Art and Craft of Northeast India: From Assam's Illustrated Manuscripts to Manipur's Woven Traditions

Spread a map of India and let your eye travel to the far east, past Bengal, to the eight states that curl around the Brahmaputra and climb into the eastern Himalaya. This is Northeast India, and it holds some of the most sophisticated and least understood art forms of India. Here are Assam's illustrated Hastividyarnava manuscripts and the mask-making monks of Majuli. Here are Nagaland's warrior shawls, Manipur's sacred looms, and the cane and bamboo work of the Khasi and Apatani hills. None of it is a footnote. It is one of the richest chapters in the entire history of Indian art, and also one of the quietest.

That quietness is the problem this piece sets out to address. The traditions of the Northeast are not marginal because they are minor. They are marginal because of geography and politics, because the region sits far from Delhi and Mumbai and rarely reaches the national textbooks. The depth was always there. What has been missing is attention.

A regional snapshot

ASSAM Illustrated manuscripts, the masks of Majuli, and three native silks including golden muga. MANIPUR Sacred Meitei weaving, the Moirang Phee border motif, and hand-built terracotta. NAGALAND Warrior shawls whose patterns record clan, rank and earned honour. MIZORAM The Puan, a woven cloth at the centre of dress and ceremony. MEGHALAYA Cane and bamboo craft, from fine baskets to living root bridges and headgear. TRIPURA Loin-loom weaving of the Tripuri and Jamatia, including the risa cloth. ARUNACHAL PRADESH Monpa handmade paper, Buddhist Thangka painting, and Adi and Apatani weaving. SIKKIM Thangka painting, monastery crafts, and Lepcha and Bhutia weaving.

Assam: Manuscripts, Sattriya Culture, and the Crafts of the Brahmaputra Valley

Assam is the natural place to begin, because it carries one of the few painting traditions in the region with a documented courtly history. In the early eighteenth century the Ahom court produced illustrated manuscripts of real ambition, including the Hastividyarnava, a treatise on elephants commissioned during the reign of King Sivasimha. Alongside the court school ran the older Vaishnava tradition of the Sattras, the monasteries founded by the saint Srimanta Sankardev in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The earliest surviving illustrated manuscript of that tradition, the Chitra Bhagavata, dates to the seventeenth century and shows the wide fish-shaped eyes and vermilion grounds that mark the Sattriya style.

The Sattras gave the region more than painting. They gave it the classical dance Sattriya, recognised nationally only in 2000, and the dramatic masks used in its bhaona theatre. The mask-making tradition of Majuli, centred on the Samaguri Satra, builds large figures of gods and demons from bamboo, clay, cloth and cow dung, some of them tall enough to clothe a performer entirely. The first such masks were made by Sankardev himself for a play staged in 1468.