[Reader-list] The Politics of Language and Dialect

[uddipan dutta]

The Politics of Language and Dialect in the Imagination of Nationality: The Contribution of the Christian Missionaries in the construction of Assamese Identity 

Dear Readers, I am giving a very brief narration of the history of Assam, before, during and after the publication of Arunodoi (1846-1880) as well as the activities of its publishers, the Baptist Missionaries to understand its historical role in the formation of Assamese Nationality. 
       
Present day Assam roughly covers the area ruled by the 'native' ethnic groups of Assam - the Ahoms, the Bodos, the Koches, the Kacharis, the Mataks, the Dimasas and the Chutiyas. But, before the advent of the British, it had been the military might of Ahom monarchy, the consolidation of its kingdom annexing a large part of the other smaller nationalities and its continuous rule for around six hundred years that fostered the imagination of a common nationality among the various linguistic communities living within the Ahom kingdom. Ahom kingdom was annexed formally to the British territory by the Treaty of Yandaboo in 1826. When the Ahom kingdom passed into British hands, it was for the first time in the history that Assamese heartland became politically incorporated into a pan-Indian imperial formation1. So, after the annexation of Assam by the British, the map of Assam changed dramatically. It became the easternmost frontier of British India. After the accession, the British ruled Assam as an 'appendage of the unwieldy province of Bengal'2. This decision on the part of the British East India Company had an ineluctable consequence upon the assertion of Assamese identity manifested through the issue of the language of the court and medium of instruction in government schools. From 1837 to 1873, Bengali was the language of the courts and government schools of Assam.  It was an administrative decision and it created a situation where Assamese was regarded as a dialect of Bengali. Baptist Missionaries put a stiff resistance to the language issue and they got the support from the early Assamese intelligentsia led by Anandaram Dhekiyal Phukan. Although the principal purpose of the missionaries was proselytizing, due to its traditional stress upon the development of the vernaculars, they did a very substantial amount of work in the standardization of Assamese. The contribution of the Baptist missionaries particularly of Nathan Brown and Miles Bronson in the enrichment of Assamese language is unrivalled in the historical narratives of Assamese nationality. The 'language or dialect' issue became quite an important issue for the later growth of Assamese nationalism within the British India and within the Indian Union. I need to elaborate this bit to highlight the significance of this decision. Modern linguists acknowledge that there is no parameter through which a language can be differentiated from a dialect. It is the claim of a set of people as the speaker of a particular language and the ability of that speech community to get it recognized by the other speech communities that makes a language 'a language'. But sometimes this process of claim and recognition is rather tortuous and may be full of conflicts as a neighbouring speech community who had successfully established its language variety as the 'language', might like to call the language variety of the newly aspirant group as the 'dialect' of its 'language'. In the formation of Assamese identity we can see that there was a conscious struggle on the part of the Assamese middle class intelligentsia to disclaim the assertion that Assamese is a dialect of 'Bengali'. And they were successful. Assamese nationality is often imagined by a common language Assamese within the geographical space called Assam and we can see the germination of this imagination in the work of the missionaries.
  
In the year 1793, an attempt was made in the British Parliament to make the East India Company responsible for promoting knowledge and learning in India, which eventually got passed in the form of a bill in the year 1813. But, before this bill got passed, two missionaries namely William Carey and John Thomas arrived at Calcutta and settled down in the Danish colony of Serampore at a distance of ten miles away from Calcutta. Carey's contribution to Bengal is a different story, but his decision of translating the Bible into different Indian languages and Assamese being one of them had a far-flung consequence upon the growth of Assamese nationalism. The Assamese New Testament came out in 1813 followed by the Old Testament in 1833. Although there were many Bengali and Sanskrit words in the translation, later pointed out by the scholars, the recognition of Assamese as a separate language is important.

