The Boro (बर'/बड़ो [bɔɽo]), also called Bodo, are a Tibeto-Burman speaking ethnolinguistic group native to the state of Assam in India.

[12] The Boro along with other cognate groups of Bodo-Kachari peoples are prehistoric settlers who are believed to have migrated at least 3,000 years ago.

According to Bathouism, before the creation of the universe there was simply a great void, in which the supreme being 'Aham Guru', Anan Binan Gosai or Obonglaoree existed formlessly.

However, caste and dowry practices are not practised by the majority of Boro Hindus, who follow a set of rules called Brahma Dharma.

[23] A majority of the Bodo people still follow Bathouism, but in censuses, they are often classified as Hindus, as their native religion has no official recognition under the Indian constitution.

[34] As those who controlled forest based produce, they emerged as intermediaries in the trade in these as well as other goods between the plains and the hills and complex relationships developed.

After the Ahom kingdom consolidated its power in western Assam in the 17/18th century it made special arrangements with Bhutan to share administrative and fiscal responsibilities.

[44] Foremost among them was Kalicharan Brahma, a trader from Goalpara who established a new monotheistic faith called "Brahma-ism" and most importantly, claimed for himself and his peers a new Bodo Identity.

[49] Additional avenues, via conversion to Christianity, were already available by the late 19th century especially with the evangelical work of Sidney Endle who is also known for his tome "The Kacharis",[50] and this formed a parallel stream of Boro articulation till much later times.

[51] Bodo was a term reported by Brian Houghton Hodgson (1847) as a endonym that, he speculated, encompassed a wide group of peoples that included in the minimum the Mech and the Kacharis.

[52] This led to two type of approaches to the Boro identity: one is the notion of a wide group was picked up by Kalicharan Brahma and his peers who posited the Boro identity in opposition to the caste-Hindu Assamese,[42] and the other one, Jadunath Khakhlari who accepted the notion for the greater Bodo race but at the same time criticised it as a neologism and insisted on the use of the name Kachari and pointed to the Kachari's contribution to the Assamese culture to underline their historical political legacy.

[55] For example, Bodo Chatra Sanmilan advocated giving up tribal attributes and wanted women to follow the ideals of Sita of Ramayana.

[58] In the absence of an acknowledged past history of state formation, the associations felt particularly pressed to show that the Boros were not primitive as some other tribal groups[59] and at the same time did not fall into the caste-Hindu hierarchy.

[60] The demand for community rights was made for the first time when at the 1929 Simon Commission the Boro leaders evoked colonial imagery of backward tribes and requested protection in the form of reserved representation in local and central legislatures.

[66] The Tribal League, a full political organisation, emerged in 1933[67] as the common platform for all plains tribes of the Brahmaputra valley[68] that included the Boro, Karbi, Mising, Tiwa and the Rabha.

According to Padma Bhushan winner Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, mythologically, Boros are "the offspring of son of the Vishnu (Baraha) and Mother-Earth (Basumati)" who were termed "Kiratas" during the Epic period.