JAS TaiAhom 2006

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Religion, Nostalgia, and Memory: Making an Ancient and Recent Tai-Ahom

Identity in Assam and Thailand
Article in The Journal of Asian Studies · February 2006

DOI: 10.1017/S0021911806000052
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Yasmin Saikia
Arizona State University
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Religion, Nostalgia, and Memory:

Making an Ancient and Recent
Tai-Ahom Identity in Assam
and Thailand
YASMIN SAIKIA
“T HERE IS NO DOUBT A FEELING that Assam [is] more a land of rakshas [demons],
hobgoblins, and various terrors” (Curzon Collection, Mss. Eur F 111/247a). This
statement more or less encapsulates the early British impressions of the area and people
east of Bengal, also known as Assam or the North-East Frontier in colonial parlance
(see map).colonial literature, the people of Assam are documented as having “ferocious
manners, and brutal tempers” and are “fond of war, vindictive, treacherous and de-
ceitful” (Butler 1855, 223, 228). Furthermore, colonial literature declared them to
be unlike any other group, “a base and unprincipled nation,” without a “fixed reli-
gion,” since they did not “adopt any mode of worship practiced by the heathens or
Mohammedans” (Vansittart 1785, 106–8). On the one hand, placed outside the line-
age of Indic culture and Aryan history, within which the British codified the high-
caste Hindus, the place was zoned off as a frontier and the people of Assam were
reduced into a group living without history. The frontierization of Assam and the
unthinkability of a history of the people of Assam survived and are reinforced in
postcolonial narratives of India. These perceptions, we should note, are the views of
Yasmin Saikia (Saikia@email.unc.edu) is Associate Professor in the History Department

at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
An earlier version of this article was presented at the international conference Borders and
Regional Markets, Economies, and Culture, organized by the Social Science Research Council
South and Southeast Asia Program in Chiang Mai, July 2003. I would like to thank my co-
conferees, Willem van Schendel, Sanjib Baruah, Niti Pawakapan, Pinkaew Laungatamsri,
Tanka Subba, Karin Dean, Kwanchewan Buadaeng, Guo Suyian, and Munmeeth Singh, for
comments on an earlier draft; Thongchai Winichakul, Sugata Bose, David Gilmartin, and
David Ludden for comments on different sections of earlier drafts of this article; and the two
anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments in preparing the final draft.
Assam the place is sometimes referred to Aham, and Upper Assam as Ujani Aham. These
spellings emphasize the local pronunciation of the words in particular contexts. The letter h,
I think, is the closest phonetic sound for the velar fricative that locals use in Assam. Some
scholars prefer to use x for the velar fricative. Both h and x are acceptable, according to language
experts in Assam.
Fieldwork was conducted in 1995, 1996, and 2003.
The Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 1 (February 2006):33–60.
䉷 2006 by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc.
33
34 YASMIN SAIKIA
Map. Assam and the surrounding areas (prepared with the assistance of
the Center of Teaching and Learning, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill).
outsiders, who backed their assumptions with official power to transform myths into
believable facts.
If, on the other hand, one investigates the narratives of the people of Assam as
told by their own historians, a very different picture emerges. Local history that is
recorded in the premodern chronicles called buranjis provides a picture of a place in
motion. A godlike king referred to as a swargadeo, which translates into English as
“the spirit of heaven,” ruled. The buranjis represent the area of the swargadeo as a
blended space, a crossroads, that was continuously under construction as new groups
of people were included, assimilated, and constituted to form a hybrid society referred
to as kun-how, or “us,” subjects of the swargadeo.1 Recently, under the banner of a
local identity movement called “Tai-Ahom,” the narrative of the crossroads is, once
again, emerging. In this article, I investigate this contemporary episode of Tai-Ahom
unfolding in Assam, which involves multiple border crossings—cultural, emotional,
and political—to produce a history of connections and interactions between South
and Southeast Asia to reconstruct a pluralistic identity.
We should note at the outset that Tai-Ahom is not a defined community, nor is
its history clearly delineated. The present-day Tai-Ahom seek to establish a memory
and history connecting Assam with Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand, and also
demand inclusion within modern India as a Scheduled Tribes (ST) group.2 Approxi-
1
For an English translation of some of the buranjis that uphold this theme of crossroads,
see Saikia 1997.
2
The Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution deals with rules and regulations that
determine who belongs to the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes categories. The
RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 35
mately six hundred thousand of the fourteen million Assamese-speaking people claim
to be Tai-Ahom.3 As a statistical number, the group is small, but those claiming to
be Tai-Ahom have raised a salient question concerning Indian history and identity.
Instead of accepting the label—Hindu and Indian—as their primary identity markers
and the textbook version of Indian history as their past, the Tai-Ahom are challenging
the epistemological and geographical limits of Indian history and dismantling the
inherited colonial historiography of the frontiers, seeking to move beyond the limited
nationalist narratives to open a space for dialogue between Delhi and Bangkok. This,
they hope, will enable them to overcome the history of silences and disempowerment
and launch a new beginning as a defined community with an identity at the crossroads
of Assam.
In this article, I focus on the production of the Phra Lung religion, which gives
form and shape to the politics and discourse of the Tai-Ahom identity movement.
Phra Lung combines elements of Tantric Hinduism with Thai Buddhism and local
ancestor worship. By exploring the connections between Phra Lung and Tai-Ahom, I
engage the vexing issues of the connections between religion and identity politics
that make it possible for followers to experience a new kind of border crossing, con-
necting the people in Assam with political and intellectual agendas in process in
Thailand. By asserting a history of connection with neighbors in Southeast Asia and
constructing a new hybrid religion, groups such as the Tai-Ahom contest the bounded
Indian identity emanating from the central state in Delhi. In turn, they are using the
site of Phra Lung to make a recognizable collective to challenge the national Indian
Hindu identity and cross the borders of the state to formulate a transborder Tai-Ahom
identity for reviving and facilitating the meetings of several different states and people
at the crossroads of Assam.
The struggle between local and national identity has been ongoing in India since
independence. The diversity of the Indian people historically speaking has led to a
lack of a cohesive understanding of a combined self. The making of an Indian self in
politics was a pragmatic strategy conceived by Gandhi and executed by the Indian
National Congress (INC) which combined many different elements and communities
to forge a cohesive anticolonial movement for independence (S. Bose and Jalal 1997;
Metcalf and Metcalf 2002). Immediately after independence, however, contesting
identities surfaced from within communities of the “majority” Hindu and the “mi-
nority” Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and others. Naga, Kashmiri, Tamil, Sikh, Dalit,
Assamese, and so on, are ongoing linguistic, religious, and ethnic identity movements
that illuminate the failure of national and state-sponsored Indian identity in local
communities. Since my concern in this article is with the politics of identity and the
representation of Assam, I will focus on the interactions, tensions, and accommoda-
tions made between the local and national narratives and identities unfolding in
Assam.
I have divided this article into four sections. First, I will attend to the broad
trends of identity construction in Assam in the colonial and postcolonial periods to
address the issue of inclusion and exclusion or making of hierarchies of Indians at the
rules defining what/who constitutes a tribal group in India are unclear. Debates for designating
a certain community as an ST often get bogged down by inane discussions and tedious disputes
over genuineness and duplicity of a claim, and decisions are hardly made. The bottom-line
issue is that the ST category guarantees certain privileges, and the premium is very high.
3
The total population of Assam is twenty-six millin; roughly more than half of the popu-
lation claim Assamese as their mother tongue. The other important language groups are Ben-
gali, Hindi, and Manipuri (see A. Bose 1998, 155).
36 YASMIN SAIKIA
northeast “frontier.” Next, I will take into account the complex relationship of Indian
national and Assamese local histories and the creative construction of Tai-Ahom in
different political arenas. In the third section of the article, I will document the history
of Phra Lung, focusing on the production and construction of a new religion and its
impact on the Tai-Ahom identity movement. Finally, I will examine the Thai con-
tributions in shaping Phra Lung to continue a struggle for a Pan-Thai identity that
is crucial to Thai national politics.
A few words to highlight some of the problems with doing a “crossroads” study.
Being trained to study history as a narrative that is located within national boundaries,
I approached the study of Tai-Ahom and Assam as issues of Indian history. That is,
I assumed that I would find the history of Assam within Indian history. Soon it became
evident to me, however, that the history of Assam is absent from the national historical
story and that the only available contemporary narrative on militancy is something
of a cliché. To move beyond this and acquire a sense of local history and culture, I
probed the buranjis. Then, I confronted another obstacle. Buranjis come in a variety
of types and languages. Some were written; others were drawn on cloth, parchment,
and even strips of bamboo and cane. There were Assamese-language buranjis; others
were written in an archaic script that scholars of Southeast Asia claim as a form of
Tai (Terwiel 1983, vol. 1; Renoo and Terwiel 1994; Chatthip 1995).4 The Tai buranjis
that were available in Assam were almost impossible to read, since no one in the so-
called Tai-Ahom villages knew the language. I had to undertake language study in
Thai and Lao to familiarize myself with the script. With the help of an Aiton teacher,
I translated some of these buranjis. Aitons are a group of émigrés from Burma who
came to Assam during the Burmese occupation of the region in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. Since then, many other groups of Khamti, Khamyang,
Turung, Syam, and so on, migrated from Burma and settled in Assam. Those who
claim to be Tai-Ahom today are not related to these groups but heavily depend on
the new settlers to make the Ahom Tai-like people to establish their from the valley-
dwelling Assamese Hindus.
Another important conceptual problem was the source of Tai-Ahom history itself.
Present-day Tai-Ahoms claim the buranjis as their history books. The buranjis, how-
ever, do not identify Ahom as a community in precolonial Assam. In fact, the term
“Ahom” is hardly ever mentioned in the texts. Additionally, in the buranjis, the
geography of the Assam kingdom is an undefined area and is simply referred to as
the swargadeo’s domain. The figure of swargadeo is the hero and royal ancestor of
present-day Ahom, who claim the first swargadeo, Sukapha, as the both man and god
who started the history of Ahom. The story of Sukapha begins in Upper Burma and
through migration connected to Upper Assam.5 In the early buranjis, the connection
between Upper Burma and Assam is repeatedly invoked through myths and legends
of shared heroes, religion, and customs, as well as royal exchanges of gifts and emis-
4
The term “Tai” denotes a linguistic community. “Thai,” on the other hand, is the name
of the people of Thailand. Lao and Shan, as wel as minor languages of southern China, Upper
Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, are included in the Tai language family. Tai-Ahom
belongs to this group. Geographically, Tai-Ahom is located within India, but its linguistic
roots are in Southeast Asia.
5
The story of the emergence of Ahom in the family of Sukapha is repeated in all buanjis.
The story, I believe, was initially copied from Burmese chronicles in the eighteenth century,
when Assam pandits were sent to the court of Burma and Buddhist temples for this purpose.
For details about the missions to Burma and the development of Sukapha as the archetypal
hero of Assam, see Tamuli 1908, 8.
saries. Today, however, when the Tai-Ahom draw their ancestral tree, the people of
Upper Burma are rendered absent. When did this shift take place? It is not docu-
mented. One thing is certain. When British India annexed Assam, the historic link-
ages between Assam and its easterly neighbors were undermined; through the dis-
course of Hindu religion, the colonial agents mapped the Assamese Hindus as low
caste and Indian, once and for all. The variety of pasts and the memories of connections
with other groups that were not part of India and with Hindu cultures and com-
munities were overlooked, and over time those histories of crossroads exchanges were
forgotten. The reimagining of the people and place of Assam as an Indian/Hindu
frontier has led to important transformations from within. One important change is
the attempt of the contemporary Tai-Ahom leaders to create a fixed Ahom space and
delink it from the rest of Assam. The leaders claim the Luit valley as a Tai-Ahom
space and the historic domain of the swargadeo.6 The association of a confined place
as the homeland and particular groups of people as part of the Tai-Ahom community
goes against the grain of the historical memory of the buranjis. The buranjis insist
on a borderless, all-inclusive kun-how community combining different religious, eth-
nic, and linguistic groups, which spread across and beyond the Luit valley in the ever-
expanding swargadeo’s domain. In undertaking research on Tai-Ahom history and
identity, I repeatedly encountered inconsistencies between the stories that the buranjis
tell and the rhetoric of present-day Tai-Ahom—in other words, between past and
present memory, history and the politics of history.
Finally, my research in Assam, which Delhi considers to be a frontier but is locally
viewed as a central meeting place of several historical communities and narratives,
generated complicated issues in investigating the discourses and types of knowledges.
I had to negotiate epistemological complexities along with the methodological prob-
lems and issues of national security that consequently emerged. My own location as
an Assamese Muslim did not complicate the process of research in Assam but was a
matter of concern to the state and Thai activists in the Tai-Ahom movement.7 To
understand the culture and history of the Tai-Ahom as well as their interactions with
Assamese, Indian, and Southeast Asian cultures and people, I lived in several Tai-
Ahom villages, read many buranjis as well as colonial and postcolonial records and
6
I use “Luit valley” in the local Upper Assam/Ujani Aham sense to designate a particular
section of the Brahmaputra River which flows through the districts of Tinsukia, Dibrugarh,
Sibsagar, Dhemaji, and Lakhimpur. I emphasize this local term to accentuate the emotions
and discourse of the local people. Luit and Ujani Aham are concepts that are particularly
internal to Upper Assam, the area of the Tai-Ahom movement. Luit is a site of nostalia about
the past, and the memory of Tai-Ahom is constructed and circulated along its banks.
7
On completing my research, when I was returning to the United States in 1996, I was
confronted by state officials in the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi who demanded
an explanation of my research and activities in Assam. I was dumbfounded: as far as I was
concerned, it was innocuous historical research. But as their questions became more and more
probing, I began fumbling for answers. Then, one of my interrogators examined my passport,
carefully read my name several times, and asked, “Are you a Mohammedan?” Before I could
reply, he asked, “Are you related to the chief minister, Hiteshwar Saikia?” I blurted out
something about our families originating in the same village. Immediately the attitude of the
officers changed. I finally boarded the flight with their blessings but was quite shaken. Re-
cently, during a trip to Thailand, I met some graduate students at Thammasat University.
They quizzed me on why I was so critical of the Thai–Tai-Ahom linkage and asked how my
identity as an Assamese Muslim influenced the positioning of my scolarly lens. I found it
amusing that they accepted identity as an unchanging, constant thing inherited and passed
down from parents to children. For an extended reading on personal identity and its influence
on my research, see Saikia 2004.
38 YASMIN SAIKIA
documents, witnessed firsthand the production of Tai-Ahom, and traveled to Thailand

