Etymology of Assam
Encyclopedia
The Etymology of Assam is an issue that often comes up for debate in the India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n state of Assam
Assam
Assam , also, rarely, Assam Valley and formerly the Assam Province , is a northeastern state of India and is one of the most culturally and geographically distinct regions of the country...

. In the latest instance, the Government of Assam
Government of Assam
The Government of Assam is the provincial governing authority of the state of Assam in the Republic of India.It consists of the Governor as the head of the state, who is nominated by the Government of India. The head of government is the Chief Minister, who is the leader of the group that commands...

 under the Indian National Congress
Indian National Congress
The Indian National Congress is one of the two major political parties in India, the other being the Bharatiya Janata Party. It is the largest and one of the oldest democratic political parties in the world. The party's modern liberal platform is largely considered center-left in the Indian...

 has sought to change the name of the state from Assam to Asom. This move has been opposed by a wide range of people, triggering once again a public debate.

The academic consensus is that the name is associated with the Ahom kingdom
Ahom kingdom
The Ahom Kingdom was a medieval kingdom in the Brahmaputra valley in Assam that maintained its sovereignty for nearly 600 years and successfully resisted Mughal expansion in North-East India...

 (called Kingdom of Assam in medieval times), established by the Shan prince Sukaphaa
Sukaphaa
Chaolung Sukaphaa , also Siu-Ka-Pha, the first Ahom king in medieval Assam, was the founder of the Ahom kingdom. A Tai prince originally from Mong Mao, the kingdom he established in 1228 existed for nearly six hundred years and in the process unified the various tribal and non-tribal peoples of...

 in the 13th and which existed till 19th century for nearly 600 years. According to historian Satyendra Nath Sarma,

While the Shan invaders called themselves Tai, they came to be referred to as Āsām, Āsam and sometimes as Acam by the indigenous people of the country. The modern Assamese word Āhom by which the Tai people are known is derived from Āsām or Āsam. The epithet applied to the Shan conquerors was subsequently transferred to the country over which they ruled and thus the name Kāmarūpa was replaced by Āsām, which ultimately took the Sanskritized form Asama, meaning "unequalled, peerless or uneven"


Though there exists an academic consensus on the association of Assam with the Ahom kingdom
Ahom kingdom
The Ahom Kingdom was a medieval kingdom in the Brahmaputra valley in Assam that maintained its sovereignty for nearly 600 years and successfully resisted Mughal expansion in North-East India...

, the exact etymology is not clear. Look below for some theories.

Theories on etymology

According to one theory, the word Assam is derived from the Indo-Aryan
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family...

 word Asama (uneven). However, this term doesn't occur before the Ahom occupation, and therefore writers like Edward Gait believe that the word Assam is derived from "Ahom". The Ahoms called themselves Tai, and it is not clear how they came to be known as Ahom. There are multiple theories on this:
  • the word Ahom may be derived from the word Shan (Syam in Assamese). However the Assamese do not use Syam to refer to the Ahoms, but only to the people of Siam
    Thai people
    The Thai people, or Siamese, are the main ethnic group of Thailand and are part of the larger Tai ethnolinguistic peoples found in Thailand and adjacent countries in Southeast Asia as well as southern China. Their language is the Thai language, which is classified as part of the Kradai family of...

     in general.
  • the word Ahom may be derived from the Indo-Aryan word "Asama" (uneven, not same) in the sense of "unequal" or "peerless"

Ha-sam

According to Amalendu Guha "The Ahom
Ahom kingdom
The Ahom Kingdom was a medieval kingdom in the Brahmaputra valley in Assam that maintained its sovereignty for nearly 600 years and successfully resisted Mughal expansion in North-East India...

 domain of Upper Assam came to be known to the Dimasa
Dimasa
The Dimasa people are a group of people in Assam, in northeastern IndiaDimasa mythology says they are the children of Bangla Raja and the great divine bird Arikhidima...

 and other Bodo people as Ha-Sam (the land of the Shams or Shans) in their language. From this the terms 'Asam' and 'Ahom' were derived in due course, and the first term came to stand for the expanded Ahom klngdom. Under the impact of the Indo-Aryan heritage of the region, the concept of 'Asam' was further extended to cover the entire area defined as 'Kamarupa' in the Kalika-Purana (c 9th-10th centuries). The Ahom statesmen and chroniclers wishfully looked forward to the Karatoya as their natural western frontier. They also looked upon themselves as the heirs of that glory that was ancient Kamarupa by right of conquest, and they long cherished infructuously their unfulfilled hopes of expanding up to that frontier."

