The Tai Ahom National Council Memo Scheduling

Dalton, Ethnology of Bengal; Alexander Mackenzie, History of Relations of the Government with
the Hill Tribes of Nor-East Frontier of Bengal, 1884; L. A. Waddell, Tribes of the Brahmaputra
Valley). “Assimilation” of the Ahom into the fold of Assamese is taken to be “complete” and
their loss of religion and language is taken for granted. Such opinions received wide circulation,
both within and outside the country, and in consonance with this theory local writings appeared
extolling the Ahom virtue for their loss of language and religion by referring to the “adage”
prajar dharmoi rajar dharma (meaning religion of the subject people is the religion of the ruler).
The Ahom received high praise for their “loss” of language and religion, and were acclaimed for
their patronization of Hindu religion. In this way, a very “ironic” situation was created, and the
Ahom themselves unconsciously fell victim to it by forgetting that the Ahom rulers had never
forsaken their original faith and practices, their culture and languages, rather they maintained
them to the end. However, such opinion influenced many subsequent writers who, without
properly verifying facts, dittoed it.
Curiously enough the same yardstick has not been applied to other local Hindu or Hinduised
communities of Assam such as the Kachari, Chutiya, Rabha and also the Brahmin and Kayastha
and even the Muslim in Assam, who had also received blood from others more than the Ahoms
did. Nobody harps on the “mixed” blood of the Brahmins in Assam but considered them as
“pure” Brahmins. “The Kachari are very mixed” and scattered population, writes Professor
Gordon T. Bowles (The Peoples of Asia, p. 348). Yet nobody raises purity of blood of the
Kacharis-Sonowals in Upper Assam who are now Scheduled Tribes. Why then the case of the
Ahom is singled out?
Ahom Retained Ethnicity: No Large-scale Mixing with Pre-Ahom Locals:
Hard Historical Evidence. Their own chronicles called buranj,i written in their own Ahom
language, records that they came from Mong Mao now included in the Dehong Dai-Singpho
Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan. The original number is given a little more than nine
thousand. (Ahom Buranji translated and edited with original text by Rai Sahib Golap Chandra
Barua published by the Assam Administration, 1930, p. 44; Deodhai Asam Buranji edited by
Suryya Kumar Bhuyan, M.A., B.L. (Cal.), Ph. D. (Lon.), D. Litt. (Lon.) published by the
Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, Gauhati, second edition 1962, p. 6. Dr. S.K.