[Assam] Tai-Ahom Connection - Yasmin Saikia/ A Follow-up

[Ram Sarangapani]

But, to the winner, goes the spoils - including history :-)

--Ram
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 10:34 PM, Dilip and Dil Deka <dilipdeka at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Remember while history is interesting, it is not perfect. History as we
> know is winners' history, losers' history gets lost or hidden. - Word of
> wisdom from one with certitude :-)
>
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> ________________________________
> From: Chan Mahanta <cmahanta at charter.net>
> To: A Mailing list for people interested in Assam from around the world <
> assam at assamnet.org>
> Sent: Monday, March 9, 2009 9:48:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [Assam] Tai-Ahom Connection - Yasmin Saikia/ A Follow-up
>
> *** Should this open our eyes to the pitfalls of our own certitudes of what
> we consider HISTORY ?
>
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> At 8:50 AM -0700 3/9/09, Dilip and Dil Deka wrote:
> > Does anyone know Yasmin Saikia's whereabouts? Is she still in the USA?
> > She has done a significant amount of research in Tai-Ahom history. She
> should be able to educate us on the origin of the word Ahom and other
> related issues we have been discussing. How do we bring Yasmin Saikia into
> the net?
> > Dilip Deka
> > =============================================================
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > The Tai-Ahom connection
> >
> >
> > YASMIN SAIKIA
> >
> >
> >
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> >
> > Andrew and John Carnegie, two brothers from Liverpool, England, unable to
> find employment in the metropolitan city of London, decided to set sail for
> India in May 1865. A month later they arrived in the colonial capital city
> of Calcutta and immediately found employment in an English tea garden in
> Assam. On 18 July 1865, Andrew wrote a letter to his mother in England in
> which he described the people and place in these words: 'There is nothing
> visible but mud and jungle here in Assam. I am alone in the jungle, a sort
> of a small king among the 400 niggers, counting women and children.'
> Andrew's representation of a dark, impenetrable land and people echoed the
> sentiments of colonial administrators of the 19th century. Almost all of
> them agreed that 'Assam [is] more a land of demons, hobgoblins, and various
> terrors.'1 'The denseness of its jungles, the steep precipices, the
> torrential streams,' in British colonial eyes, 'created a sharp
> >  geographical line separating the known from the unknown, civilization
> from savagery.'2
> > Colonial representation of the place matched their attitudes concerning
> the people. 'The Assamese,' Colonel Butler writes, 'have ferocious manners,
> and brutal tempers. They are fond of war, vindictive, treacherous and
> deceitfulŠ the seeds of humanity and tenderness have not been sowed in their
> frames.'3 Further, they were declared as unlike any other group and not part
> of the Aryan race, within which the British codified the high caste Hindus
> who were deemed the majority community in India. Placed outside the lineage
> of Aryan history and Indic culture, Assam and her people were reduced in the
> colonial official lexicon into a wild frontier society without history. The
> unthinkability of a history of Assam survived and has been reinforced in
> postcolonial India. Even today, scholars of Indian history by and large view
> the region as a 'militant' frontier peopled by insurgent groups who
> disrespect the sacred national history. These perceptions,
> >  we should note, are the views of outsiders who back their assumptions
> with official power to transform myths into believable facts.
> > If, on the other hand, one investigates the memories and local narratives
> of the people of Assam a very different picture emerges. Local history that
> is recorded in the premodern chronicles called buranjis provides a picture
> of a place in motion. Ruled by a god-like king referred to as swargadeo, the
> area of the swargadeo's domain was a blended space settled by a hybrid
> community referred to as kun-how in the Tai language and Ami in the Assamese
> language buranjis. This group did not have a fixed label but was referred to
> as a conglomerate of 'we' people.
