North East Literature & Culture - Page 5

Mehdi Hasan Chowdhury¹ & Dipendu Das²

¹Department of English, Gurucharan College, Silchar, India. ORCID: 0000-0003-1018-255X. Email: mehdihasan.ch@gmail.com

²Department of English, Assam University, Silchar, India. 0000-0003-4820-112X. Email: dipendudas2011@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–15. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne02

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Travel, Empire and Ethnographic Self-Fashioning of a White Headhunter: Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf’s The Naked Naga

Abstract

Travel Writing produced under the frameworks of colonialism and ethnography offers an opportunity to delineate the entanglement of the traveller in the ideological underpinnings of empire and ethnography. Drawing on the interdisciplinary formulations of the writing culture debate, the paper construes Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf’s The Naked Nagas (1939) as a travel text that narrativises encountered life-worlds in the Naga Hills, a contact zone in the frontier of the colonial Northeast India. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the paper traces the text’s ideological incarnation under the Nazi regime and foregrounds the self-fashioning by the European ethnographer-traveller as a salvager, a cultural translator and a white headhunter of folkloric proportion. It thereby posits the contact zone’s congeniality for translation and circulation of identities. The text exhibits a futuristic gesture towards postmodernist configurations of ethnographic writing and self-fashioning, and emerges as polysemous and simultaneously participates in and subverts the discourse of headhunting by deconstructing the inherent discursivity in headhunting. Read in the context of the colonial Northeast Indian frontier, Furer-Haimendorf’s narrative, generally marginalised in academic studies, signposts a critique of Christian evangelism as a threat to the ethnographic present of indigenous societies. The paper contributes to the interdisciplinary knowledge on the configuration of the colonial Northeast Indian frontier by envisioning the roles of, and contested affinity among, travel, empire and ethnographic exercises as evinced in travel writing.

Keywords:travel, empire, ethnography, Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf, The Naked Nagas.

The story of the Austrian-origin anthropologist Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf (1909-1995) may be said to be one of continuous circulations, mobilities and translations from the metropolitan Vienna and London to the farthest frontier of the colonial Indian subcontinent. A similar story of circulation and translation is discernible in the case of his book The Naked Nagas (1939a), whose German version, Die Nackten Nagas (1939b), became a bestseller. A fruit of Furer-Haimendorf’s extensive fieldwork during 1936-37 among a group of Nagas called Konyak, this text is his first ethnographic monograph and his “most famous work” (Baruah, 2018, p. 18). Prior to the publication of this book, in a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in 1938 – attended by the Society’s President, Henry Balfour, and J. H. Hutton — Furer-Haimendorf duly reported his fieldwork-findings from the Naga Hills and went on to declare: “There a great field lies open to the anthropologist” (Furer-Haimendorf, 1938, p. 216). In that meeting, Henry Balfour described Furer-Haimendorf as “one who is the greatest authority on the Naga Hills in general” (Furer-Haimendorf, 1938, p. 216). In The Naked Nagas, Furer-Haimendorf offers a foreign traveller’s elaborate account of an ethnographic space under the sway of empire, almost a terra incognita, with graphic descriptions of the peoples, cultures and geography, substantiated with photographic illustrations.

This paper extends the colonial concept of ‘dobhasi’, literally a bilingual speaker/translator or go-between, to situate Furer-Haimendorf in a delicate frontier of the British empire as an anthropologist ‘dobhasi’ apropos his roles as an authorial subject, a chronicler and translator of cultures, including linguistic. Furer-Haimendorf’s life reflects “the avocations of explorer, administrator, writer, and academic” (Bailey, 1992, p. 201), whose anthropological collections have circulated and been ‘translated’ in academia and popular cultural imagination as markers of multiple identity formations. Most prominently, his fieldwork-photographs, numbering more than ten thousand, have contributed to the circulation of an ethnic imagery of the Nagas in Europe, especially among the Germans (von Stockhausen, 2013, p. 26) and established him as a pioneer in visual anthropology. His oeuvre facilitates continual image-making through multiple texts: notebooks, diaries and publications, alongside material culture, and multiple gazes – the ethnographer’s gaze, and also the technologically-informed gaze of the camera. A significant dimension in this story of cultural circulation and translation is discernable in Furer-Haimendorf’sbrief convergence with the Nazis, a strand in his biographical history that has hitherto been accorded scarce attention, especially in India. Furer-Haimendorf was for some time a Nazi sympathiser with “secret Nazi party membership (since 1933)” (Gingrich, 2005, p. 115). However, he defected after his relocation to British India. In this regard, Gingrich (2005) has posited that amid the pre-war Nazi years, “exoticist popular culture” was disseminated through exhibition of ethnic groups, museum shows, films and books. Amidst this climate of cultural translation, anthropological works like Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929), and Furer-Haimendorf’sDie Nackten Nagas (German) “flirted” with a “kind of voyeuristic exoticism”. During the war in 1944, the military sections of Furer-Haimendorf’s book were republished in German. Popular anthropological works were, thus, subjected to ideological deployment via recirculation in the “public sphere that contributed to the gradual integration into the Third Reich of some academic fields, like anthropology” (Gingrich, p. 113).

As a school boy, Furer-Haimendorf sowed an interest in India through his readings of Tagore and Gandhi. Later on, his anthropological training was influenced by Vienna’s “Kulturkrieslehre”. However, the paucity of funds for fieldwork in interwar Vienna compelled him to earn his Ph.D. without fieldwork, on a comparative study of hill tribes in Assam and Burma (Myanmar). Fortunately, a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided significant support for fieldwork and advancement of anthropology in the period between the World Wars, brought him to the London School of Economics and the celebrated seminars of Malinowski, a doyen of fieldwork, during 1935-36. His teacher, Heine Geldern, a specialist in South East Asian anthropology, exercised a lasting impact on him and influenced his choice for, besides being inspired to an extent by Malinowski (Macfarlane, 1995, 21), the maiden fieldwork of thirteen months in the Naga Hills during 1936-37.  Before landing in India, he studied Assamese at SOAS. London served as a setting for meeting future British anthropologists, including a fruitful meeting with J. P. Mills (Macfarlane & Turin, 1996, p. 548). Mills, the dedicatee of The Naked Nagas was an anthropologist who also served as the Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills District. Mills kept his promise made in London to help the young anthropologist during his fieldwork in the Naga Hills – indeed, a rite of passage for the neophyte fieldworker.

The Poetics and Politics of the Literary Turn in Anthropology

This inquiry on Furer-Haimendorf’s ethnographic travels and their significations vis-a-vis The Naked Nagas builds on a literary analytical framework drawn from the writing culture debate. As a trailblazing time, the 1980s brought a “conceptual shift, “tectonic” in its implications” (Clifford, 1986, p. 22) – “a time of reassessment of dominant ideas” across disciplines (Marcus & Fischer, 1986, p. 585), informed by insights from postmodernism and literary and cultural studies. The ‘crisis of representation’ offered a critique of written ethnographic practice or the ‘literary project’ of anthropology (Trencher, 2002, p. 212). In other words, it performed the onus of directing attention to the subject, method and medium of anthropology– a rethinking of the modalities of representing the other, observation/fieldwork, and writing as a discursive practice. Clifford Geertz (1976), a prominent discussant in this debate, construed culture through a semiotic-interpretative lens as a ‘web’ of meanings (p. 5), and propounded the concept of “thick descriptions” i.e., the derivation of meaning of a cultural act from the informant’s perspective through a holistic exploration of strands of significance, and conceptualised anthropological writings as ‘interpretations’ (p. 15). George E. Marcus and Dick Cushman (1982) offered in their work a critique of ethnographies as texts. James Clifford and Marcus’ seminal edited volume Writing Culture, and Marcus and Michael Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique, both published in 1986, formally buttressed the literary project by consolidating in a framework of literary epistemology. Furthermore, James Clifford posited that “Literary processes– metaphor, figuration, narrative– affect the ways cultural phenomena are registered, from the first jotted “observations”, to the completed book, to the ways these configurations “make sense” in determined acts of reading.” (1986, p. 4). He built on the idea of ‘the predicament of culture’ to grapple with questions of authority in ethnographic representations of culture and also enunciated the ethnographer’s engagement in ‘ethnographic self-fashioning’. Later scholars have, however, critiqued the literary analytical approach in anthropological studies for its shortfalls. Nevertheless, the debate usefully delineated the textual trait of ethnography and cleared a space for interdisciplinary moorings within anthropology. By problematising the traditional understanding of an anthropological text as an unambiguous window towards deciphering other cultures, the literary turn not only imparted intellectual stimulus to experimentation in ethnography but also broadened the disciplinary canon by subsuming hitherto marginalised texts within the folds of the discipline.

