Contribution short abstract:

This paper proposes to understand, decode and understand the ‘signs and the sacred’ through the intellectual, artistic, and historical trajectory in Pre-modern Assam by scrutinising an extensive body of literary and visual art forms.

Contribution long abstract:

Assam, located in the eastern Himalayan foothills, was described as a hospitable ecology full of ‘good pastures’ and domesticated wilderness by the sixteenth-century British explorer Peter Heyleyn. In contrast, the seventeenth-century Persian chronicler, Shihabuddin Talish found her landscape dangerous and gloomy, with a sky full of clouds. Geopolitically considered as a mediating region between southeast and central Asia, pre-modern Assam’s ecology essentially appeared as grey and unruly for the pre-modern onlookers and writers till the twenty-first century Indian medieval historians from Jadunath Sarkar to Irfan Habib.

From the sixteenth century onwards, the ruling dynasties (especially the Ahoms and the Koches) meticulously documented official records (Buranjis and Vamshavalis) on one hand and the intellectual practices of bhakti tradition (The genre of literature, paintings and other art forms emerged from a spiritual movement in Assam) composed an illustrious archive to understand the history of Assam’s real and imagined ecology. This vast literary archive bearing ‘signs’ from personified demonic grey clouds, speaking cuckoo birds, and swarming locusts to the composite swine human, at times the ecological imaginations navigated the terrestrial, material, cultural, and spiritual understanding of the land. This paper proposes to understand, decode and read these ‘signs, through the intellectual, artistic, and historical trajectory in pre-modern Assam by scrutinising an extensive body of literary and visual art forms.

Keywords: Signs, ecology, pre-modern Assam