> > What is the memory of the historical 'we' community in Assam today? In
> this paper I investigate the process and consequences of the making of a new
> Tai-Ahom memory to rethink a history of the 'we' community at the crossroads
> of Assam linking South Asia with Southeast Asia.4 Although a very small
> number, no more than six hundred thousand people in Assam, are involved in
> the Tai-Ahom identity struggle, they have raised a salient question about
> the epistemological and geographical limits of Indian history and are
> challenging the inherited colonial historiography to open the space for a
> dialogue between Delhi, Rangoon and Bangkok in order to benefit marginal
> groups and extend the horizons of history and memories to include the past
> in the present, South with Southeast Asia.
> > In the following sections I first provide three short disjointed
> narratives of the moments when Ahom and later Tai-Ahom were conceived,
> constructed, and used for different purposes. Next, I examine the
> performance and production of Ahom memory in different public sites to show
> that it is both a political and economic process attracting diverse
> audiences. In the final section I investigate the Indian national and the
> Thai transnational interests in this movement to suggest possible outcomes
> of the invocation of memory linking Assam with Southeast Asia.
> > Until 1826, the kingdom of Assam was independent. On colonial occupation
> the region was transformed into a frontier and a policy for taming the
> hostile tribes was immediately generated.5 In 1873, the northeast was
> demarcated into two zones by the Bengal East Frontier Regulation I: the
> inner line area of hills with their local administration, and the plains
> area of the Assam Valley under colonial administration. Ironically, while
> the topographical and administrative division between hills and plains was
> established within colonial discourse the negative stereotypical perception
> toward the people remained unchanged.
> > Initial reports on the people were not positive.6 The Assamese were
> deemed by Moffat Mills an 'unattractive', 'degenerated' and 'stupid people'
> (1854, 5).7 The colonial representation was neither strange nor surprising.
> However, what is deeply problematic is that colonial intervention led to an
> abrupt end of histories that preceded that encounter and closed the channels
> of communications with groups that were mapped outside British India. Hence
> when we view the changes during colonialism we have to interrogate the
> policies and labels of representations both for what they convey as well as
> hide.
> > The negative recognition of Assamese by the colonials, in turn generated
> internal formulations of labels by pioneers like Moniram Dewan and Ananda
> Ram Dhekial Phukan, to name a few. While the local leaders readily accepted
> the colonial name, Assamese, to refer to themselves, they focused on
> constructing positive markers of community identification and suggested
> Assamese was a 'blended' community constituted by Hindus and non-Hindus who
> were bound together by shared social interactions facilitated by the
> Assamese language.8 The emphasis on language as an identity marker was very
> effective in the face of Bengali penetration and degradation of the local
> community.9
> > Alongside the construction of a linguistic identity for the Assamese,
> political rhetoric also emerged. The high-tide of Gandhian nationalism drew
> many in Assam to join the Indian National Congress (INC) in the shared hope
> of freedom and economic development to follow. Immediately, the Assamese
> started seeing themselves through caste Hindu eyes as a low-caste, polluted
> people, not unlike what the British had told them.
> > To rethink an image for overcoming the stigma, the Assamese created
> several new organizations, such as the 'Assamese Language Improvement
> Society', 'Assam History Society', and 'Assam Literary Society' that
> laboured to produce a 'civilized' history for making the Assamese a cultured
> Hindu group. This met with opposition from groups in Upper or eastern Assam.
> In 1893, 'Ahom Sabha' and, again, in 1915, an 'Ahom Association' were
> created to bring the Mongoloid people together and resist the intrusion of
> the Congress party. In reaction, the Hindu community published a book called
> Ripunjay Smriti in which they defamed the Ahom as a polluted group and
> suggested that the Assamese should perform rituals to cleanse themselves for
> seeking reentry into the Hindu caste fold. The harsh language of the Hindu
> Assamese motivated the Ahoms leaders to ask their supporters to relinquish
> Hinduism, give up learning Assamese language and return to
> >  local dialects and archaic rituals of ancestor worship.
