Dancing to the State: Ethnic Compulsions of the Tangsa in Assam

For those of you who have no idea who I am, where northeast India is and what my book (named in the title, OUP 2017)  is about here is the story behind the book.

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Strange encounters in the Jaintia hills

My friend Hema and I had undertaken a 2-week long road trip in January 2017 through some hilly parts of NE India. At one village in the heart of the Jaintia hills, we ran into a French anthropologist friend of mine, who was staying and working in the village at that time. The additional tensions created between the ethnographer and her field consultants on our arrival in the village as tourists are described in this description of our brief stay in the village.

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The watery Assamese

Assamese people are like water -- we are very adaptable, flexible, accommodative, we can take the shape of whatever vessel we are put into... Mahanta da said at the recently concluded 'Prabasi Asamiya' meet at Hamburg, Germany. That might very well be true...but...

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Charting the difference

Having spent the last seven years working with the Tangsa people living in the Margherita subdivision of the Tinsukia district of Assam and in the Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh, I decided to spend a few days exploring possibilities with the Moran-Motok people living in the adjoining areas including Dibrugarh, Tinsukia, Kakopothar and Bordumsa. The Tangsa are basically hills people while the Morans and Motaks have lived in the plains of the Brahmaputra valley as long as they can remember. But there are many other striking differences between these two groups.

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What a year!

2015 will go down in the personal story of my life as a really momentous year where many things happened... after a long stagnation this was the year when things finally fell in place. Three of the most important landmarks:

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A world which seems to have missed the point altogether

Coming back to Guwahati and being here for more than a month this time helped me gain a little more clarity about what it is that I find strange about people's reactions here every time I come back.  A few instances:

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After the end of the centenary celebrations

These last twelve months have been very full with various activities in connection with my father's birth centenary celebrations. Looking back after the end of the final event on Baba's 101st birthday, Kati Bihu day, the 18th October 2015, I have mixed feelings...

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The 2015 Asamiya meet at Volkach -- another anniversary

This year has been a year of anniversaries...it had already started last October with my father's birth centenary celebrations. This year was also an anniversary of sorts for me. It was also the fifth anniversary of the first meeting in August 2010 of a small group of Asamiya living in and around Germany. Since we had hosted that first event, we thought it would be nice to do it again at home... what this year's event turned out to be was much more than I could have ever imagined...

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After the event

The after-the-event report promised in the last blog...

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A catalogue of failures

This last year has been a lesson for me -- I had started out with a number of projects related to celebrating my father's birth centenary. What has become of some of them in the course of the year is a veritable catalogue of things that went wrong and proof of the fact that perhaps the problem does not lie out there but somehwere within me... perhaps I have become a misfit in this world I thought was and which I still call my home.

Some details follow...

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