Assamese

১৮৩৬ চনত অসমীয়া ভাষাক বৃটিছসকলে অসমৰ আদালতৰ পৰা আতঁৰাই তাৰ ঠাইত বাঙালী ভাষাক স্থান দিলে। পিছলৈ অসমীয়া স্কুল সমুহো বাঙালী ভাষী স্কুললৈ সলনি কৰা হ’ল। বৃটিছ সকলৰ এই সিদ্ধান্তৰ মুলতে আছিল সেই সময়ত বৃটিছ সকলক  বাঙালীসকলে অসমীয়া ভাষাৰ বিষয়ে দিয়া  ভুল বুজনি। পণ্ডিত হেমচন্দ্র গোস্বামীৰ ভাষাত, “অসমীয়া ভাষা আদালতৰ ভাষা থাকিলে সিহঁতে কাম কৰিবলৈ টান পাব, সেই বাবেই সিহঁতে ইংৰাজ হাকিম বিলাকক বুজাবলৈ ধৰিলে যে অসমীয়া ভাষা এটা বেলেগ ভাষা নহয়। ই বাঙ্গালী ভাষাৰে চহা অৱস্থা মাথোন, আৰু অসমীয়া ভাষাৰে একো টান টান ভাবৰ একো কথাকে প্রকাশ কৰিব নোৱাৰি”। চৰকাৰী আৰু স্কুলৰ ভাষা বাঙালী হোৱাৰ লগে লগে অসমলৈ অলেখ বাঙালীলোকৰ আগমন ঘটিল। চৰকাৰী দপ্তৰবোৰত বাঙালী ভাষা নজনাৰ বাবে অসমীয়ালোক সকলৰ জীৱিকাৰ পথ বন্ধ হ’ল আৰু তাত বাঙালী লোকৰ  সংখ্যা ক্রমাৎ বাঢ়ি আহিল।  অসমীয়াই অসমতে বাঙালী ভাষাৰ বিদ্যালয়ত পঢ়িব লগা হোৱাত অসমীয়া মানুহৰ এক পুতৌ লগা অৱস্থা হ’ল। বিদ্যা- বুদ্ধিও সংকুচিত হৈ আহিল। বহুতে বাঙালী ভাষাত বিদ্যালয়ৰ শিক্ষা আয়ত্ব কৰিব নোৱাৰি আধাতে স্কুল সামৰিলে। আন কিছুৱে ৩/৪ বছৰ পঢ়ি বাঙালী  ভাষাটো যি ধৰণে আয়ত্ব কৰিলে সেইয়াওঁ সন্তোষজনক নাছিল। এবাৰ আনন্দৰাম ঢেকীয়াল ফুকনে বাঙালী ভাষাত পঢ়ি থকা অসমীয়া ছাত্র এজনক তলৰ শাৰী কেইটা বাঙালীলৈ অনুৱাদ কৰিবলৈ দিছিলে- “ইয়াত বহু ল’ৰা গোট খাইছে, আমি সম্ভবতঃ এই দেশ এৰি আন দেশলৈ যাব লাগিব। দুখীয়া মানুহোবোৰে ভাত মোকলাবলৈ অপৰিমিত পৰিশ্রম কৰে।“ ছাত্রজনে কথাখিনি অনুবাদ কৰিছিল এনে ধৰণে, “অহং স্থানতঃ অনেক বালক স্থিত হৈছে। অহং গ্রাম ছাড়ি ভঙ্গ হইয়া গমন কৰা হইল। দীন হীন ব্যক্তিয়ে নিত্যো বৃহত কৰ্ম্ম কৰে, আৰু অন্ন উলিয়াই।“