to observe and discuss the making of Tai-Ahom history and culture there. The mul-
tisited and multifaceted research methodology made me keenly aware that within the
Tai-Ahom movement Phra Lung religious and cultural production occupied a central
place. The new religion was largely influential in creating a proactive politics for
establishing the Tai-Ahom as separate from the Assamese and by extension Indians,
while transcending the limited state history to forge new alliances with people and
cultures in Thailand. In this article, I present a perspective on the phenomenon of
identity politics of the Tai-Ahom, and I also address the broader phenomenon of the
subnational identity within a theoretical paradigm of transnational interests and agen-
das. It is only a perspective, however, limited and episodic in content and explanation.
Bordering New and Old Identities: Indian, Assamese,

and Ahom
Assam was largely unknown to the outside world until the British arrived in
1826. Immediately an essentializing discourse of the frontier emerged. Until 1873
British colonials treated the frontier like a wasteland. By the Bengal East Frontier
Regulation I of 1873, the northeast was demarcated into two zones: the area of the
inner line, or the hill area, and the directly administered territory known as the area
of Assam, or the plains (outer) line. Assam was initially designated as a “backward
tract” and made into a chief commissioner’s province in 1874. Ironically, while the
topographical division between hills and plains was established through these regu-
lations, the perception of the colonial government (and later the postcolonial admin-
istration too) of the North-East Frontier was singular. It was seen as a region that was
marginally connected with the rest of India and the communities of “majority” Hindu
and “minority” Muslim populations. Assumptions were validated when the British
confronted a mix of plains and hills people who were “semi-Hinduized” and “debased
Muslims” and practitioners of a variety of local religions that the British understood
as animistic.8 From the beginning, colonial policy was directed toward taming the
“hostile tribes” of Assam.9 To aid in governability, a category called “Assamese” was
produced that was separate from the hills/tribal population. Simultaneously, the plains
valley–dwelling Assamese were relegated to the bottom of the caste pole and were
situated as a lower-caste, non-Aryan Hindu people.
Before constructing the Assamese category, however, the British had dabbled with
another label. Initially they called the group “Ahom” and created fanciful histories of
the group’s journey to the valley from across the mountain ranges of Upper Burma.10
8
Reginald Lorrain’s book title Five Years in Unknown Jungles for God and Empire Being an
Account of the ounding of the Lakher Pioneer Mission, its Works amongst (with Manners, Customs,
Religious Rites, and Ceremonies of) a Wild Head-Hunting Race of Savage Hillmen in Further India,
Previously Unknown to the Civilized World (1912) sums up the entire history of representation
and interaction between the people of the northeast and the British colonials.
9
Many more descriptive terms are available for the different groups in Assam. Some re-
curring terms are “freebooters and plunderers,” “treacherous tribe,” and “warlike frontier tribe”
(see Albums and Scrapbooks of Oscar Mallite, Bailey, and Carter).
10
The first colonial myth about Ahom was created by J. P. Wade, a doctor who had come
to Assam with the regiment of Captain Welsh in 1792. Although his account of the Ahom
origin was not published, it seemed to have made its way into colonial circles; in 1828 Walter
Hamilton-Buchanan asserted that “Ahoms were the governing class in Assam, . . . descended
from the companions of Khuntai [who were rulers of Upper Burma]” (1828, 74). Until 1931,
when the Ahom were declared a“dead” community, this myth had been repeated in many
colonial documents and books
When they failed to find a distinct community of Ahom in Assam, the census takers
dismissed them as “dead” in 1931 and replaced the label “Ahom” with the newly
constructed term and group called “Assamese.” This was very handy. The group that
was deemed Assamese was transformed into a tax-paying, laboring peasant class for
expanding capitalist agricultural ventures of tea and cash-crop cultivation in the val-
ley. Reports on the Assamese in colonial discourse, however, were not positive; the
Assamese were deemed, along with the “lazy and barbaric hill tribes,” an “unattrac-
tive,” “degenerated,” and “stupid people” (Moffatt Mills 1854, 5, app. 1A; see also
Butler 1847, 127; 1855, 223, 228, 250; Hunter 1879, 1:235–39). The externally
defined criterion of “apathetic” Assamese and the development of capitalist agriculture
resulted in a strange convolution of local history and the relation of the people with
the land. The Assamese were separated from their neighbors in the hills and were
made vulnerable to outside intrusions, particularly from the British colonials.
That all histories are in motion is a known fact. Hence, the transformation of
Assam and the Assamese people through colonial intervention in the nineteenth cen-
tury was neither strange nor surprising. What is deeply problematic in this case is
that colonial intervention led to an abrupt end to histories which preceded that en-
counter and closed the channels of communications with groups that were now
mapped outside British India. Therefore, when we view the changes during coloni-
alism, we must interrogate the policies and labels of representations in the colonial
narrative for what they both convey as well as hide.
The negative recognition of Assamese by the colonials, in turn, generated internal
formulations of labels by pioneers such as Moniram Dewan and Ananda Ram Dhekial
Phukan, who suggested new and positive descriptions for community identification.
While the local leaders readily accepted the colonial name for them (i.e., Assamese),
they focused on constructing an abstract but inclusive community created by shared
social interactions to overcome the demarcation between plains and tribal people,
Hindu and non-Hindu communities of Assam. Assamese were now described as a
“blended” community (see Moffatt Mills 1854, app. “Translation of a Petition in
Person by Moniram Dutta Borwah Dewan, on account of Ghunnokanth Singh Joobaraj
and Others”). Language was presented as the glue binding the different groups to
make a single composite society in the face of colonial penetration and degradation
of the local community.11 The Assamese linguistic identity intensified in the face of
opposition from the Bengali elements in the colonial administration in Assam.
Alongside the construction of a linguistic identity for the Assamese, political
boundaries were drawn vis-à-vis the INC. The high tide of Gandhian nationalism
drew many in Assam to join the INC in the shared hope of freedom and economic
development to follow. Nevertheless, within Assam many remained unconvinced that
the rhetoric of “Indian-ness” of the INC included them. A concept of Ahamiya jati-
yatabadi (Assamese self-awareness) and an ideology of sadhin Aham (independent As-
sam) surfaced alongside the nationalist movement. The Sadhin Aham movement was
anchored on the foundation of a quest for identity through self-awareness. The efforts
of the movement were to investigate, understand, and manifest an Assamese identity
11
In 1836, influenced by the Bengali agents, the colonial administration in Assam dropped
the Assamese language from official documents, school curricula, and administrative and ju-
dicial use. It was not until 1873 that the Assamese lnguage was reinstated and put into use
once again. The historical-political process by which the Assamese language was superseded
and degraded into a secondary position on its home turf, however, created anxiety among the
people, which led over time to a struggle to self-define the Assamese community.
40 YASMIN SAIKIA
in the private and public spheres. Men such as Lakhinath Bezbaruah, Ambikagiri
Raychoudhury, and Kamala Kanta Bhattacharjee became the leaders of this self-
awareness movement. The Assamese language and poetry became tools to express this
consciousness and sentiment. In 1929, Ambikagiri, as the leader of the Assamese
movement, demanded that “the Swaraj Resolution of the Congress should state, a.
Assam for Assamese; b. those people of India who live or intend to live and
work in Assam have to learn the Assamese language and accept the Assamese
fate” (Asamiya, Ambika Giri Raychoudhuri’s Speech, file 7, April 13, 1929, Assam
State Archive). This and other resolutions of the early twentieth century articulated
the anxiety over recognition, and an introspective mission to find an Assamese self
became the quest and project of the Sadhin Aham movement. The writings of Jnan-
anath Bora, a public intellectual, provide an entry point into the mind-set of the
Assamese intellectuals and the course of the self-awareness that was promoted during
this time. In one of his articles, “Asom Desh Bharatbarkhar Bhitarat Thakibo Kiya?”
(Why Should Assam Stay within India?), he argued that the regeneration of Assam
and a free Assamese identity were possible only if it separated from the rest of India.
Boa claimed: “The Assamese have always lived in a distinct country. . . . The course
