Assam

Assam is located in the northeastern part of the country and is bounded to the north by the kingdom of Bhutan and the state of Arunachal Pradesh, to the east by the states of Nagaland and Manipur, to the south by the states of Mizoram and Tripura, and to the west by Bangladesh and the states of Meghalaya and West Bengal. The name Assam is derived from the word asama, meaning “peerless” in the now extinct Ahom language.

Assam has numerous wildlife sanctuaries, the most prominent of which are two UNESCO World Heritage sites—the Kaziranga National Park (designated in 1985), on the bank of the Brahmaputra River, and the Manas Wildlife Sanctuary (designated in 1992), near the border with Bhutan. Both are refuges for the fast-disappearing Indian one-horned rhinoceros, and the sanctuary at Manas is known especially for its tigers and leopards

The people of the plains of the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys are mainly of Indo-Iranian ancestry. By the time of their arrival in the region, however, the local Aryan peoples had become intermixed with Asiatic peoples. The Ahom people, who arrived in the region from mainland Southeast Asia during the 13th century, ultimately stem from Yunnan province of southern China. A significant minority of the population consists of rural indigenous peoples who fall outside the Indian caste system; as such, they are officially designated as Scheduled Tribes. The Bodo constitute the largest of these groups. Most of the Scheduled Tribes live in the south-central hill region and are of Asiatic descent.