Travel, Empire and Ethnography

Ethnography’s “own discursive practices were often inherited”, notes Pratt (1986), from other genres, including travel writing (p. 26). As a literary genre, travel writing exhibits an “openness to inter-and multidisciplinary readings” (Das & Youngs, 2019, p. 11). Therefore, the interdisciplinary reading of travel writing from an anthropological standpoint and of ethnography through the lens of ‘travel tropology’ is a productive practice as it facilitates “a more comprehensive view of their functioning as texts and in terms of interdisciplinary studies” (Borm, 2000, p. 94). In this context, it is important to foreground that Furer-Haimendorf’s book has been variously described: as an ethnographic monograph, “a travel book” (Hutton, 1948, p. 33), “a personal account”, “the most vivid and exciting narrative of “traditional” fieldwork ever published” (Needham, 1971, p. 93) and “a travelogue” (Ghosh, 2016, p. 454). Indeed, travel, observation and writing are a few of the common denominators between travel writing as a literary genre and ethnography as a constituent of anthropology. Consequently, one of the debates that have informed anthropology and travel writing since the 1980s when travel writing set its foot forward as an academic discipline has been the difference between the two areas. In this context, Graham Huggan (2015) notes:

while anthropological fieldwork is a ‘distinctive cluster of travel practices’, clear overlaps can be seen with other sets of practices, including those associated with travel writing, whose ‘transient and literary approach, sharply rejected in the disciplining of [anthropological] fieldwork, has continued [both] to tempt and [to] contaminate the scientific practices of cultural description on which professional anthropology first established, and has since defended, its disciplinary grounds. (p. 233)

It was under the nineteenth century colonial regimes that the academic discourse of ethnology flourished. Nevertheless, the “European ethnographic impulse”, Joan Pau Rubies (2002) has posited, predates this flourish and is traceable to “the humanistic disciplines of early modern Europe in the primary forms of travel writing, cosmography, and history”. Following the Renaissance, the “description of people in their variety” was greatly valued (p. 243). After the sixteenth century, descriptions in ethnographic terms abounded in travel writing which facilitated the impression of ethnography being a constituent of the genre. The works of naturalists, missionaries, and travellers supplied to anthropology its ethnographic data and tradition. Travellers from Europe contributed to the birth of ethnography as a new science through their documentation of ethnographic and spatial other (p. 257).

As a child, Furer-Haimendorf is said to have listened to “fireside tales” about the exploits of his family members such as Christoph Furer von Haimendorf (1479-1537) who authored a book based on his travels in Egypt, Palestine and Arabia. These tales, along with “his childhood preoccupation with opera, facilitated his entry into the realm of exotica” (Korom, 1992, p. 509). In The Naked Nagas, the travelling ethnographer sets out from England towards India in May, 1936, to study the lifeworlds of peoples who had by then been already evoked as primitive and headhunters in colonial exploration and ethnographic accounts– notwithstanding the expanse of the canvas. Nevertheless, the ethnographic eyes of the traveller gaze at the Nagas as subjects who are “almost untouched by the waves of civilization” (1939a, p. 3). Interestingly, the ethnographer’s travels and consequent subject-positions puncture the disciplinary distinction between the observer and the observed: “I have not tried to veil my affection for my Naga friends”, declares the author in the Preface. His initial approach towards the Nagas, whom he refers to as his “friends”, was “that of a scientific observer”. Yet, the disciplinary distance is subverted consequent upon his personal association with the objects of research, tantamount to going native: “the first studied aloofness gives way before a growing emotional attachment”. He posits, therefore, that The Naked Nagas is neither a “scientific book” nor “overladen with anthropological data” which is why he has “not tried to veil” his “affection” and “attraction” for the natives (1939a, p. vii). It is interesting that the French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) opens his narrative of fieldwork and travels, Tristes Tropiques ([1955]1961), through a notable ironic declaration: “Travel and travellers are two things I loathe – and yet here I am, all set to tell the story of my expedition” (p. 17). Strauss’ text– often read as ethnography and travel narrative simultaneously– signposts the intimate yet anxious association between the travelling-subject and the ethnographic-fieldworker. During the time when Furer-Haimendorf was conducting his fieldwork in the Naga Hills, Levi-Strauss was amidst the ‘tristes tropics’ of Brazil teaching and conducting fieldwork. Significantly, Susan Sontag (1966) configures Levi-Strauss as an anthropologist hero who mourns, and is also a custodian of, “the cold world of the primitives” (p. 81). Drawing on Sontag, Kubica (2014) elaborates that the anthropologist is a hero in his struggles with travel, quest for alleviation of modern western alienation, and tussle with philosophical aporia of the un/known (p. 600). In Furer-Haimendorf’s narrative, the traveller-ethnographer is both a mourner on the loss, and a custodian, of cultural practices and artefacts. The natives, incidentally, receive and configure him into a hero, a simulated image of a headhunter being fashioned, after his return from the punitive expedition: “Wherever I go I am acclaimed the hero of the day.” (1939a, p. 198).

In the context of the colonial Northeast Indian frontier, Furer-Haimendorf’s work signalled the emergence of “the first ‘real’ anthropologist in the region” who wielded an administrator’s “aura” and “closely befriended” experienced colonial administrators like J. P. Mills (Wouters, 2012, p. 114). He emerges as a connector between colonial and postcolonial ethnography in Northeast India by virtue of his anthropologically richer and more grounded works than the early administrator-ethnographers. While it is true that colonialism was productive in bequeathing a rich legacy of writings on Northeast India, this corpus cannot be, however, seen as singularly definitive and more objective than later writings. Indeed, the crisis of representation, and postcolonial theory have unearthed the want of neutrality in acts of observation and inference. Thus, in his paper read out in the meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, Furer-Haimendorf did not forget to laud the colonial Bristish administration’s endeavours to conserve native culture: “It is fortunate that a wise administration makes every effort to preserve native culture, thus sparing to the Nagas the sad fate that has befallen many other primitive races” (1938, p. 216). Views such as this, coupled with Furer-Haimendorf’s participation and exploit in punitive expedition and his proximity to the colonial regime, signal the crucial ideological affinity between empire and ethnography. Indeed, it is undeniable that the cultural heritage of societies that would otherwise remain undocumented and lost have been enriched through the “sympathetic recording of indigenous forms of life” by anthropologists (Asad, 1973, p. 479). Nevertheless, the reality which anthropologists sought to unpack and represent, and the way they sought to do so were always informed by “European power, as discourse and practice” (Asad, 1991, p. 315).

