The Printing Press in Nineteenth Century Assam and the Growth of Assamese Regionalism: a Study

1 The Printing Press in Nineteenth Century Assam and the Growth of Assamese Regionalism: A Study The nature of Assam‟s regionalism, in its early stage of development was primarily language-centric. Assamese regional identity was sought to be determined by establishing a linguistic identity by agents such as literary institutions, the middle class and the news- magazines, in all of which the printing press played a vital role. Its formation can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. This linguistic identity was achieved via a process of standardization of the Assamese language. Assam essentially is a heterogeneous region both linguistically and culturally. The process of standardization of a language for a homogenous linguistic identity is problematic in this case, as it contradicts the multiculturalism that is at the core of Assamese identity. This paper looks at Assamese regionalism in relation to the first printing press of Assam and how it was shaped and formulated thereafter. Further the paper examines the cultural politics that this regionalism gave birth to in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first printing press in Assam was established by the American Baptist Missionaries in 1836 at Sadiya, a little village in the eastern-most point of the river Brahmaputra. The Missionaries were invited to Assam by Captain Jenkins, the then administrative head of Assam under British government. He welcomed them to open a station for missionary work at Sadiya. In fact when invited to Assam the Missionaries were promised all kinds of government aids and financial support by Jenkins. Jenkins offered the Missionaries a thousand rupees if a family were to settle at the mission in Sadiya and was ready to double that sum if they had the press working for the subsequent six months. (Sword 42) Following this Nathan Brown (1807-86) and Oliver Cutter (1811-?), Brown‟s associate, set out for Sadiya in November 1835 from Calcutta and reached, in March 1836, after a long and tedious journey up the mighty Brahmaputra. With them they carried a printing press. However constant ill health and repeated attack from the native tribes, and the remoteness of Sadiya from all other Assamese towns, forced the Missionaries to leave the place for good and finally establish their Mission at Sibsagar, an old town in upper Assam in 1841.Subsequently they established the Sibsagar Mission Press in 1843. The first Assamese monthly The Orunodoi was published from this press in 1846. This press was going to determine the course of Assamese literary and cultural sphere in the upcoming years. Education was always a primary factor in Missionary activities along with preaching about Christ. As such the printing press was an essential tool for them. In case of Assam, the contribution of the Missionaries to the development of education was especially noteworthy. Brown and Cutter, upon their arrival at Sadiya established its first school in 1837 and reported the enthusiasm of many local boys to study there. The printing press was of utmost importance to meet the lack of Assamese textbooks. Although Cutter was exclusively in charge of the press, Brown was actively involved with the production of texts. From the press in Sadiya 4,850 copies 2 were printed of Brown‟s modified translation of William Carrey‟s Assamese Bible as well as thirteen chapters of Mathew. (48) One must consider the difficulties that the Missionaries went through with regard to the press. All the essential supplies like letters and pages etc. were brought from Calcutta, a journey which took three to four months by boat via the unpredictable currents of the Brahmaputra. Besides, the characters for the press was another problem, as the Assamese characters they were now using, although looked a lot like the Bengali characters, were new to them unlike English and Bengali characters which they were used to. (49) The Missionaries contributed immensely towards the Assamese language. They especially worked towards re-establishing Assamese as the official language of Assam after the colonial government imposed Bengali in 1836. Missionaries like Nathan Brown and Miles Bronson (1812-1883) repeatedly confronted the colonial government to prove that Assamese was indeed a separate language with its own literature and history and not a dialect of Bengali. To their success Assamese was restored as the official language of the land in 1873. Here it is important to note that the vernacular was important to the Missionaries in order to reach out to the local people. Similarly in Assam, prevalence of Assamese in the educational institutions was especially important to them in order to get through the people. The Mission realized as early as 1852, as stated in the summit of the Assam Mission that that Assamese was “the only medium of communication with tens of thousands among the tribes of its frontier”. ( Report on the Assam Mission at the Close of the Year 1851 with the Minutes of the First Meeting of the Assam Baptist Association, Sibsagar, 