of our history is totally different from that of India. India’s history is not our history.
Like Burma, Afghanistan, or Thailand, Assam has always been a neighboring country
of India” (1938, 264).
The discursive suggestion that a free and mutually recognizable Assamese identity
was possible for everyone in Assam, however, was not convincing to the majority in
Upper Assam. Quickly, a new leadership opposing the platform of Assamese identity
emerged under the banner of Ahom in 1893. The Ahom leadership claimed that the
rhetoric of Sadhin Aham was not directed at freeing Assam from India. The emergence
of associations such as Asamiya Bhasha Unnati-Sadhani Sabha (Assamese Language
Improvement Society, 1889) (based in Calcutta), Assam Desh-Itihasi Sabha (Assam
History Society, 1890s), and Assam Sahitya Sabha (Assam Literary Society, 1917)
added to the fear that caste Hindu groups would dominate politics in Assam and
situate the Assamese within India, rather than separate from it. The political cry of
the newly formed Ahom Association was “Ahom is not Indian” (Ahom Association,
file 362, Assam State Archive). A racial politics of Mongoloid people was generated,
and the Kacharis, Muttocks, Deuris, and others were encouraged to combine their
efforts with the Ahom to resist the Hinduization of Assam (Assam Tribune, April 25,
1941). History was seen as the most important tool to actualize Ahom claims for
separation from caste Hindus.
Trained and amateur historians wrote new narratives of Ahom to enable children
to remember “salient names and dates . . . who can then map Assam in the context
of heroes” (Borooah 1906, 47–70). This assumption that history should be the saga
of heroes was not an unusual expectation of Ahom historians. 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, however, is the disruption of
this formula in very interesting ways. Instead of borrowing heroes from Indic tradi-
tions, namely, Aryan civilization and culture, history writing in Assam developed to
subvert the grand narrative. Danavas and asuras (demons and monsters of high-caste
Hindu civilizational narrative) treated as “rejects” elsewhere found a place of pride
and were honored in the Assamese Ahom version. The famous historian of Ahom
history, Padmanath Borooah, wrote a narrative that soon found wide circulation and
was repeated in many new versions by historians of Assam.12 According to him, “[in]
ancient times this land was ruled by danabs and akhurs [danavas and asuras]. Mahir-
anga 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; Anirudha, his grandson, also married
a princess from Assam. Many more dynasties of akhurs and danabs followed that
thwarted invasion and made Hindu gods accept their superior power. In the thirteenth
century, “the Tai people came from Burma. . . . They were Buddhist people. . . . But
to conquer land they moved south-west, intermixed with the hill tribes, and adopted
their religion. . . . Sukapha, a prince of Mungrimungram, the original homeland of
the Tai people, came to Saumar [Assam] in 1229 A.D. . . . The Ahom kings ruled
for six hundred years” (1922, 46)
Was this kind of history telling and memory building simply a rhetorical device?
Maybe. My task as a historian, however, is to investigate the evidence that I have and
place it in the context of time and space to both understand and question what
happened. What conflicting and confusing situations produced these outcomes that
made Ahom feel different and alienated from Hindus and Indians, and why did they
turn to Southeast Asia, particularly Burma, to claim difference from the Assamese?
To examine and understand this, we must return to the category “Assamese” and the
politics generated through this identity and Assam’s association with India during
the early twentieth century.
By the early twentieth century, in the encounter with Hindu communities within
the shared political platform of anticolonialism, the Assamese became aware of the
outlook of the Indian Hindu communities toward them. They saw themselves through
Indian eyes as depraved, low-caste Hindus who were polluted due to associations with
tribal and other religious and ethnic groups of the northeast. The Assamese elite in
particular had long desired to be included among the Aryan communities of north
India. To assert a difference from Ahom history and community, in 1915 an Assamese
Vaishnavite priest, Tirtha Nath Goswami, published a book called Ripunjay Smriti
(Sayings of Ripunjay), in which he defamed Ahom as an antarjya—polluted group—
and suggested that Assamese should perform rituals to cleanse themselves for reentry
into the Hindu caste fold. If we place this anxiety of Assamese identity in the context
of politics, it is easy to deduce the influence of the INC in generating a sudden and
parochial desire for Assamese to proclaim their Hinduness. However, the efforts of
the Assamese to become recognized as a cultured group of Hindu Indians did not
bear positive results. Since they were already placed outside the lineage of Aryans,
people in Assam were excluded from high-caste Hindu history and thus identity. The
image of Assam “as at the edge of Hindu civilization” was sustained by representing
the people as peripheral, low communities.
The harsh language of Indian Hindu rejection led the Ahom to reject the INC
and sever their relationship with Assamese politics. The Ahom leaders claimed that
their space—that is, Upper/Ujani/eastern Assam—was separate from Lower/Namoni/
western Assam, which was dominated by caste Hindus. Many other groups, including
12
Several books appeared in the early twentieth century that established the narrative of
Assam history. The earliest versions were written by Padmanath Borooah (1922), Hemchandra
Goswami (1922), Keshav Kanta Borroah (1923), and R. K. Sandikai (1924). Many more
followed and reiterated the same plot of Assam history.
42 YASMIN SAIKIA
the Muslims of Upper Assam, backed the Ahom assertion. The claim for “Ahomstan”
in Upper Assam grew in prominence in the 1930s and continued to be so until the
end of the colonial period. In 1947, when India became independent, Assam was
included within the Indian union, which immediately led to political strife and dis-
content. The Ahom groups boycotted the Independence Day celebration, and the
Ahom Students Association at Jorhat contacted their Burmese counterparts for help
to continue the movement against Indianization (Ahom Association, file 362, Assam
State Archive). In Upper Assam, Ahom served as a rhetoric and symbol to organize
the dispossessed, outcaste communities. Leaders of the Ahom organizations encour-
aged the people to remember the time of swargadeo’s rule as the “golden days of
Assam.” Nonetheless, the newly formulated collective memory of the past did not
lead to massive changes, even within Upper Assam. Most people viewed Ahom as a
symbol of the past and recognized themselves as Assamese bound together by a shared
language.
The impetus to be Ahom, ironically, was triggered by an external factor. In 1962,
during the “Chinese aggression,” as the attack is known, Indian authorities abandoned
the local people and recommended that they flee their villages for protection. Para-
doxically, while the Indian government did nothing to safeguard the people, the
Chinese invaders took stock of the abandoned rice fields and “harvested the grain and
even stored it in the barns. When the villagers returned after the invading army
withdrew, they found to their utter surprise that the Chinese, their so-called enemies,
had saved them from starvation and destitution that year” (Buddheshwar Gogoi, ex-
chairman of the United Liberation Front of Assam, conversation, May 25, 1995). The
memory of being abandoned by the Indian government troubled many in Upper
Assam and spurred a new wave of reaction to the ignoble victimization. Politics,
particularly under the banner of the Ahom leaders, became strident, and Ahom became
both a rhetorical tool and an ethical issue to persuade the masses of Upper Assam to
disassociate themselves from India.
Following this, in 1967, when Assam was reorganized into hills and plains states,
the Ahom group petitioned the Indian government to recognize them as a separate
community from the Assamese. In October 1967, the “Ahom-Tai Rajya Parishad,”
“Ahom Sabha,” and “Mongoloid National Front” united under one banner of “Ahom
Tai Mongolia Parishad.” This organization 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” (Ahom-Tai Rajya Parishad, Assam
Tribune, June 3, 1967, n.p.). But, their efforts proved inconsequential. Ahom was not
distinguished from Assamese, but was classified as a backward Hindu community. In
1968 an attempt to create the boundaries of Ahomness led to a renewed invocation
of Southeast Asian roots. This was actualized in the term “Tai-Ahom,” which was
coined, claimed, and inserted by Padmeshwar Gogoi, a professor at Guwahati Uni-
versity and a self-proclaimed Tai-Ahom, in his 1968 book, Tai and the Tai Kingdoms
with a Fuller Treatment of the Tai-Ahom Kingdom in the Brahmaputra Valley. The label
established Ahom history as separate from Assamese history. To complete the break-
away from Hindu Assamese, a new religion replete with the paraphernalia of rituals
old and new was constructed to provide shared meanings and beliefs among supporters
of the Tai-Ahom movement.
Making New Borders of Identity: Politics and Politicians

