Welcome to this week’s issue featuring: the Hinduization of Assam, a discussion of Bollywood and Hinduism, and an aesthetic!
History Highlight: Hinduization of Assam
The history of the Indian state of Assam is extremely interesting, with the TL:DR version of its history being:
Originally at the fringes of historical Hindu/Indian civilizations
Tai-Kadai peoples (from the Guangxi region of China) migrate to the area around 1200CE, forming the Ahom Kingdom and ruling over a mix of Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman language speaking local peoples
Ahom Kingdom gradually becomes Hinduized and by ~1650CE elites and later the population switched from Ahom (a Tai-Kadai language distantly related to Thai and Laotian) to Assamese (an Eastern Indo-Aryan language related to Bengali and the languages of Bihar)
Regarding the transition from the environment in bullet 2 to bullet 3, Adarsh Jha recently published a great piece on the Hinduization of Assam. We’ve featured in previous issues some material on the Hinduization of Manipur (Week 16, Week 26). Here is a snippet from where it all started, but read the full piece, as it is rich in context and historical references.
An enquiry was ordered and it was revealed that the exiled queen’s boat reached the bank of the river at Haabung village, where a Brahmin gave her shelter. She passed away post the birth of her son, the legitimate heir to the Ahom throne. That boy was then raised by the Brahmin along with his own sons. The nobles decided to coronate him as the new king. The young boy, who was also referred to as “Bamuni Konwar’’ or “Brahmin Prince”, was given the name Sudaangphaa and was crowned in the year 1397.
Arts Highlight: Bollywood’s bottom line
Many of our readers likely are viewers of Bollywood, and certainly many are likely aware of Hinduphobic tropes in those movies, likely a function of Bollywood’s links to the underworld and Islamic terrorism. For a quick way to see this in action, check the Twitter account @Gemsofbollywood. Recently however, the rise of Telugu cinema and its popularity in the Hindi heartland, combined with Hindus wising up to portrayals of the Hindu religion in Hindi cinema, have led to a market backlash against Bollywood. Jaipur Dialogues goes into this recent phenomenon in a wide-ranging discussion, linked below:
Aesthetic: Manipur Krishna Temple
