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This is the first English book introducing Assamese Language & Literature to the outside world authored by famous litterary scholar Prof. Bhabananda Deka and his associates. Two Presidents and Two Prime Ministers of India wrote Forewords of this historic book, which was officially released in New Delhi on 24 Nov 1968 by then President of India Dr Zakir Hussain, acknowledging the pioneering literary work of Principal Deka and his associates. After half a century, Er. Arnab Jan Deka recovered the only surviving copy of this priceless book and republished it after thorough editing.
This book explores the making of colonial Northeast India and offers a new perspective to the study of the Assamese identity in the nineteenth century as a distinctly nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon, not confined to linguistic parameters alone. It studies crucial markers of the self — history, customs, food, dress, new religious beliefs — and symbols considered desirable by the provincial middle class and the way these fitted in with the latter’s nationalist subjectivities in the face of an emphatic Bengali cultural nationalism. The author shows how colonialism was intrinsically linked to the assertion of middle class intelligentsia in the region and was instrumental in eroding the essential malleability of societal processes nurtured by the Ahom state. Rich with fresh research data, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of history, political science, area studies, and to anyone interested in understanding Northeast India.
The study of Assamese literature has so far been in terms of the history of the Assamese language. This book is a history of the narratives written in Assamese language and its relation to the process of region formation. The literature dealt with ranges from pre-colonial chronicles, ballads and drama to modern genres of fiction and critical writing in Assamese language. Taking the Brahmaputra valley and Assamese literature as case studies, the author attempts to link literature, its nature and use, to processes of region formation, arguing that such a study needs to take the context of historical geography into consideration. The book views region formation in north-east India as a dialectical process, that is, the dialectic between the shared and the distinct in inter-group and community relations. It borrows an anthropological approach to study written narratives and cultures so as to locate such narratives in specific processes of region formation.
Fragmented Memories is a beautifully rendered exploration of how, during the 1990s, socially and economically marginalized people in the northeastern Indian state of Assam sought to produce a past on which to base a distinctive contemporary identity recognized within late-twentieth-century India. Yasmin Saikia describes how groups of Assamese identified themselves as Tai-Ahom—a people with a glorious past stretching back to the invasion of what is now Assam by Ahom warriors in the thirteenth century. In her account of the 1990s Tai-Ahom identity movement, Saikia considers the problem of competing identities in India, the significance of place and culture, and the outcome of the memory-building project of the Tai-Ahom. Assamese herself, Saikia lived in several different Tai-Ahom villages between 1994 and 1996. She spoke with political activists, intellectuals, militant leaders, shamans, and students and observed and participated in Tai-Ahom religious, social, and political events. She read Tai-Ahom sacred texts and did archival research—looking at colonial documents and government reports—in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. In Fragmented Memories, Saikia reveals the different narratives relating to the Tai-Ahom as told by the postcolonial Indian government, British colonists, and various texts reaching back to the thirteenth century. She shows how Tai-Ahom identity is practiced in Assam and also in Thailand. Revealing how the “dead” history of Tai-Ahom has been transformed into living memory to demand rights of citizenship, Fragmented Memories is a landmark history told from the periphery of the Indian nation.
Diverging from reductionist studies of Northeast India and its multifarious conflicts, this book presents an exclusive and intricate, empirical and theoretical study of Assam as a conflict zone. It traces the genesis and evolution of the ethnic and nationalistic politics in the state, and explores how this gave birth to nativist and militant movements. It further discusses how the State’s responses seem to have exacerbated rather than mitigated the conflict situation. The author proposes ethnic reconciliation as an effective way out of the current chaos, and finds the key in examining the relations between three communities (Axamiyā, Bodo and Koch) from Bodoland, the most violent region of Assam. She stresses upon the need to redefine ‘Axamiyā’, an issue of much discord in Assam’s ethnic politics since the modern-day formulation of the Axamiyā nation. The book will prove essential to scholars and students of peace and conflict studies, sociology, political science, and history, as also to policy-makers and those interested in Northeast India.
This book uses communities of women as a framework for reading women’s experience, rights and aspirations in Assam and Northeast India. It explores the varying roles played by such communities in the formation of society, the emergence of a women’s public sphere and the representation of these communities in culture. The essays in the volume study a host of women’s communities including the Mahila Samiti, Jain women’s organisations, Lekhika Sanstha, lesbian communities, religious gatherings, scientific and environmental groups, women’s collaborations through cookbooks, as well as nebulous communities of victims of persecution. They examine how women’s communities are both empowering and transformational but may paradoxically also be regressive and static. Lucid, analytical, and rich with case studies, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of gender studies, sociology, political science, history and cultural studies, particularly those interested in Northeast India.