Indo-Aryan migration to Assam
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The earliest
Pre-Indo-Aryan Assam
The 8th- to 6th-century BCE text,
Kamarupa kingdom.[6] Though the Sankhyayana Grihasamgraha is said to mention "Pragjyotisha" as the land of sunrise,[7] this has been shown to be a wrong attribution.[8] Archaeologically too, the Northern Black Polished Ware, a pottery style associated with the development of the first large states in Northern India, reached the Karatoya only by the 2nd century BCE.[9] Therefore, it is claimed that the spread of Indo-Aryans into Assam cannot be pushed beyond the 5th century BCE.[2]
It is also significant that neither early Buddhist sources,Kautilya's Arthashastra is identified by commentators with the Brahmaputra Valley,[12] though the Arthashastra in its current form is dated to the early centuries of CE, and the commentaries to even later.[13]
It appears that the Assam region became a punya bhumi, a region that did not require a Hindu purification ceremony, by the post Gupta period (320-550 CE).[14]
Introduction of Indo-Aryan
The earliest historical mention of this region in Indo-Aryan comes from
Davaka—are mentioned.[15] The earliest evidence of Indo-Aryan in Assam are the 5th-century Umachal and Nagajari-Khanikargaon rock inscriptions written in Sanskrit.[16]
Brahman settlements
In the historic period, the Kamarupa kings encouraged immigration from North India, and settled Brahmins as "islands of private domains in a sea of communally held tribal lands of shifting cultivation".Mleccha and Pala dynasty.[20] These early land grants had natural boundaries such as trees or water, indicating they were isolated, those from the later Pala rulers (10-11th century), increasingly bordered on other granted lands.[21] One such settlement was Habung in eastern Assam where Ratnapal of the Pala dynasty of Kamarupa settled Brahmins in c. the 10th century, then known as Ha-Vrnga Vishaya.[22]
In the late medieval period beginning with the early 16th century, a number of Brahmins from
Kanauj and Puri (Srikshetra) were settled in western Assam by the Koch kings for performing Brahminical rites[23][24][25] and this process was later continued by the Ahom state especially under the Tungkhungia Ahom kings.[26]
Baro-Bhuyan settlements
Non-Brahmin Indo-Aryan immigration occurred during the medieval times, and some of them came to be identified as part of the Baro-Bhuyans.
Languages
The subsequent
Assamese script.[29] The latest examples, such as the Kanai-boroxiboa inscription, use a proto-Assamese script.[30][31]
Sanskritisation under the Kamarupa kings
Though traditional accounts claim that the kings of Assam were Indo-Aryan, modern scholarship concludes that the kings were originally non-Indo-Aryan.[32] Sanskritization, was a process that occurred simultaneously with "deshification" (or localisation, or tribalisation) in Assam.[33] However, the process of Sanskritisation was never complete in Assam and significant sections of the population remained outside the Brahmanical influence.[34]
| King | Great deed | Sin or fault | Punishment | Brahmanical vs. Tribal tension |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Naraka | Found kingdom of Kamarupa and Worship Kamakhya | Make pact with tribal king | Goddess hidden from him | Pact with tribal king |
| Bana (or Naraka) | Builds stairway to Kamakhya temple
|
Demands vision of the goddess | Goddess hidden from him | Demonic tribal king |
| Salastambha | Conquest of Kamarupa | Unknown | Cursed to be mleccha | Founds mleccha dynasty |
| Visva Singha | Rediscover Kamakhya temple | Mother offends holy man | Mother is a mleccha | War against tribal kings, child of god and a mleccha |
| Naranarayana Singha | Rebuild the temple | Demands a vision of goddess | Descendents can't visit the temple | Defeats tribal kings but allowed soldier to worship in tribal mode |
Rudra Singha
|
Patronize Brahmins and build temples | Tribal origin, offends priest | Dies without receiving initiation | Non-Hindu tribal origin |
Modern Assamese language
The modern
northeast
Indian states.
