Buranji
Buranjis are a class of historical chronicles and manuscripts associated with the Ahom kingdom, written on sanchipat. There were written initially in the Ahom Language and later in the Assamese language as well. The Buranjis are an example of historical literature which is rare in India—they bear resemblance to Southeast Asian traditions of historical literature instead. The Buranjis are generally found in manuscript form, 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; and they have emerged as the core sources for historiography of the region for the pre-colonial period. 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 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 and the other maintained by families. The Buranjis themselves claim that the tradition of state Buranjis began with Sukaphaa who led a group of Shans 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, 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 folios were often appended with additional material to an existing Buranji, resulting in changes in language and calligraphy. Since these manuscripts were often copied or recopied for duplication before printing became available scribal errors were common. Sometimes 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 and updated with the help of external sources such as those from the Tai-Mau and Khamti polities.Traditional classifications of Buranjis
Internally, the Buranji chronicles classify themselves as either Lai-lik Buranji that are expansive and deal with political histories, and Lit Buranji which deal with single events, such as Ram Singhar Yuddhar Katha. In the 18th century a third class called Chakaripheti Buranji emerged that dealt with Ahom lineages.Different reports submitted for archiving also came to be called Buranjis: Chakialar Buranji, Datiyalia Buranji, Kataki Buranji, Chang-rung Phukonor Buranji, and Satria Buranji.
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 represent 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. 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 derived from the class of written records called Itihasa, the word buranji is used instead for "history" in the Assamese language.
Loss
During the reign of Rajeswar Singha, 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
The Buranji's contained within themselves the instinct of historiography. Nevertheless they were written for state purposes of the Ahom kingdom, and they served primarily the interests of the Ahom dynasty followed by those of the courtiers and they were not the records of the people in general. Nevertheless, the practice of writing Buranjis in the older tradition survived the downfall of the Ahom kingdom and persisted till the 1890s. Subsequently, Buranjis themselves became sources for new historiography.Pre-colonial
John Peter Wade, a medical officer of the East India Company, accompanied Captain Welsh in his expedition into the Ahom kingdom 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. suggests that Wade eventually translated three discrete 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 First Anglo-Burmese War and the Treaty of Yandaboo, in which the invading Burmese military was pushed away. In 1833 the EIC established a protectorate under a past Ahom king, Purandar Singha. Following his instructions Kashinath Tamuli-Phukan wrote Assam Buranji in 1835 before the protectorate was dismantled. Buranji writing continued among remnant and scions of past Ahom officialdom, the chief among them was Harakanta Barua who expanded Kashinath Tamuli-Phukan's Buranji, and Padmeshwar Naobaisha Phukan who wrote Assam Buranji the 1890s—the last Buranji written in the older tradition.In parallel a newly emerging colonial elite began historiography in styles that departed from the Buranji style, but still were called Buranjis. In 1829 Haliram Dhekial Phukan, an erstwhile Ahom officer who successfully transitioned into British officialdom, 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 historiographic traditions. Gunabhiram Barua's work Assam Buranji too departed significantly from the Buranji style though Maniram Dewan's Buranji-Bibekratna'' hewed much closer.
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 a keen historian, to research Assam's pre-colonial past. Gait 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—Hemchandra Goswami, Golap Chandra Barua, Gunahash Goswami, Madhab Chandra Bordoloi, and Rajanikanta Bordoloi among others. 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.Gait devised a method to check for historicity—he first convinced himself that Golap Barua did learn the language. He then checked for consistency within the Ahom and the Assamese Buranji manuscripts and with sources from Mughal sources that were available at that time. He further collated all the dates available in the Buranjis and checked them against those in the 70 Ahoms coins, 48 copper plates, 9 rock, 28 temple and 6 canon inscriptions that he had collected. Thus convinced with the historicity of the Buranjis, A History of Assam was finally published in 1906.
Gait's A History of Assam did not follow the colonial mode of historiography—it used the Buranjis sympathetically, and it avoided the ancient/medieval/modern periodisation then common in Indian historiography. It elevated the stature of the Buranjis as trusted and reliable historical sources. The ready acceptance of the historicity of Buranjis, both by native and British researchers, was in sharp contrast to the reception of other pre-colonial documents, such as the kulagranthas of Bengal.