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Buranjis (Ahom language: ancient writings) are a class of historical chronicles and manuscripts associated with the Ahom kingdom written initially in Ahom Language and later in Assamese language as well. The Buranjis are an example of historical literature which is rare in India; though they bear resemblance to Southeast Asian traditions of historical literature. The Buranjis are generally found in manuscript form (locally called puthi), though a number of these manuscripts have been compiled and published, especially in the Assamese language. They are some of the primary sources of historical information of Assam's medieval past, especially from the 13th century to the colonial times in 1828. There were two types of Buranjis: the official Buranjis, which were compiled from the time of the first Ahom king Sukaphaa; and family Buranjis, which were compiled from the 16th century. The official Buranjis contained such information as description of important events as reported by reliable witnesses, correspondence from allied rulers, tax records, announcements, annual reports of various kinds, etc. Nevertheless, the Buranjis were continuously upgraded and often refreshed with the help of chronicles of allied peoples the Ahoms were in contact with, such as the Tai-Mau and Khamti. The official Buranjis were kept in archives and most of them have been destroyed either by natural decay or by wars and conflicts.

The details in the Buranjis regarding the Ahom-Mughal conflicts agree with those in the Mughal chronicles such as Baharistan, Padshahnama, Alamgirnamah and Fathiyyah; and they also provide additional details not found in these Mughal chronicles.

Description

Buranjis were consulted by the king and high officials of the Ahom kingdom for decision making in state affairs matters. Buranjis are available in manuscript form usually hand-written on oblong pieces of Sanchi bark, though the size and number of folios varies. They are usually densely written on both sides of the folios. Most often the text begins with a legendary account of the establishment of the Ahom kingdom. Though many such Buranjis have been collected, compiled and published, an unknown number of Buranjis are still in private hands.

Buranji writing tradition

There were two kinds of Buranjis: one maintained by the state (official) and the other maintained by families. The Buranjis themselves claim that the tradition of state Buranjis began with Sukaphaa (r. 1228–1268) who led the Ahoms into the Brahmaputra valley in 1228. On the other hand, the tradition of writing family Buranjis began in the 16th century. The tradition of writing Buranjis survived more than six hundred years well into the British period till the last decade of 1890s, more than a half century after the demise of the Ahom kingdom, when Padmeswar Naobaisha Phukan wrote a Buranji in the old style incorporating substantial details from the colonial times.

Official Buranjis were written by scribes under the office of the Likhakar Barua, and these were based on state papers, such as diplomatic correspondences, spy reports, etc. The Buranjis and the state papers were usually secured in a store or library called Gandhia Bhoral under the supervision of an officer called Gandhia Barua. Generally one of the three ministers of the Ahom state, the Burhagohain, the Borgohain, or the Borpatragohain, was in command of producing Buranjis, but the junior office of Borbarua took over the power in the 18th century.

Family Buranjis were written by nobles or by officials who had themselves participated in those event (or by people under their supervision), sometimes anonymously, though the authorship often becomes known. It became a tradition for respectable Ahom nobles to maintain their own family Buranjis, and as the liberal Ahom polity absorbed new entrants the creation and existence of Buranjis spread to outside the royal archives and to non-Ahom owners. Non-royal Buranjis enjoyed equal parity with royal Buranjis. It also became a tradition to read out parts of family Buranjis during Ahom Chaklang marriage ceremonies.

Textual updating practices

Existing Buranjis were often updated by rulers or authors. Supplemental material were often added, resulting in changes in language and calligraphy. Since these were produced before printing manuscripts were often copied and recopied scribal errors were common. Often specific events were omitted, due to either changes in state policies or scribal mistakes—and Ahom nobles would rectify these omissions by rewriting existing Buranjis which remained exclusive resources for the owners. Rulers, nobles and general scholars thus contributed to the corpus of Buranjis. Sometimes these Buranjis were refreshed with the help of external sources such as those from the Tai-Mau and Khamti polities.

Content

These documents reveal chronology of events, language, culture, society and the inner workings of the state machinery of the kingdom. They were written in "simple, lucid and unambiguous but expressive language with utmost brevity and least exaggeration."