Nicholas Dirks (2001) has shed light on the process through which ethnographic knowledge in the late nineteenth century colonial India came to be privileged over other forms of knowledge as the maintenance of social order and operation of rule demanded better knowledge and modalities of knowing. The “ethnographic state”, therefore, invested in anthropological knowledge to understand and rule the subjects (p. 44). According to Nayar, alongside those who worked for territorial conquest in colonial India, the practitioners “of historiography, archaeology, anthropology-ethnography, and architecture” – whom he calls “scholar-colonials” – effected “an epistemological conquest” by “furnishing a set of discourses of expertise, interest, and labor that served the self-fashioning of the white man as the authoritative interpreter of India’s past and present” (2012, p. 206). In the context of Northeast India, colonialism and ethnography, notes Wouters (2012), shared a “fairly straightforward” relationship as the ethnographer was simultaneously an administrator (p. 101), and ethnographic writings supplied “vital intelligence” about the natives to the colonial regime (p. 102). A cognizance of such transactions between anthropology and colonialism and the corresponding context is essential, but to view anthropology as solely the handmaiden of the latter would be fallacious. Interestingly, in an entry of the classic Orientalist manual for fieldwork in ‘uncivilised lands’, Notes and Queries on Anthropology (1874), entitled “Morals”, its author E. B. Tylor reflects on the issue of contextual understanding, in this case, of native morality: “It is necessary to place ourselves at the point of view of the particular tribe, to understand its moral scheme” (p. 47). In this regard, Pratt’s (1992) theorisation on the “contact zone” is useful in comprehending the context of colonial encounters between different subjects. She defines it as “the space of colonial encounters” in which “peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict”. Pratt’s concept foregrounds the “interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters” and is often used in a synonymous sense with “colonial frontier” (pp. 6-7). In Furer-Haimendorf’s instance, it must be underscored that mobility and fieldwork were largely facilitated by the imperial framework within colonial India and the network of museums and anthropological collections operating from a metropolis like London. It is pertinent to bear in mind that in later years the colonial Indian government appointed him as a special officer of the North East Frontier Agency. He also went on to become the advisor on tribes and backward classes to the Nizam’s government in Hyderabad.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, with the decline of empire and the onset of faster means of transportation and mobility, few lands remained unexplored and unconquered. Furer-Haimendorf’s cartographic imaginary, predicated on the rhetoric of empire, is reminiscent of the musing of Conrad’s Charlie Marlow on unmapped spaces on the earth:

“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth […] But there was one yet—the biggest—the most blank, so to speak—that I had a hankering after.

“True, by this time it was not a blank space anymore. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. […]” (Conrad, 2006, pp. 7-8)

In a similar fashion, to Furer-Haimendorf, some of the blank/white spaces to be traversed in the colonial frontier, being unmapped by any Westerner, brimmed with ethnographic wealth and adventure. At certain narrative moments, his sentiment smacks of idioms of imperial conquest, such as the following:

The maps, drawn up by the Survey Party of 1924, lie spread out on the improvised table. So far they have served us well, but now we have come to the edge of mapped territory; before us lies unexplored country. Great white patches, standing out from the green and brown, indicate its extent, and a line boldly drawn through land where no European has yet been marks the probable frontier between Assam and Burma. (1939a, p. 1)

A year ago, he had “bent over these same maps on one of the large tables of the Royal Geographical Society in London” dreaming “of tropical heat and of blue skies” and the opportunity to “be among real ‘savages’” after “years of anthropological work on the green table” (1939a, p. 2).

During the explorative phase of colonial ethnography in Northeast India, pejorative images of natives, like ‘savages’ and ‘headhunters’, among others, especially of the Nagas – “an ethnological hotbed, arguably even a cradle of British Social Anthropology” (Wouters & Heneise, 2017, p. 5) – were constructed, which reflected “intense political contestation and the associated feelings of animosity and anxiety” (Wouters, 2012, p. 109). In Furer-Haimendorf’s work, The Naked Nagas, and Himalayan Barbary (1955) as well, notwithstanding his empathetic representations, stereotypes of the Naga as naked, barbarous and headhunter are foregrounded. Such essentialising propensity, ingrained in Orientalist discourse, is a general feature of the rhetoric of empire. In Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for instance, an entry entitled “Clothing”, has its first question thus: “Is any clothing used, or do the natives go entirely naked?” (Franks, p. 99). Thus, in the words of Bampfylde Fuller, Chief Commissioner of Assam (1902-05), the Naga warriors’ “fantastic” sartorial appearance is reminiscent of the Red Indians in Fenimore Cooper’s literary works, and this “bloodthirsty savages” (1910, p. 169) offer a “promising” field for “missionary endeavour” (1910, p. 170). However, there were also representational instances which projected the native in a positive light. Furer-Haimendorf’s travel amongst the natives, for example, assures him of the similitude of the “mentality” of the “‘primitive peoples’” and their modern counterparts. In Wakching, the natives appear to him in a new light through their considerate nature, helpfulness and tact:

Several of my companions were old-time head-hunters, but any deduction of hardness or cruelty of mind would be quite wrong. Big books are written about the psychology of ‘primitive peoples’, and the presupposition is usually that their mentality is essentially different from ours. Only very seldom do you hear the real unsensational truth, that ‘primitive man’ thinks and feels, in all fundamentally human things, exactly as we think and feel. (1939a, p. 86)

Indeed, the ideological bedrock of colonial writers was in general informed by the “then dominant theories of evolution, utilitarianism, and race, taught to them [the British colonisers] in established universities in the United Kingdom” (Wouters & Heneise, 2017, p. 7). In a later publication, however, while reflecting on The Naked Nagas, Furer-Haimendorf noted that: “Though written by an anthropologist this book was not in the nature of an academic study […] but reflected the impression of a western observer exposed for the first time to close contact with an Indian tribal people persisting in an archaic way of life”. He confesses further that much of the original description may appear to the latter Nagas as “naive and excessively romantic” in spite of the narrative being written through the “eyes of a sympathetic foreign observer” (1976, p. v).

The Salvage Paradigm and Critique of Christianity

During his travels, Furer-Haimendorf gazes at the native spaces as cultural landscapes at the cusp of transition precipitated by the onset of Christianity and the gradual expansion of colonial rule. Congruent with the salvage paradigm, he fashions himself in the narrative as a collector, custodian and chronicler of indigenous material cultures and everyday practices through textualisation, and hence memorialisation, in the form of writing, salvaging and photographic documentation. James Clifford (1989) defines the salvage paradigm as a reflection of “a desire to rescue something ‘authentic’ out of destructive historical changes” that is locatable in ethnographic writing, the art world, “in a range of familiar nostalgias”. This paradigm is present as “a pervasive ideological complex” in “‘art–and-culture-collecting’” practices of the West. Inherent in it is a global framework of time and space that assumes history as “linear and nonrepeatable”. This includes the plotting of ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ groups within nineteenth century evolutionism, “from savage to barbarian to civilized”, in the ‘ethnographic present’ (p. 73). In a coterminous spirit, Furer-Haimendorf notes that “the oldest cultural types” are “still surviving in the Naga Hills” and “Most of them still live practically the same life as their ancestors” (1938, p. 216).

To Furer-Haimendorf, the simulated headhunting rituals and his self-fashioning as a headhunter imparted not only an occasion to document the ritual ceremonies associated with headhunting, otherwise prohibited in British administered spaces, but it was also an act of “helping” to “the younger generation to acquire the dress of their fathers” (1939a, p. 204) and hence, the status of headhunters.  The anthropologist doesn’t regret the distribution of pieces of the ‘hunted’ skulls to the natives “for the recording of an ancient head-hunting ceremony, so obviously doomed to extinction” (1939a, p. 193). The salvage paradigm is beautifully manifest in the text, and is prominently evoked at the end of the narrative:

THE veranda of my bungalow is covered with the specimens of my collection: spears and daos from Wakching, Longkhai, Chingmei, and various villages beyond the frontier; valuable bronze gongs; cloths of different colours; red plaited hats with buffalo horns; ornaments for men and women; baskets; wooden dishes and agricultural implements; a long row of carvings, and hundreds of other things, many of which I have acquired only after long negotiation and at a high price.