> > In turn, to create pride in their past, new narratives of Ahom were
> written by trained and amateur historians to enable children to remember
> 'Assam in the context of heroes.'10 The assumption that history should be
> the saga of heroes was not an unusual expectation. Almost all history is the
> record of the winners and a tool for creating a continuous genealogy of
> power. What is surprising in the narrative of Ahom history is the disruption
> of the formula in very interesting ways. Instead of borrowing heroes of the
> 'high' Aryan civilization and culture, danabs and akhurs (demons and
> monsters) were invoked as the founder of Assam's history. Padmanath Borooah
> wrote a narrative that soon found wide circulation and was repeated in many
> new versions by historians of Assam.11
> > Borooah writes, 'In ancient times this land was ruled by danabs and
> akhurs. Mahiranga Danab was probably the original king here. Among his
> successors Narak Akhur became a very powerful king. During his rule, this
> land became Pragjyotispur [land of the eastern light].' The story continues
> to relate that the Hindu god Krishna attacked the kingdom of Pragjyotispur
> but could not defeat the local king. Krishna ingratiated himself by marrying
> a local princess and his grandson, Anirudha, too, married a princess from
> Assam. Many more dynasties of akhurs and danabs followed who thwarted
> invasion and made Hindu gods compromise to their superior power.
> > In the 13th century 'the Tai people came from BurmaŠ They were Buddhist
> peopleŠ But to conquer land they moved southwest, intermixed with the hill
> tribes, and adopted their religionŠ Sukapha, a prince of Mungrimungram, the
> original homeland of the Tai people, came to Saumar in 1229 A.DŠ The Ahom
> kings ruled for six hundred years.'12 In narrative a chronology of the
> swargadeos was suggested and they were valorized for mitigating differences
> and generating a combined polity in an ever expanding domain.
> > What was the purpose of this kind of history telling and memory building
> and wherefrom did the historians of Assam derive a story of the historical
> Ahom and swargadeos? To examine these issues we have to return to the
> category called Ahom and Assamese and the politics of identity generated by
> the colonial administrators. It appears that the first myths about Ahom were
> created by the British agents. Borrowing from the myths of Ahom origin
> compiled by J.P. Wade, the first British resident in Assam, Walter
> Hamilton-Buchannan introduced the term Ahom in the East India Gazetteer in
> 1828. He claimed that originally a group of Shan warriors led by a mythical
> godlike figure called Sukapha came to Assam in 1228 and established an Ahom
> kingdom. Buchannan's story of the Ahom which was neatly packaged within a
> western linear chronology became a colonial discourse in the early 19th
> century.
> > By telling a story of migration, conquest, and settlement of a warrior
> group from upper Burma, over and over again, a particular memory of the past
> was created in colonial documents. Most importantly, by creating a group of
> rulers and identifying the swargadeo as the fountainhead to inherit power
> from, the colonials predicted their own future in Assam. No sooner they
> achieved this purpose the colonials became active in debunking the Ahom
> rulers. In 1891, the colonial ethnographers, E.T. Dalton and H.H. Risely
> concluded that the Ahoms, the descendents of the proud race of Shans, had
> degenerated into superstitious, backward, apathetic Assamese.
> > Consequently, new problems emerged as the economy of Assam was radically
> altered with the imposition of tax on all products and importation of labour
> to slave in the colonial capitalist economy. In the shifting economic and
> social conditions new enclave societies emerged and the historical 'we'
> community became a phantom. Its only visible remnant was in the new shared
> condition of poverty of the local people. By the beginning of the 20th
> century, Assam, which was once a thriving crossroads kingdom in the east,
> became one of the poorest regions in British India.
> > The distinctions between Assamese and those claiming to be Ahoms were
> blurred, so much so that when Ahom was declared dead and folded into the
> Assamese no one questioned the colonial power of myth making; rather the
> local intellectuals accepted the colonial version of their history. The
> elimination of Ahom as a dead community by the colonials is bothersome, but
> it was preceded by yet another blatant lie - that of the 'discovery' of an
> Ahom community in the buranjis. Did the colonials find a distinct Ahom
> community in the chronicles? To answer this question we have to return to
> the buranjis and investigate the descriptions of Ahom within them and the
> distortions that followed in the colonial reading of these texts.