On October 17, 1981, under the banner of the International Tai Studies Confer-
ence held in New Delhi, a group of Ahom men and Thai scholars met to discuss
strategies on how to make the Ahom part of Southeast Asian cultures and community.
The effort of this group was to open the corridor of Upper Assam and integrate it
with Southeast Asia to overcome the restrictive powers of Indians, Hindus, and As-
samese. In this meeting, the participants agreed that Ahom politics would be inef-
fective unless the cultural orientation of Upper Assam were radically transformed.
Religion or the division between upper-and lower-caste Hindus, also referred to as
Assamese and Ahom, was envisioned as the gateway to create new possibilities for the
Tai-Ahom (Domboru Deodhai, Puspa Gogoi, Romesh Bargohain, and Kiran Gogoi,
conversations, 1992, 1994–95). The attraction for change was grounded in the real-
ities of local economics promising control of land, resources, and political power for
groups that were dispossessed and marginalized by Assamese-caste Hindu commu-
nities. This conference was innovative in its approach, but it was not a foundational
moment. It was part of a long series of “articulations” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) of
marginalization and disempowerment that had produced anxieties and hope, which
now traveled easily to new distances to find “belonging” among Thai people in Thai-
land.
First, however, the base in Assam had to be constructed and strengthened. On
returning to Assam from Delhi, a group of activists created a formal organization
called the Ban Ok Publik Muang Tai (Ban Ok) (Eastern Tai Literary Society) and a
new religion called Phra Lung. Domboru Deodhai, a village priest of Akhoyan Goan,
near Sibsagar, whom B. J. Terwiel has identified as “the last of the Tai-Ahom ritual
experts” (1983, 1:24), was designated as the high priest of Phra Lung. Domboru
Deodhai explained the Phra Lung religion to me in these words: “Phra is a Buddha-
like figure. Lung means the sangha [community]. Phra Lung means the community
of worshippers of Phra” (conversation, December 26, 1992).13 In Domboru Deodhai’s
recollection, previous attempts at producing Phra Lung had taken place in 1915,
1930, and 1967. These attempts led to an organization called Mohan, Deodhai, Bai-
lung Sanmillan, made up of “Ahom diviners.” But, their combined efforts did not
produce a defined religion. It was not until the late 1980s that Phra Lung took shape
and became a religious platform for Ahom identity. After returning from Delhi, the
organizers of Ban Ok assigned Domboru Deodhai the task of writing prayers for the
new religion so that Ahom people could read, memorize, and repeat them in public
worship functions to establish their difference from Assamese Hindus. Dietary habits
were also changed to mark the departure from Hinduism. Beef, taboo among Hindus,
became an integral part of the new Tai-Ahom diet, as did partaking of local alcohol
called haj or lau pani.
Next, a community had to be identified and impressed upon to claim Phra Lung.
But where to begin? There was no formed group called Tai-Ahom readily available.
So, the leaders of Ban Ok turned their attention to several Assamese groups in the
heartland of Upper Assam, as well as small (Burmese) Tai communities, namely, the
Aiton, Phakey, Khamyang, Khamti, and Turung. The “Assamese Ahom” and various
Tai-speaking groups were pooled together as Tai-Ahom. Ban Ok then claimed the
total number of Ahom in Assam to be six hundred thousand. Although small, the
Ahom are a concentrated population in Upper Assam and are able to significantly
undermine the Assamese identity movement there. In turn, the rise of the Tai-Ahom
13
Sometimes it appeared from his explanation that Phra alo took on the persona of Shiva.
The new religion presumably 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.
44 YASMIN SAIKIA
movement has led to many new agendas of struggle in Upper Assam. Of these, the
United Liberation Front of Assam, commonly known by the acronym ULFA, has
become the dominant organization threatening the secession of Assam from India.
Both Delhi and Dispur, therefore, are carefully watching the movements in Upper
Assam, including the Tai-Ahom movement and its supporters.
Along with the identification of community, the revival of the language of the
buranjis was deemed primary for creating a new composite Tai-Ahom group. This
was a direct challenge to the Assamese language, which is the pillar of Assamese
identity.14 A Tai Language Academy at Patsako was established by the deodhais (Tai-
Ahom ritual practitioners), and language instruction was undertaken to facilitate the
return of the Ahom to the religion of their ancestors described in the buranjis. Ini-
tially, the academy and the Tai-Ahom leaders decided that ancestor worship should
be the anchor of the revived Phra Lung religion. But since many considered that
insufficient to make a new religion, elements and practices of Thai Buddhism were
increasingly introduced to make the Tai-Ahoms different from the Hindus.
At the same time, Hiteshwar Saikia, then chief minister of Assam and a self-
proclaimed “Ahom-Assamese,” inaugurated a new economy for Ahom. He donated
one million rupees to make the Ahom a distinct community in Assam. The publi-
cation industry of Ahom history and religion received a boost, but more significantly
it enabled Ban Ok activists to make Phra Lung a combined public event and identity
platform. Celebrations to commemorate Ahom heroes and public worship intensified.
Between 1990 and 1996, at the height of Saikia’s political career, Tai-Ahom
leaders received many benefits and made impressive strides toward making the Ahom
a distinct community in Assam with linkages to Thai culture and people. Phra Lung
religious activities testified that business was brisk and that Ahoms were becoming
“Tai-like” in Assam. The process through which assumptions were concretized and
some even actualized must be described in some detail (in the next section) to un-
derstand how recognition of Ahom developed and influenced observers, including
Assamese, that the Ahom were a different group. After Saikia passed away in April
1996, however, Ban Ok lost its financial support. In the meantime, a new wave of
Hindu religious nationalism under the direction of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
emerged and swept through the country. Soon the BJP’s representatives found a foot-
hold in Assam. The lack of financial support to pursue Tai-Ahom identity, coupled
with the rising power of fundamentalist Hindu identity, slowed down the exchanges
between the Ban Ok and Thai supporters and halted the growth and development of
Phra Lung. Throughout the early 1990s, however, the leaders and supporters of Tai-
Ahom performed the critical task of revealing the restrictive limits of national identity
and created a new patchwork of contingent labels and a local narrative linking Upper
Assam with the Thai efforts to make Tai-Ahom part of a Pan-Thai identity.
Border Crossing through Phra Lung: Making Ahom Tai

