Becoming Hindu: The cultural politics of writing religion in colonial Assam

Abstract

The use of labels such as ‘isolation’ or ‘assimilation’ to characterise tribal communities dwelling in the plains region of British Assam had a discursive history that took no notice of the region’s prolonged tradition of vibrant interfaith transmissions and cultural exchanges. This essay flags a disjuncture between early ethnographic literature on the ‘tribes’ of the plains region of Assam, and their later enumeration in census data from the middle of the 19th century. While census makers in Assam attributed an ‘unusual’ surge in the number of Hindus to proselytisation by Vaishnavite and Brahman priests, and to the erosion of tribal modes of worship, this article argues that colonial enumerative practices were directly imbricated in producing the ‘Hindu’ in a way that was transformative of quotidian relations and processes of exchange characterising the region. The political pressure to possess fixed and singular identities and the growing rhetoric of a muscular Hinduism symbolised by renewed interest in Indological studies, combined to enhance Hinduism’s prestige and symbolic value. Becoming a Hindu was easier now that the definition of Hinduism as a loosely bound corpus of ritually coded behaviour enabled a wide array of practices to be labelled as ‘Hindu’.