The Bodo of Assam: Revising a Classical Study from 1950

A significant addition to earlier scholarship on Bodo religion and culture Halfdan Sïger's work on the Bodos, recently rediscovered and presented here for the first time, deserves a favoured place on the bookshelf of every person who wished to understand an important indigenous community from Assam. This work fills a massive gap in the literature in several senses. It was produced by a scholar driven purely by intellectual curiosity, separating him from earlier writers whose missionary zeal at times clouded their scholarly judgements. In addition, this work fills an 80-year gap between such earlier work and more recent scholarly interest, thus enabling readers to draw a more nuanced line between what it meant to be a Bodo at the turn of the 20th century and what it means to be a Bodo at the turn of the 21st. Siiger fills this gap brilliantly. The depth of his insights, clarity of presentation and innovativeness of research method are unparalleled in his generation; some of his techniques feel new even today. Much contemporary research has gone into understanding the Bodo and their aspirations. While Siiger does not engage directly in the intellectual debated more common today, he does provide information that might be relevant to such debates. The importance of Halfdan Siiger's ethnographic material, based on fieldwork carried out in 1949-50, is given even greater relevance by the inclusion of rare archival photos and more recent material contributed by the editors and other modern-day scholars.