

particularly in instances of researchers based in the North studying the South (Sidaway 1992, 1993, Madge 1993, Potter 1993), and the knowledge production that results from these uneven power relations (Jazeel and McFarlane 2010, Jazeel 2014). My location as a scholar

studying abroad also added to my classification in the hierarchy of participants, and allowed me access to high-level officials and politicians with relative ease. An interesting spillover effect of this was also on my research assistant colleagues, who were pleased about being affiliated with foreign research (both still wear their Cambridge t-shirts, or so they tell me). In addition to this, I was also returning to a region and a set of people whom I had previously encountered in a different role — that of a development worker. During fieldwork, it my previous, more engaged role in the NGO that I found myself referring back to as a way to justify my present role as a researcher.5 Both with respect to participants as well as

colleagues, I was confronted with their changing (and unchanging) expectations, along with my own. Having been used to being perceived as fairly benign (given my previous

development worker status), I often referenced this role when my intentions were being questioned by participants. I do not imply here that my role as a development worker was somehow less problematic or without its own complex power dynamics. Indeed, an

exhaustive literature (too vast to be done any justice here) questions precisely this assumption of viewing NGOs uncritically (Bebbington and Thiele 1993, Edwards and Hulme 1996, Kamat 2004, Choudry and Kapoor 2013, Banks et al. 2015). Nonetheless, NGOs proliferate in fields like post-conflict reconstruction and humanitarian relief (Lewis and Opoku-Mensah 2006). Post-conflict Kokrajhar was also a place often weary of the many international and national NGOs that descended upon it to undertake humanitarian relief work following the violence in 2012. The inadequate response of government agencies to the displacement crisis precipitated by the riots nonetheless meant that NGOs became an important source of support for basic services needed in the aftermath of the conflict.

As the fieldwork showed me, and has also been observed by Mandiyanike (2009), being detached from a previous, work-related identity could be seen as threatening, as well as unproductive. Many researchers return to places they have previously experienced in other ways, to people that have known them in other roles, while being conscious of the fact that they will choose to represent themselves differently. Other geographers and anthropologists have also written about existing familiarity with a place that may be seen as “home”, which creates its own dilemmas of changing relationships and categories of understanding, and

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being both an insider and outsider (Narayan 1993, Ite 1997, Sultana 2007, Mandiyanike 2009, Zhao 2017).

An important consideration for me while doing the research was how to deal with

disagreeable characters and views. Researching certain kinds of groups means treading with extra caution, negotiating the balance between understanding how they represent themselves, as well as distancing oneself from ideas that might be disagreeable (Gallaher 2009). I was frequently faced with views of prejudice and bigotry, and faced with the choice of either disagreeing, or continuing to present as a “neutral” observer, even though the idea of objectivity in field research has long been challenged by anthropologists and geographers alike. In general, I adopted the latter approach despite recognising its contradictions — I was more interested in understanding why these views existed and how they emerged, rather than imposing a set of views (my own) which did not arise neutrally either. With some of the most abhorrent (again, classified as “most” by me) views — I was careful to never assent or agree, though I admit that silence may have occasionally made me complicit. During a conversation with the top Hindu right-wing operative in Kokrajhar towards the end of my stay, however, I was glad to have made this choice also from the standpoint of safety. His repeated questions about where I was from and to whom I was feeding the information (he had learnt that one of my hosts at the NGO was Christian, which made him suspicious) suggested a degree of hostility that made me uncomfortable, especially as I insisted on standing up for my host at that stage. As other field researchers have also observed, in the context of potentially dangerous or unpredictable fieldwork, silence or noncommittal answers can be useful strategies for a researcher to employ from the perspective of safety (Kovats-Bernat 2002, Naveed et al. 2017).