![]() ![]() The books and unpublished papers written by Archer concern various fields of "tribal" or "folk art" from the sculptures of the Ahir, to the discovery of Madhubani and Kalighat paintings. Certainly, this shift was a way to survive when he quit the colonial service. While it is crucial to recover Archer from the margins of present day anthropology and study his work on the Santals, it is also important to understand his shift from being an administrative officer to become a historian of art and a curator of Victoria and Albert Museum. Following a brief analysis of the two versions of the stories, I have tried to show how neither the production of colonial episteme happened in isolation, nor can this form of knowledge be considered as a monolithic construct of the colonisers as the colonised (Indian actors) too were substantially involved in the process. Wade, in which the author has put forward two versions of "origin myths" associated with the Ahoms. The primary source that has been used for this study is a colonial document titled An Account of Assam, by Dr. Thenceforth, in Assam, the story about Ahoms has continued to be under construction. In fact, there is no empirical evidence of a historical Ahom community before colonialism! It was the colonials, who, in the late-19 th century literature, designated the Ahoms as a race of people migrating from southeast Asia and getting "Hinduised" through a process of settlement in the plains of Assam. It is very difficult to reconstruct the exact history of the origin of Ahoms based on the various available sources. This paper is an attempt to investigate the "origin myths" associated with the Ahom dynasty which ruled in Assam for almost 600 years from 13 th to the 19 th centuries.
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