Language and Nationalism: Comprehending the Dynamics in Nineteenth-century Assam (original) (raw)
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Situating English in the Language Politics of Assam
Langlit, 2016
During the colonial period, the English language was used to highlight colonial supremacy and hence the inferiority of the colonized native population in Assam. Later, political events during the independence movement added to the cleavages between English and Assamese language. In the post colonial period, these differences gave rise to an Assamese linguistic sub-national movement which viewed the teaching and learning of English as a colonial imposition and reduced the importance of the language to a subordinate position. This paper looks at the challenges that English teaching and learning face in Assam. It suggests that language policies should be so framed that English acts as a complementary force to the Assamese language and does not create an antagonistic and damaging relationship with it.
Tongue Has No Bone': Fixing the Assamese Language, c. 1800-c. 1930
Studies in History, 2008
This article deals with the politics of envisioning a vernacular for Assam proper during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through a small, connected history of orthographic contests, grammarians’ debates and print-culture, it tries to understand the various ways in and through which the boundaries of a vernacular were drawn, policed and violated during this period. Rather than narrating the complexities of the question in terms of stable and ever-present languages, this article attempts to show how the metropolis-oriented production of linguistic knowledge came to hypostatize an abstract grid of standard languages within which the mutable, heterogeneous and fluctuating speech practices (and the corresponding scribal culture) of a frontier province had to be definitively mobilized. The article explores the debates regarding the alleged dialectal status of the ‘Assamese’ and traces some connections between spatial sequence, linguistic imagination and proprietorial logic.
Indian Journal of Language and Linguistics, 2023
The state of Assam in India is the home to the people who speak Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language. Assamese is the native tongue of the people of Assam and the official language of the state of Assam. Based on linguistic standards and conventions, Assamese is a vital language for writing. However, when we attempt to see the language from the viewpoint of native speakers' attitudes towards the language, we find that the language is steadily deteriorating among the linguistic community. This deterioration is caused by Linguistic Imperialism. Linguistic Imperialism is a phenomenon in which a dominant language attempts to weaken other languages both socially and politically and in a theoretically founded way. The impact of the dominance is increasing day by day due to which a negative attitude has increased significantly among the native speakers of Assamese who considers English as superior to their mother tongue. Negative attitude is one of the reasons of language endangerment and we cannot deny the possibility of endangerment of the Assamese language in the far future if the dominance of English goes on increasing. History is evident that languages with a huge literature and population got extinct because of the reasons like negative attitude, dominance of other languages, decreasing rate of fluent native speakers, examples of such languages are Sanskrit, Hebrew, etc. This paper tries to analyse the negative attitude which is gradually increasing in the Assamese language and ways to strengthen it by reverting the dominance of Linguistic Imperialism by languages like English and Hindi.
The Politics of Language in Assam
The India Forum, 2021
https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/politics-language-assam Language has been at the heart of political debate in Assam since the formation of the British colonial province of Assam in 1874, then through the turbulent decades leading to Independence, the separation of Sylhet during Partition, and into our times.
Languages of Nationhood: Political Ideologies and the Place of English in 20th Century India
2011
My research studies the relationship of language and national identity in postcolonial India, with a particular emphasis on the English language. Language politics in India has historically been polarizing, and is already the focus of a significant body of work. Research has focused especially on the trajectory and ramifications of the Hindi-Urdu (or Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani) controversy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which interwove the discourse of nation and linguistic nationalism with that of religion and authentic “Indian-ness.” Discourses of language community and of resistance to linguistic hegemony have been the other major focal point of the existing repertoire, especially with respect to Tamil in south India. This theme has also been analyzed extensively in the context of the linguistic reorganization of states, where the question of national (dis)integration and the potential threat of separatism inherent in the official recognition of geographic and cultural bou...
Pangsau: Re-articulating India's North- East, 2018
It is a blog post originally published in Pangsau: Rearticulating India's North- East (March 7, 2018). It has got republished again in indian Cultural Forum (Link: https://indianculturalforum.in/2019/05/21/politics-of-assamese-language/?fbclid=IwAR2WIPBZANJumHvt3CIYeVNRC0tNAspK3vC3XmvOxEIzyikJOALhJh1Yfyk ) on May 21, 2019.