Saikia Yasmin Saikia

Fragmented Memories (eBook, PDF)

Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Fragmented Memories is a beautifully rendered exploration of how, during the 1990s, socially and economically marginalized people in the northeastern Indian state of Assam sought to produce a past on which to base a distinctive contemporary identity recognized within late-twentieth-century India. Yasmin Saikia describes how groups of Assamese identified themselves as Tai-Ahom-a people with a glorious past stretching back to the invasion of what is now Assam by Ahom warriors in the thirteenth century. In her account of the 1990s Tai-Ahom identity movement, Saikia considers the problem of competing identities in India, the significance of place and culture, and the outcome of the memory-building project of the Tai-Ahom.Assamese herself, Saikia lived in several different Tai-Ahom villages between 1994 and 1996. She spoke with political activists, intellectuals, militant leaders, shamans, and students and observed and participated in Tai-Ahom religious, social, and political events. She read Tai-Ahom sacred texts and did archival research-looking at colonial documents and government reports-in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. In Fragmented Memories, Saikia reveals the different narratives relating to the Tai-Ahom as told by the postcolonial Indian government, British colonists, and various texts reaching back to the thirteenth century. She shows how Tai-Ahom identity is practiced in Assam and also in Thailand. Revealing how the "e;dead"e; history of Tai-Ahom has been transformed into living memory to demand rights of citizenship, Fragmented Memories is a landmark history told from the periphery of the Indian nation.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 346
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. November 2004
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822386162
• Artikelnr.: 54816434

Autorenporträt

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

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Introduction Locating Tai-Ahom in Assam: The Place and People 1
Part One
Historical and Comparative Perspectives on Identity: Indian, Assamese and
Tai-Ahom
1. Identification in India 37
2. Colonial Origins of Ahom 77
3. The Memory of the Local: The Stories the Buranjis Tell 113
Part Two
Tai-Ahom: A Language and Culture of Emotion
4. Rationalizing a History 147
5. Performance and Politics of Tai-Ahom 177
6. There Was No Plot in the People’s Struggle 225
Conclusion The Past and Present: Connecting Memory, History and Identity
251
Epilogue 267
Notes 269
References 301
Index 319