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Opium was one of the highly valued-commodities traded in the northeastern frontier of British India. This article argues that the introduction of opium in the region was in line with the British policy of introducing high-value commodities trade in the colonies. This policy helped extract raw materials and expand exchanges in new territories. Second, this policy of introducing cash crops was subtle. Opium was introduced as a cash crop decades before tea was 'discovered' in the region. The acreage remained low as compared to tea plantations. Opium's value in terms of its revenue-generating capacity was the highest in comparison with tea and salt. Lastly, opium was disposed of through the state-run, monopolistic trade networks. Opium cultivation was discontinued in the British territories in Assam in 1860. All demands for poppy were subsequently met by importing opium from the rest of South Asia. The state-run and state-promoted tea and opium trades sustained the empire's control over resources and lubricated the state machinery. Monopoly over the opium trade was crucial to control labour/resources and finance the Empire. The colonial regime built the 'narco-state' in the northeastern frontier to expand and sustain its trading interests. The exploration of the colonial policies and measures in this regard also interrogates the nature of political economy in the region in the period under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of toxic comments on online platforms creates significant barriers to encouraging positive conversation and user involvement. The present research introduces a novel hybrid deep learning methodology that combines Bidirectional long-short-term memory (BiLSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures to improve toxic comment identification. The major goal is to improve accuracy and efficiency in detecting Assamese toxic content, particularly on social media sites. Due to insufficient existing datasets, information is manually gathered from a wide range of public domains, allowing for a thorough evaluation of the performance of the hybrid method. We used two alternative activation functions in our experiments: sigmoid and softmax. The sigmoid activation obtained 88.43% accuracy, while the softmax activation outperformed with 90.51% accuracy. We have also made an effort to use our suggested Approach in Bengali and Hindi, two additional Indian languages. Due to their comparable Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) linguistic structure to Assamese, we chose these languages, and the results have been fairly encouraging. The findings from the research are extremely significant since they highlight that the hybrid deep learning approach is a promising option for effectively identifying toxic comments on social media networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of false information in the digital age has led to serious threats about the veracity and dependability of information traded online. Fake news can exacerbate social and political divisions, as it often targets specific groups or promotes divisive narratives. This paper sheds light on the pioneering venture into the field of fake news detection in Assamese, filling a significant research gap that had previously remained unaddressed. A comprehensive dataset of 6,000 news articles was meticulously collected to aid with the proposed research. The dataset contains 3,000 true news items and an equal number of fraudulent news stories. A fake news detection system for the Assamese language was created in this work using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) models. The accuracy of the Bi-LSTM model was 94.17%, compared to the LSTM model's 93.50%. This research establishes a foundational framework for fake news detection in Assamese. The findings demonstrate the potential of LSTM and Bi-LSTM models for effectively preventing the propagation of fake news in the Assamese language and improving the accuracy and reliability of information in the digital sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing prevalence of regional languages, including Assamese, in user-generated content on social media platforms, has brought the problem of spelling errors into focus. In the realm of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, especially in hate speech and toxic comment detection models, the accuracy of spelling becomes of utmost importance to ensure that misspelled terms do not slip through undetected. This highlights the need for effective approaches to address spelling issues in such language-based applications. This research work suggests a novel approach for identifying word-level spelling errors in Assamese text. The approach employs two deep learning techniques, Long-short-term memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional Long-short-term memory (BiLSTM), to accurately detect misspelled words by analyzing the context of each word inside a sentence. The models are trained using a dataset of 2677 Assamese sentences that include both correctly and incorrectly spelled words. The LSTM and Bi-LSTM models have shown significant improvement over previous spelling detection research in Assamese. LSTM achieved an accuracy of 92.72%, while Bi-LSTM achieved 94.59% accuracy. These results highlight the efficacy of deep learning methods in identifying spelling errors in the Assamese language. By ensuring precise spelling detection and reducing misunderstandings caused by misspelled words, the proposed approach can be implemented to improve the reliability of NLP tasks such as identifying toxic comments and hate speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposed research investigates a novel approach of character-level Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) for part-of-speech (POS) tagging in the Assamese language. The proposed work contributes to Natural Language Processing (NLP) by exploring these models' ability to assign grammatical labels (POS tags) to individual words within Assamese sentences. The corpus encompasses 60,000 Assamese words and utilizes the LDCIL Assamese tagset. For training and testing, the corpus is