Located in the western borderlands of the northeast Indian state of Assam, Rupsi is today known for its airport, popularly known as Rupsi Airport.
However, the history of Rupsi has been shaped by colonial interests, wherein it served as a military airfield during the Second World War, transnational logistics, and postcolonial state formation. Today, Rupsi stands as a living example of how local landscapes are militarised, abandoned, forgotten, and reimagined by nation states.
In the early twentieth century, the region was the epicentre of Rupsi zamindari, ruled by Jagadindra Narayan Choudhury, with local narratives associating its name with his wife, Rupsi Devi.
The dominant narrative of building the airport as the beginning of the region’s modernisation is a form of historical forgetting wherein it privileges development over local histories of land, people, and dispossession.
Historical accounts suggest that more than five thousand bighas of land associated with the zamindari were occupied by the British to construct an airfield preceding the Second World War (Kanu, 2024). Rupshi Airfield became a part of the Allied forces, mostly used by the Americans to carry personnel and supplies towards the Burma-China warfronts.
Rupsi emerged as one of the biggest nodes through which a world war was strategically and materially carried out. Today, such warfare history celebrates Allied victory and speaks little about land, labour, and displacement caused by the militarisation of Rupsi.
Post-World War II, the military importance of Rupsi airfield began to decline and it was transformed into an abandoned peripheral infrastructure. Attempts were made to convert Rupsi airfield into civil operations, however, they failed.
Over the last few decades, the region underwent major transformations as the partition of the country in 1947 and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 further changed the patterns of mobility, trade, and the social systems.
As the region is situated only a few kilometres from the porous India-Bangladesh border, it came under a strict bordering process wherein the state organised mobility in the region through surveillance and militarisation.
Within such a changing geopolitical scenario, Rupsi existed as a borderland only to be defined through further securitisation and militarisation. It can then be said that infrastructure building can both enable mobility as well as restrict mobility, a contradicting way through which borderlands are produced, remembered, and forgotten.
After several decades of abandonment, Rupsi Airport was rebuilt and commercial flights started operating in 2021.
However, the state has approved renaming Rupsi Airport after Bodo social reformer Gurudev Kalicharan Brahma (Deccan Herald, 2024). This has generated questions about the erasure of Rupsi’s layered colonial and postcolonial history under a new symbolic identity.
The history of Rupsi shows how memory is produced and erased, which histories remain monumental, which remain as local memories, and which stories are forgotten.
Mamoon Bhuyan is a doctoral researcher in Sociology at Brunel, University of London. Sasanka Bhattacharyya is an Assistant Vice-President at Axis Bank Limited.
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