Khan Choudhury Amanatulla Ahmed: Rediscovering the First
Modern Historian of Kamatapur
Jyotirmoy
Prodhani
Khan Choudhury Amanatulla Ahmed (1873-1957) is one of the major
native historians during the colonial periods to have taken the task of writing
the history of a very significant kingdom and its people – Koch Behar and the Koches. In fact, writing history was an
intellectual resistance to the constant feeding of the colonisers about real
and imagined stories that further demonised, denigrated and disfigured the
natives. The substantial amount of texts produced by the colonial authors from
the late 18th century onward is symptomatic of a typical colonial
design to map, interpelate and construct the natives. In the context of North
East India there has been a significant proliferation of works pertaining to
the documentation of the indigenous ethnic communities of the land. This
includes the authors like B.H. Hodgson (Koch,
Bodo and Dhimal Tribes, 1847), Alexander
Mackenzie (The North East Frontier
1884), T.C. Hodson (The Meithis, in
1908), Sidney Endle (The Kacharis,
1911), William Carey (The Garo Jungle
Book, 1919), J.P. Mills (The Rengma
Nagas, 1937) and many more. Quite significantly most of these writers were
not trained historians or professional academics; rather they were mostly mid
level administrators or associated with their respective missionary
dispensations with perhaps the exception of T.C. Hodson who was an acclaimed
academician. The attempts have been largely anthropological, social and also
historical, but almost none of them were known scholars of such disciplines,
not even trained in the field. The colonial texts on the natives were not naive
academic exercises either. This was part of specific colonial agenda – to govern, ‘civilize’ and, of course, to subjugate.
The history written about the
indigenous tribes by the colonisers reflect a typical pattern – that of distinguishing them from all possible traces of their pan
Indian linkages. More tellingly almost all such accounts invariably express an
anxiety when the respective communities seem to have intimate cultural and
spiritual ties with that of Hinduism. The colonial historians have even
invented a phrase, “Hindu converts or “Hinduisation”. Both these terms are the
derivatives from the exercise of the Christian Missionaries that had conversion
of the natives to Christianity en masse as one of its fundamental
preoccupations. Therefore even apparently erudite and specialised works like
Hodgson’s Koch Bodo and Dhimal Tribes mentions
the native spiritual traits of the Koches as an effect of their conversion to
Hinduism from the reign of Vishwa Singha. In fact, the use of the very term
‘conversion’ in the context of the
North East tribes is a clear indication of the horrible lack of the proper
understanding of the evolution of the Hindu spiritual order as a non invasive
and accommodative discourse that has the inbuilt capacity to assign legitimacy
to the diverse religious enunciations of indigenous cultures unlike the
organised religions like Christianity and Islam which are primarily predicated
upon the denial and discrediting of the indigenous faiths of the natives.
Conversion essentially entails abandonment or even metaphorical
murdering of one’s native deity. Hence, when one is converted to Christianity
or Islam or other such organised religion one must enact this act of either
abandoning or even murdering one’s ancient God as the necessary precondition. Hinduism
has sustained and expanded itself with the native rites rather than replacing
it with in its own absolute terms. This incapacity of Christianity has made it
an urgent task to denigrate the native faiths and their practices of regular
spiritual rites, now entrenched into the Hindu fold, as something evil, self
defacing and disparaging. This has been one of the absurd fundamentals of the
colonial historiography.
Amanatulla
Ahmed was one of the very few native historians of the first quarter of the
twentieth century colonial India. The task of writing history for a native
historian under colonial regime was not easy.