As Tai-Ahom households continued to practice their version of Hindu religion,
at a public level new commemorative festivals and celebrations were devised by Ban
Ok and the Phra Lung committee to give formal shape to Ahom identity and religion.
14
Assamese is an apromhasa, a derivative of Sanskrit. Sanskrit, being the language of the
Vedas, is directly associated with Hinduism. Thus, Assamese speakers are mapped and inserted
within the caste Hindu fold.
Sukapha Divah (commemorating Sukapha) was one of the first Ahom public worship
celebrations and was meant to establish ancestor worship as the main tenet of the Phra
Lung religion. The first public worship took place in 1988.
On December 2, 1994, I attended the Sukapha Divah celebration in Guwahati.
The ceremony started with the hoisting of the flag. The newly created Ahom flag on
white cloth had a dragon on it, and the organizers explained to me that it symbolized
their connection with the Tai people. This was followed by tarpan, or “homage,” to
Sukapha, who was depicted in the portrait made for the occasion as a Mongol warlord!
To establish that it was an Ahom worship ceremony, 101 lamps were lit. The cere-
mony concluded after two hours of speech making. The speakers encouraged the Ahom
people to become Tai-like in their dress, speech, religion, and food habits. They
suggested that they travel to Thailand to learn Thai customs, contract marriage re-
lationships with Thai people, and learn the Thai language. The speakers claimed that
only then would Tai-Ahoms be able to “regain the golden days of the swargadeos.”
The celebration of Me-dam-me-phi (the placing of ancestral spirits) had emerged
as another important public event and was annually performed to commemorate the
Phra Lung religion, which prioritized the worship of ancestors. Among the Tai-Ahom
ancestors, swargadeos were considered the most important and were now recognized
as the forefathers of the present-day Tai-Ahoms. In 1991 the celebration of Me-dam-
me-phi was established as a public worship ceremony; since then, January 31 has been
identified as the day for annual celebration.
In 1995, at the celebration of Me-dam-me-phi in Guwahati, three different sites
of worship were set up. From various conversations with different Tai-Ahom leaders,
it appeared that Hiteshwar Saikia was the financial guarantor for all of them. Cele-
brations in different locations helped create awareness and reinforce the idea of a new
Tai-Ahom religion. I attended the celebration held at the state capital. In a large open
field, a makeshift temple (seng reng), was set up. Three laymen were designated as
priests for the occasion and conducted the religious functions. In 1982 Domboru
Deodhai wrote the prayers for ancestors.
The Me-dam-me-phi celebration, unlike Sukapha Divah, was not an event that
involved speech making and scholarly interpretations. It was fanfare that combined
politics with cultural play. The religious aspects of the event were clear neither to the
organizers nor to the audience. I observed that most of the attendees had no idea what
to do when the worship began. Some bowed their heads; others folded their hands;
some continued to chat and chew betel nut. The priests made an effort to call upon
them to fold their hands and join in prayer. With a show of solemnity but unable to
control the crowd, the priests started their worship. They chanted the same prayer
that they had read earlier in the morning. Then, the priests sprinkled holy water on
the audience and distributed prakhad, concoction of honey, milk, brown sugar, yogurt,
and clarified butter. The entire ceremony was videotaped, presumably for mass relay
later on the local television channel. It was a way of claiming a public space and
enabling the consumption of Tai-Ahom religion for those in Upper Assam who could
not attend the grand public worship in Guwahati, the capital city. Also, like all other
modernity enterprises, the exercise was an attempt to create a timeless past while
violating it with new technology to liberate it from the archaic and unrecoverable
deadness of official history.
Immediately after the worship was over, the distribution of haj commenced. After
a few drinks, the attendees started talking politics. When pressed whether partici-
pation in such events also altered their faith, most people answered negatively, though
they recognized that, by dislodging Brahmins and Vaishnava gossains (priests) from
46 YASMIN SAIKIA
their positions of power,15 they had created new possibilities for themselves through
Phra Lung religious practices. Tai-Ahom laymen could now officiate as priests during
public celebrations. Since these were temporary priests, their impermanent position
prevented any individual or group of individuals from becoming keepers of religion
and gaining power. Most welcomed this change.
Despite these rituals of public worship and displays of newfound Ahomness, for
the adherents the emerging idea of the Phra Lung religion was not yet neatly pack-
aged. Hence, many followers continued to cling to some practices and Hindu icons
in their private lives, as I found out during my visits to many Tai-Ahom homes. The
ambiguity between belief and practice notwithstanding, under the direction of Ban
Ok, at least at a public level, the new Phra Lung religion claimed to be different from
Hinduism.
At a private level too, rituals and celebrations were reshaped and took new forms
under the tutelage of Ban Ok. Evidently multiple practices were the order, and each
household made up some customs that were convenient for the family. Phra Lung as
performed in the private sphere varied from household to household. One private
ritual of the new religion was called Dam Pata. The celebration of Dam Pata roughly
translates as the “commemoration of ancestral spirits.” I observed two celebrations in
homes—in Guwahati and Patsako—and they significantly differed from each other.
Clearly the ceremony of Dam Pata was a new creation. There was no fixed text for
followers to rely on and reproduce. Seekers of a Tai-Ahom identity were straddling
two locations—their Hindu past and Phra Lung present. Both traditions were en-
meshed in their new worship system. In short, religion provided a connection to the
past as much as it served as a gateway to something different, involving a process of
acceptance and resistance that was the ethos of the Tai-Ahom historical-social pro-
duction.
In Guwahati I attended Dam Pata in Kiran Gogoi’s home. Gogoi is a lawyer and
an active member of Ban Ok. I suspected, based on the elaborate paraphernalia that
was set up for the occasion, that the show was put on at least in part for my benefit,
so that I, the research scholar, would get a “correct picture” of Tai-Ahom religion and
culture. The worship was held in a room in Gogoi’s home. Three trays of offerings
were placed in the center of the room. The trays were made of woven banana leaves
and straw, and each tray was designated for a deceased family member. On this
occasion, Gogoi’s father, grandfather, and patrilineal ancestors were the objects of
worship. On each tray were several offerings: eggs, rice, fruit, and rice beer. The trays
were illuminated with earthen lamps. Friends of Gogoi officiated as temporary priests
to conduct the ceremony. They started to chant “Saw nuru, saw aw kai.” Prayers were
read in Assamese invoking the gods and ancestors to bestow blessings on the Gogoi
household.
Afterward, the offerings made to the ancestors were cooked and distributed among
the visitors. Rice beer was the most important item in the array of sacred foods.
Through the medium of food and drink, an exchange between ancestors (the gods)
and people (their progeny) was believed to occur. The Gogoi household was quite
clear that in the pantheon of ancestral spirits there were no Hindu deities. In the
1930s, Gogoi’s father was apparently converted to Buddhism by a Burmese bikkhu
(Buddhist monk). Since then, the Gogois claimed, the family had practiced Phra Lung
15
In Assam, Vaishnavism is dominant. Within the Assamese community, the struggle for
power is between the Brahmins and Vaishnavas. Ahom activits aim to dislodge both of these
groups and claim power for the noncaste Hindu leaders of Upper Assam.
as part of its Buddhism. They emphasized that they were not Hindu and that Dam
Pata was not a Hindu ritual. This Buddhistic Phra Lung ceremony was considered
very powerful as well as merit earning. After the feast, the worship was over. When
I inquired how often the Gogois performed this worship, they told me that this was
the second time that they had performed it in several years and that they did not plan
to perform it again for many more years. If misfortune were to befall them, however,
they would invoke the ancestral spirits for safeguard and assistance.
Contrary to what I had witnessed and was told at Gogoi’s home, I found that
Dam Pata did not have the overtones of a Buddhist ceremony in Patsako. Hindu
deities were prominent in the Patsako celebration and occupied the same space as new
ancestors. In Patsako, Dam Pata celebrations coincided with Assamese Bihu—that is,
between April 13 and15—which in turn corresponds with the celebration of the New
Year among many Tai-speaking peoples in Southeast Asia. Bihu is a celebration of
spring and is New Year for all communities in Assam. The Tai-Ahom in Patsako
believed that originally Bihu was their festival, a “Tai thing.” But, the Hindus took
over and made it their new year’s celebration and transformed the Ahom festival.
Hence, to break away from the Hindu Assamese Bihu celebrations, Dam Pata was
devised as a community event in Patsako.
I had an opportunity to observe Dam Pata in Nandeswar Barua’s house in Patsako.
It was a very simple affair. In a corner of the kitchen, four brass bowls had been set
out in front of several pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses. The picture of the Hindu
goddess Durga stood out. Each bowl contained a little rice beer.
How does one read the two ceremonies that shared the common label “Dam Pata”?
Evidently they differed. Differences of class and location influenced the performance
of each ritual. Kiran Gogoi, the successful city-based lawyer, organized an elaborate
ceremony to represent Tai-Ahom religion to me. It was a show as well as a venue to
construct a tradition for family members to imitate in the future. Nandeswar Barua,
a peasant who lived on the brink of poverty, could not put on the same show. Dam
Pata was for his benefit, not a performance for others to consume. He had to make do
with what he had—pictures of Hindu gods and rice beer. The latter, no doubt, was
a prized commodity, for rice to feed his family was quite limited.
Beneath the layer of obvious differences, I also saw something in common. Dam
Pata undisputedly was a very important event for both families. In their efforts to
honor their ancestors, both Gogoi and Barua, as well as many others seeking the label
“Tai-Ahom,” reordered their religious practices with which they were familiar. But,
they were also doing much more than that. By doing away with intermediaries such
as Brahmins as well as introducing alcohol as an offering to ancestors/gods, which
most Hindus would consider a polluted substance, people who considered themselves
Phra Lung followers were remaking religion to suit their terms. Also, by situating
Dam Pata as a Buddhist or Tai festival, as both Gogoi and Barua did, the attempt
was to create affinities among Phra Lung, Buddhism, and Tai culture but not to make
them one and the same. In trying to maintain the distinction and make Phra Lung
more esoteric, the Tai-Ahom practitioners were also including and transforming
Hindu and Buddhist gods to suit their needs. Sometimes this entailed renaming them.
Thus, the Tai-Ahom goddess Hubasani combined the powers and qualities of the
Hindu goddesses Durga and Kali but became one goddess in Tai-Ahom religion, just
as the god Phra combined Shiva and Buddha. The changes that Tai-Ahom made, they
hoped, would define them as practitioners of another religion, one that was not Hindu
or Buddhist per se, yet one that was not totally different either. Through a practice
of syncretism (Kirsch 1977; Eaton 1993; Stewart and Shaw 1994), Tai-Ahom were
48 YASMIN SAIKIA
trying both symbolically and fundamentally to forge a separation and to claim a

likeness with many groups to share a past as well as a future by appropriating old
forms and formulating new ones of their own.
The loose approach to religion continued, even as the deodhais of Patsako, with
the support of Ban Ok, converted many to Phra Lung. The conversion ceremony was
called Te-Te. Since the principles of Phra Lung were not determined, the ceremony
entailed a simple verbal commitment in Assamese to respect ancestors. This was
described to me by Nabin Syam, the high priest of the religion since Domboru
Deodhai had passed away, and was reaffirmed as the standard practice by Puspa Gogoi,
the then secretary of Ban Ok. The conversion ceremony, both noted, is conducted at
night, and elaborate worship is offered to ancestors during the occasion. In the event
of mass conversion, a ceremony called Hu-pat (killing a cow) was performed. Although
no one knows for certain how this ritual of killing a cow to establish the finality of
conversion started, the ceremony of Hu-pat had become the fine line differentiating
“real Tai-Ahoms” from “Hindus claiming to be Tai-Ahom.” It is not hard to surmise
that the rite of killing a cow to establish the conversion of former Hindu Tai-Ahom
to practitioners of Phra Lung is in direct defiance of the Hindu belief about the
sacrality of cows. For Phra Lung Tai-Ahoms, the rejection of Hinduism and the high-
caste Hindu customs were more important than providing meaning and definition of
the new rites that were constructed in the process. Hence, other than continuing the
practice itself, there was not much in the way of explaining its importance. The ritual
killing of a cow and partaking of beef to establish the finality of conversion, however,
was not readily accepted by many supporters of Tai-Ahom, as I found out in the course
of my stay in several villages.16 Nonetheless, Bak Ok and particularly Nagen Hazarika,
one of its active members, deemed the Hu-pat ceremony crucial to making the Ahoms
different from the Hindus and insisted on adhering to this custom. Nagen Hazarika
performed this ritual on many occasions, which he documented in many photographs
that he shared with me.
Most of the supporters of Phra Lung were nevertheless not yet ready to make a
clean break from Hinduism. As a result, Hindu and Phra Lung syncretic rituals were
accommodated. During my stay in different villages, I heard several accommodation
stories that explained the reasons for the rising popularity of Phra Lung. One story
in particular helped me understand the process and context of the accommodation
strategy. In Dhemaji, a remote village-town in Upper Assam, the spirit of Phra was
said to have possessed a woman. One fine morning in February 1995, the possessed
woman marched to the Tai-Ahom temple and, after devouring the blood of several
live chickens, made divinations in the name of Phra. She warned the people that
unless they and their neighbors immediately converted to Phra Lung, bad luck, loss
of crops, epidemics, and disasters would befall the community. Subsequently, many
in Dhemaji converted. Following this, mass conversions in the adjoining villages
caused a sensation. Drama notwithstanding, those actively circulating the message of
“possession” were driven by another, more long-term objective. They were using the
event to create and fit Tai-Ahom religion within the ST category in India. By em-
16
For example, the people of the village of Barbarua identified themselves as Shankaria
Vaishnav, a Hindu group in Assam. While critical of the Hindu caste system, they were equally
reluctant to accept new dietary rules suggested by Phra Lung. They explained that they could
not discad the practices of their ancestors, whose religion forbade them to consume meat and
liquor. Since ancestor worship was an integral part of Phra Lung, they reasoned that they too
should be allowed to respect the beliefs and practices of their ancestors. Despite this, they
claimed an Ahom identity and sought recognition as Hindu Tai-Ahom.
phasizing divination practices and the role of the deodhai as the medium in their
religion, Puspa Gogoi hinted to me that Ahoms wanted the surveyors who were
touring Dhemaji at the time to understand that their religion was different from that
of Hindus and was closer in practice to the local religion of non-Hindu communities
in the northeast (conversation, March 25, 1995). Tai-Ahom leaders who see the con-
firmation of ST status as a possibility for gaining several benefits and privileges were
willing to put on a display of worship if it would help them make claims of tribalism.
The Tai-Ahom have been struggling to gain recognition as an ST group but have not
yet succeeded.
Throughout the 1990s, as is evident, the construction of Phra Lung was in process.
But, it was a murky and messy enterprise. Many agendas and agents were constructing
this new religion and seeking to make the Ahom Tai. The messiness notwithstanding,
one thing was clear: Tai-Ahom was gaining ground and making claims as a historical
community with linkages communities outside Assam and to India at large. The Tai-
Ahom gaze had turned eastward to Southeast Asia. This facilitated the recognition of
Thai input in contemporary Tai-Ahom politics and performance as a natural outcome.
To the contemporary story on Ahom, Thai scholars added their twist and put it into
circulation in Thailand, which generated a new level of construction and consumption
of Tai-Ahom in Assam.
Constructing to Consume: Thai Interest

