ASSAMESE MUSLIM WOMEN: HISTORY, INTERPRETATION AND CHANGE

The Muslims of Assam have been playing a very significant and positive role in the formation and development of the Assamese society. Muslims first encountered the Brahmaputra valley in 1206 during the invasion led by Bakhtiar Khilji. A number of Muslims who came to this valley married to local women and along with them, some aboriginal Hindus become Muslim by proselytization. Therefore, their language, culture and social way of life were assimilated with Assamese Society. Though the history of the Assamese Muslim Women is rare to found and historians were remain silent about it, but whatever the historians were written about the Assamese Muslim culture from that we can understand that the social life of the Muslim women was as like as the other Assamese women. Now from few decades we can observe that the life style of the Assamese Muslim women has gradually changed. The religious criteria for defining the changing social life of the Muslim women entails certain fundamental difficulties concerning the identification of the mass of people whom in spite of certain commonness, encompass considerable diversities. It is therefore necessary to understand the change in the light of historical analysis.