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In India, language remains one of the most powerful symbols for the imagination of ‘national’ belonging. The history of the making of a multilingual nation reveals how some languages invariably become more powerful than the others. Also, if we dig deep into the history of one language, we can discern that one dialect becomes standardised as the mainstream, others end up being marginalised. The book raises these questions and tries to lucidly unpack the history of the politics of language in India for young readers., Debarati Bagchi originally wrote the book in Bengali, and Arup Kalita translated it into Assamese. Anwesha Sengupta and Debarati Bagchi served as editors of the book, which features illustrations by Ranjit Chitrakar and Sirajudaulla Chitrakar. Wasim Helal was responsible for the book's planning, map, and cover. This publication is sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung with grants from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of the Federal Republic of Germany. This publication or its parts can be used by others for free as long as they provide a proper reference to the original publication. The content of the publication is solely the responsibility of the partner and does not necessarily reflect the position of RLS.

In India, language remains one of the most powerful symbols for the imagination of ‘national’ belonging. The history of the making of a multilingual nation reveals how some languages invariably become more powerful than the others. Also, if we dig deep into the history of one language, we can discern that one dialect becomes standardised as the mainstream, others end up being marginalised. The book raises these questions and tries to lucidly unpack the history of the politics of language in India for young readers., The book was originally written in Bengali by Debarati Bagchi and translated into English by Arunava Sinha. Anwesha Sengupta and Debarati Bagchi served as editors of the book, which features illustrations by Ranjit Chitrakar and Sirajudaulla Chitrakar. Wasim Helal was responsible for the book's planning, map, and cover. This publication is sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung with grants from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of the Federal Republic of Germany. This publication or its parts can be used by others for free as long as they provide a proper reference to the original publication. The content of the publication is solely the responsibility of the partner and does not necessarily reflect the position of RLS.

This paper includes a detailed discussion on the intelligibility of the speakers of four regional dialects of the Indo-Aryan language of Assamese. Prior research on Assamese dialects mostly being confined to examining structural variation lends this study relevance and urgency. The dialects of Standard Assamese, Central Assamese, Kamrupi, and Goalparia, covering three varieties each, were considered for the study. Using a functional intelligibility testing approach, the rate of overall intelligibility as well as of inter- and intra-dialectal mutual intelligibility of the dialects were determined. 24 speakers (1 male and 1 female from each variety) were asked to record ‘texts’— words, sentences, and connected speech in their native varieties of Assamese. 11 listeners from each variety (132 in total) were then tested on their comprehension of texts from non-native varieties. Thereafter, their rates of comprehension were used to determine the rates of mutual intelligibility between speakers of the different dialects and varieties of Assamese. This paper establishes that the rates of mutual intelligibility are unequal and asymmetric among the dialects— the native speakers of the Standard and Central Assamese dialects were more intelligible to the speakers of Kamrupi and Goalparia than vice-versa. Finally, the paper finds that the rate of intelligibility is the lowest for words in isolation and reinforces the important role of context in intelligibility.

চোখ-কান খোলা রেখে ইতিহাস শেখা যায় কেমন করে? ইতিহাস-সচেতন হওয়া কাকে বলে? এইসব প্রশ্নগুলোর উত্তর খুঁজতে গিয়ে "ইতিহাসে হাতেখড়ি" সিরিজের কথা ভাবা। একেকটি বই একেকটি বিষয় নিয়ে। লেখার সঙ্গে থাকছে পটচিত্র শিল্পীদের আঁকা ছবি। ইতিহাসের নানা সময়, নানা জটিল ধারণা সহজভাবে বুঝিয়ে বলাই এই বইগুলোর উদ্দেশ্য। বইগুলো পড়ে ছোটরা প্রশ্ন করতে শিখবে- এমনটাই আমাদের আশা। "দেশের ভাষা" হল এই সিরিজের তৃতীয় প্রচেষ্টা। &nbsp

This work is about the cultural elements assimilated within Islamic community and aboriginal ethnic community of Brahmaputra Valley. The cultural elements are including language, literature, women, bieliefs and ideologies, customs and traditions. Muslims who come to this valley married to local women is rare to and historians were assimilation Assamese Society. It also deals with the assemblage of Muslim community in Assam and how they adopted the customs, traditions and culture of the Brahmaputra Valley and established an intermixed culture.

