History does not always survive in archives. Often, it endures in memory, ritual, and the quiet transmission of trust between communities. The recent Changki–Tai Ahom Cultural Connect was a reminder that peoplehood is shaped less by political boundaries and more by shared experiences of coexistence.
The episode from 1679, when Changki villagers sheltered an Ahom king in flight, speaks to a moral geography far older than modern states. It affirms an uncomfortable truth. One cannot choose neighbours. Geography assigns them, and history teaches how to live with them. The Naga and Tai Ahom relationship grew through refuge, trade, and kinship, without erasing identity or demanding subordination.
Yet history becomes fragile when demography shifts faster than memory. In Assam, particularly along the Ahom–Naga borderlands, indigenous communities today confront a steady erosion of numerical and cultural presence.
The irony is stark. While Tai Ahom history is celebrated as civilizational heritage, the people to whom that history belongs increasingly struggle to remain socially and politically relevant in their own land. Large migrant populations, recent in origin and disconnected from this shared past, now shape the demographic reality. They may occupy the same geography, but they do not inherit its relationships, responsibilities, or moral claims.
What use is history if the living custodians of that history are rendered marginal? When peoplehood is overwhelmed by numbers, heritage risks becoming ornamental. Stories once rooted in lived experience are reduced to museum narratives, invoked symbolically but detached from contemporary power, land, and voice.
The historical relationship between the Tai Ahom and the Ao Naga was forged through trust and reciprocity between living communities. When those communities are reduced to minorities in their own lands, history risks becoming a ceremony without consequence. Memory survives, but authority over that memory does not.
The Changki gathering, therefore, was not nostalgic indulgence. It was a quiet assertion that history has owners, and memory carries obligation. Neighbours cannot be chosen, but here the neighbour itself is being demographically replaced, altering the very terms of coexistence. When numbers erase peoplehood, history is stripped of relevance and reduced to symbolism. The question is no longer whether the past was shared, but whether the descendants of that past will retain the agency to define their present; whether those who inherit that past will still matter in shaping the future. Without that, even the deepest friendships risk becoming footnotes in someone else’s narrative.
