| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Yasmin Saikia. Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2004. Pp. xviii, 327. Cloth $84.95, paper $23.95.
History, like other social science disciplines, has until recently not only taken the national order of things for granted, but historians played a key role in putting together narratives of national history. In Yasmin Saikia's words, such narratives are constructed by "claiming, coercing, coopting, and often erasing" (p. 258) multiple histories. Despite Subaltern Studies—the powerful critique of national narratives that grew out of the study of Indian history—there is no strong intellectual tradition in India of looking at local pasts in autonomous terms. The hold of nationalism, secular as well as "communal," has undoubtedly been a factor. In Northeast India there is growing interest in autonomous histories at a popular level. But academic history has not quite caught up with it. Historians based in the West are unable to contribute because the Indian government rarely grants research visas to foreign scholars to study the region.	1
In this context a theoretically informed book by a U.S.-based and Assamese-born historian that engages Assam's precolonial and colonial past as well as the present is a significant publication event. Saikia's work is no conventional history. It is about the identity movement of a little-known and tiny minority community: the Tai-Ahoms related to the pre-British Ahom kingdom that ruled Assam until 1826. According to Saikia, the term does not refer to a "fixed people"; it is only a "name in circulation" (p. 251) and a "powerful memory" (p. xv). Operating "between history and memory" (p. 13), Saikia reads the Tai-Ahom movement as an effort to "overcome erasure from national history" and to "create a 'different' sense of collectivity" (pp. 38–39).	. . .

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