Pragjyotisha

The land referred as Progjyotisha in the Mahabharata
Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....

 is now accepted to be present-day Assam. In the Bhismaparvan, the Pragjyotisha king Bhagadatta is said to have joined the Kurukshetra war
Kurukshetra war
According to the Indian epic poem Mahābhārata, a dynastic succession struggle between two groups of cousins of an Indo-Aryan kingdom called Kuru, the Kauravas and Pandavas, for the throne of Hastinapura resulted in the Kurukshetra War in which a number of ancient kingdoms participated as allies of...

 with an army of kirata
Kirata
The Kirāta is a generic term in Sanskrit literature for people who lived in the mountains, particularly in the Himalayas and North-East India and who are postulated to have been Mongoloid in origin. It has been theorized that the word Kirata- or Kirati- means people with lion nature. It is derived...

and cinas. Since the name China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

 is derived from the Qin Dynasty
Qin Dynasty
The Qin Dynasty was the first imperial dynasty of China, lasting from 221 to 207 BC. The Qin state derived its name from its heartland of Qin, in modern-day Shaanxi. The strength of the Qin state was greatly increased by the legalist reforms of Shang Yang in the 4th century BC, during the Warring...

 (221 BC - 206 BC), the reference cannot be dated to earlier than the 3rd century BC. In the Ramayana Pragjyotisha is situated on the Varaha mountain and not in present-day Assam, and it seemed that "the author of these stanzas, whosoever he was, had no idea at all of its location and was just eager to refer to it as it had already become a celebrated town".

Kamarupa

See also: Kamarupa Kingdom


The earliest epigraphic mention of the Assam region comes from the Samudragupta
Samudragupta
Samudragupta , ruler of the Gupta Empire , and successor to Chandragupta I, is considered to be one of the greatest military geniuses in Indian history according to Historian V. A. Smith. His name is taken to be a title acquired by his conquests...

's Allahabad stone pillar from 4th century AD, where it is called Kamarupa. Later epigraphic sources from Assam calls the kingdom Pragjyotisha-Kamarupa. In the early 12th century epigraphic sources from the Pala dynasty
Pala dynasty (Kamarupa)
The Pala dynasty of Kamarupa ruled the kingdom from 900 CE to 1100 CE. Like the Pala dynasty of Bengal, the first ruler in this dynasty was elected, which probably explains the name of this dynasty "Pala". But unlike the Palas of Bengal, who were Buddhists, the Palas of Kamarupa were Vaishnava...

 mention Kamarupa as a mandala (an administrative division) of the kingdom they ruled. The invasion of western Assam by Allauddin Hussein of Gaur
Gaur, West Bengal
Gour, or Gaur , as it is spelt mostly in modern times, or Lakhnauti is a ruined city, in the Malda district of West Bengal, India, on the west bank of the Ganges river, 40 kilometers downstream from Rajmahal.-History:...

 up to Barnadi river in 1498 is recorded in coins (from the early 16th century), which declares Hussein as the conqueror of "Kamru" (and not "Assam".)

Assam and other derivatives

The earliest mention of Assam is found in the Bhagavat of Sankardeva
Bhagavat of Sankardeva
The Bhagavat of Sankardeva is the Assamese adaptation of the Bhagavata Purana made by Srimanta Sankardeva in 15th-16th century in the regions that form present-day Assam and Cooch Behar...