> > It is assumed with some reservation, following G.E. Grierson's suggestion
> in The Linguistic Survey of India that buranji means 'a storehouse to teach
> the ignorant' (1904). By and large, almost all buranjis being narratives of
> swargadeos tell the readers of the deeds of the godlike figures. The effort
> is to create a cult of god-kings. In this ontological scheme demarcated
> identities of the subject communities was counter-politic; they appear to us
> a generic 'we' community that is continuously in process. For creating
> identifiable units within the 'we' polity, service caucuses under the
> command of six nobles were created. The name of the place they were
> associated with became their identity.
> > Although Ahom is not a defined ethnic community in the buranjis, it is
> not an unknown term either. It is used to refer to a class of officers
> constituted from within the preponderate 'we' community. The Ahom men, in
> other words, were the swargadeo's or king's men. They were the civil and
> military officers controlling and administering his domain. Ahom was not an
> inherited status, but an appointment that could be gained and lost in one's
> lifetime. Ethnicity was not the factor that made Ahom, but the favour of the
> reigning swargadeo and an individual's ability determined his status as
> Ahom. Hence, in the reign of different swargadeos, the composition of the
> Ahom officers differed greatly. In the buranjis we find that Naga, Kachari,
> Nora, Garo, Mikir, Miri, and even Goriya (Muslim) formed this blended
> community of trusted servants. Like the space of the polity, the class
> called Ahom expressed the reality of the crossroads. This history of the
> >  hybrid Ahom was overlooked by the British when they came to Assam.
> > Unable to read the original chronicles, they concluded that the large
> number of king's men belonged to one community. The discovery of Tai
> language buranjis led the colonial administrators to conclude that a
> 'foreign' group had migrated from the hills of Burma into Assam, established
> an Ahom kingdom, and used the buranji literature to record their history and
> culture. Immediately after declaring them an ethnic group, the colonials
> made the Ahoms 'unthinkable' by proclaiming them 'dead'.
> > Ahom as a memory and a politics resurfaced in Assam in the 1940s and,
> again, in the 1960s. In 1967 when Assam was reorganized into hill and plains
> states, the Ahom group petitioned the Indian government to recognize them as
> a separate community. In October 1967 the 'Ahom Tai Mongolia Parishad'
> demanded a separate Mongolian state to be formed in Upper Assam 'in which
> Ahom-Tais and the various other tribes would enjoy social recognition and
> all political rights.'13 Their demand was not accepted and Ahom continued to
> be part of the Hindu Assamese but within it became a 'backward community'.
> > In 1968, an attempt to create the boundaries of Ahomness led to a renewed
> invocation of Southeast Asia. This was actualized in the term Tai-Ahom that
> was coined by Padmeshwar Gogoi, a professor at the Guwahati University, in
> his book, Tai and the Tai Kingdoms with a Fuller Treatment of the Tai-Ahom
> Kingdom in the Brahmaputra Valley (1968). To complete the breakaway from the
> Assamese Hindus, the new Tai-Ahoms revived a religion calling it Phra Lung,
> which emphasized the worship of ancestors, mainly swargadeos. In the next
> section of the paper, I will focus on the contemporary dialogues and
> politics of identity in various sites, in Upper Assam, Thailand, and Delhi,
> which point to one thing - Tai-Ahom is now a label of identity that is
> exchangeable for a variety of aspirations and demands for the future. The
> question is whether these aspirations will be fulfilled?
> > On 17 October 1981, during the International Tai Studies Conference in
> New Delhi, a group of Ahom men and Thai scholars met to discuss strategies
> about how to make the Ahoms of Assam Thai-like. Tai-Ahom they hoped would
> overcome the restrictive labels of Indian, Hindu and Assamese. The
> foundational moment was also part of a long series of 'articulations' of
> marginalization and disempowerment that had produced anxieties and hopes,
> which now travelled easily to new distances to find 'belonging' among Thai
> people in Thailand.
> > But first the base in Assam had to be constructed and strengthened.
> Toward this end, the Tai-Ahom activists created an organization called the
> Ban Ok Publik Muang Tai (Eastern Tai Literary Society) and revived the
> moribund Phra Lung religion. New prayers were written by the late Domboru
> Deodhai Phukan, who was earlier identified by the Thai anthropologist B.J.