The study explores the entire journey of the Assamese cinema, which means a journey that will narrate many stories from its past and present, furthermore also will try to analyze its future potential. This paper deals with the trends emerging in genres, technical advancement, and visual representation along with a cult that emphasized the commercial success of cinema by toeing the style of Bollywood and world cinema. It explores the new journey of Assamese cinema, which deals with small budgets, realistic approaches, and portraying stories from the native lanes. It also touches upon the phase of ‘freeze’ that the Assamese cinema industry was undergoing due to global pandemic Covid-19.

I have received xenophobia and ethno-majoritarianism in the same nationalist legacy that ignites solidarities for collective subversion. Here, I explore my experiential heritage of Assamese nationalism via some personal sketches, involving people I have met and grown close to in different walks of life. I employ a psychoanalytical lens to contemplate the symbolic underpinnings of sublime patriotic imageries and therapeutically express the traumatic effects of hating Bangladeshi immigrants. Each section opens with a popular song that was freshly reimagined during the 2019 anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests. First, I argue that Bangladeshis, as signifiers of death, kill the Assamese subjectivity while staging a cause to become Assamese in the first place. Their presence represents our inability to recoup Assam’s many losses, inducing melancholic helplessness in the ethnos. Second, I illustrate how middle-class households internalise certain immigrants as domestic helps, appropriating their emotional and material labour in private to claim hegemony in public politics. Third, I demonstrate why Assam is doomed to extinguish its revolutions before they happen. Our nationalism is stuck in a pre-oedipal mess, too infantile to be anything but fearful of whatever seems like a threat to the motherland. Finally, I end on the future anterior that nurses the present with the assurance of uniting with the homeland despite all odds. That our citizenship robs immigrants of theirs, then erecting a mirror showing our own reflections as impossible citizens, is what I wish to portray here.

Nowadays we see huge amount of information is available on both, online and offline sources. For single topic we see hundreds of articles are available, containing vast amount of information about it. It is really a difficult task to manually extract the useful information from them. To solve this problem, automatic text summarization systems are developed. Text summarization is a process of extracting useful information from large documents and compressing them into short summary preserving all important content. This survey paper hand out a broad overview on the work done in the field of automatic text summarization in different languages using various text summarization approaches. The focal centre of this survey paper is to present the research done on text summarization on Indian languages such as, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, Assamese, Konkani, Nepali, Odia, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Telugu and Gujarati and foreign languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Persian, Turkish, Spanish, Czeh, Rome, Urdu, Indonesia Bhasha and many more. This paper provides the knowledge and useful support to the beginner scientists in this research area by giving a concise view on various feature extraction methods and classification techniques required for different types of text summarization approaches applied on both Indian and non-Indian languages.

Assam is a diverse land and so does it has a diverse expanse of folktale stories that widely shows the Assamese culture, the lifestyle and also its typical society. After reading the narratives of which has been taken in this research paper, the issue of women in Assamese folktales can be seen a matter of study and research, taking into consideration the aspects such as- position of women in Assamese society, identity of women, woman-woman relationship and women in the realm of class structure, and along with this a question definitely arises that do women have any hold of power in a society dominated by men and do they have any influence over the decision making aspects of men in a patriarchal society. The re-telling of Tejimola and The Tale of the Kite’s Daughter narratives is done with a feminist point of view where the role of the female characters emerge in a contemporary manner and not as what had been thought and said in earlier times. The main motive is to highlight how the women emerge as a strong persona in the patriarchal domain, although their age-old interpretations project them as weak, inferior and male-dependant.

