Assamese people

Definition

The Government of Assam faced difficulties in defining Assamese people for Assam Accord due to a linguistically and culturally heterogeneous population. Though there is a political dispute over the definition of Assamese people, in general; the people belonging to the state of Assam are referred sometimes as Assamese people or more appropriately as People of Assam. The lack of a definition has put stumbling blocks in implementing clause 6 of the Assam Accord, an agreement signed by the activists of the Assam Movement and the Government of India in 1985. Since a legal definition is important to provide "constitutional, legislative and cultural" safeguards to the Assamese people, the Government of Assam had formed a ministerial committee to finalise the definition in March 2007. To address the clause 6 issue, AASU had announced a definition on 10 April 2000 which was based on residency with a temporal limit: All those whose names appeared in the 1951 National Register of Citizens and their progenies should be considered as Assamese.

Despite the lack of a legal definition, social scientists consider the Assamese identity to constitute a tribal-caste continuum that has been the result of a historical process.

Demographics

The population of Assamese-speaking people in India, as per the 2011 Census, is 15,311,351, constituting 1.26% of the country's total population. This places the Assamese language at the 12th position among the 22 scheduled languages spoken in India. Out of this, 15,097,257 people reside in Assam, making up 48.38% of the state's total population, which accounts for 98.6% of the total Assamese-speaking population in India.

History

The Assamese identity developed through a long process of interaction among the tribal and non-tribal populations of the Brahmaputra Valley, rather than originating in a single kingdom or military conflict. The formation of regional states, the expansion of settled agriculture, intermarriage, Hinduization and the growth of a common vernacular gradually connected otherwise diverse communities. Chandan Kumar Sharma describes this social formation as a "tribe–caste continuum" in which tribal and non-tribal groups played equally important roles.

Early roots of the Assamese identity

The linguistic and literary foundations of the identity can be traced back to the early half of the late medieval period. By the 14th century, early Assamese had developed into a literary medium under rulers of several regional polities. The Kamata king Durlabhanarayana patronised Hema Saraswati, Harivara Vipra and other poets, while Madhava Kandali rendered the Ramayana into Assamese under Mahamanikya, a Kachari ruler of central Assam. Satyendranath Sarma observes that the surviving works demonstrate that Assamese had already evolved into a powerful medium of literary expression during the fourteenth century. The courts of Kamata and the Kachari kingdom therefore contributed to a regional literary culture long before Assamese was adopted by the Ahom court.

A parallel process of social and religious integration was taking place in eastern Assam. Hinduization was already visible in the Chutia kingdom before the political ascendancy of the Ahoms in Upper Assam. By the early sixteenth century, this process had produced a differentiated Hindu social order within the kingdom: the caste system had become prevalent in Chutia society, and its caste-Hindu population included Brahmins, Kayasthas, Kalitas and Daivajnas or Ganaks. Vaishnavism was also present in eastern Assam before the rise of the 16th-century Ekasarana movement. Chutia copper-plate grants from 1392 and 1401 record Vaishnava Brahmins and a donee described as a devotee of Vasudeva, indicating the presence of Vaishnava religious networks at the royal court and in rural society. Later Vaishnava traditions likewise preserved memories of Sadiya or Kundil as a centre for Vaishnavism. These developments illustrate the coexistence of Brahmanical, Vaishnava and indigenous traditions within the Chutia state.

In the longer process of assimilation, Sharma identifies the Chutias, Borahis, Morans, Deoris and Kacharis among the communities that became Sanskritized Assamese peasants, although they did not entirely abandon their earlier customs. The pre-Ahom Chutia and Kamata polities thus formed important eastern and western centres of the linguistic, religious and social processes from which the later Assamese society emerged.

Role of Vaishnavite institutions

From the 16th century onwards, Ekasarana Dharma gave this existing cultural and linguistic field a wider institutional basis. The Assamese and Brajavali works of Sankardev, Madhavdev and their followers, together with the networks of satras and namghars, created shared spaces of worship, literary production, performance and community life. The movement brought sections of the Bodo-Kachari, Tiwa, Rabha, Karbi and other communities into the sarania fold and facilitated their incorporation into the wider Assamese society, while many indigenous customs continued to survive.

These institutions, although later patronised by Ahom kings, were not originally creations of the Ahom state. Their social base developed through the activities of the Vaishnavite teachers and their disciples, and only subsequently attracted sustained royal intervention. By the seventeenth century, both the Ahom and Koch states attempted to appropriate the movement's extensive popular base, while the satras increasingly received land, manpower and other endowments from ruling elites.

Consolidation of the nationalistic identity

Assamese as a nationalistic identity was consolidated when the Ahom kingdom came under repeated attacks from the Bengal Sultanate in the early 16th century, and the people banded together under Suhungmung (1497–1539) to resist a common enemy. The kingdom not only succeeded in resisting the invasion, but a general pursued the invaders to the Karatoya River and freed most of the Kamrup and Kamata regions.

This process was strengthened under Pratap Singha (1603–1641) and during the subsequent Ahom–Mughal conflicts, culminating in the Battle of Saraighat in 1671. Muslim soldiers, artisans and professionals who had accompanied invading armies or had migrated peacefully into the valley were incorporated into the kingdom and participated in the resistance to Mughal expansion. During the same period, Assamese progressively replaced the Ahom language at court and in administration. The Ahom state therefore brought many of the already existing linguistic, religious and ethnic components of the valley within a more unified political framework. As a result of the Ahom kings increasingly patronising Hinduism alongside the proselytising activities of Ekasarana Dharma since the 16th-century—a large section of the Bodo-Kachari peoples converted to different forms of Hinduism in the 17th- 18th centuries, and a composite Assamese identity comprising caste Hindus, tribals and Assamese Muslims began to form.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Assamese society comprised Hinduized ethnic communities, caste-Hindu groups, plains tribal communities and Assamese Muslims. The precolonial developments produced a composite linguistic and cultural society, whereas Assamese nationalism in the modern political sense emerged under colonial conditions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and remained centred primarily in the Brahmaputra valley.

Tribe-Caste continuum

Social movement due to state formations

Scholars believe that with the arrival of Indo-Aryans in Assam, there was a simultaneous Sanskritisation and deshification processes beginning in the 5th–8th century during the reign of the Varman dynasty of Kamarupa;—and all Assam's kings were originally non-Indo-Aryan who were gradually Sanskritised. This enabled many of the common folks to follow the ruling classes into Sanskritisation and also bring along with them elements of their own local customs and religions.

Social movement due to Ekasarana religion

The Ekasarana dharma that emerged in the 16th century and the proselytising activities of the Sattra institutions created a path for individuals of tribal origins to traverse the tribal-caste continuum. Tribal people could take initiation at a Sattra—and a neophyte would be called a modahi if he still took liquor. A modahi successively advanced to the Sarania group (also called saru-koch), Koch, Bor-Koch, Saru-Keot, Bor-Keot and then a Kalita. At the end of this tribal-caste continuum were the Brahmins and often the pontiffs of Sattra's were Brahmins called Goswamis. Some of these Goswamis were a few generations earlier Kayasthas, and some Kayastha pontiffs were earlier tribal and low caste. It is this process by which many groups such as Chutia, Borahi, Moran, Deori, Boro peoples turned into sanskritized ‘Assamese’ peasants, especially in Upper Assam and to some extent Central Assam; and it was noted that some kayastha sattradhikars were originally Morans, Kaibartas, Chandalas, Tantis and Sankardev had himself instated gurus from Muslim, Kaibarta, Nagas, and Garo communities.