Thus the Bodos or Boros of western Assam are to be found in the Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon districts and are part of the Bodo-Cachari stock. They have settled in a dispersed manner, along the north bank of the Brahmaputra. They are known as Mechs in Bhutan and in Bangladesh. In the eastern part of the North East, they are the Dimasa-Cacharis of Nagaland and Cachar district, where they have been marginalized by Naga groups and Bengali settlers.

In recent years, the Bodos, who number just over one million and are the dominant plains tribal community in Assam, have come into conflict with the powerful Assamese-speakers of the Brahmaputra Valley who are predominantly Hindu and have held political control of the state since the end of the nineteenth century. Smarting with resentment at what they regard as the Assamese attitude of superiority, the Bodos of western Assam have in the past decades been demanding a separate state which they called Udayachal in the 1970s, and now Bodoland.

Such is the depth of Bodo bitterness against what is perceived as Assamese exploitation and their own underdevelopment, that they rejected the Assamese script as the medium of education and communication and turned instead to Devanagri or the Hindi language. At one time, even the Roman script was considered as a possible lingua franca.

The language issue is still alive among the Bodos. In early 2000, Bodo militant groups demanded the use of English as the language of communication. This has been rejected by the main Bodo literary society, the Bodo Sahitya Sabha, and an influential student group, the All Bodo Students Union. These organizations said that changing the script and language at this time would create confusion in the community and negate the advantages it had gained during the past years.

The rationale behind the demand for English was fairly obvious: it would have meant the severance of any connection to the Indian heartland.

Since 1993, the Bodo demand for separation from Assam has become extremely strident, assuming a violent character that aims at ousting non-Bodos from an area which militants have claimed as, their traditional homeland. This geographical belt stretches in their lexicon from the Sunkosh river that flows down from Bhutan and joins the Brahmaputra to the once-thriving river port of Sadiya, near Arunachal Pradesh.

Sadiya, of course, no longer exists, having been buried deep in the bosom of the Brahmaputra after the great earthquake of 1950. But rhetoric often buries reason as well. In this region, the Bodos do not add up either to a numerical majority or a community that has the advantage of linguistic and geographical contiguity. They are dispersed for the most part and are small minorities in many areas.