2008/02/01 by Bodhisattva Kar · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #South Asian Studies and Conflicts #Assamese #Vernacular #Politics #History #Linguistics #Period (music) #Frontier #Literature #Sociology #Aesthetics #Art #Philosophy #Law #Political science #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1177/025764300702400102
openalex publication_date 2008/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
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.