See also
- Tibeto-Burman migration to Indian subcontinent
- Varman dynasty
- Pala Dynasty
- Indo-Aryan migration theories
- Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni
- Sanskrit
- Aryan
References
- ^ "We are unsure about the exact time when [Indo-Aryan']s earliest migrations into northeastern India began (Choudhury 1959, pp. 96–111), but these migratory waves likely occurred between the second century BCE and the first century CE (Rosati 2016)"(Rosati 2017, p. 2)
- ^ a b "It was the Indo-Aryans who brought wet rice (sali), iron, plough and cattle (the latter as a source of power and milk) to the region. Revised versions of the Mahabharata and several puranas (c. 2nd century B.C - 2nd century A.D.), the Kalika Purana of c.9th-lOth centuries and the Prasastis of Kamarupa kings-all these indicate this early Indo-Aryanization of Assam. However, there is no mention of Kamarupa/Pragjyotishpura in the early Buddhist sources. This significantly suggests that the Indo-Aryans had not spread out as far as to Assam before 500 B.C., at least not in mentionable numbers." (Guha 1984, p. 74)
- ^ "Unfortunately, there is no evidence sustaining the historicity of this myth, nor identifying the period when the Indo-Aryans arrived in Assam; according to the epigraphic records, the middle of the fourth century CE can be determined as the latest historical term for the Indo-Aryan migrations into Assam, being the term "when political power shifted from mytho-historical Naraka-Bhauma dynasty to Pusyavarman, the first historical king of" Kamarupa (Rosati 2016)."(Rosati 2017, pp. 6–7)
- ^ "The first group of migrants to settle in this part of the country is perhaps the Austro-Asiatic language speaking people who came here from South-East Asia a few millennia before Christ. The second group of migrants came to Assam from the north, north-east and east. They are mostly the Tibeto-Burman language speaking people. From about the fifth century before Christ, there started a trickle of migration of the people speaking Indo-Aryan language from the Gangetic plain." (Taher 2001, p. 12)
- ^ "[That Assamese has an Austroasiatic substratum] is consistent with the general assumption that the lower Brahmaputra drainage was originally Austroasiatic speaking. It also implies the existence of a substantial Austroasiatic speaking population till the time of spread of Aryan culture into Assam, i.e. it implies that up until the 4th-5th centuries CE and probably much later Tibeto-Burman languages had not completely supplanted Austroasiatic languages." (DeLancey 2012:13)
- ^ (Puri 1968, p. 7)
- ^ Pathak, Guptajit (2008). Assam's history and its graphics. p. 39.
- ^ "Another text called Samkhyanagrihasamgrahasutra where a passage is wrongly supposed to refer to the land of Pragjyotisha is seen to suggest the earliest Brahmana settlement in Assam. M.M. Sarma has rightly pointed out that the word "Pragjyotisha" in the sutra means "before the appearance of any light and it has no relation with the country Pragjyotisha"." (Baruah 2008:167)
- ^ a b c (Guha 1984, p. 75)
- ^ (Puri 1968, p. 4)
- ^ "...appear to call the land including Assam Kirrhadia after the Kirata population." (Sircar 1990, pp. 60–61)
- ^ "If we go by Bhattaswamin's commentary on Arthashastra Magadha was already importing certain items of trade from this Valley in Kautilya's days" (Guha 1984, p. 76)
- ^ "...the Arthashastra in its present form has to be assigned to the early centuries of the Christian era and the commentaries to much later dates." (Sircar 1990, p. 61)
- ^ "The name of Pragjyotisha has been traced in a passage of Sankhyana Grihya-samgrahawhich mentions it in connection with a vrata rite and speaks of the country as a punya-desha or holy land. However the popularity of the vrata rites and the holy character ascribed to the land appear to suggest a post Gupta period." (Sircar 1990, p. 61)
- ^ (Sircar 1990, p. 59)
- Gauhati area and the Barganga inscription speaks of the spread of the Aryan culture up to the Dabaka area, the present inscription stands as an unquestionable testimony to the spread of the Aryan culture up to the sarupathararea of upper Assam as early as in the early part of the 5th century A.D.
