Abstract: This work deals with two ethnics groups: the Tai Lue in Sipsong Panna, South Yunnan, and the Tai Ahom in the northeast Indian state of Assam. It has to be emphasized that for centuries these two minorities had no personal contact. The group known nowadays as the Tai Ahom migrated from the border area of Northeast Burma/Southwest Yunnan through Northern Burma to the Brahmaputra valley in Assam about 800 years ago. There was a successful Tai Ahom kingdom which lasted for 600 years from the mid 13th century until the end of the first Burmese-Anglo War in 1826. The Tai Lue established their first kingdom in South Yunnan in the end of the 12th century. Nowadays, the two groups live under different political systems: the Tai Ahom within the parliamentary democracy of India, and the Tai Lue under the socialist, one-party state of China. Both groups are, in the states in which they live, a social minority and are economically marginalized, without access to the sea and many hundreds of kilometers away from the capital of their state. They lived under massive restrictions on their cultures throughout their histories due to either foreign domination or as a result of assimilation to their respective environments. This fact has been held up in recent decades by various revitalization processes and led to new summits of traditional and religious practices including the Tai language and other cultural characteristics. Since the 1950s in South-Yunnan the district where the Tai Lue live has been called Autonomous Prefecture of Sipsong Panna. The monastery network of Keng Tung (Northeast Burma), Northern Thailand, Northwestern Laos and Sipsong Panna, contributed immense financially and personally to restore the monasteries which have been demolished during the mid 20th century, so that the culture of the Tai Lue, especially the language and Theravada Buddhist practices have survived. The Tai Ahom in Assam and the smaller Tai minorities in northeast India are supported and regularly visited by representatives of the King of Thailand (Princess Sirindorn) as well as by delegates of the Thai government to promote Pan-Tai relationships over the South-, Southeast- and East Asian corridor consisting of Northeast India, Burma, South China, Laos and Thailand, and to foster economic and cultural cooperation between India and Thailand.
Keywords: ethnic minorities, identity, foreign domination, colonization, marginalization.
Title: Tai Lue and Tai Ahom: Foreign Domination and Colonization
Author: Wolfgang Obst
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
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