Folk literature has come to be identified as one of the priceless resources of an indigenous community. Folk literature is an important carrier of culture, heritage and tradition of a particular cultural or linguistic community. In this context, Assamese „Biyanaam‟ are one type of Folk literature which falls into this mentioned description. The biyanam presented during such ceremonies reflect the socio-cultural life of the Assamese community. This trend showcases the myths, outfits, jewellery, food habits, the cultural ethos etc. This folk songs are called ‘Biyanaam’ (Marriage songs) as they are sung or played only on occasions of marriage ceremony. Rather it is the reflection of collective emotions as well as collective consciousness of Assamese people surfacing as or in the form of oral literature. It transforms and travels along with the changing currents of time. The „biyanaam‟ or “wedding songs” sung in a traditional Assamese wedding ceremony is an integral part of Assamese culture. An Assamese wedding household is practically incomplete without these wedding songs that are sung throughout various ceremonies by the ladies present there.

Natural language processing is associated with human-computer interaction, where several challenges require natural language understanding. The Word sense disambiguation problem comprises the computational assignment of meaning to a word according to a specific context in which it occurs. There are numerous natural language processing applications, such as machine translation, information retrieval, and information extraction, which require this task which takes place at the semantic level. To solve this problem unsupervised computation proposals can be effective since they have been successfully used for many real-world optimization problems. In this paper, we propose to solve the word sense disambiguation problem using the cuckoo search algorithm in the Assamese language. We illustrate the performance of our algorithm by carrying out experiments on an Assamese corpus. And comparing them against an unsupervised genetic algorithm that is implemented in the Assamese language. Results of the experiment show that the cuckoo algorithm can achieve more precision, recall and F-measure, attaining 87.5, 84, and 85.71 percentages respectively.

BACKGROUND Assam is in the North East of India. The earliest inhabitants of Assam were people who came from Southeast Asia. The ethnic communities constitute about 12 to 13 percent of the state population. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the carrying angle of the elbow in ethnic Assamese community. METHODS The study was conducted in the Department of Anatomy, Tezpur Medical College. Out of 225 students admitted in first semester M.B.B.S. in two consecutive years in Tezpur Medical College, 20 students belonged to different ethnic communities of Assam. The carrying angle of both the right and left upper limbs were measured in the twenty selected students. Evaluation was done following all legal formalities. RESULTS The mean carrying angle in males was 10.33 + / - 1.56 in the right limb and 12.11 + / - 1.72 in the left limb; in the females it was 11.73 + / - 2.73 on the right side and 11.45 + / - 3.26 degree on the left side. CONCLUSIONS The study was done to find the carrying angle of the elbow in the ethnic Assamese community. The results of this study will be of help in the diagnosis and treatment of deformity and injury around the elbow. KEYWORDS Carrying Angle, Elbow, Ethnic Assamese Community

The Koch language is spoken in the states of Assam (Goalpara, Nagaon, Dhubri, Kokrajhar, Chirang, Bongaigao, Barpeta, Baksa, Udalguri, Karbi Anglong, Golaghat districts), Meghalaya (West Garo Hills, South-West Garo Hills, South Garo Hills and East Khasi Hills Districts). Koches are found in West Bengal (Northern part) and also in Bangladesh. The speaker strength of Koch in India according to 2011 census is 36,434. Koch community is the bilingual speakers of Assamese, Bengali, Garo, Hindi, and English. Contact situations of Koch with Assamese and Bengali languages have made the language vulnerable to language shift. The UNESCO report mentions Koch as ‘Definitely Endangered’1. Koch has gained the status of a scheduled tribe in Meghalaya in 1987. Kondakov (2013) traces six distinct dialects of Koch, viz., Wanang, Koch-Rabha (Kocha), Harigaya, Margan, Chapra and Tintekiya. He (2013:24) states, “The relationship between the six Koch speech varieties are rather complex. They represent a dialect chain that stretches out from Koch-Rabha in the north to Tintekiya Koch in the south.” This is diagrammatically represented as - Koch-Rabha(Kocha)→Wanang→Harigaya→Margan, Chapra→Tintekiya where the adjacent dialects exhibit more lexical similarity than those at the ends. Nine ethno-linguistic varieties of Koch (also mentioned in Kondakov, 2013:5) have been reported during field investigation. These are Harigaya, Wanang, Tintekiya, Margan, Chapra, Satpariya, Sankar, Banai and Koch Mandai.

