- Lived:
- 6 June 1890, Raha, Nowgong (Nagaon) district → Guwahati; died in office, 5 August 1950
- Field:
- law, then politics — Congressman, twice premier of Assam, and the constitution-maker who wired the Northeast's hills into the Indian republic
- The Big Idea:
- In 1946 the agreed plan for free India filed Assam under Bengal, in a group the Muslim League would dominate. Bordoloi refused to let his province enter that room — against the British, against the League, and against his own party's high command — and because he refused, when the subcontinent split a year later, Assam and everything India now calls the Northeast stayed in India.
- In their words:
- "…not to sit in a section with any other province" — his instruction to Assam's ten constitution-makers, moved in the provincial assembly, 16 July 1946
- If you remember one thing:
- Roughly one Indian in thirty lives in the eight states of the Northeast. That they carry Indian passports at all traces, more than to any other single decision, to a dying lawyer in Guwahati saying no to almost everyone — and being right.