THE ETHNIC IDENTITY OF THE BODOS OF ASSAM: A CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS

The present article inter-alia finds its broad base on this idea and aims at facilitating reconstruction of the ethnic identity of the Bodos — a prehistoric tribe of northeast India, giving a bird's eye-view on their rites and rituals, beliefs and attitudes. Notwithstanding some immaculate works done by the great missionaries in the last decades of the nineteenth-century and the native writers in the twentieth-century in collecting and compiling books on Bodo folklore, a vast array of folk-songs, tales, seasonal observances, riddles, sayings etc giving varying shades of regional and local cultural practices still remain untraced and undocumented. This study attempts at giving a kaleidoscopic view of the religious rituals that could help others understand and appreciate the folkloric identity of the Bodos.