The Assamese people are a socio-ethnic linguistic"As an socio-ethnic linguistic community, Assamese culture evolved through many centuries in a melting pot syndrome." identity that has been described at various times as nationalistic"All this suggests that Assamese nationalism was a post-British phenomenon. As an ideology and movement it took shape only during the second half of the 19th century, when such questions as the preservation and promotion of the mother-tongue, jobs for the sons of the soil and concern over colonial constraints on development, began to stir Assamese minds." or micro-nationalistic."Assamese micro-nationalism began in the middle of the nineteenth century as an assertion of the autonomy and distinctiveness of Assamese language and culture against the British colonial view of Assam as a periphery of Bengal." This group is often associated with the Assamese language, the easternmost Indo-Aryan language, and Assamese people mostly live in the Brahmaputra Valley region of Assam, where they are native and constitute around 56% of the valley's population. The use of the term precedes the name of the language or the people."Assamese language and literature played a major role in forming the Assamese cultural mind even before they came to be known as Assamese." It has also been used retrospectively to the people of Assam before the term "Assamese" came into use."Yet once the community adopted Assamese as its name, even their ancient language started to be referred to as Assamese." They are an ethnically diverse group formed after centuries of assimilation of Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman, Indo-Aryan and Tai populations, and constitute a tribal-caste continuum—though not all Assamese people are Hindus and ethnic Assamese Muslims numbering around 42 lakh () constitute a significant part of this identity. The total population of Assamese speakers in Assam is nearly 15.09 million which makes up 48.38% of the population of state according to the Language census of 2011.
Etymology The name "Assamese" is of British colonial coinage of the 19th and 20th century. Assamese is an English word meaning "of Assam". Also, -ese is the English suffix with etymological roots in the Latin -ensis—"[u]sed to form adjectives and nouns describing things and characteristics of a city, region, or country, such as the people and the language spoken by these people." wikt:-ese.—though most Assamese people live in Assam, not all the people of Assam today are Assamese people.
Definition
The Government of Assam faced difficulties in defining Assamese people for Assam Accord due to a linguistically and culturally heterogeneous population. Though there is a political dispute over the definition of Assamese people, in general; the people belonging to the state of Assam are referred sometimes as Assamese people or more appropriately as People of Assam. The lack of a definition has put stumbling blocks in implementing clause 6Clause 6 of Assam Accord: "Constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards, as may be appropriate, shall be provided to protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social and linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people." of the Assam Accord, an agreement signed by the activists of the Assam Movement and the Government of India in 1985.Assam dithers over Accord, The Telegraph, 15 July 2004. Since a legal definition is important to provide "constitutional, legislative and cultural" safeguards to the Assamese people, the Government of Assam had formed a ministerial committee to finalise the definition in March 2007.1.40 lakh aliens deported since 1971 , The Assam Tribune, 27 March 2007Move to define Assamese people , The Assam Tribune, 31 March 2007 To address the clause 6 issue, AASU had announced a definition on 10 April 2000 which was based on residency with a temporal limit: All those whose names appeared in the 1951 National Register of Citizens and their progenies should be considered as Assamese.AASU joins 'Asomiya' debate, The Sentinel, Guwahati, 1 April 2007AASU flays Barman, Prafulla Mahanta, The Assam Tribune, 1 April 2007
Despite the lack of a legal definition, social scientists consider the Assamese identity to constitute a tribal-caste continuum that has been the result of a historical process.
Demographics
The population of Assamese-speaking people in India, as per the 2011 Census, is 15,311,351, constituting 1.26% of the country's total population. This places the Assamese language at the 12th position among the 22 scheduled languages spoken in India. Out of this, 15,097,257 people reside in Assam, making up 48.38% of the state's total population, which accounts for 98.6% of the total Assamese-speaking population in India.
History
The Assamese identity developed through a long process of interaction among the tribal and non-tribal populations of the Brahmaputra Valley, rather than originating in a single kingdom or military conflict. The formation of regional states, the expansion of settled agriculture, intermarriage, Hinduization and the growth of a common vernacular gradually connected otherwise diverse communities. Chandan Kumar Sharma describes this social formation as a "tribe–caste continuum" in which tribal and non-tribal groups played equally important roles.Sharma argues that the Assamese identity was the product of a historical process in which tribal and non-tribal groups played equally important roles and describes Assamese society as a classic case of a tribe–caste continuum.