I cannot help my eyes falling also on those objects which I feel now I would rather never have possessed – a small log-drum, a pair of grave-statues, and the model of a chief’s coffin – for their making has brought much sorrow to their creators. (1939a, p. 234)

Furer-Haimendorf notes, much later, that the cultural artefacts he had collected from the Naga Hills were not taken “out of the men’s houses which I think would have been quite wrong, even if one could have done that, but I got the same artist to carve them for me” (Macfarlane, 1996).  Ironically, however, The Naked Nagas corroborates his participation in the plunder and destruction of a native village in an unadministered region, among other negotiations for salvaging artefacts.

The Naked Nagas also critiques the evangelism of the American Baptist Mission among the Nagas and shows their interventions as a fosterer of cultural erosion. The deserted and dilapidated bachelors’ hall or “morung” in an Ao village presents “a deplorable sight” to the ethnographer. To him the morung becomes a nostalgic signifier of lack: “Gone are the merry feasts, when young and old alike assembled in the morung round the great pots of sweet rice-beer”. In sharp contrast to the morung stands the Baptist missionaries’ chapel wherefrom emanates the sound of Christian song that is “not in harmony with Naga expression”, while the natives exiting the chapel “seemed to me [him] mere shadows of Nagas, or, even worse, caricatures of Europeans” (1939a, p. 55). With the displacement of the morung by the chapel came other corresponding cultural changes:

The Aos’ most cherished and valued possessions, the pride of generations, lay unheeded and scattered in the jungle: ‘vain trifles’ that Christians should not value – ivory armlets, necklaces of boars’ tusks, cowrie shells, head-dresses and baldrics, and artistically woven coloured cloths all discarded, for are they not temptations of the devil ? (1939a, pp. 55-56)

Through the juxtapositional images of the perishing morung and the discarded artefacts, vis-a-vis the thriving chapel, Furer-Haimendorf documents a paradigmatic contrast between two lifeworlds and their corresponding ideologies and relevance in a climate of colonial evangelical intervention. With the advent and consolidation of missionaries among the Nagas, proselytisation was carried out and new believing-subjects were fashioned as evidenced in missionary writing, in A Corner in India (1907) by Mary Mead Clark, for instance.

When Furer-Haimendorf questions the village-pastor on the desertion of the morung, the latter replies thus: “‘They are from the olden times; to use them would be against our rules’”. This shift had critical repercussions on native lifeworlds to the extent of evacuating the significations of cultural objects and practices. Indigenous material culture and everyday practices, in an emergent Christian setting, become markers of a linear temporality so that morungs can only be construed in terms of times past whose use is prohibited by “our [Christian] rules”. As an anthropologist, Furer-Haimendorf comprehends the vitality of the morung as a composite site of education, regulation, social engineering, and communitarian spirit, including the consequences of its decay: “But now the old community spirit is lost, and many people fall into the evil ways of selfish individualism” (1939a, p. 56). In Western conceptions of memory, this ethnographic present signifies a past, and represents culturally unique time/s or ‘traditions’ that are always on the verge of change due to various forces like trade, missions, ethnographic exercises, among others. (Clifford, 1989, pp. 73-74).

Headhunting and Ethnographic Self-Fashioning

In one of the crucial episodes of travel “into unadministered territory” – dubbed as “the promised land” by J. H. Hutton (Furer-Haimendorf, 1938, p. 216), Furer-Haimendorf accompanies the then Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills, J. P. Mills, as part of a military expedition against the ‘Kalyo Kengyus’ who “were completely terrorizing their neighbours, and had developed the hunting of heads into systematic man-hunts”. On this occasion, the travelling-anthropologist reflects: “It is the dream of every anthropologist once to enter ‘virgin’ country, and so this was a particularly solemn moment for me” (1939a, 131). Interestingly, many of the Naga coolies have also joined the expedition with the hope of engaging in headhunting and a “dream of attaining the rank of head-hunters” (1939a, 151). Surprisingly, as the expedition reaches Pangsha, there is a reversal of stereotypical roles; the coolies and scouts are granted permission to plunder the deserted village:

Jubilantly they throw themselves on the deserted streets, on the empty, fated houses. A spear flies through the air and hits a squeaking pig; the head of a cow falls under the mighty stroke of a dao; the last pieces of furniture are brought out of the houses, and one or two forgotten ornaments. (1939a, 166)

Amidst this grotesque scene of plunder, Furer-Haimendorf joins the loot for ethnographic artefacts. He justifies the plundering of Pangsha by reminding them of the massacres the people of Pangsha had committed, of which the recent trophies in the form of dislodged human heads hanging from a low tree were ample evidence. In a moment of self-reflection, he notes on the destruction of indigenous art that the “regret of the ethnologist at the destruction of such works of art must once more give way” (1939a, pp. 172-173). He removes “four heads from the head-tree”, puts them in a basket and “hoist the gruesome booty on my [his] back, much to the amusement of the Nagas and the slightly shocked surprise of the sepoys” (1939a, p. 173). It is in such moments that an element of fictiveness and want of ethical moorings, both disciplinary and humanistic, within the discourse of the civilising mission, and colonial anthropology gets uncovered.

Although in reality Furer-Haimendorf doesn’t cut off human heads, yet in order to preserve and accentuate his image as a sahib among natives, also to document associated rituals, he brings back the human heads. Upon return, pieces of the skulls are distributed to the village morungs, for their supposedly inherent auspiciousness and magical effects, while Furer-Haimendorf keeps one for himself as a memento to be exhibited and museumised in Europe. He notes in his paper that he “had looted” the skulls from a “hostile village” whose inhabitants were killed and therefore the salvaged heads “could be considered perfectly good head-hunting trophies” (1938, p. 212). While citing the reason for his intention to carry a skull to Europe, Furer-Haimendorf tells a simulated anecdote to a native named Shankok: “But think, what would the girls of my village say if I returned after a whole year in a foreign land without a head?” (1939a, p. 205). Later, he is invited to participate in a ritual dance of headhunting because the natives believed that he had “brought us [them] the head”. He is conscious of his already constructed public-image: “I am considered the real head-hunter”, and that his refusal to partake in the dance will “shake the people’s confidence in me [him]” (p. 207). On another occasion, he transcribes a folksong believing it to be a record of ancient headhunting ritual, only to eventually discover that it is “a song about myself [himself]” (p. 209).