Feminist movement deconstructs the constructed images of women on the screen as well. The gap between real and reel woman is a vibrant topic of discussion for the feminist scholars. As a regional genre of Indian film industry Assamese film flourished during the third decades of twentieth century. Like the films of other parts of the world, Assamese films also constructing the image of woman, particularly Assamese women, in its own way of projection. Hence, this article is an attempt to explore the questions related to women’s representation by taking the films of Assamese director Dr. Bhabendra Nath Saikia as reference. Moreover, as per the demand of the article it will cover a historical overview of the representation of women in Indian cinema and Assamese cinema. Different theories from psychoanalysis and feminism will be applied to analyze the select movies.

The seriousness of pancreatic diseases and the utmost importance of its correct diagnosis and treatment are expected to be helpful in correlating the functional capacity for further study in basic science and in decision making in clinical settings especially in transplant surgery of pancreas. Knowledge of normal morphometry of pancreas in living subjects is essential for understanding the segmental resection of pancreas as well as pancreatic imaging. A descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted in the Department of Anatomy, Forensic Medicine & Pathology of Gauhati Medical College, Guwahati from May, 2016 to December 2019 on 103 specimens of human pancreas from 13 to 78 years age of both sexes. The collected samples were divided into seven age groups: A (10-19 years), B (20-29 years), C (30-39 years), D (40-49 years), E (50-59 years), F (60-69 years) and G (≥70 years), for convenient description. The differences between length of pancreas were statistically significant in A vs C, A vs D, A vs E, A vs F, A vs G, B vs C, B vs D, B vs E, B vs F and B vs G. The differences between weight of pancreas were statistically significant in A vs F, B vs C, B vs G, C vs D, C vs F, D vs F, E vs F, E vs G and F vs G. The present study is expected to standardize the morphology of pancreas in Assamese population.

Tai Ahom language is an extinct language only practice during the cultural events or rituals of Ahom people. Endangered archives programme of British library is one of the major initiatives taken for the documentation and archiving endangered heritages of all over the world. A project, namely “Documenting, conserving and archiving the Tai Ahom manuscripts of Assam” is an initiative of British Library where total 55 manuscripts collections’ containing 474 individual manuscripts with 15088 images of Sibsagar district of Assam was digitally archived. The study describes various attributes of those collected manuscripts. Analysis of the study shows that most of the manuscripts were created during 18th century in Tai and Assamese language. Various historical, astrological, spiritual writings of our forefathers are there. Some are fortune telling manuscripts, Mantras, Religious prayers are there in the manuscripts.

Word formation by derivation is very productive in Assamese. A significant amount of words in Assamese owe their origin to derivation. The analysis in this paper takes into account the derivational processes related with lexical word categories, and, numerous bound morphemes that are used in the derivational process in the language. This analysis helps us to understand some of the important aspects of Assamese morphology. These aspects are - role of class maintaining and class changing morphemes, derivation of word from synonyms, productivity of derivational morphemes, morphophonemic changes in root as a result of affixation of derivational morphemes, presence of allomorphs of various bound morphemes, ability of a morpheme to derive words from different word categories. The significance of this papers lies in the fact that these word formation processes could help develop morphological rules that can be used for developing computational morphological tools like- stemmer, spell checker, tagger etc.