> Terwiel as 'the last of the Tai-Ahom ritual experts.'14 Domboru Deodhai
> explained to me the Phra Lung religion in these words. 'Phra is a Buddha
> like figure. Lung means the Sangha. Phra Lung means the community of the
> worshippers of Phra.'15 Dietary habits were also changed to mark the
> departure from Hinduism. Beef, taboo among caste Hindus, was introduced in
> the Tai-Ahom diet, as did partaking of alcohol called haj or lau pani.
> > Along with the identification of a community based on old and new
> customary practices, revival of Tai language was taken up in the newly
> established Tai Language Academy at Patsako. New festivals and commemorative
> events such as Sukapha dibah, Jaymoti dibah, Me-dem-me-phi, etc, were
> created and publicly celebrated. Additionally, an active academic
> conversation about Tai-Ahom history and culture was generated and several
> conferences were organized in Assam and outside to facilitate the
> entrenchment of a Tai-Ahom memory among believers and scholars. The academic
> and cultural impetus for this movement was facilitated by the then chief
> minister, Hiteshwar Saikia, a self-proclaimed 'Ahom-Assamese'.. Saikia
> donated vast sums of money to make the Ahom a community. This gave boost to
> the publication industry, which created a new knowledge base about Ahom.
> > Under the leadership of the Ban Ok and many more new organizations that
> emerged in the 1990s facilitated with financial help by local politicians,
> Tai-Ahom turned the gaze of Assam from the west, that is Delhi, to the east,
> to Southeast Asia. In this enterprise, besides Thai academic interest in and
> support for the Tai-Ahom movement, networks of complex transnational
> relationships developed with Buddhist missionaries, the Thai monarchy, and
> rebels groups of Upper Burma who were drawn into the politics of identity in
> Assam.
> > However, after Saikia passed away in April 1996 the Ban Ok lost its local
> financial support. In the mean time, in 1997 the stock market collapsed in
> Thailand and this affected the funding of academic projects and slowed the
> pace of trade and tourism that were part of the Thai search for Tai groups
> outside of Thailand. Alongside, in India, under the leadership of the
> Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a new wave of Hindu religious nationalism took
> hold. The lack of financial support coupled with the rising tide of
> fundamentalist Hindu identity slowed down the exchanges between the Ban Ok
> and their Thai supporters. Nonetheless, throughout the early 1990s, the
> leaders and supporters of Tai-Ahom performed the critical task of revealing
> the restrictive limits of national identity and created new patchworks of
> contingent labels and a local narrative linking Ahom with Thailand to make a
> pan-Thai identity.
> > A question that arises is why do some people in Assam want to be
> recognized as Tai-Ahom? The reasons, like the various groups who profess
> this identity, are neither orderly nor homogenous. There are clear divides
> between the classes and their respective expectations. The urban class views
> it as a political and professional tool for empowerment, and they focus on
> the issue of job allocations and economic improvement. On the other hand,
> for the depressed groups of deodhais, the subalterns in the movement so to
> speak, the movement is an arena of resistance against the exploitative
> institutions of the caste Hindus. The Tai-Ahom connection with a variety of
> Buddhist groups in Southeast Asia, the deodhais hope, will deliver them from
> their ignominious and powerless condition and place them, once again, in
> positions of social and religious leadership.
> > Because the spaces that the urban youths occupy are different than their
> counterparts living in the villages, consequently their aspirations also
> differ. Urban youths want adventure and experiences in the form of travel,
> education and employment in Thailand. These young men consider a new level
> of consumerism as a mark of their difference from the Assamese. This is not
> an option available to the rural youth who are engaged in a life and death
> struggle for survival. Irrespective of the gaps between the different
> groups, it is clear that varieties of people are engaged in the movement and
> are facilitating and sustaining change. This is not to suggest that they are
> autonomous architects of their world; I believe these agents are also
> subjects of history and the society that they inhabit. They are made by
> circumstances of history both within and outside Assam
> > One of the visible groups influencing and making Tai-Ahom is a group of
> Thai academics. Why are the Thais interested? To answer this question, a
> brief note on the 20th century Thai academic and intellectual politics is
> important.