The propagator of Neo-Vaishnavism was Srimanta Sankardeva (1449-1568). When he was born, the socio-cultural situations of Assam were too much lamentable. Around then different misbehaviours were submitted for the sake of religion, which vitiated the social structure. There were individuals who approximately clung to Saivism or Vaishnavism and other people who rehearsed Saktism. The supporters of these factions enjoyed malicious practices like animal and human sacrifices, mystical ceremonies and so forth. Furthermore, the outcomes were poor people and oppressed individuals became survivors of these horrendous practices. To spare this circumstance Sankardeva, established the Neo-Vaishnavism in Assam, which is normally known as the Eksarana-Nam-Dharma. Sankardeva's Neo-Vaishnavism has given birth of new a social and social life for Assamese individuals and zeroed in on a public character moulded by social conventions and language through Cultural Nationalism, which presented to the Indigenous individuals with the assistance of Sattras and Namghar. Sankardeva was not only a religious propagator, but also a great social reformer and the pioneer of the socio-religious or cultural movement of medieval Assam in the Sixteenth Century.

The Assamese Novel were born since in the late nineteenth century. The influence of the western literature is significantly distinguished in early periods of Assamese novel. Nearly hundred and thirty years ago in the ‘Jonaki era’, different Assamese novelist tried their hands in contributing creation of the Assamese Novel. Among of those Padmanath Gohainbaruah, Laximinath Bezbarua, Rajanikanta Bodoloi was pioneer of the Assamese novel. Before independence, the main trend of Assamese novels was based on historical novel. After the 2nd World war and Independence of India, Assamese novel developed through various genres, especially the genre of social novels become very stronger. New genres of novel like political novel, biographical novel, detective novel, mystery novel, mythological novel, science fiction etc were also written after independence. In twenty first century, most of the novels have been written in the above mention categories, although the two strong genres have influence in the present Assamese novels, the first genre in genre of historical novel and second it is biographical novel. It is notable that contemporary Assamese novel reflecting the various issue of Assamese society also. This paper is trying to discuss about present scenario of Assamese novel.

A history of literature, in broad sense, also could reflect the transitions in thoughts, imaginations, ideologies and lifestyle of a specific linguistic community. The same could also be witnessed in the case of a history of translation as translation has been playing a vital role in the growth of different languages and literature of the world. The history of translation in Assamese is as old as the written Assamese literature. Though the role played by translation in the growth and development of Assamese language is crucial, an extensive history of translation in this language has not been compiled so far. At this backdrop, this article attempts to document various translation or trans-creation activities that took place in different periods or eras during the development of Assamese language and literature. While acknowledging the impossibility of documenting enormous amount of translations done over the years in such a small article, a sincere effort will be made to present an outline of translation literature in Assamese using the linear periodization as more often employed in Assamese literary historiography.

This paper argues that the formation of the Assamese society is a product of a historical process in which both the tribal as well non-tribal groups played equally important roles. As opposed to the contention that posits a binary opposition between the caste and tribes in the Assamese society, the latter represents a unique case of tribe-caste interaction.

This paper is a Bangla translation/elaborated version of the two English papers: Abstract ID: 2024842, and abstract ID: 2015951, though the India census reports since 1871 were put to show the lacunas of statistical survey techniques that helped to construct genealogical fantasy and nation statist boundary. Secondly, the tensed relationship between Laksminath BejBarua, an Asamiya writer, and Rabindranth Tagore was shown to understand the impact of extra-linguistic variables at the moment of a birth of nation in the context of colonialism. Thirdly, the role of print capitalism was depicted through the abstract ID: 2015951] endeavor of Fakirmohan Senapati, an Odia writer, by analyzing the discourse of his biography. [Cf. Otherwise the abstract of this Bangla paper is as same as Abstract ID: 2024842.
All the linguistic movements in colonial India lead to the demand/desire for autonomy in different spheres and were linked with anti-imperialistic nationalist movement, though on the contrary, all these movements had become the mirror image of dominant others’ nation statist mimic imagination. In this way, there was a demand for “autonomous” and “pure” tool indigenous grammar (free from “adulteration”) of a well-defined enumerated and “pure” language which is selected centrally as a standard language. Therefore language-managers of a given community did two things: a) they, as a member of imagined community, defined the language boundary (i.e. selection of standard and extension of the standard language from centre to periphery) and b) managed that language with the help of a tool called grammar.

