War of Words: Language and Policies in Nineteenth-century Assam

Abstract

One of the crucial features of the tussle over Assamese in the nineteenth century was that it inspired multiple imaginings of the ‘Assamese’. This article has been conceived with the aim of following some of these different mappings of the ‘Assamese’ that became the focal point of a debate over the identity of the Assamese language in nineteenth-century Assam. The article contends that neither the official nor the missionary discourses on linguistic identity can be labeled as either exclusively ideological or instrumentalist. One of its principal aims has been to foreground a particular moment in the history of the debate when official rhetoric seems to have shed, if only momentarily, its usual concerns of governance and power and engaged in a genuine quest for ‘authentic’ linguistic attributes for defining the vernacular. The article addresses both the ideological parameters of the official discourses on the identity of Assamese as well as the pragmatic considerations and the lack of harmony in the seemingly unanimous discourse of the missionaries. Further, there has been an attempt to reflect on the many lives of Assamese in the pages of the vernacular periodicals, wherein, apparently fixed linguistic boundaries were tampered with in an attempt to equip the ‘mother tongue’ with suitable linguistic and cultural properties. The article shows how boundaries of religion were drawn up and affirmed as the provincial elite sought to produce a Hindu–Sanskrit identity for the ‘Assamese’ community.