He said that the storytelling sessions jointly done with AIR Guwahati prominently featured stories from tribes as did the online poetry reading sessions. However, Saikia said the Sabha is working towards the direction. In fact, after independence, the presidents made a sincere effort to include the multiple communities residing within Assam,” he said, “Although, in more recent years that changed.” At one point of time, there was a great interest towards scholarly work and folklore.
“The digitisation project is a welcome initiative, especially because the Sabha’s popularity had waned over the years. The Sabha was established in the upper Assam town of Sivasagar in 1917 and is considered the state’s apex literary and socio-cultural body.Īccording to Avinibesh Sharma, who runs a Vintage Assam, a website dedicated to digitising Assam’s history, the Sabha’s initiative should also include photographs, apart from books and manuscripts. Apart from numerous webinars, online poetry readings, a collaboration with All India Radio’s (AIR) Guwahati division for a children’s storytelling program drew a wide range of listeners. “Hopefully, the same will happen with Google Translate soon too,” said Saikia, adding that the pandemic and lockdown gave a fillip to the organisation’s digitisation plans. In September, in what is considered a digital milestone for the language, Microsoft Translator added Assamese as the twelfth Indian language. Even though some community volunteers were doing it off and on, I gave a public appeal for wider participation during the lockdown,” he said. “For example, Google Translate is a community-based venture and it has to be fed by users. “They will be in-charge of searching for books and documents from different sources - whether from Naamghars, Sattras, libraries, or even personal individual collections,” said Saikia, who during the lockdown, worked on strengthening the presence of the Assamese language online. Saikia also stressed on how the 2,000 units of Sabha will be on the ground to catalyse the digitisation process. The Assamese script has, till date, been clubbed under the Bengali script. Unicode is a computing industry standard where characters of different writing systems are digitised and identified under separate charts made by the Unicode Standard Consortium. The Sabha now has an IT Cell which is shouldering the digitising initiative, with state-government owned (Assam Electronics Development Corporation Ltd.) AMTRON providing technical support.įor the team, spread across different Sabha chapters in Assam, the foremost responsibility is to make “contents searchable online.” “Usually material is digitised through images and PDFs – that is not helpful when you are searching for particular words or phrases,” said a Sabha volunteer, who is involved in the project, “But we are trying do it in such a way - using the Unicode - so that even if you search for it, you will be able to find words and phrases.” “It was widely accepted,” he said, “Digital technology has immense potential, it can take literature beyond boundaries by making it more accessible.” 2,000 state units activated
In his inaugural presidential speech at Sualkuchi earlier this year, he brought up the role of technology in the Sabha roadmap. Saikia, a Sahitya Akademi-winning writer, who was Assam Police DGP till August 2019, was elected as the Sabha’s president in January 2020. “We will also be collaborating with IIT-Guwahati, Tezpur University, Cotton University to build the digital archive,” said Saikia, “So far, there have only been piecemeal approaches to digitising select literature from these universities.” “And they can be in any part of the world,” added Saikia, “Many members of the Assamese diaspora particularly welcome this decision since all these years, they have had limited access to such material.”Īmong the texts that will be digitised includes the first Assamese language magazine/journal, Orunodoi, published in 1846, content from saanchipaats or 13th century manuscripts made of tree bark, old dictionaries as well as other “valuable books and writings.”
With digitisation plans afoot, a plethora of material will be available in a single place: an online archive accessible to the public.