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Assam and India - Fragmented Memories, Cultural Identity, and the Tai-Ahom Struggle
Yasmin Saikia
Price
695.00
ISBN
9788178241234
Language
English
Pages
336
Format
Hardback
Dimensions
140 x 216 mm
Year of Publishing
2006
Territorial Rights
Restricted
Imprint
Permanent Black

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This book explores how, during the 1990s, socially and economically marginalized people in Assam sought to produce a past in order to create for themselves a distinctive identity recognized within contemporary India. It describes how specific groups of Assamese described themselves as Tai-Ahom-a people with a glorious past stretching back to the invasion of what is now Assam by Ahom warriors in the thirteenth century. Saikia considers the problem of competing identities in India, the significance of place and culture, and the outcome of the memory-building project of the Tai-Ahom. Over her research she lived in several Tai-Ahom villages, speaking with political activists, intellectuals, militant leaders, shamans, and students, and participating in Tai-Ahom religious, social and political events. She read Tai-Ahom sacred texts and scoured the archives in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. She outlines various narratives relating to the Tai-Ahom-by the British, by the Indian state, and within the texts of the people. While India's central regions-the cow belt, Bengal, the Deccan, Tamil Nadu-have been the subject of rich histories in recent times, regions at the periphery such as Assam have not been much written about by sophisticated, analytic historians. By revealing how certain contemporary Assamese have transformed the 'dead' history of Tai-Ahom into living memory, Yasmin Saikia has helped transform our understanding of one of the most hotly disputed sites in modern India.

Yasmin Saikia is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of In the Meadows of Gold: Telling Tales of the Swargadeos at the Crossroads of Assam.
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