Handwriting recognition is one of the challenging tasks in the area of pattern recognition and machine learning. Handwriting recognition has two flavors, namely, Offline Handwriting Recognition and Online Handwriting Recognition. Though, saturation level has been achieved in machine printed (Offline) character recognition. Presently, due to dramatical development in IT sector, touch-based devices are available in the market with efficient processing capabilities. With this revolution, research in the area of handwriting recognition has become more popular in real-time (Online) mode. In this paper, a comprehensive review has been reported for online handwriting recognition of non-Indic and Indic scripts. The six non-Indic-scripts and eight Indic script namely, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Roman, Thai, and, Assamese, Bangla, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, respectively have been considered in this article. This study comprises introduction of online handwriting recognition process, various challenges, motivations, feature extraction, and classification methodologies, used for recognizing the various scripting languages. Moreover, an effort has been made to provide the list of publicly available online handwritten dataset for various scripting languages. This study also provides the recognition and beneficial assistance to the novice researchers in field of handwriting recognition by providing a nut shell studies of various feature extraction strategies and classification techniques, used for the recognition of both Indic and non-Indic scripts.

In recent years a considerable attention has been given to the study of control and pro-drop. Languages with rich agreement patterns allow for phonetically empty subject which is called “pro”. This paper deals with the pro-drop phenomena of Assamese. The main objective of the paper is to give a descriptive analysis of the subject pronouns and their nature in the pro-drop phenomena. The paper also aims to give a basic idea of this pro-drop phenomenon and shows how certain subject pronouns behave differently in Assamese. Pro drop in Assamese is a major linguistic characteristic of the language. The findings of the study revealed that we can drop most of the subject pronouns in Assamese. Though Assamese is considered as a pro-drop language, this phenomenon is not acceptable in written language. The sentences should be in a full structural representation in written language. In other words, we can say that pro-drop is used in our daily conversations; it is more or less like informal conversations.

This paper studies the relationship of Language Learning Strategies (LLS) use and proficiency. Four hundred and fifty undergraduate Assamese ESL learners from three colleges of Dibrugarh University, Assam participated in the study. The aim of the paper is to investigate the relationship of Assamese ESL Learner’s use of LLS and reading and writing proficiency in English. A Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) based questionnaire is used to identify learner’s use of LLS and a reading and writing activity questionnaire is used to measure learner’s proficiency. The participants answered the instruments at the beginning of the experiment, followed by LLS instruction for four weeks and a post-test on the same questionnaires. The Pearson’s correlation analysis revealed significant positive correlation between the use of all the six types of LLS categories and learner’s proficiency in reading and writing, both in the pre and post-test context. The study recommends that LLS instruction should be integrated in the undergraduate ESL classrooms to increase learner’s proficiency in English.

Herbal medicine is currently experiencing a revival in the world, along with other complementary therapies such as traditional Chinese Medicines, Osteopathy and Homeopathy. Many of the pharmaceuticals currently available to physicians have a long history of use as herbal remedies, including opium, aspirin, digitalis, and quinine. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 80% of the world's population presently uses herbal medicine for some aspect of primary health care. Herbal medicine is a major component in all traditional medicine systems, and a common element in Ayurvedic, homeopathic, naturopathic, traditional Chinese medicine, and Native American medicine. The district of Lakhimpur, Assam, situated at the far east corner of North East India is a region of rich biodiversity. Because of its location at the foothills of Arunachal Pradesh, an environment with heavy rainfall and high humidity, conducive for a significant floristic diversity prevails in this region. The native people of this region, the greater Assamese community, therefore depends to a large extent on the varied plant species for food and medicine besides other uses. An attempt has been made to explore and enumerate the potential ethno-medicinal plants used by the people of Lakhimpur district, Assam. The survey was conducted in some remote areas of the district occupied by Deori communities specially restricted to Narayanpur sub-division and a total of 58 medicinal plants comprising of 39 families were recorded. The ethonomedicobotanical exploration is carried out by concerning of the people who are related with making traditional medicine that orally prescribed. Different parts of these plants are used by the local inhabitants for the cure of some common ailments occurring in the areas. The data includes the list of such medicinal plants along with their local names, families, parts used, the method of treatment and the disease cured.