But being a part of the ancient Kamrupa, Amanatulla has been a part of
the great Kamrupi legacy of historiography. Among the native rulers of the
medieval India the Koches and the Ahoms were the only dynasties that had
promoted the writing of history under the full royal patronage. The Vanshavalis of the Koches and the Buranjis of the Ahoms are two of the
most significant native historiographic traditions of medieval India. The great
Koch regime in Kamatapur is known for the keeping of the royal record in the
form of Vanshavalis. The Darang Rajvanshavali being one of the
most significant historical documents of the Koches. With the advent of
colonialism as the native kings became mostly subservient to the colonial
rulers, the history of the land did not remain as glorifying to encourage the
recording of that history under royal patronage. This led to the steady decline
of indigenous history by native historians; besides the mode of writing history
considerably changed under the colonial tutelage. Therefore this enterprise was
taken over by the colonial writers instead, often with the objective to subvert
the past and the present realities of the natives from within. `
This is significant that the
reigning King of Koch Behar commissioned one of the most learned men of his
land to write the history of his kingdom, and arguably Amanatullah Ahmed had
emerged through his Cooch Beharer Itihas
(1936) as the first native historian of Kamatapur to have mastered the art of
modern historiography of the West to write the history of an indigenous
kingdom. While writing the history of Koch Behar he had carried out an
extensive research and drew up a broad canvas to construct a comprehensive
narrative of the Kamatapur history beginning from the time of Kamrupa to
Kamatapur to the present Koch Behar of his time. He had extensively travelled,
collected materials, consulted documents, visited sites, explored the
libraries, met the members of Koch royal families including the royal
households in Bijni, Darang as well as Panga in Rongpur and so on. He had also
covered a vast geographical territory that included the whole of North East
including Koch Behar, Rongpur, Bihar, Bhutan, Nepal and also the major
metropolises of the time like Calcutta and Delhi in order to obtain materials.
In the ‘30s Rs. 3500/-was a substantial sum which the King of Koch Behar,
Maharaja Raj Rajendra Narayan Bhup Bahadur, offered for the publication of the
book. Though Amanatulla Ahmed was not a career historian but was a passionate
social and cultural activist. His keen involvement with culture, language,
people, society and history enriched his vision and immensely expanded his
discursive range. This is one of the reasons that his magnum opus, Cooch Beharer Itihas is not only a
political history of the land but also a social history of the people.
For a historian of his
generation in India, he had his predicaments – the limitations and restrictions. For good deal of basic sources he
had to rely on the colonial accounts which were only relatively easily
available resources which essentially narrated the colonial version of the native
history. The task at hand for him was to decolonise history. This was a crucial
challenge. Amanatulla’s history of Koch Behar was also an attempt to transcend
the geography that was demarcated through political contingencies of the time.
In fact, after a period of amnesiac spell, he had resurrected the memory of
Kamrup Kamata in the consciousness of the masses through this book. When the
colonial historiography affected a perceptive distance of the North East
natives from the rest of India, Amanatulla reinvented the history of this place
and people against a pan Indian ethos. The exoticisation of the North East has
been a systematic enterprise effectively undertaken by the colonial observers
who had projected the land as semi civilised, remote, hazardous, and primitive
where any sign of civility was at best the result of discrediting aberrant
apostasy.
Amanatulla has not only been a
historian but was also an intellectual activist of the time. His cerebral
conviction, intellectual honesty, extraordinary urge for deeper historical
queries made him one of the most active intellectuals to set up some of the
most significant institutions and organisations in Assam and Koch Behar. Uttar Banga Sahitya Sanmelan and Coochbehar Hitasadhini Sabha were two of
the major institutions of which he had been one of the founders. He was also
one of the key architects of the Kamrup
Anusandhan Samiti, which turned to be the most notable organisations to
have begun the exploration of the linguistic, cultural and the historical past of
the ancient territory of Pragjyotishpura – Kamrupa.
Khan Choudhury, the royal title
given him by Maharaja Raj Rajendra Bhup Bahadur, a polyglot with equal
competence in many languages including Bengali, Assamese, Sanskrit, Parsi,
Urdu, English etc. was a man of secular intellectual credibility. He was
particularly interested in the history and archaeology of Kamrup- Kamata. He
had also presented erudite papers in several scholarly gatherings in various
parts of undivided India. Khan Choudhury Amanatulla Ahmed has become more
relevant in the current context of contested historical claims made from
numerous quarters for political gains.
