This dissertation explores the emergence of modem identities in the Northeastern Indian province of Assam through an examination of changing colonial and indigenous representations of its land and people. It considers the emergence of regional identity, the demarcation of ‘tribal’ and ‘lower caste’ groups and Assam's relationship with Indic ‘high culture’. The dissertation examines these representations against the background of changing economic structures and the emergence of a new bureaucratic system and its clerical servants. It considers Assam’s development as a primary producer of a globally traded commodity, tea, and the complex ways in which related social and cultural structures meshed with ideologies of race, language and progress. The study begins in 1826, when British conquest brought the former Ahom kingdom into the orbit of India and severed it from its Southeast Asian neighbours. It ends in 1935 when the main elements of ‘Assamese identity’ had already been put into place by its middle class elites and literati and Assam was already being powerfully affected by influences from the wider Indian nationalist struggle. Chapter 1 examines Assam’s shifting frontiers through administrative and demographic movement, in the light of its new utility as a primary commodity producing ‘Edenic’ periphery of the British Empire. Chapter 2 traces how this process interacted with changing characterisations of its inhabitants. It examines how the colonial requirement for a pliable labour force reshaped these, as did the interventions of an indigenous elite. Chapter 3 goes on to examine the symbolic and cultural dimensions of this transition to colonial modernity. It examines the role of precolonial aristocrats and gentry in this transition through their creation of a new print culture in the vernacular. Chapter 4 focuses upon the way in which this vernacular language came to be the most important component of an emergent Assamese identity, and the social inclusions and exclusions that this process entailed. Chapter 5 explores the alternative ‘publics’ developing in Assam. It considers their publicists’ representation of changing notions of ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ as they related to regional and all-India ideas of a gendered national space.
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