Becoming Assamese

This book explores the making of colonial Northeast India and offers a new perspective to the study of the Assamese identity in the nineteenth century as a distinctly nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon, not confined to linguistic parameters alone. It studies crucial markers of the self — history, customs, food, dress, new religious beliefs — and symbols considered desirable by the provincial middle class and the way these fitted in with the latter’s nationalist subjectivities in the face of an emphatic Bengali cultural nationalism. The author shows how colonialism was intrinsically linked to the assertion of middle class intelligentsia in the region and was instrumental in eroding the essential malleability of societal processes nurtured by the Ahom state.

Rich with fresh research data, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of history, political science, area studies, and to anyone interested in understanding Northeast India.

Madhumita Sengupta is Assistant Professor of History at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. She completed her MA in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and PhD in History from the University of Calcutta. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) and has taught at Rani Birla Girls’ College, Kolkata. Her areas of research interests include linguistic, cultural and regional identities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in India, socio-economic and cultural aspects of British rule in India and the colonial history of Northeast India.