Assam
(2002 est. pop. 27.2 million). With an area of 478,524 square kilometers, Assam is the largest of India's northeastern states and produces 60 percent of India's tea. It is connected with the rest of the country by a narrow submountainous corridor between Bhutan and Bangladesh. Named from the Sanskrit Asoma (peerless), Assam offers beauty and a rich legacy of civilization. Home to several different peoples— Austroasiatic, Mongolian, Dravidian, and Aryan—Assam developed a composite culture. The state is dominated by the river Brahamputra, whose lush 700-kilometer valley is sandwiched between the Himalayan foothills to the north and the hills and plateau of Meghalaya to the south.
The early history of Assam is obscure. The Mahabharata and the Puranas refer to a great kingdom known as Kamarupa in this region, ruled by a legendary king Narakasura. The first reliable description of the kingdom was that of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who in 640 attended the court of Bhaskaravarman, an ally of the Gupta monarch Harsha and a patron of Hinduism. Stone and copperplate inscriptions indicate a succession of Hindu dynasties, but any centralized kingship had collapsed into loose confederacies of Hindu rajas by the early thirteenth century. The Ahom kings from Myanmar (Burma) adopted Hinduism and provided increasing power and prosperity, culminating under King Rudra Singh (1696–1714), the renowned military strategist and patron of the buranji, or Ahom chronicles, who established an extensive trade with Tibet, repulsed seventeen Mughal invasions, and built the great cities of Nowgong and Rangpur. A Hinduism rejecting the caste system and based on community prayer was spread in monasteries that became centers for dance, music, and manuscript painting. The British eventually drove out the Myanmar invaders and made the area part of British India in 1826.
Following Indian independence in 1947, Assam shrank through cessions to Pakistan and the creation of new states and territories—in 1963, Nagaland; in 1972, Meghalaya; in 1986, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Assam was the scene of recurrent riots and violence by minority ethnic groups including the Bodo, Mizo, Nagas, and Tripuri, and by the Assamese against outsiders, such as immigrants from Bangladesh. The United Liberation Front pursues the independence of Assam, and several militant Bodo groups promote a separate state.
Further Reading
Baruah, Sanjib. (1999) India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mahanta, Prafulla Kumar. (1986) The Tussle between the Citizens and Foreigners in Assam. New Delhi: Vikas.
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