The Buranjis not only describe the Ahom kingdom, but also the neighbours (Jaintia, Kachari and Tripura Buranjis) and those with whom the Ahom kingdom had diplomatic and military contacts (Padshah Buranji).

Traditional classifications of Buranjis

Internally, the Buranji chronicles classify themselves as either Lai-lik Buranji (Assamese: Barpahi Buranji) that are expansive and deal with political histories, and Lit Buranji (Assamese: Katha) which deal with single events, such as Ram Singhar Yuddhar Katha. A third class came to be called Chakaripheti Buranji since the 18th century that dealt with the royal lineage.

Different reports submitted for archiving also came to be called Buranjis: Chakialar Buranji (reports from outpost officers), Datiyalia Buranji (from frontier officers), Kataki Buranji (from ambassadors to other polities), Chang-rung Phukonor Buranji (architectural plans and estimates from engineers, dealing with construction of maidams, bridges, temples, roads, ramparts, excavation of tanks, etc.), and Satria Buranji (report on the Satras).

Language

Buranjis were written in the Ahom language, but since the 16th century they came to be increasingly written in the Assamese language—and Ahom Buranji manuscripts have become rare.

Ahom buranjis

Buranjis written in the Ahom language span a period of 400 to 600 years and ended two centuries ago when the last of the speakers of the language died out. The Ahom script used in these Buranjis is an older Shan writing system that was not fully developed to include diacritics to denote the different tones or distinguish between proto-Tai voiceless and voiced distinctions. Since the Ahom language has not been spoken for about two hundred years now reading them today involves heavy use of reconstructions.

Assamese buranjis

The first Assamese Buranjis were written during the reign of Suhungmung (r. 1497–1539). A manuscript called Swarga Narayan Maharajar Akhyan, included in the published compilation Deodhai Asam Buranji, is dated 1526 and considered as the oldest Assamese Buranji. The language of the Assamese Buranjis, on the other hand, formed the template for the standard literary language in the late-19th century. Assamese Buranjis used the Garhgaya style of writing—one of three different styles of the Bengali-Assamese script prevalent between the 17th and 19th centuries in Assam. The Assamese of the Buranjis forms its own standard, and is a close precursor of the modern Assamese standard.

Even though the Indo-Aryan rooted word for history is itihash, the word buranji became synonymous with "history" in the Assamese language.

Loss

During the reign of Rajeswar Singha (r. 1751–1769), Kirti Chandra Borbarua had many Buranjis destroyed because he suspected they contained information on his lowly birth.

Much of the official Buranjis have been lost due to acts of nature, war, and a major part of the official Buranjis was lost during the 19th century Burmese invasion of Assam.

Buranjis in historiography

Pre-colonial

John Peter Wade, a medical officer of the East India Company, accompanied Captain Welsh in his expedition into the Ahom kingdom (1792–1794) to put down the Moamoria rebellion. He wrote his report, and from his notes, published his work Memories of the Reign of Swargee Deo Gowrinath Singh, Late Monarch of Assam some time after 1796. During his stay in Guwahati he encountered the king's scholar-bureaucrats and was shown a copy of an Ahom Buranji and he took the help of Ahom priests to translate the preamble into English. Saikia (2019) suggests that Wade eventually translated three discreet Assamese Buranjis, though it is not known which ones, or who his Assamese collaborators were.

Colonial

The Ahom kingdom came under East India Company rule in 1826 following the Treaty of Yandaboo, in which the invading Burmese military was pushed away. The older tradition of Buranji writing continued for some time among the scions of earlier Ahom officialdom, the chief among them was Harakanta Barua's expansion of Kashinath Tamuli Phukan's Assam Buranji and Padmeshwar NaoBaisha Phukan's Assam Buranji, the last Buranji written in the older tradition.

A newly emerging colonial elite emerged that began histography in a new style. In 1829 Haliram Dhekial Phukan published Assam Desher Itihash yani Assam Buranji—written in a hybrid Assamese, Sanskrit, and Bengali language, it drew deeply from the traditional Buranji material and format, but broke away from it by being mindful of early Indian histographic traditions. Gunabhiram Barua's work too departed significantly from the Buranji style though Maniram Dewan's Buranji-Bibekratna hewed much closer.

