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In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space. Various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness onto “non-Aryan” indigenous tribals and migrant laborers. As vernacular print arenas emerged in Assam, so did competing claims to history, nationalism, and progress that continue to reverberate in the present.

The Bodo (or Boros) are one of the indigenous tribal peoples of Assam. During colonial times they resisted Christianization and in recent decades they have been involved both in interethnic violence and separatist insurgencies. Much research has gone into understanding the Boros and their aspirations but an issue has been that earlier accounts of this once-animist people are meagre and date from the colonial period. The rediscovery and publication of the ethnographic material based on fieldwork carried out by Halfdan Siiger among the Boros in 1949–50 is thus hugely important. Siiger’s manuscript is unique, offering detailed descriptions of the social and ritual life of the Boros and new insights into the traditions and myths as they were told in the village he studied before the transformation of religious life in recent decades. Thanks to Siiger’s diligent translation and interpretation, the manuscript also preserves a number of ritual formulas and songs in the Boro language. Siiger’s manuscript is given even greater relevance by the inclusion of more recent material contributed by the editors and other contemporary scholars. In addition, his original photos are augmented by new photos from the village and by rare images from the collections of the National Museum of Denmark.