The largest community of the Brahmaputra valley is the Assamese-speaking Hindu mainstream, the Asamiya. They are the people usually meant by the word Assamese in its narrow ethnic sense, and they are the cultural mainstream of the state. In a catalogue of distinct peoples they are the easiest to overlook, precisely because they are the majority into which so much else has flowed. Yet theirs is the most revealing origin of all, because they descend from no single migration. The Asamiya are a composite. They were assembled over two thousand years from many peoples and many arrivals, and fused into one nation by a shared language and a shared faith.
Name and origins
The people call their land Asama, in the modern spelling Asom, and their tongue Asamiya. The English word Assamese is a later, colonial formation, built by British administrators on the place-name Assam much as Sinhalese was built on Sinhala or Canarese on Kannada. The older name itself is disputed. The most widely held view traces it to the Ahoms, the Tai people who entered the valley in the thirteenth century and gave their name to the country they came to rule, so that the land was called after its newcomers. A learned tradition reads it instead as the Sanskrit asama, meaning peerless or unequalled, a scholarly gloss laid over the same sound. Others have proposed a Bodo root, ha-som, for low or level land. Whatever its first source, by the medieval period the name had settled on the valley, and in time it settled on all who came to share its speech.
The mainstream Assamese are best understood not as a race but as a layering. Beneath everything lies the indigenous population of the valley, the Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic peoples whom Suniti Kumar Chatterji called Indo-Mongoloid and grouped under the old Sanskrit name Kirata. They were the demographic foundation. Every later layer settled on top of them, and the great majority of the community's ancestry runs back to them, not to any incoming stock. Over centuries they were gradually drawn into an Indo-Aryan language and a Sanskritic, Hindu culture. What changed was speech and faith. The people themselves largely stayed.
That this base is non-Aryan in origin is written into the Assamese language itself. Banikanta Kakati showed it to be an Eastern Indo-Aryan tongue descended from Magadhi Prakrit, yet one deeply shaped by the Bodo and other substratum languages it absorbed. Those older tongues left their mark on its sounds, its grammar, and its everyday words. A language does not carry so deep a substratum unless its speakers were, in large part, the earlier population learning a new speech. The Assamese mainstream is therefore, at root, the valley's own peoples, Aryanised in speech and Hinduised in religion rather than a transplanted population from outside.
Settlers and the assimilated
Onto that base came waves of Indo-Aryan settlement. From the time of Kamarupa, kings endowed Brahmins with land, and the great series of Kamarupa copper-plate grants is in large part a record of such gifts. They settled learned Brahmin families across the valley. Tradition and the later record hold that many of these and subsequent migrants came from the Gangetic plains, from Kanauj, Mithila, and Bengal, brought east by successive courts. The Koch king Naranarayan and, after him, the Ahom monarchs imported Brahmins, Kayasthas, and other castes to serve temple and court. These migrant communities were never large in number. Yet they supplied the Sanskritic learning, the priesthood, and much of the literate class around which caste-Hindu Assamese society took shape.
The third and largest stream into the Assamese mainstream was assimilation. As the valley's kingdoms Hinduised, their ruling and subject peoples entered the caste-Hindu society. The Ahoms adopted Hinduism from the seventeenth century, and they, along with sections of the Chutia, Koch, Moran, Borahi, Deori, and Kachari peoples, were progressively absorbed. Historians hold that this fusion quickened under the Ahom king Pratap Singha, who reigned from 1603 to 1641 and whose long rule built the offices and the settled order in which it gathered pace. It was pressed further by war. The idea of a single Asamiya jati, a nation rather than a scatter of peoples, hardened in the later Ahom centuries as the valley closed ranks against the invaders who came up the river from the west, first the sultans of Bengal and then the Mughals. A common enemy did as much as a common court to make one people of many.
The result is the characteristic caste order of the Assamese Hindus. It holds the Brahmins and the Ganak, the astrologer Brahmins, the large Kalita and Kayastha communities, the Keot or Kaibarta, and others. This order is looser and less rigid than in the Indian heartland, and the cultural histories of Assam describe it as accommodating rather than closed, a society that took people in more readily than it shut them out.