divided into an 80:20 ratio where 80% of the corpus is used for training the models, and the rest of 20% is used for evaluation. The character-level LSTM model achieves an accuracy of 92.80%, while the character-level Bi-LSTM model surpasses it by achieving an accuracy of 93.36%. The performance of the proposed research outperforms the existing research works in the Assamese language. The results of this work broaden the understanding of POS tagging in Assamese, offering valuable findings that could be applied to other languages with similar characteristics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is concerned with automatically assigning the appropriate sense to an ambiguous word. WSD is an important task and plays a crucial role in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. A Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system translates a source into a target language based on phrase-based statistical translation. MT plays a crucial role in a WSD system, as a source language word may be associated with multiple translations in the target language. This study aims to apply WSD to the input of the MT system to enhance the disambiguation output. Hindi WordNet was used by selecting the most frequent synonym to obtain the most accurate translation. This study also compared Naïve Bayes (NB) and Decision Tree (DT) to test and build a WSD model. NB was more appropriate for the WSD task than DT when evaluated in the Weka machine learning toolkit. To the best of our knowledge, no such work has been carried out yet for the Assamese Indo-Aryan language. The applied WSD achieved better results than the baseline MT system without embedding the WSD module. The results were analyzed by linguist scholars. Furthermore, the Assamese-Hindi transliteration system was merged with the baseline MT system for the translation of proper nouns. This study marks a remarkable contribution to Assamese NLP, which is a low computationally aware Indian language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hate speech detection research is a recent sizzling topic in natural language processing (NLP). Unburdened uses of social media platforms make people over-opinionative, which crosses the limit of leaving comments and posts toxic. A toxic outlook increases violence towards the neighbour, state, country, and continent. Several laws have been introduced in different countries to end the emergency problem. Now, all the media platforms have started working on restricting hate posts or comments. Hate speech detection is generally a text classification problem if considered a supervised observation. To tackle text in terms of computation perspective is challenging because of its semantic and complex grammatical nature. Resource-rich languages leverage their richness, whereas resource scarce language suffers significantly from a lack of dataset. This paper makes a multifaceted contribution encompassing resource generation, experimentation with Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL) and state-of-the-art transformer-based models, and a comprehensive evaluation of model performance, including thorough error analysis. In the realm of resource generation, it adds to the North-East Indian Hate Speech tagged dataset (NEIHS version 1), which encompasses two languages: Assamese and Bodo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyse and describe the nature of morphophonemic variation in the nominal morphology of Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Assam. Previous discussions of morphophonemic variation in the language have focused on the phonological aspects of such variation (Goswami and Tamuli, 2003: 410-13). However, the present study seeks to examine the nature and range of phonological variations within morphemes triggered by nominal morphological processes such as (a) deictic inflections for relational nouns, (b) case inflections for nouns and pronouns and (c) nominal word-formation via derivation and compounding.Identifying the phonological and morphological factors behind the morphophonemic variation in nominal morphology will serve to uncover the patterned nature of the underlying regularities of a major area of Assamese grammar. Moreover, in seeking to align the morphophonemic variations with specific nominal morphological processes rather than treating them in intrinsic phonological terms, this study proposes to highlight the interdependent functioning of the levels of analysis. Such functioning is evident in instances of phonological variations within morphemes that serve to mark different grammatical functions in the language. In addition to such descriptive considerations, the range of variations and their associated morphological processes can also shed light on specific aspects of diachronic change when they are cross-linguistically compared with cognate languages. The study will be based mainly on corpus data using the empirical methodology of corpus linguistics. Supplementary introspective data will also be used where necessary.

The present paper is an attempt to analyze and discuss some important concepts relating to the conditional conjunctions in Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in Assam. This study explores the form, function and distribution of conditional conjunctions which are used to describe a condition. Conditional conjunctions enable non-finite forms to express conditionality and temporal circumstances. The study focuses on one important way of introducing the structure of condition in Assamese by suffixation to the verb root. The verb of the dependent clause of a conditional sentence carries the inflectional morpheme as a non-finite form, which is not fully inflected for tense and person. The non-finite forms which are used to indicate the function of conditional marker will be discussed. While discussing the function of conditional conjunction as part of sentence structure, the subject-verb agreement of the dependent clause and the temporal expression of the inflectional form will be examined. Most of the examples in this paper are taken from the author’s own native speakers introspection, but some of the examples were first observed in The CIIL-Lancaster Assamese Corpus.