Kochbehaer
Itihas is a
very important document as a comprehensive answer to the dubious and absurd
claims, especially by an ill informed section of the Bodos, that the Koch
kingdom was actually founded and ruled by some Bodo ancestors and not by the
historically established Koches. They even went to the extent of inventing some
fancy names distorting the actual names of the historical figures. It should be
noted that the very term Bodo is a suspicious terminology for it was primarily
an invention by a few colonial writers who had written on the past of the
people of Assam mostly on the basis conjectures and plausible imaginations
inventing curious stories. One such colonial author, B.H. Hodgson, invented the
term ‘Bodo’ as a philological nomenclature to denote a group of Tibeto Burman
languages in 1847. That is, the term is essentially a late 19th
century colonial invention. Later the term was used by the colonial rulers even
to refer to the great Kacharis. But subsequently only a particular group
retained the term as their community name which evidently suggests that prior
to the colonial naming the group might not even have a proper name for
themselves. The term Mech is a generic term with ample evidence in ancient
texts, including the Sanskritic and Brahminical ones, that the ethnic
communities that did not follow ritualistic Hinduism were considered as the
Mech. The modern equivalent of the term is definitely ‘Tribal’ that included
many ethnic categories like the Garos, the Rabhas, the Koches, the Dhimals and
so on. Later the colonial historians liberally used the term interchangeably to
refer to the communities randomly, betraying the veritable confusion of the
colonial writers.
It may be noted that Hodgson’s
book Koch, Bodo, Dhimal Tribes
(1847), despite limitations of antiquarian
propositions, many of which were mostly based on assumptive surmises, made some
very perceptive and authentic empirical observations. Through his intensive
field studies he had discovered that as late as in the mid nineteenth century
the Bodos were primarily nomadic with almost no connection with one spot. He
even quite rightly points out that being nomadic, in their language there was
no term for ‘village” let alone a kingdom. He writes, “The condition or status
of the Bodos and Dhimal people is that of erratic cultivators of the
wild....though cultivators, all and exclusively, they are nomadic cultivators,
so little connected with any one spot that neither the Bodo nor the Dhimal
language possesses a name for village!” (1847, 154).
From this highly informed observation it can be clearly concluded
that till the mid nineteenth century the Bodos were essentially nomadic without
any idea of settled village. Hence it
becomes quite amusing when they claim a historically established Kingdom of the
Koches as their own when they were still nomadic, practising primitive method
of agriculture from one place to another without the social capability for
settled habitation. More importantly one can always find reason to interrogate
the antiquarian claim of the community named as Bodos by the British colonisers
for no such word ever existed in the great body of literatures of Pragjyotishpura,
Kamrupa and Kamatapur that had proliferated till the early 19th
century. It is significant that Hodgson in the same book mentions that most of
Koch Rajahs, following the maxims of Vishwa Singha, drove the Bodos into the
forests from their kingdoms. (1847, 153) This indicates quite sadly that the
community which was termed as the Bodos by the colonisers were actually a
subjugated minor subjects of the Koch rulers across Assam and Koch Behar.
Khan Choudhury Amanatullah Ahmed’s
historical work on Koch Behar is not only a priceless document pertaining to Koch
Behar alone, rather it remains an abiding source of history for the Koch
Rajbanshi people of Assam and Koch Behar, vis a vis the erstwhile Kamatapur.
References
Ahmed, Khan
Choudhry Amanatulla. Coochbeharer Itihas.
Coochbehar: Coohbehar State Press, 1936.
Hodgson, B.H. Essay the First on the Koch, Bodo and Dhima
Tribes in Three Parts. Calcutta:
Tomas Baptist Mission
Press, 1847.
Koch, Sibendra
Narayan. Koch Janagosthir Atit Sandhanat
Eti Khoj. Tura: Meghalaya Koch Sanmilan, 2012.