in the Tai-Ahom
How did Thai scholars facilitate the Tai-Ahom identity movement? To answer
this question, we first need to investigate the construction of Thai nationalism and
the Pan-Thai movement, which was started in the early decades of the twentieth
century and has appeared in many incarnations since then in Thailand. Historians of
Thailand suggest that the process of making the people of Siam into one seamless
group of Thai citizens was started as a royal mandate toward the end of the nineteenth
century (Wyatt 1984; Keyes 2002). In 1939, when Siam was rechristened as Thailand,
the diverse communities were given the name “Thai” and made into one composite
society. The Thai language and Buddhist religion were deemed the hallmarks of the
Thai people. Through this enterprise, a contained Thai national community was cre-
ated, but resistance to the royal scheme also immediately emerged.
In the late 1930s, Phibun Songgram and Luang Wachit Wathakan launched an
ambitious movement to include many groups living outside Thailand, who they
claimed also shared Thai-ness (Keyes 2002). A great Thai race was born in this dis-
course, and many different communities in Southeast Asia were deemed as sharing a
common Tai ancestry. This was reinforced by invoking the story of Tai migration
from Nanchao in southern China, a theory that was propounded by Western and
missionary scholars in the late nineteenth century and had gained wide currency in
the early twentieth century.17 The theory of a common homeland of Tai people enabled
the Pan-Thai group to claim the dispersed Tai people and embark on the search for
kin throughout Asia. The defeat of Japan, the main ally and supporter of the Pan-
Thai leaders, at the end of World War II weakened the movement in Thailand,
17
The Nanchao theory appears in almost all standard works on the early history of Burma
and Thailand produced in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century
(see, for example, Dodd 1923; Wood 1926; Hall 1950; Elias 1876; Milne 1910).
50 YASMIN SAIKIA
resulting in its collapse. Nonetheless, the ideology of Pan Thai-ism did not die out
completely; rather, as Charles Keyes argues, the Pan-Thai movement emerged in a
new incarnation, and “since the 1980s the Thai have renewed their interest in those
who can be assumed to belong to a chonchāt Thai [Thai race], whether they live in
Thailand or outside of the kingdom” (2002, 1181). The burgeoning interest in finding
ancestors and cousins outside Thailand has led Thai scholars to claim as Tai groups
those in Laos, Vietnam, and southern China, in addition to as far west as Assam.
Much of it is driven by nostalgic remembrances and the creation of a memory that
superseded historical differences among the communities claimed as Tai.
Promoting the agenda of connection between Thailand and Laos, Suwit Thira-
sasawat writes: “In my opinion, Lao people are Tai as well, and our brothers. . . .”
Furthermore, he suggests that “as the stronger group among the Tai, and in the long-
term effort to unify the Tai in the Golden Peninsula into one federation, Bangkok
Thais should admit their mistakes . . . and conduct equal relations with Tais in Lanna
and Lan Xang, in Laos and in Isan” (1975, 8–9).18 Another group, led by Srisakra
Vallibhotama and Pranee Wongthes (1993), claims the people of Zhuang in the
Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region as the oldest of the Tai sibling groups. Srisakra
has been a determined proponent of a grand narrative of Tai people spread across the
Irrawady and Salween regions and the Mekong and Red rivers. Searches for Thai
ancestors and relatives are spread throughout these areas now, and the projects of
scholars, activists, and tour operators are thriving.
The Pan-Thai movement has not limited its search for ancestors to present-day
Southeast Asia but has spread its operation in South Asia too. Chatthip Narthsupha,
the founder of the Community Culture School, is active in spreading Pan Thai ideals
among the Tai-Ahom in Assam. Chatthip, a professor of economics at Chulalongkorn
University, believes that “[t]o understand [the Thai self] one way is to begin studying
this in Thailand. The other is to study the cultural relationship among various Tai
peoples. The most obvious evidence of this relationship is language. The structure of
language is the structure of thought, of the spiritual thought, which could link us
back to various Tai communities even though they may reside outside Thailand”
(1996, 32). Thus, Chatthip connects the national Thai to the Pan-Thai desires to find
kin and relatives outside Thailand and make them part of a common and linked cause
to “find and make Thai-ness.”
The number of multiple ancestors and relatives whom the different groups have
found and continue to find leads to several contestations within Thailand: Who is an
authentic Tai relative? Which group is older than the other? How can they be used
to benefit the Thai? These are all crucial questions in the contemporary Pan-Thai
enterprise. While the debates continue among intellectuals in Bangkok, for the Thai
in Thailand, the Pan-Thai movement is also an enterprise to create a transnational,
global impact of Thai culture and goods (Keyes 2002) and establish Thai hegemony
over the neighboring peoples. Although Chatthip tries to reassure his critics that the
efforts to find Tais outside Thailand are not motivated with the aim “to expand the
Thai nation-state,” but rather are a way to “oppose the state, all states in this region”
(1996, 15), the direction of the movement does not authenticate this. Instead, we find
that the status of Tai groups outside Thailand is compromised to the agenda of
identity created and executed by Bangkok Thai intellectuals. I read the effort “to lay
out a network of all Tai communities” that would “cross political borders and use
18
I am grateful to Thongchai Winichakul for drawing my attention to this literature and
translating the text.
cultural borders instead” (Chatthip 1996, 21) as both a subversion of the artificial
divide between groups in South and Southeast Asia and an attempt to create a new
Thai hegemony. I believe this would make the peripheral Tai groups vulnerable to
colonialism by Bangkok. No doubt, the intensity of Thai cultural colonialism would
be different in different places. Since I am mainly concerned with the Thai and Tai-
Ahom interactions, in the following section I will try to map the process of exchanges
between these two groups and reflect on the impact of the Thai discovery of Ahom.
Thai scholars found Ahoms during the First International Thai Studies Conference
in 1981, and Chatthip’s group adopted them as a Tai community. Immediately the
differences between Assamese and Ahom, Ahom and Indian, were exacerbated. The
history of Assam was linked to Thailand. This encounter also transformed the agenda
within Thailand. Thai history and Pan Thai-ism transcended the boundaries of South-
east Asia and moved beyond them to include areas and peoples mapped within India
(South Asia) in the Thai cause. The Thai/Tai now could belong to both South and
Southeast Asia, and the Ahom became the bridge community. From 1981 to 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. To experience new possi-
bilities in the global market of identity politics was a bold plan in defiance of the
bounded national space and the construction of a homogeneous Hindu identity in
India.
While a brisk production of Tai-ness was immediately heralded in Assam with
the help of Ban Ok and the financial support of Hiteshwar Saikia, as I have discussed
in the previous sections, in Bangkok the search for Ahom took formal shape. Chatthip
and Renoo Wichasin19 of Chiang Mai Ratchabhat Institute became outspoken advo-
cates for the Tai-Ahom movement in Thailand. Beginning in 1980, Chatthip en-
couraged several young academics to study Tai-Ahom history, religion, and culture
in Thailand (Chatthip and Renoo, conversations, February 7, 1995). Ranee Lertleum-
sai of Silpakorn University and Willauwan Kannittanan of Thammasat University
also became actively involved in studying Tai-Ahom myths and religion.20 These
scholars generated an interest in the Tai-Ahom in Thailand.
Chatthip’s influence was not limited to the world of Thai academics. He was also
influential in renewing the study of buranjis in Assam. In his public address at the
Second International Seminar on Tai Studies, held February 7–9, 1995, in Guwahati,
Chatthip proudly recalled his role in the Tai-Ahom movement. Fourteen years ago,
he said, he had encouraged Professor J. N. Phukan of Guwahati University to under-
take the study of Tai-Ahom history. Chatthip had also influenced Professors Romesh
Buragohain and Puspa Gogoi to dedicate their academic and political energies to the
Tai-Ahom movement.21 The joint political and academic pursuits also led to close
friendships between Chatthip and Tai-Ahom leaders. In villages such as Patsako,
Chatthip is a household name.
Why was Chatthip interested in a local movement in Assam? To what use could
he put the Tai-Ahom movement in Thailand? Interest in the Tai-Ahom as well as
other “Tai” groups outside Thailand was mostly motivated by internal developments
19
An alternative transliteration of her name is Renoo Wichasilp.
20
At Thammasat University, the Tai-Ahom Study Center was created and is still func-
tionng. A few gradute students are enrolled in the program.
21
In Guwahati both professors admitted to me Chatthip’s influence on their lives and
political careers.
52 YASMIN SAIKIA
within Thailand. In the 1970s, as Western capital moved into Asia, Thailand became
an important place for commercial investment. Chatthip, as a professor of economics
and a Thai regional specialist, was distressed by the course of capitalist “development”
in Thailand’s society and economy. Many Thai academics feared that the “foreign aid”
agencies dumping money and experts in Thailand would erode village societies, im-
pose Western norms of economic development, and foist a value system that would
go against Thailand’s communal village system (Chatthip 1991, 1995; Pongpaichit
and Baker 1998). They developed a nativist political and intellectual agenda empha-
sizing the “community culture” of villages. They hoped to empower villagers, so that
village communities could gain a foothold in national development projects and bar-
gain on somewhat equal terms with the state in planning the development. For this
to happen, the Thai needed to find an archaic, “original” Tai society that they could
display as a model to inspire the “transformed” Thai villages to follow. Unfortunately,
such a village society did not exist in Thailand. What was absent had to be created.
Textual materials on Tai culture and history were reread, and new interpretations of
the past were suggested. The forgotten and lost pristine village community was re-
found in the texts.
The “discovery” of the Tai-Ahom and their buranjis, deemed the repositories of
an isolated, archaic, genuine Tai community, was not a coincidence, since Chatthip
believes that “ancient Tai identities are still preserved in these texts and words and
reflect the continuity of these identities” (1996, 14–15). Claimed as an ancestral
group, the Ahom became a subject of deliberation and consumption for the proponents
of “community culture” in Thailand. The Tai-Ahom and their buranjis provided an
imaginative space for a return to a pastoral village life overrun by the new capitalism
centered in Thailand’s cities.
While the Bangkok intellectuals actively sought out an “authentic Tai village
culture” to empower the local people of Thailand in the face of capitalist intrusion
from the West and the Thai state, Tai-Ahom leaders in Assam saw in the Thai
endeavor an outlet for their political and economic ambitions. They seized this op-
portunity at the First International Thai Studies Conference in New Delhi. Along
with representatives from Thailand, Tai-Ahom delegates drafted a common agenda
to explore their “shared” identity. The rather abstract and unknown category called
“Ahom” in the buranjis was revitalized through discussions and became a platform
to challenge the Assamese identity movement that was in full form in the early 1980s.
By associating Ahom history with Thai history and culture, the leaders of the Tai-
Ahom made their enterprise exotic and different from that of the Assamese. Moreover,
the newly found connection with Thailand provided an impetus to mix and match
different strands of religion, some kind of Buddhism with the newly minted Phra
Lung rituals, and to demand ST status. The postcolonial state practice of economic
neglect and the cultural marginality of Assam within India were both challenged by
the obscure Ahoms with the help of Thai international support.
Conferences within Assam accelerated the production of Tai-ness among the Tai-
Ahom, providing occasions for frequent visits from Thai scholars. Since 1981 two
“international” conferences on Tai studies have been held in Assam, both funded by
Hiteshwar Saikia. The participation of Thai scholars made a big impression on the
audiences, particularly on the delegates from the villages of Upper Assam, who were
led to believe that the Tai-Ahom and Thai were closely related and were convening
to reestablish age-old associations. During my stay in villages in Upper Assam, I often
heard stories about visits to Thailand. On these occasions, the entire male populace
would gather to listen to the travelers’ encounters in the “land of their forefathers.”
In these accounts, Thailand was presented as a place of pilgrimage where everyone