In this paper, the author tries to show the Bengalee intellectuals’ (language judge/-police/-managers) perspectives (19th. C. and the first three decades of the 20th C) on the issue of autonomy of two neighbouring languages, viz. Oriya and Asamiya, two neighboring languages of Bangla. The paper shows a classical centre-periphery relation, where Bengal as a centre, wanted to subsume the periphery through hegemonic selving in course of standardizing and extending the political geography of Bangla with the supposed language module. The situation shows dialectic of hegemonic inclusion, which creates internal colonization, and thus captive languages with a feeling of derivative nationalism were trying to combat external colonization as well. These cases in the colonial period and at the time of the birth of a new nation states might help us to apprehend the post-colonial withdrawal syndrome from the other defeated varieties (i.e., so called “dialects”).

Śaṅkaradeva is considered as the master builder of the Assamese society. He was a great creative artist, an innovator, a motivator and a preacher of neo-vaiṣṇavite faith and ideals. Śaṅkaradeva laid the foundation of a culturally vibrant and rich Assamese society. The contribution of Śaṅkaradeva influenced the people of Assam as well as the economy to great extent. He always utilized the locally available materials and goods for his religious and cultural activity. The social reformative activities of Śaṅkaradeva had directly impacted the economy of the state. His persistent emphasis on improving the work culture among his disciples helped the enhancement of productivity in the economy. Utilization of his unique ideas of locally available materials boosted the economy of the society.

In the early nineties BJP politically aired a new slogan—‘Indianization of big cities’ since old names, to them were, symbolic to either Mughals or British slavery. The idea later became cheaper for all political parties with much vote bank credits.

And in the process Indian politicians spread a new virus in the world—every one has to redo or delete old data. The commercial capital of India Bombay became Mumbai, Madras changed into Chennai, the first British capital of India Calcutta became Kolkata and the hi-tech capital of India Bangalore followed to be Bengaluru.

Novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, written in prose form. It deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Novel can be considered as the mirror of a society. It’s a best way to reflect the social systems. Novel is an integral part of literature hence the novel has immense importance. Since the last part of the nineteenth century novel has been becoming an integral part of the Assamese literature. Various novelists are enriching the Assamese literature through their novel. Yeshe Dorje Thongchi is one of the novelists who through his novels contributed to the Assamese literature. His Mauna Onth Mukhor Hridoy is one such novel which elaborately depicting the tribal social life of Arunachal Pradesh

The tribes and tribal economies have variously been represented in the northeastern region as remote, paddy producing, and land scarce settlements where the populations use the community land and collective labour in order to practice the shifting cultivation. These economies do occasionally utilize the trans-Himalayan trade and commercial network to siphon off and mobilize the agricultural surplus. The reciprocity and redistribution institutions otherwise do function to fulfill the needs of the tribal settlement and population. The state is treated among the tribes as exploitative agency and virtually an outsider entity. These tribal economic arrangements are however, recently posited to be transforming into the peasant economies to budding agrarian capitalist frameworks. The emergence of tribal elites, de-peasantized population, sedentary agriculture and wage labor market are identified as indictors of changes and transition. The predicament is however the cavalier approaches towards the theoretical and conceptual schema in analyzing the transitions and transformations on the part of the regional social science scholars and academics. There is an added problem of the shortage of empirical data to support the thesis of mode of production transition in the region.