Determining the nutrient factors influencing food choice provides important insight into the feeding strategy of animals, which is crucial for understanding their behavioral response to environmental changes. A bamboo‐leaf‐based diet is rare among mammals. Animals’ food choice and nutritional goals have been explained by several frameworks; however, the influence of nutrients on food choice in bamboo‐leaf‐based macaques is not yet available. Assamese macaques (Macaca assamensis) inhabiting limestone forests are characterized by such a bamboo‐leaf‐based diet, predominantly consuming young leaves of Bonia saxatilis, a shrubby, karst‐endemic bamboo. We studied the feeding behavior of one group of Assamese macaques using instantaneous scan sampling in limestone forests of the Guangxi Nonggang National Nature Reserve in southwest Guangxi, China. We compared the nutrient content of staple food and nonfood items and examine the role of key nutrients in the food selection of macaques. Our results showed that young leaves of bamboo B. saxatilis contained more water, crude protein, phosphorus, and less tannin than nonfood items. Furthermore, staple foods contained a higher content of water and less content of calcium than nonfood items. More specifically, quantities of water, crude protein, calcium, and phosphorus in food items were critical factors affecting feeding time on a specific plant item. Our results suggest that young bamboo leaves could meet macaques’ required protein and water intake, while enabling them to maintain their mineral balance, consequently facilitating to maintain the primates’ bamboo‐leaf‐diet in the limestone forest. Our findings confirm the effects of nutrient contents in food choice of Assamese macaques, highlighting the importance of the nutrient contents in maintaining their bamboo‐based diet and the need to increase the knowledge on their nutritional strategy adapted to the bamboo‐dominated diet inhabiting the unique limestone habitat., Using behavior and nutriology methods, we found that young bamboo leaves provided resident macaques required protein, water, and mineral intake, likely enabling animals to maintain bamboo‐leaf‐based diet with combining behavioral adjustment. Our results provide an important insight into the nutrition strategy of primates in responses to limestone forest, consequently further deepening our understanding in why animals maintain a bamboo‐leaf‐based diet from the nutrient dimension.

We report first country record of Boiga quincunciata (Wall, 1908) (Squamata: Colubridae) from Bhutan. This addition increases the ophidian fauna of Bhutan to 70 species and adds the seventh species of snake within the genus Boiga.

The Assamese buffaloes are being reared by the farmers/breeders for milk, meat and for draught purposes. These buffaloes are known for higher fat contents in their milk (8.5 percent on an average) and are famous in the market with a great demand and are known as “Khuti milk”. They are good source of livelihood for breeders and the graziers both in its breeding tract and have attracted researchers to consider the study of some important economic traits under field conditions. The present study was organized and considered the data on a total of 324 Assamese buffaloes distributed over three districts namely Kamrup, Nagaon and Darrang in Assam covering 35 khutis (open herds) during the year 2015-16 eighteen months. The lactation milk yield of Assamese buffalo was observed as 448.38±1.67 kg with a lactation length of 237.06±0.74 days and the peak yield and days to attain were measured as 3.41±0.02 kg and 54.16±0.19 days respectively. The reproduction traits like age at first calving, gestation period, service period and inter-calving period were considered for the study based on the breeders’ interview using pre-structured formats. The age at first calving was recorded as 52.28±0.81 months, the gestation period was observed as 323.10±0.68 days with an inter-calving period of 465.70±1.67 day. The service period and the dry period for these buffalo was 171.34±0.82 and 252.84±1.47 days respectively. The production and reproduction performance of Assamese buffaloes need special attention to be addressed for further improvements to help a large size of population of Assam, who are entirely depending for their livelihood on these valuable AnGR (buffaloes) of Assam.