Colonial—Gait's A History of Assam

In 1894 Charles Lyall, the then Chief Commissioner of Assam and a keen ethnologist, charged Edward Gait, a colonial officer and keen historian, to research Assam's pre-colonial past. He implemented an elaborate plan to collect local historical sources: coins, inscriptions, historical documents, quasi-historical writings, religious works and traditions; and created a team of native collaborators from among his junior colonial officers. Among Buranjis, he collected six Ahom-language manuscripts and eleven Assamese-language manuscripts. He charged Golap Chandra Barua to learn the Ahom language from a team of Ahom priests who purportedly knew the language.

Published Buranjis

The first Buranji to be printed was Assam Buranji by Kashinath Tamuli Phukan, which was published by the American Baptist Mission in 1848. Kashinath Tamuli Phukan wrote this Buranji under the instructions of the then Ahom king Purandar Singha and his minister Radhanath Barbarua. This version was further expanded, in the Buranji tradition, by Harakanta Baruah (1818–1900). The Harakanta Baruah version was edited in its near-original form and published by S K Bhuyan in 1930 as Assam Buranji.

The earliest Ahom-language Buranjis published was one that covered the period from Khunlung-Khunlai to the death of Sutingphaa in 1648—it appeared in the Assamese magazine Orunodoi from 1850-1852 in serial form under the name Purani Asam Buranji. The text from Orunodoi was later compiled and edited by S K Bhuyan and included in the 1931 published Deodhai Asam Buranji.

