Assam

Assam is a northeastern state of India with its capital at Dispur. Located just below the eastern Himalayan foothills, it is surrounded by the other northeastern states: Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya. Assam and its commercial capital Guwahati form the gateway to the northeastern states, together called the seven sisters. These states are connected to the rest of India via Assam's border with West Bengal and a narrow strip called the "Chicken's Neck." Assam shares international borders with Bhutan and Bangladesh.

Origin of name

Some consider Assam to be a corruption of the Sanskrit word asama or assama meaning uneven. This word well describes the hilly region, as the Indo-Burmese corridor consists of a number of mountainous chains of the lower Himalayan region and valleys between them. Others believe the word is related to the Ahoms who ruled Assam for 600 years, as there is no record of the use of this name before their advent in 1228.

The word asama or assama was used during the time while Bhaskarvarman ruled Kamarupa. Then the present upper Assam used to emit poisonous gasses and was uninhabitable. Some of the Kamrupi criminals escaped to this land during those days in order to avoid punishment, as reported in the travel notes of the Chinese traveler Xuanzang. Those people were also called asama or assama. Xuanzang not traveling back via this route returning to China was because he was worried about attacks from asama or assama people. In Kamrupi, the term can also mean one who is not comparable with, in addition to weird/sinner, but no yester year Kamrupi scriptures referred the land asama or asam or asom.

The British general did not choose the name from any of the above, but concatenated it from the scientific name “Anthera Assama”, i.e., he dropped “Anthera” and “a” of “Assama”. This was done for the first time while British created “Upper Assam State” after the “Yandabu Accord”.

This contention is however unlikely. Antheraea Assama is the biological name of the species of silkworm that produces the Muga silk. The species is endemic to the Assam region, and it is likely that the species is named after the region it belonged to and not the other way around.

Anthera Assama was discovered long before the Yandabu Accord, and assama here implies unequal or not comparable with – assama was chosen as part of the scientific name because the silkworm can only live in the climate of foothills of Eastern Himalaya.