The western anthropological fascination with skulls is well known. For instance, in Notes and Queries on Anthropology’s entry entitled “Preserving Specimens”, Barnard Davies advises travellers that when human skulls can be salvaged, one should “get them in as perfect a state as possible” and even “imperfect specimens” should not be cast away (1874, p. 142). He goes on to detail the methods of packing, documenting identity, and transmitting a skull. Indeed, headhunting was an important trope in the colonial discourse pivoting around the Nagas. A striking instance is found in the work of Bampfylde Fuller who notes that some “hill peoples” of Assam “are certainly in an early stage of culture, addicted to head-hunting and constantly at war with their neighbours” (1930, p. 111). Fuller argues that only through the imperial annexation of native space – the Naga Hills, could the “brutal raiding of the plains” be checked, and that “The effect of our [British Raj’s] control has been marvellous”. In describing a people “collectively spoken of as Nagas” (1910, p. 168), Fuller categorises their geographical space through an ancient cultural practice: “We are in a country of head-hunters” (p. 167). Contrastingly, Furer-Haimendorf offers a contextual basis: “the bringing in of a head not only furthers in a magical way the fertility of the village, but also in a more concrete manner acts as an incentive to trade and production” (1939a, p. 204). He construes headhunting as “a practice connected with the magical idea of the fertilizing power of the blood” (1969, p. 156). Contemporary scholars, like Zou (2005), have contextualised the trope of headhunting as “an ambivalent site of discourse where the coloniser/ethnologist can inscribe his/her desires” and that “imperial pacification was no less violent that native headhunting” (p. 76). In The Naked Nagas, this trope facilitates the emergence of a novel subject that stands as a paradox from an Orientalist standpoint. After the publication of the groundbreaking texts of Edward Said (1978) and Marry Louise Pratt (1992), the genre of travel writing which pivots on the representation of the other witnessed intense scrutiny as a site of colonial knowledge formation, and for its discursive agency in Orientalism. Said formulated Orientalism as a discourse founded on “an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”” (1979, p. 2) via which the Europeans come to know and dominate the other – the Orient. This modality of knowing the other – involving manoeuvres in fashioning the subjectivity of the other and, therefore, of the self – operates within the relational ideological framework of knowledge and power. In this backdrop, travel writing has been viewed as a vehicle that dramatises “an engagement between self and world” (Blanton, 2002, p. xi). In its negotiations with a variety of alterity – cardinally, the self and the other, travel writing offers insights into subject position/s and self-fashioning. In this regard, Thomson posits that since the late eighteenth century there has been an increasing proclivity in travel writing “to foreground the narratorial self, so that the traveller becomes as much the object of the reader’s attention as the place travelled to” (2011, p. 99). In a similar context, James Clifford (1988) has posited that a new “ethnographic subjectivity” developed in the early twentieth century that may be seen as a “late variant” of the “sense of the self” that Stephen Greenblatt had enunciated (p. 93). He further notes that the “ethnographic discourse” functions in a “double manner” by portraying “other selves as culturally constituted”, yet simultaneously constructing “an identity authorized to represent, to interpret, even to believe – but always with some irony – the truths of discrepant worlds” (p. 95). Joseph Conrad and Malinowski who grapple with the constructed nature of culture and language in their works are Clifford’s paradigms of ethnographic subjectivity. In this context, Furer-Haimendorf, as an ethnographer, is invested with authority issuing from his status as an inscriber and cataloguer of identity as well as his association with colonial power. This facilitated his negotiations with the other and his manoeuvres with self-identity to the extent of fashioning and performing the fictive figure of a white headhunter.

Conclusion

Read through the prism of postcolonialism, Furer-Haimendorf’s ethnographic self-fashioning, especially as a white headhunter, presents potential moments for the collapse of colonial difference. Indeed, the colonial climate contained a creative tension, as postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha have shown, in its proclivity to generate hybridity and deconstruct normative notions of purity and contamination. The contact zone as a dynamic space for the circulation and refashioning of identities of the self and the other is evident in the story of Furer-Haimendorf who had already transformed into a folkloric hero during the course of his fieldwork.  The polysemous text The Naked Nagas and its dynamic ethnographic-author, thus, epitomise translation and circulation. Indeed, borrowing the language of Clifford, it can be said that Furer-Haimendorf’s fieldwork “‘takes place’ in worldly, contingent relations of travel” (1996, p. 11). He emerges as a veritable ‘dobhasi’, a chronicler and translator of cultures who has helped shape identities by textualising ethnic markers often predicated on racial stereotype. By going native, he destabilises traditional ethnography’s claim to objectivity and, in the wake of the literary turn, his text may be said to be gesturing towards postmodernist configurations of ethnographic writing and self-fashioning. The text participates in the discourse of headhunting and simultaneously subverts it by unpacking the discursivity that the practice predicates upon through the instance of the ethnographer-traveller’s self-fashioning as a white headhunter. In the context of the colonial Northeast Indian frontier, the text signposts a critique of Christian evangelism as a threat to the ethnographic present of indigenous lifeworlds and offers a window to comprehend the contested affinity between travel and ethnography, as also the ideological negotiations between empire and ethnographic practices enacted in an imperial frontier.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding
No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

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Mehdi Hasan Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of English, at Gurucharan College, Silchar, Assam, India, and a doctoral candidate at the Department of English, Assam University, Silchar, India.

Dipendu Das is Professor of English, at Assam University, Silchar, Assam, India. His areas of specialisation include Drama Studies, New Literatures in English, Subaltern Studies and Translation Studies.

Dwijen Sharma
Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Tura Campus, Meghalaya, India. Orcid: 0000-0003-2140-2757. Email: dwijensharma@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne01

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Buranji in Northeast India: A 13th Century History Project of Assam

Abstract
The writing of Buranji in the geographical area that we now call Northeast India began with the establishment of Ahom kingdom in 1228 CE. The first Ahom king, Sukapha, who came along with soldiers and kinsmen from upper Burma ordered the writing of buranji as a part of documenting the battles they fought, incidents that took place, followers they gained etc. Initially, the buranjis, which were either written under the orders of the king or by noblemen who wanted to record and authenticate their illustrious lineage, were written in Tai Ahom language, but later these chronicles began to be written in Assamese. The Ahom buranjis not only dealt with the royal family and polity but also with the neighbouring kingdoms with whom battles were fought or had diplomatic relations. Thus, Tripura Buranji, Jaintia Buranji, Kachari Buranji etc were written. Unlike modern historiography based on rationalist-positivist model, the buranjis, though they chronicle and narrate facts and events based on state documents and other archival material kept in Gandhiya Bharal, are imbricated with myths, legends and non-linear time. Therefore, buranjis are often coupled with literature, unlike the western disciplinary project of historiography which, nevertheless, has been critiqued by scholars like Hayden White, K. M. Pannikar among others. The article, taking into consideration Suryya Kumar Bhuyan’s model of vernacular history writing, examines how the buranjis constitute a unique form that is indigenous and considerably different from the western paradigm of historiography disseminated by the colonial project.

Keywords: Buranji, Ahom, Assamese, Northeast, Indigenous

I

The tradition of writing Buranjis is said to have begun in what we now call Northeast India with the arrival of the Ahoms from a region situated in upper Burma and southern China in the 13^th century. As the Buranji tradition of writing history is unique to the region, it forms a significant body of historical chronicles of the kingdoms of Koch Behar, Kachar, Jaintia, Manipur and Tripura. Although Edward Gait dated Buranjis to 568 CE, yet he considered the Buranjis from 1228 CE as reliable. Gait thus gives us a scope to explore whether there were buranji like tradition in this region prior to the arrival of the Ahoms. However, some historians like Yasmin Saikia argue that buranjis are the 17^th century chronicles which proliferated during the colonial rule (Yasmin Saikia 2004:22). Buranjis, which literally mean in Tai-Ahom language “a granary or a store-house of knowledge that teaches the ignorant” (Sarma 1989:744), or what John F Hartman has translated as “ancient writings” (Hartman 1997:227) are chronicles in prose written largely on the bark of the Sanchi trees under the order of the king or high dignitaries of the state. The buranjis were based on “the periodic report transmitted to the court by military commanders and frontier governors, dimplomatic epistles sent to and received from foreign rulers and allies, judicial and revenue papers submitted to the kings and ministers for their final orders, and the day-to-day annals of the court which incorporated all the transactions done, important utterances made, and significant occurrences reported by reliable eye witnesses” (Bhuyan 2010: xii).  There were buranjis devoted to relation of the Ahom kingdom with the neighbouring kingdoms as in Jaintia buranji, Kachari buranji and Tripura buranji. Further, the buranjis devoted to diplomatic and military relations were known as Kataki buranjis; Ahom’s relation with Moguls found a place in Padshah Buranjis. Further, Buranjis were of two types—the official and the family. The official buranjis were written by scribes based on state papers, diplomatic correspondences, judicial proceedings, etc. under the office of the Likhakar Barua, while the family buranjis were written by nobles or by other under their direct supervision, sometimes anonymously revealing “language, customs, institutes, official and judicial procedures, social and religious usages and intricate details of the state machinery” (Barpuzari 1992:2). It was first written under the instruction of Sukapha in Tai-Ahom language and later it began to be written in Assamese, particularly from the 16^th century. Interestingly, this tradition of writing history has a “marked similarity with the Southeast Asian tradition of historical chronicles” like Yazawin, Hamannan etc (A Saikia 2008:477). However, the colonial administrators were initially skeptical of such buranjis as they considered the narratives in buranjis being “blended with what is fabulous and uncertain” (A Saikia 2008b:146). For instance, H. H. Wilson was categorical in reprimanding the Indians for the blending of ‘fabulous’ stories with historical details (Wilson 1825:7; quoted in Mantena 2007: 398). However, Edward Gait, who heralds the western tradition of history writing in Assam with the publication of A History of Assam (1906), considered the buranjis as a remarkable and reliable source for writing history of the region. Further, S K Bhuyan maintained that buranjis “have conserved the feelings, customs and manners and institution of the people of Assam, and couched as they are in a natural and racy prose style, they constitute an unrivalled monument of national literature which few other peoples of India possess” (Bhuyan 1932:17; quoted in A Saikia 2008:499)

