Recreating the past; Revivalism in Northeastern India

Abstract

In this article I would like to introduce the problems of reviving a ritual once it has disappeared without a trace, posing the modern actors an inter- esting set of dilemmas. The paper centres upon the example of the Ahom, an ethnic group in Northeast India which over the past centuries has lost trace almost completely of the culture of its Southeast Asian forebears. During the past fifteen years I have witnessed and personally played a minor, essentially indirect, role in the blossoming of a revivalist movement among the people of Ahom descent. It is a movement that has taken root in the face of what seem to be almost overwhelming odds. Tai-speaking peoples Tai-speaking peoples form the most numerous and most widely spread peoples in Mainland Southeast Asia. They first became recognizable as such in the first millennium A.D. in what is now Kuangsi Province in Southern China. In the middle of the eleventh century they became embroiled in a long and fierce war with the Chinese, which ended in a resounding defeat of the Tais. Hereupon many Tais suddenly began migrating southwards and south-westwards into the region of Mainland Southeast Asia. They fanned out rapidly, and within a few hundred years had conquered most of the valley regions where they are now found: in northern Vietnam, in Laos, in all of Thailand, in Northern Myanmar, in the Chinese province of Yunnan, and in Northeastern India. At present there are probably a hundred million speakers of Tai languages. The