Indo-Aryan migration to Assam

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The earliest Indo-Aryan migration to Assam is estimated to have occurred between the 2nd century BCE and 1st century CE^[1]—not earlier than 500 BCE.^[2] The earliest epigraphic record suggests that the Indo-Aryan migration began latest by the middle of the 4th century CE.^[3] They came from the Gangetic Plains into a region already inhabited by people who spoke Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages.^[4]^[5]

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Pre-Indo-Aryan Assam

The 8th- to 6th-century BCE text, Shatapatha Brahmana, describes the Sanskritization of East India up to the Karatoya river, the western boundary of the historic 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,^[9] nor Ashokan epigraphs^[10] (3rd century BCE with the capital in East India) mention the Assam region. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1st century CE) and Ptolemy's Geography (2nd century CE) refer to the region that included Assam as Kirrhadia, after the Kirata people (pre-Indo-Aryan), who were also the sources of the goods that were being traded.^[11] A reference to Lauhitya in 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 Samudragupta's Allahabad inscription, where two kingdoms from the region—Kamarupa and 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".^[9] Two inscriptions of Bhaskaravarman (600-650 CE) on copper plates are re-issues of grants to Brahmins to settle in parts of the Kamarupa kingdom during the reign of Bhutivarman (518-542).^[17] This policy, of the local kings settling Brahmans from other places in the kingdom, was a common policy of all Kamarupa kings that gave rise to pockets of Brahmanic influence.^[18] From the inscriptions it can be made out that the Brahman donees came to Assam from present-day Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.^[19] The number of Brahmin grants on record remained small even post–7th century, as the land was not granted on a large scale by any ruler of the 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 Mithila, Benaras, 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 Kamarupa inscriptions, written in Sanskrit, suggest that a majority of the Indo-Aryan immigrants spoke Kamarupi Prakrit the precursor of Assamese language and the Proto-Kamata; and that the learned few knew Sanskrit.^[27] Sanskrit was the liturgical language of Hinduism and the state language of Kamarupa; and Assamese became a link language, accepted as a second language by some of the aboriginal peoples; over time, it became the first language for many. In return, Assamese acquired linguistic features of the native speakers.^[28] The writing shows an evolution from the early Gupta script towards modern 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]

Kingship and Worship of Goddess^[35]
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 Assamese language is the easternmost Indo-Aryan language, spoken by over 15 million native speakers.^[36] It also serves as a lingua franca in the region.^[37] With closely related languages it is also spoken in parts of Arunachal Pradesh and other northeast Indian states.

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)
^ (Sharma 1978, p. 305) While Umachal inscription stands as an index to the spread of the Aryan culture up to the 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 sarupathar area 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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