On August 19, 2026, violence erupted in Shillong, Meghalaya, during a black-flag bike rally organised by the Khasi Students' Union (KSU). Statues of Swami Vivekananda and Subhas Chandra Bose were damaged in the course of the protests. Bose's statue was toppled, while the glass enclosure around Vivekananda's statue was smashed. Vehicles were vandalised, and there were allegations that people were attacked.
The KSU has long demanded that Meghalaya's local tribal population be guaranteed rights over jobs, land and resources, and that the growing influence of people and capital from outside the state be curbed. The rally was organised around these demands. Across the states of Northeast India, different tribal communities have their own student unions, which often function as major socio-political forces. The KSU, similarly, is an influential organisation of the Khasi tribe in Meghalaya.
For decades, it has raised questions of land, employment, migration, tribal rights and local autonomy. The basic fault line was already clear: local tribal rights versus outsider dominance. That is where one must begin if one wants to understand why the statues were attacked.
In India, reports of statues of B.R. Ambedkar being vandalised are common. An attack on a statue is not merely an attack on stone or metal. It is an attack on the politics and social memory for which the person has come to stand. Ambedkar symbolises the breaking of social dominance; his statues are therefore attacked by those who wish to preserve that dominance. But attacks on statues of Vivekananda and Subhas Chandra Bose may seem puzzling to people in north India. What quarrel, one might ask, could Khasi youth possibly have with Vivekananda or Bose?
The answer will not be found in books. One has to look at where these statues stood. They stood in Shillong's R&R Colony. R&R stands for Relief and Rehabilitation. The settlement was established to rehabilitate Bengali families displaced from East Pakistan who had arrived here. Residents of the colony installed statues of Subhas Chandra Bose and Swami Vivekananda in their park. There were also plans to install a statue of Rabindranath Tagore. A nearby school is named Tagore Memorial L.P. School.
Seen in this context, the incident becomes easier to understand. The statues of Vivekananda and Bose there were not simply statues of two "national icons". They stood in the middle of a Bengali settlement. They marked that community's cultural memory and its public presence—in effect, they had become symbols of Bengali cultural dominance. The attack on them was, in that sense, an attack on those symbols. Nor was this the first instance of a tribal community in Northeast India resisting Bengali symbols. Bengali imperialism has been opposed before. In private conversations, tribal intellectuals and social activists from Tripura and Meghalaya have forcefully criticised Rabindranath Tagore, the most exalted icon of Bengali culture.
Shillong is a city built in Khasi territory. Modern Shillong, however, was created under British rule. In 1874, the British made it the capital of Assam. With the capital came government offices, courts, schools and other institutions. All of them needed educated employees. From the early decades of its control over Assam, the British administration had relied on officials and clerks brought from Bengal. Bengali employees played a major role in the police, courts, revenue administration and education. Thus, by the time a separate province of Assam was created in 1874 and Shillong became its capital, the administrative presence of the educated Bengali middle class was already established.
Once Shillong became the capital, the process accelerated. Bengali government employees, traders and other professionals settled there in large numbers. Colonial Shillong was not just a new city built on Khasi land; it was becoming a bureaucratic centre in which British rule and the educated migrant middle class that accompanied it became steadily more visible and powerful. An English-educated middle class had already developed in Bengal. Bengali employees, teachers, doctors and other professionals therefore arrived in Shillong in large numbers. Gradually, Bengalis came to dominate the city's administration and institutions of modern education. Prosperous Bengalis built bungalows across the city.
To understand this, one has to see it from the perspective of Khasi society. The land belonged to the Khasi people. Political power lay with the British. But in the everyday machinery of administration, the Bengali middle class seemed to be everywhere. The office clerk was often Bengali. The teacher was Bengali. Doctors and other professionals, too, were often Bengali. Thus, in local experience, British rule and the Bengali middle class came to appear as two parts of the same system. This is the root of what may be called "Bengali imperialism". The political empire was British, but British rule gave the educated Bengali class such an advantage that it became far more influential than the local tribal society.
Bengali culture is often presented as a coherent and distinctive tradition whose roots can be traced to some pure "Aryan" past. History is far more complicated. Bengali culture took shape over thousands of years through prolonged contact, conflict and intermingling among Austroasiatic, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman and other local populations. Bengal was never a sealed cultural island. It remained closely connected to eastern India, Chotanagpur, Assam, Tripura and other parts of the Northeast. Bengali language, food, folk practices and social life bear clear marks of communities that inhabited this wider region long before the Bengali bhadralok emerged. The Bengali bhadralok learned a great deal from these tribal communities.
