Fragmented Memories: Struggling to Be Tai-Ahom in India (review)

Saikia has selected a fascinating problem—the highly politicized construction of the ethnic identity Tai-Ahom in India's far northeast. From 1981 to 1997, various groups in upper Assam created this ethnicity to express their resentment against dominant groups in both lower Assam and distant India. Saikia uses complex historical and literary sources and methodologies to represent the feelings and aspirations of these self-proclaimed Tai-Ahom, to reveal what the indigenous histories on which they base their claims literally say, and to show how the British colonial state and independent Indian nation alienated them. Throughout, Saikia discusses her own location as a Muslim woman from an elite family long prominent in the region, who is also a American-based academic expected by many Tai-Ahom to publicize their cause internationally.

Saikia thoughtfully considers "the processes and agents that organize the production of memory-history" as used by the Tai-Ahom (15). To legitimate what were to these peoples real memories of their once glorious origins, the Tai-Ahom accepted British colonial historiography about a people who had migrated from northern Thailand and established their rule over Assam in the thirteenth century. Yet British ethnographers also identified these people as savages outside of history, thus making them "dead" (254). Similarly, the Indian nationalist narrative—which Saikia argues centered on north Indian high-caste Hindus—ignored the Tai-Ahom, thereby failing to integrate them into the new Indian nation. To recover their self-esteem and garner power, their cultural and political movement articulated a rich Tai-Ahom history, including creating symbolic clothing, international conferences with similarly inclined ethnic activists from Thailand, and explicitly anti-Hindu rituals like beef eating and rice-beer drinking.

By actually studying the surviving indigenous local histories, buranjis, Saikia discovers the Ahom were an "honored clique" of king's men (officials, officers, and courtiers) from diverse origins (130). This finding explains why so many peoples could identify themselves with the fluid and changeable Ahom identity. Thus, although "Tai-Ahom history . . . has very little to do with factuality but rather is a charged emotional discourse," Saikia argues that these people believed it "valid" (226).

Many ethnic separatist movements vie for recognition in far northeast India; some have obtained their own new provinces there. Saikia traces how the people calling themselves Tai-Ahom were marginalized economically, culturally, and politically by the British colonial administration, by the Indian government, and even by the Assamese ethnic movement based in lower Assam. Yet, she concludes that the Tai-Ahom movement "became a failed political rhetoric" after Assam's Chief Minister Hiteshwar Saikia, its powerful patron, died in 1996 (250).

Saikia's book contrasts with the other major recent book on this region, Sanjib Baruah's India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia, 1999). Baruah concentrates on other ethnic movements, only briefly touching on the Tai-Ahom movement in an endnote (217, n. 1). Baruah's political-science orientation leads him to conclude that a federated system giving more autonomy to Assam would alleviate the region's "sub-national" movements.

Saikia, stressing cultural constructions, argues instead that formal recognition by the Indian government of the erased histories of these peoples would alleviate their alienation. Her impressive array of methodologies and diversity of sources in several languages makes Saikia's Fragmented Memories an absorbing evocation and analysis of the Tai-Ahom movement.