was happy, kindly disposed, and successful. The narration would end with sighs of
longing to “return to the place where we originally came from.” Such repeated stories
of travel to Thailand, at public and private gatherings, convinced the Tai-Ahom that
they were more Thai than they had known. At the same time, their distancing from
the Hindu community was becoming more apparent. Even Hindus in Upper Assam
agreed without hesitation that the Tai-Ahom and the Thai were related in the past.
Conferences and seminars on Tai studies were also held in Thailand to facilitate
exchange between Tai-Ahom and Thai scholars. Generally speaking, the Tai-Ahom
agenda within Thailand was and continues to be marginal compared to Thai inter-
actions with groups in Laos, southern China, and Vietnam. The issue, however, is not
of a matter of scale and degree. Rather, I think the emphasis should be on the process
and the construction of memories that enable the establishment of a Thai presence in
India through the Tai-Ahom, which is no ordinary feat. This is particularly important
in light of the fact that, only a few decades ago, Indianists had established an intel-
lectual colonialism by labeling Thailand, along with other regions of Southeast Asia,
as “Greater India.”22 The tables had now turned. Thai intellectuals were making
inroads into the minds and hearts of the people mapped within India and transforming
groups such as the Tai-Ahom into a Thai-like community. One could say that Upper
Assam was now part of “Greater Thailand.”
I experienced the growing familiarity between Assam and Thailand at the Sixth
International Thai Studies Conference held in Chiang Mai in 1996. At this conference
were several sessions on the Tai-Ahom, and their history and identity was a hot topic
of debate in the plenary session. Evidently recognition of “marginal Tai groups living
outside Thailand” was a serious academic concern.23 My paper on Tai-Ahom politics
did not go unnoticed. People were either very encouraging or highly critical of my
approach. That was a surprise and a new experience, for at South Asian studies con-
ferences, very few people at all showed interest in the subject. I found myself won-
dering whether the Tai-Ahom were a subject of Southeast Asian and not South Asian
history. Of course, the real issue is the politics of production of academic knowledge
that creates certain topics worthy of attention and silences others. Assam and the Tai-
Ahom are unspoken subjects of Indian history. I read as a challenge to the statist
parameters of Indian history and politics Tai-Ahoms’ effort to create an interstitial
history in the face of this ubiquitous silence. Hence, I would argue that, although a
small movement, their efforts to transcend the boundaries of enclosure deserve schol-
arly attention and analysis.
22
The literature on “Greater India” was inaugurated by the historians of the Bharatiya
Vidyabhavan Series in the late 1960s. This group of scholars wrote a narrative that transformed
Indian history into a cultural, political, and emotional text. The nation was upgraded to a
sacred, mystical entity in this narrative. I have been reading the historical narrative produced
by this school, alongside the new narrative of Indian history written and produced by BJP
government historians. There are some striking similarities between the two versions. One
important and obvious similarity is that both of them use history to create power for and
endow it on select groups of people, namely, the Hindi-speaking Hindu communities of central
and north India, and tout their myths and tales as Indian history.
23
Since 1996 two International Thai Studies Conferences have been held, one in Amster-
dam (1999) and one in Thiland (2002). Upon making inquiries, I found that the Tai-Ahom
leaders were absent from these conferences. Since Hiteshwar Saikia passed away in 1996, the
avenues of financial assistance for Tai-Ahom leaders to travel abroad to solicit support for their
movement have disappeared. Whether their absence at the conferences affected international
interest in the Tai-Ahom needs to be investigated.
54 YASMIN SAIKIA
Thai academic interest in and support for Tai-Ahom identity was only one aspect
of a very complex relationship. It did not take long after the first meeting in 1981
for the label Tai-Ahom to become an item of transaction between the two interested
parties. First of all, it resulted in a commodification of “Tai-Ahom objects.” In several
villages in Sibsagar, a large number of buranjis, locally called puthis (religious books)
are available for buying. “Thai scholars,” many in Patsako Village told me, were “very
kind and paid handsomely for these puthis that they took back to Thailand for trans-
lation.” Funding for the purchase and translation of buranjis into Thai came from the
Toyota Foundation of Japan (Renoo 1996, 14). On several occasions, different villagers
also confided in me that “when Thai delegates visit our village, we stage rituals and
worship for their benefit. They want to see ancient Tai-Ahom spirit worship, so we
do it” (conversations, April 1994–March 1995). Thai scholars were not the only ones
determining the price of a Tai-Ahom past. Rebel groups from Upper Burma and
adjoining regions in Nepal had joined the fray and were helping the ULFA reclaim
the past of the swargadeo’s kingdom to create a future independent Assam. These
groups had also raised the stakes of Tai-Ahom history, and now everything came with
a price.
While Thai scholars indirectly generated income for the Tai-Ahom in Assam
through travel and tourism and the buying of “Tai antiquities,” they also disseminated
a wide array of “cultural goods” from Thailand to enable Tai-Ahoms to create a Tai
ambiance and lifestyle to distinguish themselves from the Assamese. Pictures of the
Thai monarch and his wife adorned many Tai-Ahom homes and places of work and
worship. Ironically, while Thai scholars sought a pre-Buddhist past in Tai-Ahom
villages, people in Upper Assam were trying to become like the Thai by making Phra
Lung rituals resemble Buddhist rituals. For this they felt the need to have a Buddha
image in each of their temples. With the direct involvement of the Thai monarchy,
a large number of Buddha images were sent regularly from Thailand, and villages
competed to acquire them. A market in Buddhist paraphernalia developed as a result,
and demand exceeded supply. The most lucrative wares were tankhas (scroll paintings
depicting the Buddha), handwritten manuscripts, and religious robes. From Thailand
people sent such items to Assam to make merit. In Assam this helped the Tai-Ahom
demonstrate that they were not Hindus, but a different religious group that practiced
ancestor worship along with Buddhism; Buddha was now claimed as an ancestor of
the Tai people.
Tai-Ahom leaders viewed the association with Thai scholars and supporters as an
avenue for many more transformations within: cultural, political, and economic. To
fulfill these goals, the leaders made regular visits to Thailand. There they stayed at
universities and in Buddhist viharas (temple complexes) as well as with local people
to learn the different ways to make the Tai-Ahom fit the mold of the archaic Tai that
the Thai desired. This they hoped would enable both groups to find and thus succeed
in the ancestor hunt and identity making. They hoped that in the future Thais looking
for a place to visit or in search of genealogical roots would come to Assam to “find”
pristine Tai culture in villages.24 In the meantime, the production and consumption
of “Tai-Ahom” in Assam financially benefited several groups and individuals. It cre-
ated new jobs for Tai-language teachers, brought business to Tai-Ahom building
engineers and contractors who built Tai-Ahom temples and Sukapha bhavans (Sukapha
meeting places), boosted the publication industry of Tai-Ahom books, and created
24
Puspa Gogoi explained to me these details and the reasons for pursuing them during
our conversations in Dhemaji, March 1995.
new sites of political power. All these activities also heightened an awareness of a
separatist identity and fueled the Tai-Ahom movement. In 2002, for a brief period,
a direct flight between Guwahati and Bangkok was operated to jump-start a new
relationship. The Indian government went so far as to acknowledge the historic con-
nections of the Ahom people with Thailand in the hope that a new level of commerce
and trade between the two countries would thereby be engendered (Times of India,
April 4, 2002). But once again, rhetoric was not enough. Recently the flight between
Guwahati and Bangkok was discontinued for an “indeterminate” period. The formal
linking of Assam with Thailand by official authorities was short lived. The Tai-Ahom
identity movement today serves a limited political agenda in Upper Assam. Ban Ok
struggles to keep alive the practice of Phra Lung in its annual conference and public
worship celebrations. These events are not glamorous and lavish, as they were a few
years ago, and people are losing interest because Tai-Ahom was not accepted as an ST
community. In Thailand, as Chatthip Narthsupha told me in a recent conversation,
there is no interest or money to fund extensive research on the Thai living outside
Thailand. The Tai-Ahom now look more and more distant, a forgotten ancestral group
that few are interested to know about and learn from (conversations, July 8, 2003).
As had happened many times before, the Tai-Ahom identity movement has become
a marginal story in the contest for identity at the crossroads.
Conclusion
In this article, I have presented the “creative tensions” (Basu 1992) in the con-
struction of the Tai-Ahom identity. The source of Ahom creativity lies in the various
axes of ambiguities and contradictions that resist the formulation and reduction of
Ahom into a this-or-that thing. The web of interpretations and agents of the Tai-
Ahom renounces the totalizing discourse of a grand narrative. Heeding Michel Fou-
cault’s (1977) advice to “listen to history,” I have emphasized the small accounts, the
disjointed narratives, and the fragmented episodes that different agents with different
agendas make to produce knowledge about the Tai-Ahom to acquire power in the
process. Their activities and performances reveal the arbitrariness of a presentist move-
ment as well as demonstrate that identity is not an unchallenged artifact, but a
contingent patchwork negotiated at many supportive and opposing levels (Hobsbawm
and Ranger 1983). The small stories of Ahom memory that are conveniently pegged
with a specific date, actor, or event do not create distinct borders of Ahom history.
Rather, I have shown that they are launched from an unstable position that is con-
sistently amended and made useful for transactions with different labels and narratives.
Fluidity is the key element in this enterprise. The leaders and supporters use the
memory of an Ahom past in a creative way to depart from the tyranny of a modern
singular national history, within which Ahom has been rendered absent. I am re-
minded by Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1995) penetrating reading of the Haitian Rev-
olution, which was nullified in French historiography and archives, to read the Tai-
Ahom effort at writing a new history as an assertion, to claim a possible place for
speaking outside the control and limits of the authoritative state records (Trouillot
1995).
The intersubjective social and political function between religion and identity—
the private and the public—is not a new phenomenon. The ground swell for
community-identity formation in religion and religious discourse in the case of west-
