Becoming Assamese: Colonialism and New Subjectivities in Northeast India

This book explores the making of colonial Northeast India and offers a new perspective to the study of the Assamese identity in the nineteenth century as a distinctly nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon, not confined to linguistic parameters alone. It studies crucial markers of the self — history, customs, food, dress, new religious beliefs — and symbols considered desirable by the provincial middle class and the way these fitted in with the latter’s nationalist subjectivities in the fac...