EVOLUTION OF ASSAMESE IDENTITY: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

Assamese identity, as it is understood today, is not a static or primordial category but a historically layered construct shaped by successive waves of migration, statecraft, religious reform, colonial intervention, and postcolonial politics. This paper traces the evolution of Assamese identity from the ancient kingdom of Kamarupa through the six-hundred-year Ahom polity, the socio-religious transformation initiated by the Neo-Vaishnavite movement of Srimanta Sankardeva, the disruptions of colonial conquest and administrative reorganization, the consolidation of linguistic nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the turbulence of the Assam Movement and subsequent citizenship debates. It argues that Assamese identity has always been a negotiated and composite formation, built through the assimilation of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities under shared political and cultural institutions, even as this inclusive core was periodically contested by narrower ethnolinguistic definitions. Understanding this layered history is essential to making sense of the region's present-day debates over language, migration, and belonging.