A Critical Review of the First Travelogue written in an Indian language on Assam Udāseen Satyashrabār Asam Bhraman by Ramkumar Bidyaratna.

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]