Colonial Labour, Displacement, and the Politics of Belonging in Jhumur Panday's Deceit Brought Us to Assam and Other Stories from the Barak Valley

This paper examines the postcolonial significance of Jhumur Panday's Deceit Brought Us to Assam and Other Stories from the Barak Valley (2025), focusing on colonial labour recruitment, displacement, subaltern marginalisation, gendered violence, and the politics of belonging. It situates the collection within scholarship on Assam's plantation economy and recent criticism of literary representations of tea-garden labour. The paper's principal literary source is Shibani Phukan's review of Panday's collection; it draws historical and critical context from research on colonial recruitment, the Chargola Exodus, labour mobility, and the representation of marginalised communities in Assamese literature. The paper argues that the collection, as represented in available criticism, offers a regional intervention into dominant accounts of economic development by foregrounding the lives of communities whose labour and experiences have often been marginalised. It also considers how translation and regional memory shape the circulation of these stories. Because the full collection was not available for direct examination, the study is explicitly limited to a secondary-source-based analysis and does not claim to provide close readings of the stories. It concludes by identifying questions for future research based on direct textual analysis.