Early roots of the Assamese identity The linguistic and literary foundations of the identity can be traced back to the early half of the late medieval period. By the 14th century, early Assamese had developed into a literary medium under rulers of several regional polities. The Kamata king Durlabhanarayana patronised Hema Saraswati, Harivara Vipra and other poets, while Madhava Kandali rendered the Ramayana into Assamese under Mahamanikya, a Kachari ruler of central Assam. Satyendranath Sarma observes that the surviving works demonstrate that Assamese had already evolved into a powerful medium of literary expression during the fourteenth century.Sarma discusses the literary patronage of Durlabhanarayana and Mahamanikya and concludes that the surviving fourteenth-century works demonstrate the development of a “powerful medium of literary expression” in Assamese. The courts of Kamata and the Kachari kingdom therefore contributed to a regional literary culture long before Assamese was adopted by the Ahom court.
A parallel process of social and religious integration was taking place in eastern Assam. Hinduization was already visible in the Chutia kingdom before the political ascendancy of the Ahoms in Upper Assam.Sharma notes that Hinduization had begun in the Chutia kingdom before the advent of the Ahoms and had therefore reached Upper Assam despite its distance from the principal centres of Brahmanical influence. By the early sixteenth century, this process had produced a differentiated Hindu social order within the kingdom: the caste system had become prevalent in Chutia society, and its caste-Hindu population included Brahmins, Kayasthas, Kalitas and Daivajnas or Ganaks.; Vaishnavism was also present in eastern Assam before the rise of the 16th-century Ekasarana movement. Chutia copper-plate grants from 1392 and 1401 record Vaishnava Brahmins and a donee described as a devotee of Vasudeva, indicating the presence of Vaishnava religious networks at the royal court and in rural society. Later Vaishnava traditions likewise preserved memories of Sadiya or Kundil as a centre for Vaishnavism. These developments illustrate the coexistence of Brahmanical, Vaishnava and indigenous traditions within the Chutia state.
In the longer process of assimilation, Sharma identifies the Chutias, Borahis, Morans, Deoris and Kacharis among the communities that became Sanskritized Assamese peasants, although they did not entirely abandon their earlier customs.“In the process, several tribal groups like the Chutias, Borahis, Morans, Deoris, Kacharis (Bodos) ... turned into sanskritized ‘Assamese’ peasants in course of time (although they did not altogether relinquish their tribal customs).” The pre-Ahom Chutia and Kamata polities thus formed important eastern and western centres of the linguistic, religious and social processes from which the later Assamese society emerged.
Role of Vaishnavite institutions
From the 16th century onwards, Ekasarana Dharma gave this existing cultural and linguistic field a wider institutional basis. The Assamese and Brajavali works of Sankardev, Madhavdev and their followers, together with the networks of satras and namghars, created shared spaces of worship, literary production, performance and community life. The movement brought sections of the Bodo-Kachari, Tiwa, Rabha, Karbi and other communities into the sarania fold and facilitated their incorporation into the wider Assamese society, while many indigenous customs continued to survive.Sharma argues that neo-Vaishnavism “rejuvenated and further consolidated” the formation of a wider identity and “laid the very foundation of the Assamese identity”. He identifies people of Bodo-Kachari, Tiwa, Rabha and Karbi origin among those who became saranias and were gradually assimilated into Assamese society.
These institutions, although later patronised by Ahom kings, were not originally creations of the Ahom state. Their social base developed through the activities of the Vaishnavite teachers and their disciples, and only subsequently attracted sustained royal intervention. By the seventeenth century, both the Ahom and Koch states attempted to appropriate the movement's extensive popular base, while the satras increasingly received land, manpower and other endowments from ruling elites.
Consolidation of the nationalistic identity Assamese as a nationalistic identity was consolidated when the Ahom kingdom came under repeated attacks from the Bengal Sultanate in the early 16th century, and the people banded together under Suhungmung (1497–1539) to resist a common enemy. The kingdom not only succeeded in resisting the invasion, but a general pursued the invaders to the Karatoya River and freed most of the Kamrup and Kamata regions."The idea of a composite Assamese or Asomiya 'jati' or nationality took shape during the later part of the Ahom rule. This process had started during the first Muslim invasion from neighbouring Bengal in the 16th century when the people were brought under an Ahom or Assamese banner against the common enemy. Not only were the Ahom successful in repelling the Muslim invasions, but by the 1530s the Ahoms had freed the greater part of Kamrup and Kamata from Muslim occupation and "extended their dominion right up to the Karatoya in Murshidabad in the west and almost to close proximity of Dacc".