Amri Erotic

The Amri are the western and lowland branch of the Karbi, a Tibeto-Burman people of northeast India whom outsiders once labeled Mikir and who call themselves Arleng. What sets the Amri apart from their hill relatives is geography and everything that follows from it. They live where the Karbi hills run down into the Brahmaputra valley: the western edge of Karbi Anglong, the Kamrup and Morigaon districts of Assam around Sonapur and the edge of Guwahati, and the Ri-Bhoi district of Meghalaya. Amri is one of the old territorial divisions of Karbi country, alongside Ronghang and Chinthong, and the valley settlements are often called Dumrali. Centuries beside Assamese, Khasi and Tiwa neighbors have left a mark on speech, farming and worship without dissolving the sense of being Karbi.

Their speech, usually listed as Amri Karbi, is close enough to the hill variety that many linguists treat the two as dialects of one language, though vocabulary and pronunciation have drifted, and nearly everyone also speaks Assamese. Karbi itself sits awkwardly in the Sino-Tibetan family tree: it shares features with the Kuki-Chin and Naga languages to the east but fits neatly into none of them. Society is organized around five patrilineal clans, the kur, and marrying inside your own clan is forbidden. Hill Karbi traditionally farmed swidden plots. The valley Amri mostly work wet rice paddies like their neighbors.

Religion is a layered affair. The older Karbi faith centers on household and territorial deities, with Hemphu and Mukrang at the top, on ancestors, and on offerings of fowl, pigs and rice beer made by village ritual specialists. In the plains this has absorbed a good deal of Assamese Hinduism, and the big communal occasion is Dehal, a yearly worship for the welfare of the village, rather than the Rongker of the hills. There is a Christian minority as well. Funerary custom still matters enormously: a death is not fully settled until the proper rites send the spirit to the village of the ancestors.

The sharpest modern issue is political. The Karbi hill districts won autonomy under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian constitution, but the Amri settlements in the valley fall outside that territory, and plains Karbi have spent decades pressing for the Scheduled Tribe recognition that their hill relatives hold. Along the Assam and Meghalaya border, Amri villages also sit inside a boundary dispute that predates the state of Meghalaya itself. The result is a people fully Karbi in clan, ritual and memory, who have had to argue for that status on paper.