Modern Practices in North East India

History, Culture, Representation

Lipokmar Dzüvichü, Manjeet Baruah

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351271349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book brings together essays on North East India from across disciplines to explore new understandings of the colonial and contemporary realities of the region. Departing from the usual focus on identity and politics, it offers fresh representations from history, social anthropology, culture, literature, politics, performance and gender.

Through the lens of modern practices, the essays in this volume engage with diverse issues, including state-making practices, knowledge production and its politics, history writing, colonialism, role of capital, institutions, changing locations of orality and modernity, production and reception of texts, performances and literatures, social change and memory, violence and gender relations, along with their wider historical, geographical and ideational mappings. In the process, they illustrate how the specificities of the region can become useful sites to interrogate global phenomena and processes — for instance, in what ways ideas and practices of modernity played an important role in framing the region and its people. Further, the volume underlines the complex ways in which the past came to be imagined, produced and contested in the region.

With its blend of inter-disciplinary approach, analytical models and perspectives, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and general readers interested in North East India and those working on history, frontiers and borderlands, gender, cultural studies and literature.

Part I

REGION, FRONTIER AND STATE

1
REGION FORMED AND IMAGINED

Reconsidering temporal, spatial and social context of Kāmarūpa

Jae-Eun Shin

Defining Kāmarūpa: regional history and history of region

The only common point that can be found among numerous definitions of a region is perhaps ‘a spatial unit distinct from the space that surrounds it’. ¹ However, a spatial unit is neither a self-evident nor a natural-given entity. From a historical point of view, the emergence of a region has a long gestation period through which political, economic, socio-cultural and ideological elements were intricately connected and congealed in a particular pattern. The formation of a region would never see its end. It is rather an ongoing process which proceeds with innumerable variations and deviations. To this day, the division of a larger region into smaller ones continues in different parts of India on the basis of distinctive regional identities and political demands for autonomy. The extent of a region is, therefore, by no means the same all through the history, and its boundary has constantly changed in the midst of hegemonic conflicts and negotiations. Being historically determined, a region is not a solid entity but a fluid process of configuration.

The idea of a region, by contrast, is the more concrete articulation of the identity as a region. Emphasising its importance, Schwartzberg, who is renowned for his A Historical Atlas of South Asia, defines a region as ‘a perceived segment of time-space continuum differentiated from others on the basis of one or more defining characteristics’. ² A perceived region is not necessarily coterminous with an instituted region. It is rather an awareness of subjective space based on a variety of historical, linguistic, cultural, socio-structural and environmental factors. ³ The resulting subjective regions, thus, range from a relatively restricted area within an instituted region to a larger territory that might extend far beyond the geographic limits of modern states. ⁴ At a more fundamental level, the idea of a region provides ‘a basic cosmology or orientation to the world and a focus for one’s affections’ ⁵ and entails a deep emotional and physical attachment to the region where one belongs or believes to belong. In many cases, it becomes a conceptual device by which a distinct regional identity is constructed; in the initial stage, it is based on some vague awareness of languages, environments, sacred centres, customs, ethnicity and so forth. But later on, as regional consciousness develops, far more defined and solid sets of arguments and justifications are created. ⁶ Writing a regional history with a distinctive sense of past plays a decisive role in this process.

This development does not occur by chance but takes place when certain circumstances and agents are present, that is to say, when regional historians are located at a particular historical juncture and intellectual climate. In South Asia, the exclusive idea of a region has taken concrete shape in the course of the nationalist movement to which many historians committed themselves in various ways. From the late nineteenth century, the inculcation of history emerged as a new and rationalist discipline, and its deployment became an attractive vehicle for new identities and aspirations. ⁷ It, needless to say, was never a unilinear development. Each region had its own way of recalling the past and a strong sense of history cultivated by a group of regional historians and intellectuals-cum-activists. But the fact remains that there have been common trends or paradigms in regional history writings, albeit divergent historical articulations. Thapar makes three important points in particular: (1) there is the all-too-ready acceptance of the conventional periodisation; (2) certain theories current in earlier historical writing and believed to be almost axiomatic are endorsed; and (3) there is the almost inevitable search for a golden age, often identified as the period to which the currently dominant group traces its roots, and it is described in the growing tints of cultural resurgence. ⁸