, composed in the 15th and 16th centuries. The relevant stanza is (in iTrans)

kiraTa kachhaari khaachi gaaro miri
yavana ka~Nka govaala |
asama maluka dhobaa ye turuka
kubaacha mlechchha chaNDaala ||

In a map of "Kingdom of Bengale", drawn by Joh. van Leenen around 1661 and published around 1662, Assam was clearly named and correctly identified.

One of the first unambiguous references comes from Thomas Bowrey in 1663 about Mir Jumla's death: "They lost the best of Nabobs, the Kingdome of Acham, and, by consequence, many large privileges".

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was a French traveller and pioneer of trade with India, and travels through Persia , most known for works in two quarto volumes, Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and diamond merchant for some important diamonds of the century...

's Travels in India, published in 1676 uses the spelling "Assen" for Assam in the French original.

The official chronicler of Mir Jumla too calls the place "Asam".

In various documents of British East India Company, in their relationships with the last few Ahom kings, the name of country was mentioned as Assam. After the fall of the Ahom kingdom
Ahom kingdom
The Ahom Kingdom was a medieval kingdom in the Brahmaputra valley in Assam that maintained its sovereignty for nearly 600 years and successfully resisted Mughal expansion in North-East India...

 and the conquest by the British in 1826, in the Treaty of Yandabo
Treaty of Yandabo
The Treaty of Yandabo was the peace treaty that ended the First Anglo-Burmese War. The treaty was signed on 24 February 1826, nearly two years after the war formally broke out on 5 March 1824, by General Sir Archibald Campbell on the British side, and by Governor of Legaing Maha Min Hla Kyaw Htin...

, "Assam" was used to denote the area under the erstwhile Ahoms, and its protectorates (Darrang Koch, Jaintias, Kacharis and some hill areas in the present Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland).

After the British took control of the region, the name "Assam" was extended to the province which was then much larger than he erstwhile Ahom kingdom
Ahom kingdom
The Ahom Kingdom was a medieval kingdom in the Brahmaputra valley in Assam that maintained its sovereignty for nearly 600 years and successfully resisted Mughal expansion in North-East India...

. It then included, Garo Hills
Garo Hills
The Garo Hills are part of the Garo-Khasi range in Meghalaya, India. They are inhabited mainly by tribal dwellers. Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, is located in this range. It is one of the wettest places in the world. The range is part of the Meghalaya subtropical forests ecoregion.Garo Hills...

 and Lushai Hills
Lushai hills
The Lushai Hills are part of the Patkai range in Mizoram and partially in Tripura, India.-Flora & Fauna:The hills are for the most part covered with dense bamboo jungle and rank undergrowth; but in the eastern portion, owing probably to a smaller rainfall, open grass-covered slopes are found, with...

 (Mizoram
Mizoram
Mizoram is one of the Seven Sister States in North Eastern India, sharing borders with the states of Tripura, Assam, Manipur and with the neighbouring countries of Bangladesh and Burma. Mizoram became the 23rd state of India on 20 February 1987. Its capital is Aizawl. Mizoram is located in the...

). The boundaries of Assam have been redrawn many times after that, but the name Assam remained. Today, the political boundary of Assam contains roughly the historical Ahom Kingdom
Ahom kingdom
The Ahom Kingdom was a medieval kingdom in the Brahmaputra valley in Assam that maintained its sovereignty for nearly 600 years and successfully resisted Mughal expansion in North-East India...

 and its protectorates, the Kachari kingdom
Kachari Kingdom
The Kachari Kingdom was a powerful kingdom in medieval Assam. The rulers belonged to the Dimasa people, part of the greater Bodo-Kachari ethnic group...

, Koch Hajo
Koch Hajo
Koch Hajo was the eastern portion of the Kamata kingdom that splintered off under Raghudev Narayan in 1581 from the Kamata kingdom then under Nara Narayana in medieval Assam. The Sankosh river was fixed as the boundary between Koch Hajo and the western portion that came to be called Koch Bihar....

 and a part of the Jaintia Kingdom
Jaintia Kingdom
The Jaintia Kingdom extended from the east of the Shillong Plateau of present-day Meghalaya in north-east India, into the plains to the south, and north to the Barak River valley in Assam, India...

.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK