The Boro (Anglicised as Bodo) community, hailing mainly from the plains of Assam, who migrated to Delhi at different points in time after 1947, have emerged as one the prominent communities from the north east of India. It was in 1988 that a collective forum of the community in the form of Delhi Bodo Association (DBA) was founded to provide a common platform for community members to meet each other and to celebrate seasonal cultural festivities collectively.
The foundation of DBA has certain historical and political significance in the context of its associational relevance as it worked to create an alternate space for forming an ethnic based identity in Delhi at a time when the political movement for the creation of a separate Bodoland state in Assam was becoming more assertive. Therefore, the objective of the paper is to analyze the way DBA has undergone change since the time of its inception, especially regarding their ideas about ‘self’ and community identity as they engage with the larger society of India.
The associational networking is made possible by applying the method of ‘culturalism’ to reclaim community identity and to find new meanings in such alternate spaces, at individual or collective level. While it is more common to see associational networking in diaspora communities, the need felt for forming such city based inland networks by ‘migrant population’ is also to do with ‘sense of belongingness’, which can be more intimate but can also become widely political in character. It has been observed that with the change in the demographic composition of Boro people in Delhi over the last several decades, the aspirational change has become apparent; and the intra-community dynamics provide scope for understanding the larger issues of mobility, engagements, intersectionalities, contestations and intergenerational positionalities in a given space.
