Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India

Fragmented Memories is a beautifully rendered exploration of how, during the 1990s, socially and economically marginalized people in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam sought to produce a past on which to base a distinctive identity recognized within late-twentieth-century India. Yasmin Saikia describes how groups of Assamese identified themselves as Tai-Ahom–a people with a glorious past stretching back to the invasion of what is now Assam by Ahom warriors in the thirteenth century. In her account of the 1990s Tai-Ahom identity movement, Saikia considers the problem of competing identities in India, the significance of place and culture, and the outcome of the memory-building project of the Tai-Ahom. Assamese herself, Saikia learned the Tai-Ahom language and some Thai and Lao. Between 1994 and 1996 she lived in several different Tai-Ahom villages; spoke with political activists, intellectuals, militant leaders, shamans, students, and ordinary people; and observed and participated in Tai-Ahom religious, social, and political events.She read Tai-Ahom sacred texts and did archival research–looking at colonial documents and government reports–in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. In Fragmented Memories, Saikia reveals the different narratives relating to the Tai-Ahom as told by the postcolonial Indian government, British colonists, and various texts reaching back to the thirteenth century. She shows how Tai-Ahom identity is produced and performed in Assam and also in Thailand. Revealing how the dead history of Ahom has been transformed into living memory to demand rights of citizenship, Fragmented Memories is a landmark history told from the periphery of the Indian nation.