II

During the colonial period, particularly in the later part of the 18th century, there was an attempt to locate the indigenous histories of the pre-colonial India.  However, the texts that were discovered did not fit into the western mode of history. The discipline of history that emerged in the West studied past from a positivist rational framework. It required scientific evidence and an objective outlook. Therefore, the Occidentalists believed that Indians did not have historical consciousness. Incidentally, however, the Orientalists recognized some of the ancient Indian traditions of writing about the past, though they lacked the attributes of what make a Western/ modern history. Nevertheless, Textures of Time (2003) argues that History in India is “embedded within the non-historical genres such as poems, ballads, and works within the larger Itihasa-Purana tradition” (Aquil & Chaterjee 2008:4; Textures 2003:1-23). What it referred to is the historical consciousness as embedded in both the oral and written traditions of India. If we look at the Itihasa-Purana, Vanshavali, Caritas, Bakhar and Tarikh, they are found to be replete with myths and legends and therefore, they might not be historically accurate or strictly chronological, but they present historical consciousness and traditions of India. Only because of their difference in style and language from modern western historical methods, they should not be dismissed as altogether ahistorical (Textures 2003:184-251). These texts provide a glimpse of the ancient Indian society, their religious practices, worldviews, architecture, occupational practices and food habits.

Interestingly, the Western scholars found Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, the 12^th century Kashmiri text in verse significantly close to history proper in the Western sense of the term, largely because of its Persian inheritance. It is well established that the Persian writing practices are closely connected to European tradition of writing, as they share a common source in Greek tradition. Nevertheless, the Western scholars never accepted the Persian tradition of history writing in India as vernacular/ indigenous despite the proliferation of numerous histories of India by Indians following that tradition. In this context, Partha Chatterjee states, “these Persian chronicles remained confined to the military and administrative activities of Sultans and their officials and didn’t strike roots in the indigenous, local and vernacular traditions of retelling past” (Aquil & Chaterjee 2008:2). On the other hand, C.A. Bayly argues that a great number of Indo-Persian histories were written in the 18^th century which had distinctly modern concerns and “which appear to come from entirely indigenous sources and not from the promptings of a colonial education” (Aquil & Chaterjee 2008:3).

In History in the Vernacular (2008), the editors, Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chaterjee present the vernacular traditions of history writing in India by examining a range of vernacular history from various parts of India— Buranjis of Ahom in Assam, Islam and Indian history at the Darul Musannefin in Azamgarh, Niti in Telegu, and the writings of Iswarchandra Gupta in Bengali, Narmad in Gujarati, Sri Ramamurti in Telugu etc. But they did not conform to the modern convention of history writing. However, Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam (Textures 2003:263-270) gave the example of a Telegu text of the 19^th century titled, Dupati Kaifiyat that “appears to pass every test of modern historical writing and yet it was produced within a tradition outside the disciplinary grid of colonial education” (Aquil & Chaterjee 2008:5). Thus, it entails the presence of texts or what is called “Vernacular history”¹ that delineate the past in various regional languages in India.

Further, Textures of Time debunks the widespread assumption that India had no history writing tradition in the pre-colonial times. It illustrates certain suitable reading techniques which would help in identifying certain distinctly historical narratives that are embedded in genres specific to literature exhibiting certain discursive signs— “factual, bound by secular causal explanations, informed by an awareness of the credibility of sources, and largely having to do with them life of the state”— that the readers attribute to historical narratives (Aquil & Chaterjee 2008:4). Thereby, the historical narrative is constituted in the act reading. Rao, Shulman & Subrahmanyam further state that in the act of reading, one is constantly reading the texture, the internal structuring of a given narrative, wherein lies the historiographical mode. Such narratives as the authors of Textures of Time argue were abundantly found in South India, particularly in the works of Karanam in the 16^th century. Further, in the “Introduction” to History in the Vernacular, Partha Chatterjee discusses C. A. Bayly who pointed out that even in north India, such narratives were found in the works of the Munshis, though initially in Persian but later in Hindustani, Rajasthani and other vernaculars. Further, Prachi Deshpande describes bakhar, a form of historical narrative, which was prevalent in the western part of India, particularly in the Maratha region. It documented the history of a lineage or of an event. Similarly, in Bengal, contrary to common assumption of the production of historical narratives in the early 19^th century, Gangaram’s Maharashta puran, Nawazish Khan’s Pathan prasamsa were written in the 18^th century. Further, in the Northeastern Part of India, there was a buranji tradition in Assam, which dated back to the 13^th century. It also influenced the neighbouring kingdoms of Koch Behar, Kachar, Sylhet, Manipur, and Tripura to take up the form to narrate their histories. Thus, these vernacular histories have been influential in demolishing prejudices against the existence of history in pre-colonial India.

However, not much is known about the Ahom buranji in mainland India. It was Edward Gait who attempted to collect and translate most of the buranjis, and consequently he published A History of Assam in 1906. As Gait was a trained ethnographer, his method of historical enquiry was different from the western academia. Thus, he furrowed through both objective evidences and quasi historical materials to create an authentic historical account of Assam out of the buranjis. Thus, he gave a sense of legitimacy to buranjis as an accepted form of historiography. However, unlike Gait, other colonial historians were interested in creating colonial archives where manuscripts, records of the state, letters from bureaucrats and heads of foreign countries etc are preserved. The aim of preserving such records in colonial archives was to show how superior the colonial knowledge system was, particularly their positivist rational historiography, while devaluing vernacular history of India. The epistemic violence that the colonial system has exerted on Indian knowledge system generated a condition for acceptance of anything Western as modern and scientific. In this context, Pierre Nora has argued that “the discipline and practice of history in the past century accorded itself a scientific arsenal and enforced the view that historical method was produced to establish true memory. In effect, it sought to gain control over our access to our diverse pasts by discrediting other genres (oral and written) through which the past was often filtered into the present” (Pierre Nora, 1996: Vol I; quoted in Mantena 2007: 399). Thus, colonial archives were constituted of colonial ideology that consciously discredited and delegitimized pre-colonial modes of historiography.

Nevertheless, Gait worked hard to collect, collate, and unearth buranjis and other textual and material sources to create an archive for future historians of positivist rational order. The same task was later carried forward by S K Bhuyan and institutions like Kamrup Anushandhan Samiti (1912) and Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, Assam (1928). It is an anathema that the history of Assam was not included in India’s history. This exclusion is still conspicuously felt and talked about. It not only created alienation in the people Northeast India but also a distance with the people of mainland India. Therefore, as a visionary, Gait realized this colonial discrepancy and what effect it could have in the later time. In his preface to A History of Assam, he wrote:

The Ahom conquerors of Assam had a keen historical sense and they have given us a full and detailed account of their rule which dates from the early part of the thirteenth century…in spite of this there is probably no part of India regarding whose past less is generally known. In the histories of India as a whole, Assam is barely mentioned and only ten lines are devoted to its annals in the historical portion of Hunters Indian Empire.” (Edward Gait, 1984: p.viii)

Thus, the possible ignorance or prejudices of colonial historians and Mainstream native historians hindered the possibility of exploring a unique and indigenous history of a porous and significantly heterogeneous region of India.