A selected list of Buranjis

Notes

1. Hartmann 2011, p. 227: "The Tai-Ahom term buran is cognate with the Standard Thai word boran (ancient). Buranji, then, are ancient writings."
2. "With the coming of the Ahoms, begins a procedure of keeping records of all events of the time, in a class of documents called Buranjis which are so numerous and voluminous that they overshadow the other primary sources like archaeology and numismatics." (Baruah 1986:43)
3. (Barua 1953:132)
4. ^ Goswami & Tamuli 2007, p. 436.
5. "The oft-repeated complaint of the absence of any historical literature in India has to be qualified not only by Kalhana's Rajatarangini in Kashmir but also by Assamese historical literature." (Sarkar 1992:1)
6. "The established fact is that the buranji tradition bore a marked similarity with the Southeast Asian tradition of historical chronicles." (Saikia 2008:477)
7. "A number of Buranjis written in Assamese have been published by the Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, Assam." (Baruah 1986:45)
8. "(T)he primary sources of information of medieval Assam from the thirteenth century onward may broadly be classified under the heads: Ahom and Assamese Buranjis, contemporary chronicles, memoirs and farmans in Persian, letters in Assamese in Persian, archaeological, epigraphic and numismatic sources, accounts of foreign travellers and East-India Company's reports and records." (Sarkar 1992:1)
9. ^ Hartmann 2011, p. 228.
10. (Sarkar 1992:4)
11. "The most general use of these works was within the limited elites of the Ahom administration. The nobility, apart from the king, consulted them to arrive at decisions relating to affairs of the state." (Saikia 2008:478)
12. "Oblong strips of Sanchi bark were used to prepare these manuscripts. The size and numbers of folios varied. Normally both sides of the folios contained written lines. The manuscript of one such buranji of 1804 was enclosed in a painted wooden box made of one piece of wood.22 It contained 85 folios or 170 pages, and each folio measured four inches by 12½ inches.23 Folios were packed with ten lines of ‘closely packed writing on each page’.24 Another buranji contained 59 folios. Each of them measured 2½ inches by 10¼ inches, and contained five to seven lines.25 In most instances the text begins with narratives, encapsulated in a few legends, of the early days of the establishment of the Ahom kingdom." (Saikia 2004:477)
13. Baruah 2012, p41: "Quantitatively, Buranjis comprise a very large volume of texts or chronicles. Today, they are preserved in different museums and archives across Assam. However, a large number of Buranjis are still in private possession of families.".
14. "The official type trace their genesis to the appearance of the Tai-Mau chieftain Sukapha and a band of some 10,000 followers in Sadyia, a point in the northern reaches of the Bhramaputra Valley in the reputed year of 1228 A.D." (Hartmann 2011:228)
15. "According to Wichasin, there are two types of Tai-Ahom chronicles: official and family. The latter were begun in the sixteenth century A.D." (Hartmann 2011:228)
16. ^ "The system of compilation of buranjis continued to be practised till the last decades of the nineteenth century. The content and form of the later buranjis did not change substantially. In the 1890s, Padmeswar Naobaisha Phukan, a successor of the Ahom nobility, wrote an Assam buranji. The text was a careful reproduction of the pre-colonial chronicles, to which Phukan added substantial narratives of contemporary events." (Saikia 2008:479)
17. "Information and facts mentioned in a buranji emerged after consulting state papers.... Official communications, letters of ambassadors or spy reports were significant parts of these state papers." (Saikia 2008:477)
18. "(B)uranjis were closely guarded, at least the official ones, the reason why they were kept in the Gandhia Bhoral (store house/library) under the supervision of an Ahom official called Gandhia Barua." (Narzary 2021:13)
19. "One of the three principal functionaries of the Ahom ministry supervised the function of chronicling royal events. From the middle of the eighteenth century, another superior executive called Barbaruah and ranked below a minister, usurped the function of producing buranjis." (Saikia 2008:478)
20. "Quite often, the actual participants in events were fortunate enough to write these buranjis. Rarely was any mention made of the author, who was indicated only at a later period. (This absence did not deter modern historians from accepting the legitimacy of these texts as fundamental historical evidence)." (Saikia 2008:477)
21. "It was a tradition of the Ahoms that one who belonged to the nobility should possess a buranji. In order to prove noble ancestry, the Ahoms wrote buranjis for themselves. Newly entering groups thus followed their royal counterparts and also had buranjis written. These then made them free from the official narrative constraints of the Gandhia Bharal (royal archives)." (Purkayastha 2008:180)
22. "private buranjis were treated at par with government buranjis in terms of authenticity. Since the buranjis were regarded as authentic records, they came to acquire social authority in themselves...certain pages in buranjis bear testimony to the disgracing of an Ahom minister, Kirtichandra Barbarua. Ultimately, the buranjis became his target: the minister burnt a large number of buranjis that stamped him as jalambata (net-maker), indicating his low ancestry." (Purkayastha 2008:181)
23. "In the Ahom system of chaklang marriages, for instance, pages from buranjis were read out publicly to confirm the social status of the families concerned." (Purkayastha 2008:181)
24. (Saikia 2004:478)
25. "The official chronicles from that early period were subsequently "refreshed" with chronicles of Tai-Mau and Khamti, with whom the Tai-Ahom maintained contact." (Hartmann 2011:228)
26. (Baruah 1986:43)
27. (Baruah 1986:43f)
28. (Baruah 1986:47)
29. (Baruah 1986:43)
30. (Sarkar 1992:2)
31. "Ahom written history covered a span of some 400-600 years; it effectively ended with the dying off of the last speakers two centuries ago and has remained fossilized in the pages of their chronicles." (Hartmann 2011:229)
32. "Because Tai-Ahom, like other older "Shan" writing systems, was never fully developed...there are no written diacritics to indicate tones, as in Standard Thai, and a single Ahom consonant can represent both proto-Tai voiceless and voiced distinctions made in the Thai, Lanna,and Lao writing systems." (Hartmann 2011:229)