ern Europe as well as the ex-colonies, many scholars argue, created pathways for
56 YASMIN SAIKIA
nationalist politics and new interpretations of power (Kedourie 1960; Brass 1985;
Smith 1986; Chatterjee 1993; Hasan 1993; Guha 1997). Several articles which have
recently appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies make us aware of a variety of devel-
opments of “new” and revived religious orientations in South, Southeast, and East
Asia claiming to form identities and bodies of alternative power. These new manifes-
tations of religions, Julia Day Howell (2001), Lauren Leve (2002), and Irene Eng and
Yi-min Lin (2002) argue, draw on existing mainstream traditions and communal
religiosity to reorient traditional religion, be it Hinduism, Islam, or Buddhism, and
create a layered effect of accommodations and resistance for dismantling established
authority. The aim of both leaders and practitioners is to create “an important source
of legitimation . . . outside the system of symbols sanctioned by the official ideology”
(Eng and Lin 2002, 1266–67). Thus, revived religious traditions become tools for
negotiating power relations in the public sphere and increasing the bargaining power
of local groups vis-à-vis the established systems controlled by dominant actors at
national centers. The Tai-Ahom effort at making Phra Lung defies the construct of
state Hinduism, which presents itself as the religion of Indian citizens. In turn, the
Tai-Ahom movement has raised a murmur of protest, and leaders within the move-
ment suggest Phra Lung as a tool for local people in Assam to bargain with the central
state in Delhi for rights and recognition as a separate and equal community.
Can we read the Tai-Ahom movement as a resistance against the new Indian
national enterprise of making monolithic, hegemonic labels—Hindu and Indian? I
think the familiar approach to resistance in Indian history as moments of dramatic
transformation, organized protest, and subaltern agency does not fit the Ahom case.
Rather, the Ahom story reveals a vital concept of “everyday resistance,” to which
James Scott (1985) has drawn our attention. The Ahom leaders whom I have shown
in the long history of engagement with the state continuously accommodated the
state’s power so much so that they accepted the label “Assamese” and, for a long time
too, the representation as a Hinduized plains people. The desire to overcome the
negative connotation associated with this label developed in subtle, undefined spaces
of local anticolonial politics and contingent understandings that changed course many
times. In the postcolonial period, in small, unorganized ways, those who claim Ahom
identity seek to subvert and undermine the narratives of a bounded Indian history
and elite power of caste Hinduism by talking about a past in terms that overrun the
demarcated boundaries of the nation-state or by eating beef or drinking alcohol. The
symbolic resistance in this respect struggles between creating a borderless identity
and finding a place to belong and affirm one’s presence.
The longing for the “unknown” in the Proustian sense creates an emotion of
alienation and nostalgia for something that is not there for Tai-Ahom today. “Home”
is the site of debate: Where is it? How should it be represented? Some claim a fixed
place in Upper Assam, others in Thailand, and some say it is somewhere in southern
China. The instability of home as a knowable place and subject enhances the possi-
bility that the historical narrative of Ahom cannot be grounded in a solid location
and hence must always remain outside the limits of bounded space. This may be an
ideal location to situate a critique of the nation-state and of identities bounded in
place and time. But as I have shown in this article, the tension of homelessness and
derogatory representations of frontier people such as the Ahom have made them vul-
nerable to claims leading to a commodification of their past by more powerful groups,
such as the Thai, that create an equivalence to use their memories to outline different
realities in the present. Does this mean that Ahom has become subject to a new regime
of tyranny of Thai national history?
By blurring Ahom into Thai, Thai activists mystified the Ahom in Assam. Ahom
became a performative representation that assumes the reality of pretenses to claim a
historic community that can enjoy specific and real gains today. The consciousness of
a relationship with the Thai in the past, to make a present as Tai-Ahom, is an attitude
that is forward looking and futuristically driven. Fanciful stories of a universal Tai
identity are made up by Thai scholars in Bangkok and are bought by Ahom in Assam
without reservation. They have become “listening subjects” (Foucault 1977) of the
Thai. If this were all there was to Tai-Ahom, though, it would reduce the story to a
simple line: they are not Indian-but Thai-like. It would become a static story—but
that is not the case. The relativism of the Tai-Ahom identity, as I have argued, makes
it a “happening” story, but it does not become a specific thing, a fixed category.
History, memory, and identity are constantly reconstructed in light of local problems
and time-bound knowledge. Tai-Ahom efforts have produced results without achiev-
ing goals. Membership in Tai-Ahom organizations grows daily, and more people in
Assam want to know about “their” past, the Tai-Ahom past. But, they do not cease
to be Assamese, Indian, Hindu, Phra Lung follower, Buddhist, Thai, or many other
selves whom they accept and reject to serve their purposes, as they had done in the
past. Knowing “self” and “other” is a contingent awareness at the crossroads, and the
Tai-Ahom case illustrates it for engaging with the lived reality of a crossroads com-
munity.
Finally, the question that scholars of identity often ask: How does one label such
a movement? The term “subnational” provides limited access to understanding the
Tai-Ahom. I am particularly bothered by the prefix “sub-“ because it introduces “na-
tional” as primary, ascribing to it a metaphysical quality. It also situates the national
as essential and always there, rather than exposing it as a construct of capital, power,
and homogenizing discourse. In the Indian case, the assumption of continuity of an
essential national has led to a serious manipulation of history that is going on unabated
under the guidance of the Hindu nationalist dictates of the BJP. India is no longer
represented as a union of states created at the end of British colonialism. Rather, it
is viewed as a deified “holy land” and “fatherland” beyond reproach.25 In consequence,
subnational movements are positioned as a contestation to the sacred national and
deemed as disorderly politics that seeks to undo the national balance. Such stream-
lining and interpretation create binaries of opposition and allow for a regime of re-
pression and violence against people, coercing them into accepting the national as
natural identity and within it their (lowly) place. We have seen in this article that
the Tai-Ahom movement questions this normative stance and demands for more
intricate and pluralistic recognitions. The formulation of history, according to the
Tai-Ahom, has to be a continuous dialogue for constructing and reconstructing local
selves that can include and assimilate. In other words, it calls for blurring the bound-
aries of the present and the ways of knowing imposed by national institutions to
engage in another mode of knowing outside the limits of restricted national bound-
aries and sites of history. Is the Tai-Ahom movement an example of the much-talked-
about phenomena of transnationalism and postnationalism (Wilson and Dissanayake
1996; Appadurai 2001)?
25
The concept of India as fatherland and holy land was first articulated by Domodar
Savarkar in his 1923 book, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Today Savarkar’s concept has become
the foundation for Indian nationalism and a tool to exclude vast groups of people, particularly
Muslims, from practicing full citizenship rights, because allegedly they have religious loyalties
outside the country.
58 YASMIN SAIKIA
Although variety and pluralism are the hallmarks of the Tai-Ahom movement,
which seems to indicate liberation from the confines of national identity and hints at
restructuring identity by crossing many borders, the movement is limited to certain
agendas and aspirations that can be mapped within the national scheme. A variety of
people have been brought together in a common and deeply felt purpose, expressed
as Tai-Ahom, to demand recognition and economic and political voice to escape their
present anonymity and deprivation within the Indian national state. Tai-Ahom iden-
tity politics serves as a language of “interiority” (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990) and
emotion of people who seek to translate the experienced reality into visions and agen-
das to secure a future within the nation-state by moving beyond it. The performance
and production of Tai-Ahom identity have not yet achieved the goals that the move-
ment set to accomplish. But, the process set in motion a more important and exciting
possibility that illustrates the false unity of national history and the problem of la-
beling. In turn, it shows how a relatively local construction can create a new history
that does not take sides with South or Southeast Asia, is neither a transnational nor
a postnational movement, but mediates between many levels and hierarchies of la-
beling to make and unmake new versions of the past and present.
List of References
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file, album 10. Oriental and India Office Collections. British Library, London.
A PPADURAI , A RJUN , ed. 2001. Globalization. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
A SSAM S TATE A RCHIVE . Political organizations and associations files, 1920–30. Gu-
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Religion, Nostalgia, and Memory: Making an Ancient and Recent Tai-Ahom

Article in The Journal of Asian Studies · February 2006

Historical connections between South and SouthEast Asia View project

Northeast India: A place of relations View project

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Religion, Nostalgia, and Memory:

Yasmin Saikia (Saikia@email.unc.edu) is Associate Professor in the History Department

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 35

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 37

documents, witnessed firsthand the production of Tai-Ahom, and traveled to Thailand

Bordering New and Old Identities: Indian, Assamese,

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 39

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 41

Making New Borders of Identity: Politics and Politicians

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 43

Border Crossing through Phra Lung: Making Ahom Tai

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 45

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 47

trying both symbolically and fundamentally to forge a separation and to claim a

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 49

Constructing to Consume: Thai Interest

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 51

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 53

In these accounts, Thailand was presented as a place of pilgrimage where everyone

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 55

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 57

RELIGION, NOSTALGIA, AND MEMORY 59

M ETCALF , B ARBARA , and T HOMAS M ETCALF . 2002. A Concise History of India.

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