This paper looks at the acquisition process of Assamese classifiers by children and tries to determine the pattern of acquisition, indentify the age by which this process starts and find out the elements that influence this process. Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Northeastern part of India, has a numeral classifier system that consists of about 27 classifiers (CLF). The classifiers play an important role in Assamese grammar as they help the speakers to define the world in a systematic way. For example, the classifier – ʤupa is used for referring to trees with a bushy structure but for tree with a long stem, the round and long shape classifier – dal is used. The use of classifiers in Assamese is obligatory when referring to an entity in the [Numeral + CLF; Noun] and [Noun; Numeral + CLF] structure. For this study, data was collected from nine native speakers of Assamese (2 to 6 years), using semi-structured games and spontaneous speech recordings. The resulting set of 548 utterances contained 710 tokens and 14 types of classifiers. 545 of the 716 contexts for classifier tokens (76.11%) showed correct classifier use. Three types of errors were found: (i) 118 overgeneralizations (e.g. using the general classifier – tu instead of specific ones), (ii) 6 classifier omissions in Noun + CLF constructions, and (iii) 27 lexical errors (e.g. replacing – pah (CLF for flowers) with– ʤupa (CLF for bushy trees)). During the sessions even the 2 year old children never produced a single utterance of the bare numeral. This suggests that children have knowledge of the construction of numeral classifier phrases from an early age. It was also seen that there is a correlation of age with classifier and case blocking (the case markers were blocked by the use of classifiers and vice versa). Classifier blockings were reduced as the age of the children increased, whereas case blocking increased with age. This phenomenon was extensively noticed in the children from 2 years onwards.

After 10 years of the annexation of most part of the present day Assam into British India, the Missionaries have arrived in Assam in 1836. In April same year Bengali was introduced as the court language in Assam and the service of Bengalis became indispensible in education system which ensured Bengali to be the medium of instruction in Assam. Bengali continued to enjoy court language status until Assamese replaced Bengali in 1873. While nearly four decades of Bengali supremacy over Assamese in courts and schools in Assam worked adversely towards a sustained development of Assamese language, it eventually created a conducive atmosphere to develop linguistic nationalism in Assam, and with the help of missionaries, Assamese Language and literature entered into its Modern Age (1826-Present) during this period. This paper will attempt to trace the emergence of 'little nationalism' in Assamese vernacular history in such a linguistic revivalism. While this paper explores the contribution of informed Assamese youth and also missionaries in reinstating Assamese to its full glory replacing Bengali in 1873, it also opens up the complexities involved in Assamese 'little nationalism' in the context of post colonial Assam.

Human rights are those rights which are essential for all the individuals as they are consonant with their freedom and dignity and are conductive to physical, moral, social and spiritual welfare. Human rights are a birth rights of and individual, and therefore inherent in all the individuals irrespective of their caste, creed, religion, language, sex and nationality. Attaining equality between women and men and eliminating all forms of discrimination against women are fundamental human rights and United Nations values. Women around the world nevertheless regularly suffer violations of their human rights throughout their lives, and realizing women’s human rights has not always been priority. Achieving equality between women and men requires a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which women experience discrimination and are denial equality so as to develop appropriate strategies to eliminate such discrimination. ‘A Study of Women Human Rights of Bodoland territorial Council’ is based on some important assumptions on the Study of Women’s human rights especially in the BTC area. Bodoland Territorial Council is a Sixth Schedule area which was created on 10th February, 2003, and is basically a backward and one of the most conflict prone areas of Assam. Several types of common conflicts have been occurring in the region like communal conflict, ethnic conflict, insurgent and government conflict, parties’ conflict, etc. incidents of violation of rights of women have become a matter of serious concern in the rural as well as urban areas of the country. Women from economically backward and less educated communities have been primarily affected. This paper mainly focuses the study of women’s rights especially in the area of education, health, socio-economic, gender discrimination, domestic violence, unequal rights at the workplace and political participation of the Bodoland Territorial Council. The condition of women’s human rights in the Bodoland Territorial Council, is basically in education, health, socio-economic and political lower than in rest of the Assam.

40 lakh names struck off, Prateek Hajela’s team made an unpleasant joke with peasantry of Assam and a gigantic mockery of public resources.