33. "There are Tai-Ahom Buranji chronicles written primarily in a Tai language called Ahom, not spoken for some 200 years" (Hartmann 2011:227)
34. "...reading today is really an exhausting exercise in reconstruction." (Hartmann 2011:229)
35. "It was in the reign of Suhungmung that Buranjis in Assamese were first written." (Baruah 1986:44)
36. (Baruah 1986:48)
37. Saikia 2004, p. 6.
38. "The prose of the Burañjīs is a standardized literary prose in the true sense of the term. It is through this prose that Arabic and Persian elements crept into the language in abundance. This prose comes very near to the literary language of the modern period." (Goswami & Tamuli 2007:398)
39. "The etymological meaning of ‘buranji’ came to be represented as synonymous with that of both ‘history’ and ‘itihash’." (Saikia 2004:496)
40. "Thus under Rajeswar Simha. (1751-69), Kirtichandra Barbarua ordered the destruction of innumerable Buranjis as some of these recorded his low origin." (Sarkar 1992:3)
41. "These official records were kept in Ahom archives, most of which were lost or destroyed by natural forces or in wars." (Hartmann 2011:228)
42. "In the early 1790s, the Ahom kingdom was in the midst of a series of civil wars. Dethroned in the uprising, the Ahom king turned to the EIC for help. Lord Cornwallis, as Governor General of Bengal, accepted the request and sent Captain Welsh to control the civil war in the province." (Saikia 2019:117); "By 1792, Wade decided to move to Calcutta to practise medicine. A year later he was asked to accompany Captain Welsh to Assam as a physician and naturalist. Company officials expected that a physician trained in the basic sciences would be competent to report on the natural resources of the region." (Saikia 2019:119)
43. "It was only in 1796 that he could arrange his notes into a manuscript entitled Memories of the Reign of Swargee Deo Gowrinath Singh, Late Monarch of Assam. The manuscript was published after a couple of years." (Saikia 2019:120)
44. "Wade, a medical practitioner with the East India Company, complied a history of Assam based on his study of Assamese buranjis in the early decade of the nineteenth century. The manuscript was never published in his lifetime." (Saikia 2008:481f)
45. "Wade’s search for local texts written in the Ahom language led him to discover the buranjis of the Ahom kingdom. It is possible that Wade was shown copies of a buranji by one of the Ahom ministers in Guwahati... So he took the help of Ahom priests to translate the preambles of the buranji into English." (Saikia 2019:121)
46. (Saikia 2019:122)
47. "On the other hand, the new colonial elites produced by the colonial state also began to write about the past—but in a new style." (Saikia 2008b:143)
48. "In 1829 Haliram Dhekial Phukan, the first Assamese historian of modern times, had published his history of Assam under the title Assam Desher Itihashyani Assam Buranji. Thus, in the first half of the nineteenth century the Assamese intelligentsia faced an etymological dilemma which finally ended with the general acceptance of buranji as the local vernacular equivalent of itihash, history." (Purkayastha 2008)
49. "But even as he drew profusely from the prevalent buranji tradition of Assam and the Ahom period, Haliram was attentive to the cultural world of contemporary Bengal. The arrangement of his themes came closer to the buranji, but his treatment of the distant past rested undoubtedly on the foundations of the early-nineteenth-century historical tradition." (Saikia 2008b:144)
50. "Writing in a hybrid of Assamese, Sanskrit, and Bengali, Haliram drew heavily from the contemporary oral traditions of Assam and Bengal..." (Saikia 2008b:143)
51. (Saikia 2008:480)
52. "In July 1894 Charles Lyall, the area's chief commissioner, while preparing a note on the future of historical research in Assam, spelled out the fear within the colonial administration of losing historical documents belonging primarily to the Ahom period: various natural conditions were hostile. Edward Gait had already prepared a synopsis of books in the possession of the Deodhais—the Ahom royal priests— and this attracted the attention of Lyall." (Saikia 2008b:144)
53. "Armed with official sanction, Gait created an elaborate scheme to collect Assam's historical documents. He divided the historical sources into six categories, viz. coins, inscriptions, historical documents, quasi-historical writings, religious works, and traditions." (Saikia 2008b:147)
54. "Gait had requisitioned the service of many of his juniors to help him in the collection and translation of local historical records. Hem Chandra Goswami, Golap Chandra Barua, Gunahash Goswami, Madhab Chandra Bordoloi, and Rajani Kanta Bordoloi were some of these close associates. Most collaborators worked in the colonial administration, but had a very different social 'commitment'." (Saikia 2008b:156)
55. (Gait 1926:xi–xii) harvcol error: no target: CITEREFGait1926 (help)
56. "A committee of five Deodhais was appointed to teach the Tai Ahom language to Golap Chandra Barua and assist him in translating the buranjis. Baruah also acknowledged the help of Deodhais in teaching him the Tai language. See Golap Chandra Barua, 'Preface', in Ahom Buranji." (Saikia 2008b:168f)
57. "The first ever buranji to acquire a modern print form was Kashi Nath Tamuli Phukan’s Assom Buranji, published by the American Baptist Missionaries in 1848." (Saikia 2008:499f)
58. "The earlier Assam Buranji of Kashinath Tamuli was penned under the instruction and supervision of the Ahom king, Swargadeo Purandar Singh and his official Radhanath Barbarua." (Narzary 2021:17)
59. "The enlarged version of this chronicle was written by Sadaramin Harkanta Barua (1818–1900) who was a witness to the last phase of Ahom rule and consolidation of the British administration in Assam." (Narzary 2021:17)
60. ^ "This was later edited for the benefit of a wider audience by S.K. Bhuyan without making much changes in the original form and published by the Department of History and Antiquarian Studies of Assam in 1930." (Narzary 2021:17)
61. (Baruah 1986:47)
62. This manuscript was recovered from the family of Sukumar Mahanta)
63. Also called Tai-Ahom Buranji from Khunlung and Khunlai, the English translation of which by Golap Chandra Barua is unpublished
64. Collection of seven old Buranjis.

