Review: ‘The Assamese’ by Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty
Encyclopaedic in scope and epic in range, The Assamese: A Portrait of a Community is full of details about Axom’s origins and the mind-boggling pluralities of its history, society, art, culture, music, theatre, textiles and craft
In this 600-page doorstopper on the Assamese community, the writer aims to survey almost every aspect of what constitutes being Assamese (more accurately ‘Axomiya’) and the several crisscrossing worlds that those who consider themselves people of Axom inhabit and carry forward. From the extremely distinctive linguistic miscellany and originality of the pronunciation of the word ‘Axomiya’, (the velar fricative – the distinct tonal inflection of the ‘xh’ turning into ‘suh’ in spoken Assamese), to the differentiating factors of the community’s history, its fraught equation with Bangla and Bengalis, the conflict-ridden relations with nearly all the other ethnicities that populate Axom and neighbouring states (and country) with which Assam shares its border – this book wants to enclose as much as it can in its gigantic embrace.


Encyclopaedic in scope and epic in range, this tome is full of details about Axom’s origins. Its multiverses, the mind-boggling pluralities of its history, society, art, culture, music, theatre, textiles, craftspeople, the munificence and magnificence of its tribal and non-tribal musical traditions, local mobile theatres that travel across the villages along the Brahmaputra, its highly under appreciated cinema and schools of painting and above all, the distinguished and sui generis cuisine and cultures of Axom, all find space in its pages. Undergirding all this is the sheer might of the Brahmaputra’s sway on the region’s collective consciousness. Recent works of history and general non-fiction have focused precisely on this, and so this book attempts to steer a little away from the geopolitics of the river, while focusing much more on the stamp it imposes on everything in Axom. It’s a riverine dictator. Significantly, its people do not consider the river a god, unlike most other river-worshipping people. Perhaps this is due its often violent and unpredictable behaviour that causes large scale annual mayhem and horror.
To drown the reader in all sorts of germane detail about Axom and to educate them on a major part of India that gets stereotyped and misrepresented in the worst possible ways in mainstream discourse, is the book’s unstated mantra. It wants to
tilt and reframe the discourse. For sheer effort and doggedness, The Assamese: A Portrait of a Community merits wide readership and engagement. The writing is lucid, sometimes school text book like yet always aiming to inform the reader informally about weighty matters. Barooah takes great pains to unpack technically complex matters to do with linguistics, textiles and the arts, that one assumes, must be quite difficult even for Axomiya inhabitants to fully understand. Yet, the author manages to break down countless intricacies of Assam’s society, history and politics, always attempting to engage with a plurality of relevant voices on the sub-topics at hand. A slight narrowing of focus, a much deeper people-profiling through which all or some of these themes could have arisen, might have made for a sharper, more active reading experience. But that may have meant no grand canvas to make the many eddies and ebbs of Axomiya-ness come alive.

A massive tome, this is not a coffee table book at all. This reader longed to linger on images, photos, paintings or visuals of Axomiya life which the author dives into, while reading about them. Further, some maps on the region may have helped to identify all the lovely and dramatic places and things that are talked about.
To someone partially acquainted with the region and its scholarship, this reader found it amazing that a book on Axom delved so much into the evolution of the community while keeping the themes of the Brahmaputra or the Kamakhya temple in Guwahati at an arm’s length simply because there is already so much in-depth scholarship on them. It nevertheless still found a way to respect them and illumine several less addressed cultural and artistic facets. Alongside images and maps, some simple charts chronicling the political and social lineages of Axom might have also helped in easing the reader into the region’s several chronologies. That apart, this book is a nice sign that Indian non-fiction is increasingly granting our several regions the continent-like status in letters that they deserve. May we have more such in-depth and accessible portraits of every one of India’s less written about communities.
Rahul Jayaram teaches at the School of Film, Media & Creative Arts at R V University in Bangalore.