However, Assamese people want NRC update work be done properly and professionally. They want to move ahead of this Hindu - Muslim, Assamese - Bengali and; indigenous and non-indigenous politicking now and focus on real development issues. Assam witnessed enough bloodshed in the past; it may need peace and unity as priority, nonetheless, an accurate NRC is everyone’s dream. This half-done work by Prateek Hajela’s team created additional issues with some hope and some dismay.

Cultural worlds are fluid, and so are humans. Assimilation and migration are intrinsic to any society. Thus Assam is not an aberration. Anyone studying Assam knows how complex and layered its history is. So it is obvious that the articulation of Assamese identity has also undergone multiple changes. The Assam Movement was primarily a cultural movement. It defined the measurements of the "son of the soil" and an outsider. On its aftermath, Assamese and Assam were viewed through certain fixed categories and a homogeneous self was projected through the movement. It also defined the migrant as an "illegal" or "alien" entity, who as a common enemy defined the Assamese self. I wish to share some time with the idea of culture in general and Assamese culture in particular, as articulated by two stalwarts of Assamese cultural and social world, Jyoti Prasad Agarwala and Bishnu Prasad Rabha. In their articulation of cultural worlds, one finds a fine balance of political emotions and freedom. In his novel Our Village, Agarwala writes: "Culture can distribute light in society." For him, those deeds, those thoughts, those actions that make one's contemporary life beautiful and meaningful are culture. On the other hand, those acts, thoughts, actions and behaviors that degrade people, that make people's life sad, corrupted, sick, unhappy, one that turns humans into demons, are against culture. The human journey is a cultural journey toward light and beauty. Agarwala thought that in worshiping that beauty we decorate our culture. "Worshiping beauty is culture," he writes. In this context, he recognizes the role of an artist in creating beauty. In his definition of an artist, even an intellectual may find a place for opposing cultural forces, for in their opposition, they protect beauty.

The cry for an abnormal Muslim population growth in Assam is a hoax. It is factually busted time and again but the political forces which find it suitable as polarization tool keep propping this issue as campaign material. An Army General should have avoided any public rhetoric on such politically heated issue.

Self-improvement literature is a popular genre. The author of the selfimprovement literature provides instructions for readers to solve the problems regarding self-improvement. Positive thinking and success are the main themes of selfimprovement literature. Self-improvement literature started as a genre in America. In 1903 Lakshminath Bezbaroa published the first assamese self-improvement book ‘Kamat Krititva Labhibar Sanket’. Assamese self-improvement literature has its own nature and characteristics. The aim of the study is to explore the origin and characteristics of Assamese self- Improvement literature.

In each and every natural language nouns play a very important role. A subcategory of noun is proper noun. They represent the names of person, location, organization etc. The task of recognizing the proper nouns in a text and categorizing them into some classes such as person, location, organization and other is called Named Entity Recognition. This is a very essential step of many natural language processing applications that makes the process of information extraction easier. Named Entity Recognition (NER) in most of the Indian languages has been performed using rule-based, supervised and unsupervised approaches. In this work our target language is Assamese, the language spoken by most of the people in NorthEastern part of India and particularly in Assam. In Assamese language, Named Entity Recognition has been performed using the rule based and suffix stripping based approaches. Supervised learning technique is more useful and can be easily adapted to new domains compared to rule based approaches. This paper reports the first work in Assamese NER using a machine learning technique. In this paper Assamese Named Entity Recognition is performed using Naïve Bayes classifier. Since feature extraction plays the most important role in getting better performance in any machine learning technique, in this work our aim is to put forward a description of a few important features related to Assamese NER and performance measure of the system using these features.

