“I want to clarify my position calmly and respectfully.”
That is how many women in Assam learn to begin—carefully, pre-emptively, almost apologetically—when raising even the most ordinary of concerns. In this instance, the issue was noise. Loudspeakers in a community hall repeatedly exceeded prescribed decibel limits, even during the day.
Requests were made, reminders given, rules cited. The management had been asked—more than once—to do its job. Nothing changed. When frustration finally surfaced in a sharper tone, the problem was no longer the noise, but the manner in which the concern was expressed.
This seemingly mundane conflict—about loudspeakers, rules, and accountability—offers a telling entry point into a larger structure that governs social life in Assam: axomiya bhadrata.
The expectation was not simply that rules be followed, but that the demand for their enforcement remain calm, pleasant, and non-disruptive. Peace was valued more than compliance. Tone mattered more than substance. And the burden of maintaining that peace fell, predictably, on the woman who spoke.
In Assam, axomiya bhadrata is often spoken of with pride. It evokes civility, restraint, cultural refinement, and a gentle moral order that distinguishes Assamese society from the perceived abrasiveness of elsewhere.
To be bhadra is to be well-mannered, composed, non-confrontational—to know one’s place and stay within it. This idea is celebrated as cultural virtue.
Yet beneath its soft vocabulary lies a harder truth: bhadrata has long functioned as a gendered structure of control—one that disciplines women through silence, endurance, and respectability, while preserving patriarchal power without the need for overt violence.
Unlike patriarchy that announces itself through brute force, axomiya bhadrata works quietly. It operates through suggestion rather than command, through raised eyebrows rather than raised voices.
A woman is not told outright to tolerate injustice; she is reminded to “adjust,” to “understand,” to “maintain dignity.” She is asked to be accommodating rather than angry, resilient rather than demanding, dignified rather than defiant.
Suffering borne gracefully is praised as strength, while discomfort voiced aloud is treated as a lapse in manners, a breach of decorum. In this moral universe, the “good woman” is not the one who is free, but the one who adapts without complaint.
A daughter learns early that harmony is her responsibility. If an argument erupts, she is expected to soften it. If a relative makes a cruel remark, she is told to ignore it—“don’t make a scene.” A son’s temper is excused as youthful impatience; a husband’s anger is contextualised as stress.
A woman’s anger, by contrast, is framed as excess—besi kotha, besi bhab—too much speech, too much feeling. Even grief must be regulated. A woman who mourns too loudly is reminded to be “strong,” not to unsettle others. Emotional labour thus becomes second nature, invisibilised as virtue, naturalised as feminine maturity.
From childhood, girls are trained into bhadrata through countless small instructions: speak softly, sit properly, don’t answer back, don’t embarrass the family. These lessons are rarely framed as oppression; they are framed as culture.
A girl who questions authority is not merely disobedient—she is axotbho, unbecoming. The language is telling. It is not behaviour that is judged alone, but character, morality, womanhood itself.
What gives bhadrata its enduring power is its ethical cover. Patriarchy here does not present itself as domination; it presents itself as protection—of harmony, family, community, and culture.
Women who resist are not accused of rebellion alone; they are accused of being axotbho (unbecoming), selfish, Westernised, or disruptive. The charge is not merely political; it is moral. To challenge inequality is to violate civility. To name harm is to disturb peace.
Axomiya bhadrata is deeply invested in the management of conflict—not its resolution, but its containment. Conflict is something to be smoothed over, softened, pushed indoors. In families, disputes are settled privately, often at the cost of women’s safety and autonomy.
Violence becomes a “family matter.” Silence is framed as maturity. In workplaces, harassment is minimised to preserve “cordiality.” Women are advised to avoid confrontation, to not “ruin the atmosphere,” to think about reputations.
In community spaces—namghars, neighbourhood committees, local institutions—harm is rendered as misunderstanding, coercion as temper, structural injustice as adjustment. The insistence on calm becomes a demand for complicity.
Feminist thinkers have long warned us about this politics of calm. Abolitionist feminists such as Angela Davis remind us that violence is not only spectacular and visible; it is also slow, structural, and normalised through institutions and norms.
From an abolitionist perspective, the problem is not merely individual acts of harm, but the systems—familial, cultural, legal—that make such harm inevitable and unaddressable.
Bhadrata operates much like a non-carceral disciplinary regime—it does not punish loudly, but it regulates behaviour through shame, moral pressure, and social exclusion.
Axomiya bhadrata also intersects with caste, class, ethnicity, religion, and geography. Upper-caste, middle-class Assamese norms are universalised as culture, while other ways of being are judged against them.
Women from marginalised communities—tea garden workers, Muslim women, migrant women, queer and trans persons, incarcerated women—are disciplined twice over. First, for violating patriarchal expectations, and second, for failing to perform the “right” kind of respectability.
Their anger is read as threat, their grief as excess, their resistance as disorder. Their suffering is rendered invisible because it does not fit the aesthetic of bhadrata.
Abolitionist feminism helps us see how this respectability politics functions as a form of social incarceration. Silence becomes a cell; adjustment becomes a sentence. Women learn to police themselves long before any external authority intervenes.
In this sense, bhadrata is not merely cultural—it is disciplinary. It produces compliant subjects while disavowing its own violence.
This is not to deny that bhadrata also carries values of care, restraint, and community. These values have sustained people through decades of conflict, displacement, and precarity in Assam.
But when civility is demanded selectively—when it flows upward to protect power and downward to discipline dissent—it ceases to be ethical. It becomes regulatory. The critical question, then, is not whether bhadrata is cultural, but whose comfort it is designed to protect, and whose conflict it demands be swallowed.
For feminist politics in Assam, the task is not simply to reject bhadrata, but to interrogate and transform it. What would it mean to build a culture where dignity does not require silence? Where care does not demand self-erasure? Where women are allowed to be loud, angry, inconvenient—and still worthy of belonging?
Abolitionist feminism invites us to imagine responses to harm that do not rely on silence or punishment, but on collective accountability, truth-telling, and structural change.
Reclaiming Assamese identity does not require preserving every inherited norm. Cultures are not fragile artefacts to be handled with fear; they are living, contested, and capable of transformation.
A more just Assamese society would be one where civility is not confused with obedience, where politeness does not mask power, and where bhadrata no longer serves as the velvet glove of patriarchy.
Until then, we must name what has long gone unnamed—that some of the most enduring structures of gendered inequality in Assam are not maintained through force, but through politeness—and that silence, when enforced as virtue, is never neutral.
Abantee is the Co-Founder and Director of Studio Nilima: Collaborative Network for Research and Capacity Building. She is a doctoral student and presidential scholar at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, George Mason University, USA.
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