Linguistic landscape refers to the study of the languages that are seen in the public spaces of a given area. It is a way of observing the language use in a particular region and the visibility of different languages. Linguistic vitality, which refers to the strength and status of a language, is also studied through the process of linguistic landscape analysis. The study of the linguistic landscape of Sivasagar town focuses on identifying the languages that are visible in public spaces, such as signs, advertisements, and street names. It aims to determine the dominant languages and the representation of other languages in the town's linguistic landscape. By analysing the languages seen in the town's public spaces, the study provides insights into the linguistic diversity of the area and the relative status of different languages. The data has been analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings suggest that English is the major language found in the linguistic landscape, followed by Assamese and Hindi. Other languages are not visible in the landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study discusses the outcomes of the contact and diffusion in two contact varieties of Assamese with respect to classifiers. The findings suggest that while classifiers have remained remarkably stable in their characteristics in Assamese over the past 160 years, during the same period, one of the contact varieties (Nagamese) has significantly diverged from the source language, and the other variety (Nefamese) displays greater continuity. The divergence in Nagamese is attributed to the substratal effect which has altered its characteristics associated with numerals and quantifiers in the source language, thereby making it more congruent with the host Naga languages. By concentrating on a smaller part of the region spanning three contiguous states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Nagaland from Northeastern India, the findings also help unlock in small ways the mysteries surrounding the diversity of classifiers arising out of areal diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1903–1928) is one of the most complete sources on South Asian languages. It has influenced all subsequent studies of the language situation in India. However, there are indications in the Survey's volumes, in its unpublished files, and in Grierson's correspondence, that extra-linguistic considerations affected his approach to some Indian languages. Drawing on these sources, this essay focuses on Panjabi, Siraiki, Assamese, and Hindi-Urdu. It shows how factors stemming from Grierson's views on religious difference and on language as a basis for nationality, as well as colonial politics of governance, may have influenced his characterisations of these languages. However, this does not invalidate the Survey, which is not straightforwardly 'colonial'. Moreover, each of these languages is also described using linguistic argumentation, as reflected in the LSI's skeletal grammars and its focus on dialectal variation. As such, we have to work with this tension in the LSI, without trying to resolve it either by rejecting the Survey in toto because of the instances of politics affecting its analyses, or by accepting it wholesale while ignoring the extra-linguistic considerations which influenced how it characterised some Indian languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to be a writer from Northeast India? What does it mean to write from the margins of India? What are the limitations of Indian English writing when it comes to depicting marginal, radical literary traditions that question the idea of India? The author of The House with a Thousand Stories and There Is No Good Time for Bad News, Aruni Kashyap, shares his formative experiences as a writer, including the influences of Indian writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Assamese literary culture, and Indigenous oral storytelling traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The writing of Buranji in the geographical area that we now call Northeast India began with the establishment of Ahom kingdom in 1228 CE. The first Ahom king, Sukapha, who came along with soldiers and kinsmen from upper Burma ordered the writing of buranji as a part of documenting the battles they fought, incidents that took place, followers they gained etc. Initially, the buranjis, which were either written under the orders of the king or by noblemen who wanted to record and authenticate their illustrious lineage, were written in Tai Ahom language, but later these chronicles began to be written in Assamese. The Ahom buranjis not only dealt with the royal family and polity but also with the neighbouring kingdoms with whom battles were fought or had diplomatic relations. Thus, Tripura Buranji, Jaintia Buranji, Kachari Buranji etc were written. Unlike modern historiography based on rationalist-positivist model, the buranjis, though they chronicle and narrate facts and events based on state documents and other archival material kept in Gandhiya Bharal, are imbricated with myths, legends and non-linear time. Therefore, buranjis are often coupled with literature, unlike the western disciplinary project of historiography which, nevertheless, has been critiqued by scholars like Hayden White, K. M. Pannikar among others. The article, taking into consideration Suryya Kumar Bhuyan’s model of