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) can be defined as a task that focuses on estimating the right sense of a word in its context. It is important as a pre-processing step in information extraction, machine translation, question answering and many other natural language processing tasks. Ambiguity in Word Sense arises when a particular word has more than one possible sense. Finding the correct sense requires thorough knowledge regarding words. This information of words is often derived from the sources such as words appearing in the context of the target word, part of speech information of the words in the neighbour, syntactical relations and local collocations. Our main aim in this paper is to develop an automatic system for WSD in Assamese using a Naive Bayes classifier. This is the first work to the best of our knowledge on developing an automatic WSD system for Assamese language. Assamese, the main language of most of the people in NorthEastern part of India is a morphologically very rich language. In Assamese WSD is a challenging task because a word can behave differently when combined with a suffix or a sequence of suffixes to have an entirely different sense. WSD often makes use of lexical resources such as WordNet, lexicon, annotated or unannotated corpora etc for its process of disambiguation.

A PhD studentship is available for UK and EU citizens only. The studentship will attract an annual tax-free stipend of £14,777 for up to 3 years, subject to satisfactory progress and will cover the UK/EU tuition fees. You should hold a first degree equivalent to at least a UK upper second class honours degree in a relevant subject. This project would suit a student with a strong background in international health policy and systems. Candidate whose first language is not English must provide evidence that their English language is sufficient to meet the specific demands of their study, the Faculty minimum requirements are: • British Council IELTS-score of 6.5 overall, with no element less than 6.0 • TOEFL iBT-overall score of 92 with the listening and reading element no less than 21, writing element no less than 22 and the speaking element no less than 23.

In history books, we often find terms such as partition, migrant, refugee, illegal immigrant and stateless person, which however do not reflect how emotionally loaded these categories became in the context of the Partition of India in 1947. The Partition and the ensuing migratory movements devastated a nation. At the same time, it created three new nations within the next three decades: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Partition destroyed homes on the one hand and designed new political spaces on the other. Minorities suddenly felt stranded on the wrong side of the newly created national borderlands as the partition displaced gigantic numbers of citizens on both sides of the border but also extended the living space (Lebensraum) for others. It created an unending caravan of people who fled from or to their ‘promised lands’, looking for shelter and refuge. In the eyes of some, the Partition of 1947 was part of a bigger and so-called better agenda, named “a process of nation-making.” But in reality, this event as a whole cautioned people that the home you have may no longer be your home tomorrow. It taught people that you might hate the neighbourhood you so fondly grew up with, as from one moment to the other you could no longer trust your neighbours. Above all, it created a South Asia which had not existed before; all of this in the name of ‘nation-making'. More than seven decades after the Partition, the entire process comes across as a catalyst for two key issues: one, how to negotiate with the mistakes that occurred in the past while designing future agendas, and two, creating new possibilities to introduce new policy-making, a new system of governance and treatment of the refugees-turned-citizens people displaced during and after the Partition.

The essay is a tribute to Dr. Amalendu Guha, the pioneer of Marxist historiography of Assam. It takes a synoptic view of his works, the debates they have generated, and their overall contributions to the understanding of the socio-historical processes of the state.

Word sense disambiguation is a technique in the field of natural language processing where the main task is to find the correct sense in which a word occurs in a particular context. It is found to be of vital help to applications such as question answering, machine translation, text summarization, text classification, information retrieval etc. This has resulted in excessive interest in approaches based on machine learning which performs classification of word senses automatically. The main motivation behind word sense disambiguation is to allow the users to make ample use of the available technologies because ambiguities present in any language provide great difficulty in the use of information technology as words in human language that occur in a particular context can be interpreted in more than one way depending on the context. In this paper we put forward a survey of supervised, unsupervised and knowledge based approaches and algorithms available in word sense disambiguation (WSD). Index Terms-Machine readable dictionary, Machine translation, Natural language processing, Wordnet, Word sense disambiguation.

Maulana Ajmal, a graduate from Darul Uloom Deoband, a fulltime philanthropist and a part-time corporate savvy he was, besides being a son of a rich man, Haji Ajmal Ali, has no political patrimony to inherit. His assets are his undying labour, passionate peacemaking and being with the people in need, even when he has not dreamt about knocking the door which opens to politics. An unorthodox but pleasant character, a distinguished personality and altogether a divinely gifted soul, he is hard to define in simple words. Ajmal – the beauty he is. His advantage is his strong faith; he is a silent fighter against all odds.

