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 18^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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.