vernacular history writing, examines how the buranjis constitute a unique form that is indigenous and considerably different from the western paradigm of historiography disseminated by the colonial project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent years the Automatic speech recognition systems have made vivid acts. Still, the key to making recognition more robust is to reduce the difference between training and testing with speech that commonly held. The postulation of ASR (Automatic speech recognition) is becoming less and less feasible, because ASR applications change from firmly measured to more usual situations with a erratic number of random sound bases. Decoding the speech source of interest while listening to several sound sources at the same time seems a more accurate description of the ASR process with different features that suits these challenging environments. The aim is to compare the accuracy with different features at different instance for robust ASR into two sub-problems:(a) identification/separation of the speech and noise using speech properties alone and (b)recognition based on the comparison of the accuracy and entropy. The basic assumption is that some regions of the speech time-frequency representation remain relatively unaffected by the noise, that they can be identified and that they alone are sufficient for ASR. In contrast to conventional techniques which require models of all sources in the auditory scene and their subsequent decoding even when only one of the sources is of interest, the techniques described in this paper make no such requirement. However, they are flexible enough to use this information if itis available. In the adaptation of a conventional Hidden Markov model (HMM) based ASR system two techniques are used for partial indication: (i) down grading of the state dispersals, so that only the likelihood of the reliable sections are evaluated; and (ii)attribution of the undependable sections by replacing the unreliable features with a single point from the community restricted deliveries. In the experiments, the reliable features are identified via clustering accuracy derived through Kmeans clustering. The potential of the techniques is indicated by using the clean speech to identify the reliable regions in the noisy speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the life of human being, communication is the key element for the evolution in various fields. Information passing to the right person following exact manner helps in both commercial and delicate stage. Now we are living in a digitized world and every means of communication is only machines such as Phone calls, text messages, talking toys, vedio games, robots etc. are information communicator. Many applications have been developed to achieve the effectual communication between two sides without any disturbances. The applications act as a mediator helping in message delivery system in different forms like: coding, text, speech signals or facial expressions. The different areas of articulatory and acoustic-based speech recognition system, conversion from speech signals to text, syllable extraction and from text to synthetic speech signals, language translation, intelligent toys, human structured robots, psychological treatment and emotion recognition; where the applications have been widely used today. Through this review paper, we have observed different analytical reports of various speech feature selection methods, various clustering techniques and coding algorithms that have been applied in voice signals to attain the stated deliverables and will focus on the supervised and unsupervised techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Assam lies nestled in the far north-east corner of the Indian subcontinent. A country blessed with ample natural resources, the state of Assam also has a plethora of options in terms of choosing their core food sources. Banana or kol, as named in Assamese, has hundreds of varieties available in many parts of the world. They grow particularly well in tropical countries. It is found abundantly in the state of Assam and people have been making judicious use of the fruit and its plant parts in their cuisine since time immemorial. But nevertheless, a detailed review on its uses and importance and rising popularity in ethnic delicacies has not yet been documented well. This paper attempts to bring together the popular banana-based recipes of Assam state and its use in everyday religious ceremonies by the people of this community. It has age-old recipes used commonly in Assamese households and descriptive analysis of their microbial and biochemical diversity. It aims to bring to the fore the rising popularity of these ethnic dishes amongst modern population and is an attempt to revive these dishes and bring them into the mainstream Indian ethnic cuisine. As more and more people become aware of ethnic cuisine, it increases a global connectivity based on exchange of such information from lesser-known sources. The importance and significance of documenting these lesser-known recipes of Indian Assamese cuisine is an attempt to keep it relevant and take it to a broader audience who are appreciative of such oriental dishes. It is also high time a policy framework is worked upon by respective government of state and the centre for the true recognition and sustainability of such ethnic cuisine.