III

It, however, may be noted that almost all buranji manuscripts began with the legend of Khunlung and Khunlai, the ancestors of the Ahom king, Sukapha, followed by narratives marking the establishment of the Ahom kingdom, though some later buranjis preferred not to follow this practice and limit their narrative to certain decades. It was also customary to update these narratives by successive generations. Often omissions and commissions were made to these manuscripts in the course of time at the behest of the king or members of the nobility, or at times due to compiler’s own dislocation or interpretation leading to a change in language and original intent.² However, contrary to colonial historian, Mark Wilks oft quoted statement regarding the history of India as “deformed by fable and anachronism, that it may be considered as an absolute blank in Indian literature” (quoted in Mantena 2007: 398), the historicity of buranjis was accepted. A majority of Western scholars engaged with the history of Assam recognized buranji as an authentic representation of the past and as a reliable historical source. For instance, Edward Gait argued that the historicity of the buranjis “was proved not only by the way in which they support each other, but also by the confirmation which is afforded by the narratives of Muhamaddan writers wherever these are available for comparison” (Gait 1984: xii; quoted in A Saikia 2008b: 152). Even archaeological records (coins and rock inscriptions) proved the historicity of buranjis.  Further, Gait accepted the reliability of dates found in the buranjis as they “are the original records, and are all in complete accord” (Gait 1984:104; quoted in A Saikia 2008b: 152). Similarly, native scholars trained in modern education like Hiteswar Barbaruah maintained that “buranjis are devoid of statement derived only from inferences or only supported by legends” (Barbaruah 1927; quoted in A Saikia 2008: 495), in fact one can bank upon them for maintenance of “accurate chronology” (Barpuzari 1990:3-8; quoted in A Saikia 2008: 496).

The texts like Buranjis which are considered as reliable chronicles acquire the status of history on the basis of the structure of sentences as emphasized by French philosopher, Jacques Rancière in the following words:

History can become a science by remaining history only through a poetic detour that gives speech a regime of truth. The truth it gives itself is that of a pagan incarnation, of a body of words substituted for erratic speech. It doesn’t give this to itself in the form of an explicit philosophical thesis, but in the very texture of narrative: in the modes of interpretation, but also in the style of the sentences, the tense and person of the verb, the plays of the literal and the figurative. (Rancière 1994; quoted in A Saikia 2008: 495

Ranciere’s statement is critical of William Taylor who stated, “From the prevalence of poetry in Hindu composition, the simplicity of truth is almost always disguised. The painful result is that the Hindu mind has become familiarized with lying. Truth is insipid. Evidence loses its force” (quoted in Mantena 2007:398). Nevertheless, Ranciere here echoes Rao, Shulman & Subrahmanyam, who in their Textures of Truth underlined the importance of textures in comprehending the regime of truth, particularly the historicity of Indian texts. Thus, it is obvious from the writings of Ranciere, Gait, Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam that buranji can be regarded as historical literature. Apparently S K Bhuyan realized it much earlier. As he was trained in English literature, he had the theoretical orientation and the much-needed confidence to reconstruct the history of the pre-colonial Assam from the literary texts. So, Bhuyan followed the tradition started by Gait to study the buranjis, which included the collection, collation and translation of old manuscripts. Often, he found several versions of the same manuscripts, which he carefully collected from the custody of local people. Then he would select events from various buranjis and shape them into a single narrative that would address the concern he was working towards in that particular work (Neog 1998:12; quoted in A Saikia 2008:500). Further, by reproducing letters in the buranjis verbatim, he underlined the pivotal position of diplomacy during the Ahom rule (quoted in A Saikia 2008:498). He also reproduced some of the conversations amongst various stakeholders in the narrative that betray the power and ideology of the people. Thus, the buranjis were “endowed with a much-needed legitimacy of truth” (quoted in A Saikia 2008:498). Bhuyan managed to put light on many new areas of Ahom history adding new dimension to buranjis. In this way, Bhuyan compiled, collated and edited seven buranjis between 1930 and 1936.³ It amounts to editing and rewriting the buranjis from a positivist rational perspective with an ethnographic touch. Bhuyan also explained the process involved in editing thus:

The following processes are involved . . . transcription of the original; comparison of the transcript with the original to guarantee accuracy; grouping the transcript with the paragraphs and chapters with appropriate headings; collation of the text in the event of there being two or more chronicles containing the same version, so that no important detail or expression having any philological interest may be left out in the final version; correction of orthographical errors which reveal scribal idiosyncracy rather than a system; rigidly avoiding any correction which will involve phonetic alteration; . . . numbering of the paragraphs; correction of the galley proofs; . . . correction of page proofs once, twice and even thrice by comparison with the corrected galley proofs and with press-copies and originals where necessary; compilation of the title page, table of contents, preface, errata, etc., and their transcription and proof reading. We are having a constant eye on the introduction of shorter methods as far as they are compatible with literary accuracy and the approved traditions of scientific editing of ancient texts. (DHAS Bulletin No.1(1932): 16)

In the edited volumes published by the Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, Assam, Bhuyan incorporated a table of contents, preface and introduction in English, followed by the chapters in Assamese, and brief analysis of each chapter in English. Referring to Bhuyan’s editing of buranjis, Yasmin Saikia identified two significant characteristics– “One is the maintenance of the original prose style, and the other the employment of a dual dating system, namely, the Indian Saka era as well as the Tai-Ahom Lakli calendar” (in Purakayastha 2008: 182).

As discussed earlier, Bhuyan regarded buranjis as ‘buranji literature’ for he recognized the limitations of the buranjis— though buranjis had historical value, they lacked the critical insights that modern history has (Purakayastha 2008:182). For instance, he failed to find the biographical narratives of some of the important personalities of pre-colonial Assam, like Jaymati, Mula Gabharu, Lachit Barphukan, Sankardeva, among others, who were instrumental in changing the narrative of the history of Assam in their times. Therefore, as an editor, Bhuyan tried to infuse a critical spirit into historiography for he had the task cut out to reconstruct the past. So, he treated the pre-colonial historical and quasi-historical resources of Assam with the rational spirit of the West to create a positivist history of Assam.⁴

Further, as stated by Sudeshna Purakayastha, S K Bhuyan moulded the buranjis to reconstruct a “modern past”. This positivist historiography is an outcome of the acceptance of “the Western spirit of rationalism within the framework of an imaginative approach derived from pre-colonial vernacular traditions” (Purakayastha 238). Though the official buranjis contain the stories of Swargadeos, thereby marginalizing other significant historical figures, who, nevertheless, played a considerable role in nation building project of Assam, the family buranjis, which were written to prove noble ancestry (Gogoi 173), were free from the official narrative constraints of the Gandhia Bharal and, therefore, had illustrations of some significant, but marginalized historical characters. Referring to this, Golap Chandra Barua writes:

This buranji as well as Ahom Buranjis (both in Ahom and in Assamese) which I have come across till now supply very little information on many very important points regarding great personages such as (1) Lachit Barphukan, (2) Ramani Gabharu … (4) Jayamati Kuari and others; and also relating to religious reformers, and poets, such as (1) Sankardeva . . . In order to compile a complete Assam Buranji, a writer will have to collect information on all the above points from Bangsabalis [family histories]. (Quoted in Purakayastha 2008:191; Barua “Preface”)

Bhuyan drew from such vernacular traditions to write historical biographies. These deeds of the heroes were so graphically portrayed that Assamese readers loved to be identified as descendants of such heroes. Such heroes have redefined the contour of Assamese nationalism. Even today, they are selectively invoked to redraw Assamese identity and pride.

