ABSTRACT
Historically one of the greatest migrating people, their identity as a hill tribe is simply a carry-over of the recognition and acknowledgement they had in a very different geographical and political Assam of colonial ethnographic studies. The census enumerates 14 hill tribes; 12 of these are tribes whose settlements go back to the days of undivided Assam and include pockets of Khasi, Jaintia and related tribes, Garo, Naga and a clutch of Kuki and related tribes — the most numerous and significant component outside the eight plains tribes and two hills tribes. Consider, for instance, the case of the Deuri, a plains tribe whose habitat is dispersed on both banks of the Brahmaputra in Upper Assam. Generations of the closest interaction with the Assam-ese people, language and culture has blurred many elements of uniqueness of these communities.