The paper reports on the changing phase of sociolinguistics in India. The early phase of sociolinguistically oriented research is located within the philological tradition of India which ruled the early phase of the modern linguistics activities. The next phase was led by Gumperz and Pandit, who were deeply influenced by Emeneau, particularly with reference to outcomes of stable bi/multilingualism. Post Pandit, sociolinguistics in India took a major applied turn which lasted for nearly three decades. Beginning 2000 saw a variationist wave in sociolinguistics in India which has got stronger over the years. The paper analyses the factors that were responsible for the various turns that Sociolinguistics took over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hunting encompasses a range of sensory experiences such as sight, smell and taste (game as food). On the tea frontier of British Assam, such a sensory world of hunting was closely connected to the ideas and practices of empire, as well as to the production of the global commodity of tea. In this regard, A.R. Ramsden's memoir, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in Assam (1945), provides a rich illustration of sensory experiences in the making of such a tea frontier and a global commodity. Furthermore, the memoir is constituted through the complex interplay of senses that is mapped onto the plantation social order. In the process, the sensory experiences of the 'sahib' and the 'native' are organised in an imperial narrative of tea and frontier-making. Yet, given its historical moment, the context of imperial crisis is also reflected in the memoir through the contradictions of sensory experiences and, thereby, the problems faced in producing the imperial narrative of tea and frontier-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reluctance shown by Assamese speakers towards their mother tongue in the present context in the future are honestly pushing the language to the brink of death. Today we live in a society where there is no lacking of parents who are proud to say that their children do not know how to speak their mother tongue. However, there is no shortage of students in the same society who have a keen interest in understanding their mother tongue well. As a result of such mentality, a large number of students have chosen the Assamese subject as their Major paper. This paper attempts on discussing how the presentcurriculum has helped students pursuing Assamese as a Major subject and what additions to the present curriculum would prove to be beneficial. This paper would be carried forward in analytical method and in doing so, the Assamese Language and Literature curriculum of some colleges and universities in Assam has been used in the preparation of the dissertation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online handwriting recognition (OHR) has gained major research interest not just due to the enormous technological advancement in recent years, but also the easy availability of the various electronic devices. This digital revolution is opening up a new dimension in every passing day to the regional and low resource languages with these languages get noticed by the researchers. In this paper, we have targeted a low resource language, Assamese, which is mainly spoken in the eastern region of India. We have proposed a novel and efficient feature vector for recognition of online handwritten Assamese numeral images. Our feature vector has been conceptualized based on the properties of light rays emerging out from a point source. Here we consider that there are multiple hypothetical light emerging sources in a sample numeral image. The amount of light fenced by the image is quantified and considered as a feature. The idea of using point light source to estimate the shape of online handwritten numerals is completely new and efficient. Impressive recognition accuracy is obtained on application of the feature vector on a standard online handwritten Assamese numeral database and it outnumbers some popular and standard feature descriptors, available in the literature. The source code of this work can be found in the following github link: https://github.com/ghoshsoulib/CTRL-Assamese-Digit-Recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture is the life blood of a society. Culture goes on at a consistent pace crossing all limits and borders. The river is a wonderful creation of world nature. 'Brahmaputra' is one of the largest rivers in the world. This discussion paper attempts to discuss the impact of the river 'Brahmaputra' on folk culture which is an integral part of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Out of the several modern Indo-Aryan languages that evolved in the eastern part of India, Assamese and Bengali are the two most prominent ones. Though both these two languages reached their respective present existence after passing through different phases of development, yet their roots are the same. Therefore, between both languages, there are many similarities even though both have evolved in distinctly different geographical areas, and there exist distinct differences between them. The differences not only create the distinction between them but also express their individuality too. In both, languages, pronoun and pronominal have occupied an important role in the discussion of morphology. Along with pronoun, the use of various pronominal which have evolved from the same root has flourished in both the languages. In this regard, both similarities and differences could be noticed in these two languages. Therefore, to identify the co-relation as well as the linguistic characteristics of both the languages, the comparative analysis is the only way out. In this study, an attempt is made to focus on how the pronominal of both languages are used to identify the similarities and differences between the two languages.