References

• Barua, B K (1953). "Early Assamese Prose". In Kakati, Banikanta (ed.). Aspects of Early Assamese Literature. Guwahati: Gauhati University, Assam. pp. 124–147. Retrieved 12 February 2018.
• Baruah, S L (1986), A Comprehensive History of Assam, Munshiram Manoharlal
• Baruah, Manjeet (2012). Frontier Cultures: A Social History of Assamese Literature. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-50080-7.
• Gait, Edward A (1926) . "Introduction to First Edition". A History of Assam. Calcutta and Simla: Thacker, Spink & Co.
• Goswami, G. C.; Tamuli, Jyotiprakash (2007), "Asamiya", in Cordona, George; Jain, Dhanesh (eds.), The Indo-Aryan Languages, Routledge, pp. 429–484, ISBN 9780203945315
• Saikia, Yasmin (2004). Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India. Duke University Press. ISBN 082238616X.
• Hartmann, John F. (7 April 2011). "Phongsawadan Tai-Ahom: Ahom Buranji , 2 Vols. Transcribed and translated by Renu Wichasin. Bangkok: Amarin Printing and Publishing Ltd. Pp. xxiv, 993 . Map, Photos, Tables, Glossary. ". Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. 28 (1): 227–229. doi:10.1017/S002246340001554X. S2CID 162440951.
• Narzary, Dharitri (2021). "Buranjis and the Asian History Writing Tradition". History and Sociology of South Asia. 15 (1–2): 7–27. doi:10.1177/22308075221077716.
• Purkayastha, Sudeshna (2008). "Restructuring the Past in Early-Twentieth-Century Assam: Historiography and Surya Kumar Bhuyan". In Aquil, Raziuddin; Chatterjee, Partha (eds.). History in the Vernacular. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. pp. 172–208. ISBN 81-7824-301-6.
• Saikia, Arupjyoti (2008). "History, buranjis and nation: Suryya Kumar Bhuyan's histories in twentieth-century Assam". The Indian Economic and Social History Review. 45 (4): 473–507. doi:10.1177/001946460804500401. S2CID 144145900.
• Saikia, Arupjyoti (2008). "Gait's Way". In Aquil, Raziuddin; Chatterjee, Partha (eds.). History in the Vernacular. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. pp. 142–171. ISBN 81-7824-301-6.
• Saikia, Arupjyoti (2019). "Geographical Exploration and Historical Investigation: John Peter Wade in Assam". In Bhattacharya, Neeladri; Pachuau, Joy L.K. (eds.). Landscape, Culture, and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India. Cambridge University Press. pp. 110–127. ISBN 978-1-108-48129-8.
• Sarkar, J. N. (1992). "The Sources". In H K Barpujari (ed.). The Comprehensive History of Assam. Vol. II. Assam: Publication Board. pp. 1–34.

• Indian literature
• Ahom kingdom
• Diplomatic correspondence
• Tai history
• Indian chronicles