> > In 1939, by royal mandate Siam was renamed Thailand and a composite Thai
> society was created by including the diverse communities. Resistance to the
> contained Thai national community emerged almost immediately. Phibun
> Songgram and Luang Wichit Wathakan launched an ambitious movement called
> Choncat Thai to claim a common Tai race constituted by people living within
> and outside Thailand. This discourse was reinforced by invoking the 19th
> century story of Tai migration from Nanchao in Southern China, which western
> missionary historians had identified as the original homeland wherefrom the
> Tais had supposedly migrated in the remote past.16
> > Several groups in Laos, Vietnam and Southern China were claimed as
> sharing a common Tai ancestry. The search for kin groups was intensified in
> the 1970s as Thailand was drawn into the western capitalist commercial
> orbit. A new school of thought called 'Community Culture' emerged in
> Bangkok. The group aimed to help the Thai villages withstand the intrusion
> of the state and western norms of economic development and empower them to
> generate a 'native' economy. For this they needed an archaic Tai village
> system to serve as a model. Chatthip Nartsupha, the leader of the Community
> Culture School in Bangkok, saw in the buranjis of Assam the possibility of
> an imaginative space for return to a pastoral village life. Ahom, the
> unspoken subject of Assam and Indian history, was adopted to fulfil the aim
> of the Thais.
> > Thai history and pan-Thaiism transcended the boundaries of Southeast Asia
> and moved beyond to include areas and people mapped within South Asia. For a
> decade and a half (1981-1997) exchanges between Ahom and Thai activists
> generated a transnational discourse and created a real expectation to make
> Assam a meeting place for historical, cultural and commercial exchanges
> between South and Southeast Asia.
> > The activities in the east also drew attention of the (previous) BJP
> government. A two pronged plan toward Assam was developed in consequence.
> One, Delhi tried to bridge the differences between Assam and the rest of
> India by bringing the Assamese closer to the Hindutva fold, strengthening
> their power in multiple ways in order to distance them from their
> northeastern neighbours and crush the people's movements through armed
> violence. Second, the government tried to capitalize the new found
> connections with Southeast Asia. A direct flight between Guwahati and
> Bangkok was started in 2002 to launch a new relationship with Thailand and a
> transnational roadway system connecting India with markets in Southern China
> and Southeast Asia passing through the Northeast was seriously considered.
> > The government went so far as to acknowledge the historic connections of
> the Ahom people with Thailand in the hope that a new level of commerce and
> trade between the two countries would be engendered in this admission. As is
> evident, the goal of the new friendship was driven by economic exigencies
> and financial forecasts. This sets a dangerous precedent to transact and
> barter memories, pillage history and hopes of everyday people for temporary
> monetary gains, and fictitiously manufacture a friendship without the desire
> to uphold it in good and bad times.
> > The people claiming to be Tai-Ahom, however, are not admitted into the
> new arithmetic of history and commerce. They continue to struggle for
> recognition and economic and political voice in Assam. Their murmurs are
> rarely heard. By and large, those claiming to be Ahom continue to be among
> the poorest in Assam, which is one of the poorest states in India.
> Nevertheless, the web of interpretations concerning Tai-Ahom has generated a
> creative tension for departure from the tyranny of a modern singular
> national history.
> > I read this effort of remembering a different past and attempt at writing
> a new history as an assertion to claim a possible place for speaking outside
> the limits of the authoritative state records and engage national history to
> move beyond the limits of a bounded geography and sites determined by power.
> If these efforts can be translated into action, it may help to mitigate the
> continuing mistrust and grievances of neglected and marginalized groups and
> create new possibilities for them as well as herald a friendship between
> India and Southeast Asia.
> > Footnotes:
> > 1. The Curzon Collection, MSS Eur F 111/247a, Oriental and India Office,
> British Library, London.
