Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in IndiaFragmented Memories is a beautifully rendered exploration of how, during the 1990s, socially and economically marginalized people in the northeastern Indian state of Assam sought to produce a past on which to base a distinctive contemporary identity recognized within late-twentieth-century India. Yasmin Saikia describes how groups of Assamese identified 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. In her account of the 1990s Tai-Ahom identity movement, 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. Assamese herself, Saikia lived in several different Tai-Ahom villages between 1994 and 1996. She spoke with political activists, intellectuals, militant leaders, shamans, and students and observed and participated in Tai-Ahom religious, social, and political events. She read Tai-Ahom sacred texts and did archival research—looking at colonial documents and government reports—in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. In Fragmented Memories, Saikia reveals the different narratives relating to the Tai-Ahom as told by the postcolonial Indian government, British colonists, and various texts reaching back to the thirteenth century. She shows how Tai-Ahom identity is practiced in Assam and also in Thailand. Revealing how the “dead” history of Tai-Ahom has been transformed into living memory to demand rights of citizenship, Fragmented Memories is a landmark history told from the periphery of the Indian nation. |
Contents
Locating TaiAhom in Assam The Place and People | 1 |
Identification in India | 37 |
Colonial Origins of Ahom | 77 |
The Memory of the Local The Stories the Buranjis Tell | 113 |
Rationalising a History | 147 |
Performance and Politics of TaiAhom | 177 |
There Was No Plot in the Peoples Struggle | 225 |
The Past and Present Connecting Memory History and Identity | 251 |
Epilogue | 267 |
Notes | 269 |
References | 301 |
| 319 | |