Food offers perhaps the clearest example. Tribal societies across eastern and northeastern India have long traditions of rice, fish, tender bamboo shoots, fermented foods, local greens, vegetables and forest produce. Bengali society adopted many of these practices. But Bengali society often did not accord the living tribal forms of those traditions the same respect. Fermented bamboo, soybean, fish and other foods from the Northeast are routinely described, because of their smell, as "stinky", "dirty", "wild" or "uncivilised". This is not simply a matter of taste. In Bengal and elsewhere in India, fermented foods such as curd, idli, dosa and pickles are considered perfectly normal and respectable. The problem is not the technique of fermentation. It lies in the social gaze that decides whose food will be called "tradition" and whose will be dismissed as "smelly food".
Pork, blood-based dishes, fermented soybean, bamboo shoots and many local plants are about more than taste. They are bound up with social memory, environmental knowledge and community life. Contemporary anthropological studies treat them not as strange habits of a "backward" society but as elements of a developed knowledge system and cultural identity. But Bengali and other outsider attitudes have often been far less generous. The Bengali bhadralok has had a long tradition of seeing itself as educated, modern and culturally superior. That self-image has shaped its view of tribal societies in the Northeast as well. Nor is this superiority complex unique to Bengalis. People who arrive in the Northeast from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and other plains regions also often regard local food, dress and ways of life as inferior to their own. The difference is that the Bengali middle class has had an older and more influential presence in Shillong, and therefore occupies a distinct place in local memory.
The most revealing feature of this sense of superiority among Bengalis and other plains communities is that it often fails to recognise its own cultural debts. The ritual ululation known as uludhwani is now commonly seen as a distinctive marker of Bengali weddings, Durga Puja and other auspicious occasions. But it is not exclusively a Bengali tradition. Similar collective high-pitched ululation is practised in Assam and Odisha. Documentary references also record uludhwani in Tripuri tribal wedding rituals. It is one of the shared traditions of the wider eastern and northeastern cultural region within which Bengali culture itself developed. One strand of Bengali modernity was formed precisely in this way: it borrowed extensively from surrounding folk and tribal worlds, but the prestige conferred by modern education and colonial power enabled it to present itself as the representative of "civilised" culture.
That is where the tension begins. Khasi society is matrilineal. Its social traditions differ sharply from those of many other communities in India. For a Khasi family, someone turning up their nose at the smell of its food is not experienced merely as an insult to a culinary tradition. The slight becomes part of a larger social experience in which an outsider lives on their land, benefits from local resources, yet regards the local society as inferior. The outsider may call their language a "dialect", their religion "primitive", their food "dirty" and their way of life "backward". Such contempt may look trivial in isolation, but in politics it accumulates. In everyday life it sends a clear message: the relationship is not one of equals. One community takes itself as the norm and sees the other as a backward society that must rise to that norm.
This is why tribal resistance in the Northeast cannot be understood only through statistics of land, jobs or migration. Behind it is also a question of dignity—of how a local society is seen within its own geography. And when an outsider community's economic or administrative presence is joined by a sense of cultural superiority, resistance no longer concerns only the distribution of resources. It becomes resistance to an entire social posture in which outsiders take it upon themselves to teach local people how to eat, how to live and which culture they should consider superior.
Opposition to Bengali dominance in Shillong has a long history. In 1979, Khasi-Bengali clashes in Shillong altered the city's social composition. Bengali homes and neighbourhoods were targeted. People were killed, and large numbers of Bengali families were forced to leave the city. At the time, Shillong had a very large non-tribal population. Its share declined steadily in the decades that followed. Three major waves of violence targeting non-tribal populations have been documented in Meghalaya: 1979, 1987 and 1992. The 1987 agitation was even more explicit. It was also led by the KSU. Thousands of students marched through Shillong carrying banners that read: "Non-tribal get out". At the time, shops owned by Bengalis and other outside traders shut down amid threats and attacks.
The old material basis of Bengali dominance in Shillong has now weakened considerably. The agitations of 1979 and those that followed changed the balance of power in the city. Today, at least in Meghalaya, political power lies with local tribal communities. They also enjoy strong constitutional protections in matters of land and government employment. But when a system of dominance ends, the memory produced against it does not necessarily disappear. It survives in other forms. Sometimes in demands for local jobs. Sometimes in checks on migrant labourers. Sometimes in opposition to outside companies controlling land and resources. And sometimes in the blow of a hammer on a statue.
From a north Indian vantage point, the two damaged statues in Shillong are statues of Indian national icons. But within the history of Khasi resistance, they were not only that. They were also cultural memories of an older Bengali dominance. That is why they became targets.
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*Rabindranath Tagore School of Languages and Cultural Studies, Assam University
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