There was a spiritual revivalism in America, called the Second Great Awakening during the period 1795- 1812. The new Awakening held up before the eyes of the people the dream of a happy unified world through the spread of Christianity in all the countries. Many people joined enthusiastically into the service of the Christianity. On 23 March 1836, two American Baptists, Nathan Brown and Oliver T. Cutter arrived with their families at Sadiya, an easternmost point of Assam. But the destination of Brown and Cutter's journey was not Assam but some points beyond. They expected to reach Golden Gate of Celestial Chinese Empire and also to reach the Shan tribes of Northern Burma and South China. But they missed both their avowed aims. After a series of misfortune and disaster they turned their eyes upon fertile soil of Brahmaputra which was rather peaceful and free from hostility of the tribes. Nathan Brown decided to publish the Bible once again in Assamese as he found the Bible translated by Carey as inadequate. The effort of the missionaries yielded some fruit and brought immense hope to the Evangelists.  Nidhiram was the first Assamese convert who later came to be known as Nidhi Levi Farwell. Another success came to the missionaries in the form Batiram Das (later known as Batiram Das Peck), a Kayastha youth who became the fourth convert by his own choice. But the success of the Missionaries was rather short lived. The new faith failed to penetrate the cohesive fabric of the Bhakti faith prevalent in the Brahmaputra Valley. The Baptist leaders saw it soon that they should turn their attention more towards the tribes living in the hills. But they did not completely pull themselves away from the plains. Let's see some of their contribution to Assamese language.
 
Nathan Brown's version of New Testament (a part) and his Grammatical Notices of the Assamese Language were published in 1848. He rendered some the Psalms into Assamese verse. He also made books on elementary arithmetic and (1845, 1855) and Geography (1851) for school children. His seminal contribution to Assamese Language was the editing of Arunodoi and unearthing of many old Assamese manuscripts.  The other great linguists Miles Bronson edited the Anglo- Assamese Dictionary which was the result of twelve years of his constant labour. He also maintained a continued course of correspondence with the company authorities at Calcutta to put Assamese in the schools and administration of Assam. The passion of establishing Assamese as a 'language' and to prove that it was not a 'dialect' was so strong in Miles Bronson that he organized many signature campaigns and put memorandums before the authorities. One such memorandum, dated 9 March 1872, has been called 'The Humble Memorial of Assamese community at Nowgong, Assam'. It bears the signature of 216 persons led by Bronson himself as the 'president of the committee'. On 25 July 1873 the Lieutenant - Governor issued orders under Act XXIX of 1873 (which gave powers to the Governor- General in Council to order the uses of any other language and script than Persian in lieu of the latter) and Section 337 of the Criminal Procedure Code for the use of Assamese in Kamrup, Nowgong, Sibsagar and Lakhimpur Districts in law courts and in all matters concerning revenue. The resolution of the General Department (Education), dated 12 April, 1873, moreover set forth the government's decision to use Assamese in place of Bengali in all primary schools, where the middle and high schools were to have the same rule. 

Arunodoi was published from the Mission press of Sibsagar as an effort of the Evangelists. The colloquial language of the common people was the language of Arunodoi. Once the language got written and printed, slowly through different processes of standardization it got accepted. Thus they played an important role in patronizing the standardization of a particular variety of language that came to be known as Assamese language and thereby fostering a strong linguistic identity among the set of people who accepted it as their language. The assertion of this linguistic identity led to the creation of a strong nationalism based on language, which I would try to deconstruct later in the pages of Jonaki. Another aspect of Missionaries' role can be analyzed in the claim of Arunodoi as 'A Monthly Paper, devoted to Religion, Science and General Intelligence', which I would analyze in my next posting. Readers, last but not the least it is often said in the linguistics "A Language Is a Dialect Which Has an Army."..........................




1 Baruah, Sanjib.2001.India Against Itself Assam And The Politics Of Nationality. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
2 Gait, Edward. A. 1990 [1905]. A History of Assam. Guwahati: Lawyer's Book Stall.
 
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