Bodo

The Bodo, or Boro, are a Tibeto-Burman people of the Brahmaputra valley in Assam and the largest of the Bodo-Kachari family. Their forebears entered from the north in prehistoric times; rivers such as the Dibang and Dihing preserve traces of that settlement.

After Kamarupa broke up in the twelfth century, Bodo-Kachari branches founded medieval states including the Dimasa and Koch kingdoms, the Koch taking power in 1515. The western Assam Bodo remained village farmers, working shifting fields by collective labour and trading forest produce.

They kept the old Bathou faith, centred on the high god Obonglaoree and the shijou tree, though Hindu influence spread and some entered the Ekasarana dharma. As Koch rule expanded and Ahom power tightened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bodo communities withdrew to the Himalayan foothills, outside state taxation into the 1700s.