Interestingly, Bhuyan, while writing in Assamese sometimes used imaginative and rhetorical compositions in figurative language, and therefore alleged to have romanticized the buranjis, i.e. to move beyond the limits of factual accuracy.⁵ So, his critics would hesitate to regard him as a scientific historian in the Western sense of the term. Nevertheless, buranjis as vernacular history frequently used literary genres. In this context, Bhuyan argued:

It is curious how the Assamese intellect nurtured by the extravagance of Vaishnava poetry could pin itself down to the chronicling of grim realities and hard facts in a colourless and impersonal fashion. The bridge between these two phases of the intellect labouring in the realm of fiction or of fact was afforded by the model set forth in the buranjis . . . the chroniclers enjoyed immunity from the influence of imaginative poetry and who were subjected to rigorous discipline and supervision as their works were compiled as a matter of official routine. (Bhuyan 1962: xxii-xxiii)

From the study of the edited volumes of the buranjis, it becomes clear that the boundaries between facts and fiction, rationalism and imagination, and history and literature got blurred. Referring to this, Sudeshna Purakayastha states, “Bhuyan sought to complement in his own writings ‘facts’ with the ‘imaginative instinct’ ingrained in buranji literature” (Purakayastha 2008:184). This becomes clear when Bhuyan, in an article entitled “Asomiya Chhatrar Sahityacharcha,” (2005) stressed that training in literary studies and history would go a long way in the historiographical pursuit.⁶ Such training would provide intellectual competence to untangle the buranjis and scientifically reconstruct the past of Assam. For instance, though the “buranjis recorded only those events which were crucial to the royal polity,”⁷ the “small events, slips of the tongue, have also been included in the narratives of the buranjis” (Bhuyan 115; quoted in A Saikia 2008:497), and it requires a trained eye to arrest its meaning in the reconstruction of the past from the narrative.

Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam in Textures of Time question the positivist method of ‘filtering’ facts from different historical narratives as it violates the integrity of the narrative. Through this process, colonial historians like Taylor, Wilson, Wilks among others attempted to separate the mythic from the historical in the narratives, causing violence to the integrity of the narratives themselves. In buranjis, for instance, the mythic and the historical occupy the same plane, with the mythic providing a moral framework for the actions or events. However, the colonial historians believed that Indians were “cognitively incapable of distinguishing between myth (the non-verifiable) and history (the verifiable)” (Mantena 2007:406). But Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam argue that the readers possess this cognitive ability to separate fact from fiction as they are trained to search the internal textual clues.

If we look at the narratives in Buranjis, the events which constitute the narrative in a linear time tell many stories with teleological views.  As Ricoeur states: “A story is made out of events, to the extent that plot makes events into a story’, the plot of which need not conform to chronological sequence since it is the configuration towards meaning that makes the story” (Ricoeur 1978: 105). So the stories that the scripter of the buranjis wanted to tell, according to White and Danto, depend on the sequencing of events/ facts. This is akin to what Aristotle attributed to construction of complex plot. Further, Collingwood and Dray made us realize that events in the buranjis and the changes they brought about depended on the choices made by the ruler and his royal court. Further, to reconstruct the authentic past, one has to, in the words of Hayden White, “discover the ‘real story’ within or behind the events that come to us in the chaotic form of ‘historical records’” (White 1981: 4). When a story is told, the plot is revealed. This plot “symbolizes events by mediating between their status as existants ‘within time’ and their status as indicators of the historicality in which these events participate. Since this historicality can only be indicated, never represented directly, this means that the historical narrative, like all symbolic structures, says something other than what it says” (Ricoeur 1978:233). Thus, if one interprets the traces of the trajectory of the linear sequence of actions, one may be able to reconstruct the past. In the words of Ricoeur:

Every narrative combines two dimensions in various proportions, one chronological and the other nonchronological. The first maybe called the episodic dimension, which characterizes the story made out of events. The second is the configurational dimension, according to which the plot construes significant wholes out of scattered events. (Ricoueur 1980:178-79)

As it is the event which contributes to the development of plots, the event can be endowed with historicality. So, the reading of such events leads to the understanding of the past. Buranji is therefore an interpretation of the past. These buranjis are not only a gateway to the understanding of pre-colonial Assam, but also helped the modern historians to draw an authentic account of Assam in particular and the Northeast India in general. In this context, G. A. Grierson, while attributing the greatness of the Assamese language to its ‘national literature’ and the buranjis, said, “The Assamese are justly proud of their national literature. In no department have the Assamese been more successful than in branch of study in which India, as a rule, is curiously deficient” (Grierson 1903:396; quoted in A Saikia 2008:477). The Ahom buranjis underscored the prevalence of vernacular history in pre-colonial Assam since the 13^th century.

Notes:

¹ Partha Chatterjee stressed that vernacular histories are different from the authorized practices of modern academic history. Dr. Raziuddin Aquil, on the other hand, pointed out the limitations of vernacular histories and how they may be used as a weapon in the political struggle for identity based on religion, caste, region and languages. (See History in the Vernacular, 2008).

² Buranjis were often destroyed under royal patronage to contain malicious information that could harm their power and position. Such destruction of buranjis reveals the power and function these chronicles wielded in the politics of the precolonial state. For instance, Kirti Chandra Barbaruah, who supposedly collected all the available buranjis and then selected and destroyed those that ‘misrepresented’ him and his family. Further, facts and their associated narratives in buranjis are manipulated and added, depending on the nature of polity.

³Sudeshna Purakayashtha enumerates the list of buranjis edited by S K Bhuyan—Assam Buranji by Harakanta Sharma Barua (1930), Kamrupar Buranji (1930), Tungkhungia Buranji (1932), Deodhai Assam Buranji (1932), Assamar Padya Buranji (1932), Padshah Buranji (1935), and Kachari Buranji (1936). The Jaintia Buranji, Tripura Buranji, and Assam Buranji from Sukumar Mahanta’s family, and the Satsari Assam Buranji were edited in 1937, 1945, and 1960 respectively.

⁴In 1927 Bhuyan wrote: “We cannot conceive the exact nature of the white man’s burden if the infusion of the critical spirit, love for truth for its own sake, veneration of the past and selfless worship of culture be eliminated from its category.”

⁵Vernacular histories use literary genres, such as the novel, drama, autobiography, and even poetry to reveal historical consciousness. For instance, Bankimchandra’s historical novels were criticized by Maitra for misrepresenting historical facts. However, the historian Jadunath Sarkar argued that Bankim searched for a higher level of truth, a romantic conception of artistic truth, that was for beyond the reach of any historians, (See Sudeshna Purakayastha’s reference to S.K. Bhuyan’s Assamese writings that stir romance of the queen Jaymati in “Restructuring the Past in Early Twentieth Century Assam: Historiography and Surya Kanta Bhuyan”)

⁶ For Bhuyan literary talent and historical training create a condition for understanding and interpreting historiography. (See Sudeshna Purakayastha’s “Restructuring the Past in Early Twentieth Century Assam: Historiography and Surya Kanta Bhuyan”)

⁷ Bhuyan quoted 17th century evidence to prove Swargadeo Siva Singha’s (1714–44) instruction to the Ahom pundit to specifically write only about the chronology of the Ahom kings and their works. (See Arupjyoti Sakia’s “History, Buranji and Nation”)

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Dwijen Sharma teaches in the Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Tura Campus, Meghalaya. His recent edited books are Indian Fiction in Translation: Issues and Explorations (2014), and Writing from India’s North-East: Recovering the Small Voices (2019). He has published widely in both national and international journals. His areas of interest include Indian literature, Environmental humanities, and Critical theory.