- ^ "...the Doobi plates ... record the grant originally made by Bhutivarman in favor of two Brahmanas of the Ghosha family..." (Sircar 1990b, p. 103)
- ^ "Inscriptions show that from the 5th century A.D. onwards the granting of lands to Brahmanas in different parts of the region became a common practice for the rulers of early Assam. These settlements emerged as the pockets of Brahmanic influence." (Baruah 2008, p. 167)
- ^ "The genealogies of these Brahman donees also incidentally refer to their places of origin, like Pundra, Sravasthi, Varendri, Madhyadesha i.e. areas of present day Bangladesh, Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh." (Das 2005, p. 227)
- ^ "On other hand, the number of inscriptions containing actual land grants to brahmanas and their settlements in Kamarupa was small even in the post-seventh century. Since the land was not granted on a large scale to brahmanas by any ruler of the Mlecchas and the Palas, it may be presumed that cultural assimilation was not imposed with any great emphasis on Sanskritisation"(Shin 2018, p. 456)
- ^ "While demarcating the boundaries of these agrahara grants initially only natural boundaries like water bodies, trees, and the like are mentioned, but in the inscriptions of the Pala dynasty, they increasingly bordered on other sasanas , i.e. land donated by a royal decree." (Das 2005, p. 228)
- ^ (Guha 1983, p. 33)
- ^ Shin (2010), p. 10: "It is suggested that under the Koch kings, patronage of brahmans began earlier and more vigorously than in the Ahom kingdom. Encouraged both by the Koch kings and the regional bhuiyan landlords, a number of brahmanas from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Bengal migrated into western Assam in the sixteen century"
- ^ (Adhikary 2018): Apart from this Maharaja Biswa Singha (Koch dynasty) invited a large number of Brahmins from Kanouj, Benaras and other learning places and provided them rent free lands to perform religious practice. He also appointed Ballabhacharya, the chief priest of Kamakhya Temple to Koch Kingdom."
- ^ (Sheikh 2012, p. 251): "He (Biswa Singha) brought some learned Brahmanas from Mithila, Benaras, Kanauj, and Srikshetra (Puri) to his kingdom to perform the Brahminical rituals"
- ^ Das (2014), p. 158: "The practice of giving grants to gain religious merit can be seem in full blossom in Ahom times"
- ^ "... (it shows) that in Ancient Assam there were three languages viz. (1) Sanskrit as the official language and the language of the learned few, (2) Non-Aryan tribal languages of the Austric and Tibeto-Burman families, and (3) a local variety of Prakrit (ie a MIA) wherefrom, in course of time, the modern Assamese language as a MIL, emerged." (Sharma 1978, pp. 0.24–0.28)
- ^ "Large scale diffusion of linguistic innovations has been taking place between Asamiya, the Sino-Tibetan languages and Khasi in this area for a very long time (Moral 1997, p. 44)
- ^ (Lahiri 1991, pp. 58–59)
- ^ (Lahiri 1991, pp. 57–58)
- ^ N.R. Sharma, The Kāmarūpa School of Dharmaśāstra, 1994, Page 3 Moreover, the discovery of the copper plate-inscriptions issued by different kings of ancient Assam (Kamarupa) at different times brings to light the Aryan colour of the cultural heritage of Assam.
- ^ "Virtually all of Assam's kings, from the fourth-century Varmans down to the eighteenth-century Ahoms, came from non-Aryan tribes that were only gradually Sanskritised." (Urban 2011, p. 234)
- ^ "Here I will follow the lead of Wendy Doniger, who suggests that the development of Hinduism as a whole in South Asia was not simply a process of Sanskritisation, that is, the absorption of non-Hindu traditions into the brahminic system; rather, it also involved a process of 'Deshification', that is, the influence of local (deshi) and indigenous cultures on brahmaic religion and the mutual interaction between Sanskritic and deshi traditions." (Urban 2011, p. 233)
- ^ "It is well known that till recent times some of the major tribes of Assam have remained beyond the pale of Sanskritization and some of them are still maintaining their own cultural traits. Therefore, it would be not tenable, if we identify the whole Brahmaputra valley and its adjoining areas as the region influenced by the Brahmanical faiths (as projected by some scholars)." (Baruah 2008, p. 168)
- ^ (Urban 2009)
- ^ "Statement". censusindia.gov.in. Archived from the original on 6 February 2012.
- ^ "Axomiya is the major language spoken in Assam, and serves almost as a lingua franca among the different speech communities in the whole area." (Goswami 2003:394)
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