The Tai Ahom National Council Memo Scheduling

further aggravated during the seventeenth century when the whole of lower portion of the
Brahmaputra Valley upto the Manaha River, was annexed to the Ahom kingdom after defeating
the Mughal army in 1681 A.D. The territorial limit of the Ahom kingdom now extended from the
Upper Chindwin valley beyond the Patkai on the east to Goalpara on the west covering both
banks of the river Brahmaputra. This territorial limit of the Ahom kingdom remained unchanged
till its occupation by the British during 1824-26 following the First Anglo-Burmese War.
However, this expansion did not follow by a transfer of large Ahom population from
their core area in Sibsagar to the newly acquired lands, and there is no such instance either in
history or in tradition of the Ahom. Only some Ahom officials and their entourage (and their
families as well) had been posted at certain centres for administrative purpose. In course of time
there grew up only certain small pockets of Ahom settlements and these are still to be found.
Under the circumstances there was no circumstance appeared for a large scale social mixing of
the Ahom population with the non-Ahom population of the Central and Lower portions of the
Valley. As such the unfounded theory that the Ahoms got mixed up with all sorts of people to
loose their social and cultural identity, including biological, is a baseless surmise rather than a
fact of history. The Ahoms never evinced any desire at any time of their history of six hundred
years to ascend the caste hierarchy (Hindu) or to merge themselves in other non-Ahom
communities.
Biological and Anthropological Studies on the Ahom
Ahom Distinct ‘Gene’ Identity Remained:
Anthropologically, the Mongoloid Ahom have their high epicanthic fold with relative high skin
colour bears the fact. “Brachycephalic and hyperbrachycephalic heads are few, though among
the Ahom (1) this rises to very high figure (31 p.c. + 26 p.c.)” (The Gazetteer of India, Country
and People, Vol. I, p. 302). Some two decades ago as noted by the well-known Professor
Emeritus of Anthropology of Syracuse University, New York, Gordon T. Bowles “that there
is no single monogenic or polygenic trait that is common to all so-called Mongoloids” (Peoples
of Asia, 1977, pp. 344-45), and therefore one need not proceed from a supposition that when the
Ahom arrived in the thirteenth century they carried the characteristics of an ideal Ahom
Mongoloid. But their blood mixture does not display erratic behaviour.
Theorizing the distinctive mixture of population Professor Bowles writes,