Therefore, regions were often viewed as a given territory bounded by their own border in the early regional history writings. The great achievements of the kings, glories of the dynasties and careers of the distinguished literary or religious figures were grafted onto the temporal and spatial entity which was often ‘retrospectively’ defined. Over the last three decades, however, such a regionalist tendency and some of the underlying assumptions of regional history writings have been questioned and reconsidered with special reference to the making of the regional states, socio-economic structures and cultural patterns in different parts of early India. ⁹ This recent shift leads us to delineate ‘histories of regions’ rather than ‘regional histories’. As Sahu underlined, there is a marked difference between them: while regional histories are consumed by a desire to establish the comparative historical precedence, antiquity or uniqueness inspired by regional sentiments and chauvinism, histories of regions are engaged in a dispassionate discerning of processes, structures and the trajectory of the evolution of institutions and traditions across regions. ¹⁰ Regrettably, not all the regions have witnessed the paradigm shift in their history writings. Meaningful attempts to understand a region in a larger historical context have been made in some areas including Orissa, Rajasthan, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, whereas conventional dynastic history writings are still dominant in other areas. Besides, not all the epochs of a region draw the same level of scholarly attention. A certain phase is thoroughly interrogated with a new framework, while other phase remains in a timeless capsule of antiquarian studies. The latter is the case for many history writings on Kāmarūpa (or Prāgjyotiṣa-Kāmarūpa). ¹¹

What is Kāmarūpa? The most simplistic and generally shared definition is the ‘earliest kingdom of Assam’ or the ‘ancient past of Assam’. However, the implication of this definition is far more complicated than historical reality. The importance of Kāmarūpa was accentuated by the group of nationalist historians/antiquarians of Assam since the early twentieth century when searching for the past, or more precisely, redefining the past emerged as a fundamental constituent of the making of Assamese identity. Their main concern was to find out a proper place for Assam in the mainstream of Indian history and civilisation. Kāmarūpa became an entrance through which Assam could connect herself with the rest of the subcontinent. It constituted a historical region where ‘there are sacred myths and symbols, held by significant groups within the area, regarding the relationship of people to their past and geographical entity.’ ¹² Although considerable progress has been made in the quantitative compilation of textual, epigraphical and archaeological information on the early Brahmaputra Valley, the writings on Kāmarūpa have been mostly limited to a dynastic history, emphasising a unilinear political continuity of the region from the past to the present. Either a number of controversial issues remained unsolved or they were erased conveniently from the dominant history writings on Kāmarūpa which underlined the coherence of language, ethnicity, religion and culture of the region. This coherence, mostly imagined and retrospectively imposed, became the important basis for the exclusive regional identity against neighbouring regions and the political aspiration to justify the dominance of Hindu majority over other minorities. ¹³

Reconsidering Kāmarūpa never means bypassing the main concerns of the historiography nor using very different source materials. Rather, it involves us asking new sets of questions in order to see the past from a different perspective and read the relevant sources with a different interpretive strategy. The practice of history, though not historical accounts in a modern sense, was an important instrument for expressing the power of the dominant social group in Kāmarūpa. ¹⁴ It includes the royal genealogy, the commemoration of the progenitor, narratives of sacred sites and so forth. What can be discerned from such practices are not purely historical facts, but perceptions and intentions through which various facets of events and memories were reconstructed in a given direction. By considering the function and purpose of Sanskrit records in the socio-political context of early medieval India, one may look at controversial issues of Kāmarūpa history afresh. I will particularly discuss the three points in the temporal, spatial and social context of Kāmarūpa by putting three simple questions: (1) Was Kāmarūpa an ancient kingdom? (2) Was it identical with Prāgjyotiṣa? (3) Was it a part of Āryāvarta? Through this exercise, I will delineate the two different historical processes, that is, the imagination of the region in the modern historiography on the one hand and the formation of the region in the early medieval period on the other.

Reconsidering Kāmarūpa: temporal, spatial and social context

Was Kāmarūpa an ancient kingdom?

It is not merely a question of time-bracket. Periodisation involves historical assumptions by which certain political, economic, cultural and even religious identity are given to a particular time span. For instance, the conventional three divisions of Indian history, viz. Hindu, Muslim and British period were constructed on the basis of the image of oppressive and static pre-modern India and that of liberated and progressive British India since James Mill’s History of British India (1817). Although the nomenclature has changed into the Ancient, Medieval and Modern period, the underlying assumption remains almost unchanged. It has been, therefore, a controversial issue since the beginning of the modern Indian historiography. ¹⁵ Over the last three decades, some of the general historical assumption of the periodisation has been questioned with special reference to the historical transformation of the region outside the Gangetic heartland. Of many attempts to redefine historical changes of India, a major outcome was new conceptualisation of early medieval India; although the time span may differ according to each regional context, the period between the sixth and seventh and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries constitutes an important transitional phase of history which was marked by the expansion of agrarian settlements of brāhmaṇas through land grants, the increased interaction between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical social groups and the formation of regional state, caste system and cultic centre. ¹⁶

Barring a few works, such a recent consideration has yet to be critically reflected in the history writings on Kāmarūpa. The legacy of generalisation inherited from the colonial...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: frames of region and people: practices of knowledge and representations
• Part I Region, frontier and state
• Part II Knowledge, people and representation
• Part III Writing culture, writing politics
• Bibliography
• Index