This version of Captain Hannay’s 1835-1836 journal appeared in several places in the late 1830s. This particular version was published in Selection of Papers Regarding the Hill Tracts Between Assam and Burmah and of the Upper Brahmaputra (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1873). It was been typed in and edited by Mike Charney (SOAS) for publication in the SBBR 3, Spring 2005 issue..

This project considers diverse histories of statelessness in the modern era, with particular emphasis on the non-European world. From international legal regimes and national political categorizations, to institutional and demographic encounters, stateless places and populations are prevalent, sometimes surprisingly so, in our world.

Editors:
Laura Robson
Wilson Center Fellow 2021-2022
Oliver-McCourtney Professor of History
Penn State University
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Jennifer Dueck
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Canada

Most strains of nationalism prefer homogeneity over heterogeneity. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its political arm the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is in power in India, are no different. They seek to create a Hindu nation out of India by erasing differences from a society that is steeped in diversity. Similarly, production of cultural homogeneity was one of the mainstays of the Assam Movement of the early 1980s in the northeastern Indian state Assam. It is through this movement that a singular, homogenous Assamese self or identity came to be projected. This projection, which continues even today with different agents and agendas, inevitably ignored the heterogeneous forms of life and culture in Assam. In such a milieu, the intellectual space also sided with such an understanding of culture or provided impetus to it. With the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process in practice, this homogenization of the intellectual space needs sufficient attention. Homogenization of intellectual space, writes Ernest Gellner in his book Nations and Nationalism, is possible when a culture starts to assert control over the state. This domination suppresses the heterogeneous ways of life and culture. By imposing a homogenous cultural world, preferably of a "high culture," it distinguishes itself from what it considers an inferior culture. In this process, there is a conscious drawing and redrawing of boundaries-of an insider and an outsider. Such a practice is further supported by a bunch of intellectuals who justify and promote such claims to culture. Culture is perhaps the most important element of nationalism. It maintains a close relationship with thought and power. Seemingly, homogenization of intellectual space and practice is one of the mainstays of narrow nationalism, which subverts all other forms of voice. The recent arrests of activists, lawyers and intellectuals are a case in point, where the state uses its legitimate power to suppress dissent or alternative articulations of history and culture.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is crucial when it comes to taking care of information extraction, question-answering, document summarization and machine translation which are undoubtly the important Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. This work is a detailed analysis of our previously developed NER system with more emphasis on how individual features will contribute towards the recognition of person, location and organization named entities and how these features in different combinations affect the performance measure of the system. In addition to these, we have also evaluated the behaviour of the features with the increase in training and test corpus. Since this system is based on supervised learning, we need to have a large parts of speech tagged and named entity tagged Training Corpus as well as a parts of speech tagged Test Corpus. The maximum value of performance measure of the overall system is obtained when the training corpus is of size with 5000 words and the amount of named entities present in the test corpus is 50 and the values obtained are 95% in terms of precision, 84% in terms of recall and 89% in terms of F1-measure. This work will add a new dimension in the usage of features for recognition of ENAMEX tags in Assamese corpus.

Language is an emotive issue. Assamese language for the Assamese people was no exception. During the colonial rule, a language as alien as Bengali, was introduced as the official language of Assam, stirring a commotion in the society. Assamese language was mired in different controversies as to its distinctness. Anandaram Dhekiyal Phukan is known in the annals of history as the greatest votary of the Assamese language. He is credited with the laurel of bringing Assamese to its rightful position. The paper tries to examine his role in the reinstatement of the Assamese language. Did he achieve it single handedly or in conjunction with like minded allies as the American Baptist Missionaries? It also explores other factors which may have incidentally helped in the reinstatement of the Assamese language.