Bound by language and faith
What made these many origins into a single people were two great unifying forces, and the first was the Assamese language. It spread as the common tongue of the valley, crossing the lines between the layered communities that had once spoken many separate languages. In it grew a shared literature, from the medieval chronicles and the translations of the neo-Vaishnava age onward, so that peoples of different descent came to read, sing, and remember in one speech. To be Asamiya, more than anything else, came to mean to hold Assamese as one's mother tongue, and because the language carried the identity, any threat to it was felt as a threat to the people. That is why the defence of Assamese, in the schools, the courts, and the press of the colonial and modern periods, became one of the great causes of Assamese public life, fought at times at the cost of blood.
The second unifying force, and the decisive one, was the neo-Vaishnavism of Srimanta Sankardev. His movement gave the valley a single devotional culture that cut across caste and community. It carried that faith through two institutions raised in every locality, the namghar, the village prayer house open to all, and the sattra, the monastery that became a centre of teaching, music, and manuscript. Because these welcomed people regardless of birth, they drew tribal and caste communities alike into one religious life. More than any political act, this forged a common Assamese identity, and between them the language and the sattra turned a layered population into a self-conscious people.
Neo-Vaishnavism did not sweep the older worship away. Beneath and beside it ran the ancient Sakta devotion to the mother goddess, centred on the great temple of Kamakhya above Guwahati, along with the household and village cults of the valley's own gods. The Assamese religious world holds all of these at once, the congregational song of the namghar and the blood-offering of the goddess, without feeling the need to choose between them.
The rhythms of the year
Nothing marks the Assamese year, or the Assamese person, like Bihu. It is not one festival but three, each tied to a turn of the rice year. Rongali or Bohag Bihu comes in mid-April, the Assamese new year and the festival of spring and sowing, a week of feasting, of the husori singers moving house to house, and of the fast, flirtatious Bihu dance. Kati Bihu falls in the lean month of October, an austere lamp-lit festival of the half-grown crop and the empty granary. Magh or Bhogali Bihu comes in mid-January when the harvest is in, the festival of plenty, of the night-long feast and the burning of the makeshift meji at dawn. Between them the three Bihus carry the whole cycle of want and abundance by which a farming people lives.
The same shared culture is worn and eaten. The woman's dress is the mekhela chador, the two-piece drape woven in cotton or in the valley's own silks, and the single most recognised token of the whole people is the gamosa, the white cloth with a red woven border that is given in honour, worn at Bihu, and hung in the prayer house. Assam clothes itself in threads it raises at home, the golden muga found almost nowhere else on earth, the creamy pat, and the warm everyday eri. The table is its own signature, built on rice and river fish and the flavours found nowhere quite the same, the alkaline khar and the sour tenga that open and close a proper meal, and the rice-cakes and sweets, the pitha, that belong to the festival mornings.
The valley and the modern Assamese
The Assamese are, before all else, a people of the Brahmaputra. Their heartland is the long alluvial floor the river has laid down and remade over uncounted floods, and their oldest calling is the wet cultivation of rice on it. The river that feeds them is also the force that has periodically unmade them, and the shifting of its channels and the drowning of its banks are woven through the whole of their history. By the language census of 2011 a little over fifteen million people gave Assamese as their mother tongue, close to half the population of the state and a clear majority within the Brahmaputra valley itself. They are the bearers of its mainstream language, its literature, and its high culture, and their reach runs from the upper valley around Sivasagar, the old Ahom country, down through central Assam to the lower districts along the Bengal frontier.
The River That Made AssamAssam is the land the Brahmaputra made. Follow the great river from a Tibetan glacier to a modern monsoon, and the whole valley assembles around you.Read the story →The word Assamese carries a second, wider meaning today, beyond the ethnic Asamiya core. It is a civic and linguistic identity that can embrace every community of the state, the tribal peoples, the tea-garden community, the Muslims of the valley, the Bengali community, and others, all of whom may claim it. There is the narrow ethnic nation, and there is that inclusive Assamese nationality, and the relationship between the two is one of the central questions of modern Assam. It ran through the Assam Movement of 1979 to 1985, the long agitation against unchecked migration, and it has not been settled since. Who counts as Assamese, and on what terms, is argued over still, in the language of indigeneity, of the khilonjia or son of the soil, and of the anxious arithmetic of who belongs.
That unfinished argument is the modern face of a very old truth. The Assamese mainstream was never a pure stock. It is the valley's great confluence, the place where the Kirata base, the Indo-Aryan settler, and the assimilated kingdoms all ran together into one language and one faith. It is a people still being made, and the river at its centre is the fitting image of it, gathering many waters and never standing still.