Yasmin Saikia's Fragmented Memories is a sensitive work of historical anthropology that takes as its subject the small Ahom community living in Assam in northeastern India. Here, she analyses “Tai” and “Ahom” as “invented” categories emerging from a combination of colonial power/knowledge and local anxieties, finally coalescing into a bid for legitimacy within late twentieth-century politics of identity.
From the mid-nineteenth century, Assamese intellectuals and British officials transmuted local chronicles into printed knowledge, disseminating widely their narrative of the Ahom, the warrior followers of the hero Sukapha. He and his followers were said to have made their way from Upper Burma to Assam in the thirteenth century, finally becoming its rulers. They ruled successfully until buffeted by Burmese and British ambitions, assisted by the Ahom warrior elite, Brahmin, and caste Hindu service elites. This was the generally accepted outline of the Ahom presence in Assam. It gained support from anthropologists...