The complex pattern of exceptionality in Assamese vowel harmony is taken to be one of the strong empirical arguments for an OT-system with lexically indexed constraints that are locally restricted (e.g. Mahanta 2008; 2012; Pater 2010). In contrast, we argue that the two exceptionality patterns in Assamese are not an argument for the assumption of lexically indexed constraints but instead fall out as an epiphenomenon from well-known mechanisms of phonology. We present two possible purely phonological reanalyses, each assuming a different vowel feature system: One based on floating features and constraint ganging and another based on floating features and underspecification. These phonological reanalyses have important consequences not only for the argument of a strictly modular phonology that disallows any reference to morpho-syntactic features (e.g. Bermúdez-Otero 2012; Bye & Svenonius 2012), they also shed new light on the possible different sources of apparent exceptionality. More concretely, both reanalyses take the exceptional trigger for vowel harmony to be a standard instance of an unassociated feature that needs to dock to a host. An additional exceptional undergoer for another vowel harmony process receives two different interpretations that depend on the assumed vowel feature system: It is either predicted from simple underspecification that makes vowels without contrasting counterparts more prone to phonological changes or it is interpreted as a phonologically Derived Environment Effects that easily falls out from constraint ganging in Harmonic Grammar (Legendre et al. 1990; Smolensky & Legendre 2006; Potts et al. 2010).

This chapter is a short thematic introduction to the papers that appear in this special volume on the phonetics and phonology of a selective but representative set of languages from the South Asian sprachbund. The volume consists of five papers that engage with a broad set of topics, namely, acoustics of Kalasha affricates, perception of breathiness in Gujarati, syllable structure of Kuki-Chin, syllable structure and incipient vowels in Lamkang, and vowel harmony in Assamese. These papers, we hope, are representative in terms of the choice of theoretical frameworks and methodologies employed in addressing the various linguistic phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on impressionistic and acoustic data, Assamese is described as having a phonological tongue root harmony system, with blocking by certain phonological configurations and over-application in certain morphological contexts. This study explores physical properties of the patterns using ultrasonic imaging to determine whether the impressionistic descriptions match what speakers actually do. Principal components analysis (PCA) determines that most participants produce a contrast in tongue root position in the appropriate contexts, though there is less of an impact on tongue root with greater distance from the triggering vowel. Analysis uses the root mean squared distance (RMSD) calculation to determine whether both blocking and over-application take effect. The blocking results conform to the impressionistic descriptions. With over-application, [e] and [o] are expected; while some speakers clearly produce these vowels, others articulate a vowel that is indeterminant between the expected [e]/[o] and an unexpected [ɛ]/[ɔ]. No speaker consistently showed the expected tongue root position in all contexts, and some speakers appeared to have lost the contrast entirely, yet all are considered to be speakers of the same dialect of Assamese. Whether this (apparent) loss is a consequence of crude research methodologies or accurately reflects what is happening within the language community remains an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a cultural artefact, the dress holds an important position in everyday life. Other than covering one's body, it is representational and can be linked to questions of identity, nationalism, status, class and caste. This paper highlights the importance of clothing as a significant part of material culture and analysing the factors that have influenced the change in women's dress in different periods during the twentieth century Assam. It discusses the symbolic value and meaning attached to the dress and explains how it becomes a carrier of ethnic identity and class. The finding in the study is based on a structured interview using a visual ethnographic tool (photographs) as well as literature selected purposively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travel narratives usually provide ethnographic information about a place and its inhabitants. The travelogue written in 1881 by Ramkumar Bidyaratna gives an excellent ethnographic account of contemporary Assam and Assamese society of the nineteenth century. The travelogue, which was originally written in Bengali, was translated into Assamese by Munin Sarma in 2014. The book is significant for its prudent comments on various socio-cultural aspects of the Assamese society like – condition of Assamese women, widow remarriage, commerce, religion, etc. As stated in the translated version, Bidyaratna's travelogue was probably the first travelogue on Assam written in an Indian language. There was an aim behind Bidyaratna's travel to Assam. From his experiences from his travel to places outside Bengal he had developed a belief that unless one gets associated with another culture, it is natural to have a wrong notion about that culture. His aim was to eradicate misunderstandings between the Assamese and the Bengalis. In this present study, the Assamese version of the travelogue has been used to explore and interpret the sociocultural milieu of Assam as represented in the narrative. This paper critically reviews the book, firstly, to explore the way ethnographic information about Assam has been represented in it; and, secondly, to generate an understanding of the progressive thinking of the writer as evident from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]