> > 2. Col. S.G. Burrard, Records of the Survey of India: Exploration on the
> North-East Frontier, vol. IV (1911-1913), Superintendent Government
> Printing, Calcutta, 1914, p. 3.
> > 3. J. Butler, Travels and Adventures in the Province of Assam during the
> Residence of Fourteen Years, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1855, pp. 223,
> 228..
> > 4. Although terms such as South Asia, Southeast Asia, etc, are hollow and
> undefinable, within the world of these terms, however, are cultures and
> communities with deep histories and enduring memories. When I refer to
> Southeast Asia here, I invoke the neighbours in the east with whom Assam and
> her people share many centuries of common memories. The forgotten memory of
> connections with these communities is somewhat revived by the Tai-Ahom
> identity struggle.
> > 5. Many more descriptive terms are available for the different groups in
> Assam. Some terms that recur are 'freebooters and plunderers', 'treacherous
> tribe', and 'warlike frontier tribe'. See Albums and Scrapbooks of Oscar
> Mallite, Bailey and Carter, British Library, Oriental and India Office
> Collection, London.
> > 6. See J. Butler, A Sketch of Assam with Some Account of the Hill Tribes,
> Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1847, p. 127; W.W. Hunter, Statistical Account
> of Assam, 2 vols, Trubner and Co., London, 1879, pp. 235-239.
> > 7. M. Mills, Report on the Province of Assam, Calcutta Gazette Office,
> Calcutta, 1854.
> > 8. See Mills, Report, Appendix 'Translation of a Petition in Person by
> Moniram Dutta Borwah Dewan, on account of Ghunnokanth Singh Joobaraj and
> Others', pp. Lxv-ixxxvi.
> > 9. In 1836, influenced by the Bengali agents, the colonial administration
> in Assam dropped Assamese language from public documents, school education,
> administrative and judicial use. It was not until 1873 that Assamese
> language was reinstated and put into use, once again. The
> historical-political process by which Assamese language was superseded and
> degraded into a secondary position in its home ground created a peculiar
> anxiety among the people and this led over time to a struggle to self-define
> the Assamese community.
> > 10. Padmanath Borooah, Assam Buranji or The History of Assam, Lila
> Agency, Tezpur, 2nd ed., 1906, p. 47.
> > 11. See Hemchandra Goswami, Purani Assam Buranji, Kamrup Ansandhan
> Samiti, Guwahati, 1922; Keshav Kanta Borroah, Ahamar Athutajati Jatir
> Utppatir Bibaran, D.R. Gogoi Nakhrai Bagicha, Tinsukia, 1923; R.K. Sandikai,
> Mula-Gabharu, S.C. Goswami, Jorhat, 1924. Many more followed and reiterated
> the same plot of Assam history.
> > 12.. Padmanath Borooah, Buranji-Bodh, Lila Agency, Tezpur, 1900, p. 46.
> > 13.. Ahom-Tai Rajya Parishad, Assam Tribune, 3 June 1967.
> > 14. B.J. Terwiel, The Tai and Ancient Tai Ritual, 2 vols, Review Office
> of South East Asian Studies, Gaya, 1983.
> > 15. Sometimes, it appeared from his explanation that Phra also took on
> the representation of Shiva. The new religion combined Buddhism with
> Hinduism to accommodate some old beliefs and practices of Ahom Hindus, while
> slowly enabling their transition to a Buddhist way of life and worship to
> mirror Southeast Asian cultures and customs. (Personal Conversation, 26
> December 1992, Patsako, Sibsagar.)
> > 16. A few examples are Ney Elias, Introductory Sketch of the History of
> Shans in Upper Burma and Western Yunan, Foreign Department Press, Calcutta,
> 1876; L. Milne, Shans at Home, John Murray, London, 1910; William Dodd, The
> Tai, Race, Elder Br ther of the Chinese, Torch, Iowa City, 1923; W.A.R.
> Wood, History of Siam, n.k.. London, 1926; D.G.E. Hall, Burma, Hutchinson
> University Library, London, 1950.
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