1852, 33 quoted in Choudhury, 133) If Assamese were to be recognised as the official language for all the tribes, it would make communication with the common people and educating them much easier for the Missionaries. This can be marked as an early inception of the process of standardization of Assamese which eventually led to the problematic nature of Assamese regionalism. Towards the Assamese language and literature The Orunodoi played an important role. It gave momentum to the Assamese literary and cultural milieu, which was shattered after the repeated Burmese attacks between 1816 and 1826 before the British established their rule in Assam in 1826 following the Treaty of Yandaboo. It was the first news-magazine of Assam, which although was initially printed with the intention of awakening people towards Christianity, also had news from all over the world, translations of old Ahom histories, creative literary pieces and articles about science and social reforms which covered most of its contents. The language used in The Orunodoi, however, was not literary Assamese; rather a formulation of the spoken language as was perceived by the Missionaries, which was a variety of Assamese from the upper Assam region. For the vocabulary of the magazine, the editors were dependent on an unpublished dictionary by Jaduram DekaBarua where the simplified method of forming words according to their pronunciation was maintained. (Choudhury 140) It is also necessary to consider that in the Missionary era of Assamese literature a few contemporary writers rejected the language of The Orunodoi and chose to write in the tradition of the Vaishnava saints. (Sharma 252) Due to the language and cultural barrier the Missionaries were unable to do justice 3 to extant literary Assamese language as they failed to appreciate or were indifferent to the literature of the Vaishnavite poets of the pre-colonial Assam. Towards the end of the nineteenth century gradually the editors began to follow the word and sentence structure system provided by Hemchandra Barua(1835-96). The reason behind this was a large number of Assamese literati‟s dissatisfaction with the language of The Orunodoi. In a memorandum submitted in January 1858 Bronson mentioned of a similar concern as a result of which he believed that the Missionary books failed to gain the attention of the local people. (Choudhury 141) As such they resorted to the standardized version of Assamese which was provided by Hemchandra Barua, in his dictionary Hemkosha (1900) where he provided the Sanskrit origins of the words along with their Sankritised spellings. Hem Barua‟s Hemkosha, though a timeless contribution to Assamese literature raises some concerns which contributed to the politics of standardization of Assamese. Barua believed that the two most integral aspects to learn any language were its grammar and dictionary. Therefore he glorifies Sanskrit as respected language of the ancient times over the local (vernacular) languages. (Barua, iii) It is, therefore, not surprising that in his dictionary his means to standardize the language was by establishing the affiliation of Assamese to Sanskrit and thereby conforming to the Hindu-Aryan hierarchy. By citing only Sanskrit as the origin of Assamese vocabulary he constructed a genealogy that denied the coming together of languages of different language families to create the Assamese language. Barua‟s affiliation to Sanskrit is not only problematic as it attempted to establish a discourse of cultural hegemony in Assamese linguistic identity, but also for the fact that the language families that existed in Assam deny a single language of origin of Assamese. A stronger inclination to form an Assamese identity took place towards the end of the nineteenth century by a few Assamese students studying in Calcutta who were also affected by the Bengal Renaissance. The pioneers of Assamese literature, culture and society like Lakshminath Bezbaruah, Chandrakumar Agarwala, Hemchandra Goswami, Padmanath Gohain Barua, Satnyanath Borah, Kanaklal Baruah were studying in Calcutta when they created Assamese literary Society in 1872, which was later renamed as Asamiya Bhasa Unnati Sadhini Sabha (hereafter ABUSS) in 1888. The Assamese monthly, Jonaki which came out in 1889 was the mouthpiece of this society. The vision of the society towards an Assamese identity formation was clear when they listed out their main agenda to be (a) to collect and reprint old Assamese manuscripts, (b) circulation of Assamese in all the educational institutions of Assam, (c) to impose correct grammar and linguistic system (as opposed to what was circulated in the pages of TheOrunodoi), (d) translation of famous books from Sanskrit and other languages into Assamese, (e) to write books on historical, cultural and social aspects of Assam, (f) to fill up the void in Assamese literature and textbooks, etc. (Baruah 53) It is evident from above how the Society‟s optimum focus on circulation and imposition of Assamese was also a strong inclination towards the standardization of Assamese.

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