Once out-of-print, now preserved forever: How rare 19th century Assamese journals are going online | North East India News

The range is immense: from love poems to political affairs, social commentary to children’s literature, humanitarian crises to tips on homemaking — all captured in an ambitious project to cover “every possible rare book and journal published in Assam”.

If a slim 16-page booklet, Gogona, provides an insight into the workings of a Bihu committee of Dibrugarh in the late 1950s, the 20 issues of the historic Orunodoi (1846), Assam’s first magazine, is a window into the social and political life of the time. There’s Jonaki (1889) that introduced romanticism in Assamese literature, Abahon (1929) that was considered to have pioneered photojournalism in the region and Ramdhenu that birthed a new crop of writers, many of whom went on to become the state’s leading literary luminaries.

The cover of a 1970 issue of Cartoon, a political satire magazine.

‘Like JSTOR, without the paywall’

An initiative of the Nanda Talukdar Foundation (NTF) and supported by the Assam Jatiya Bidyalay Educational and Socio-economic Trust, in its current capacity, Digitising Axom has journals published over a century, from 1846 to 1917.

The journals, in their entirety, have been sourced from the personal library of Assamese littérateur Nanda Talukdar, who died in a car accident in 1984. The demise was untimely and Talukdar, one of the state’s most well-known editor-biographers, left behind not just a rich legacy of work, but also a library of rare books and journals, collected over decades.

It is these that have been digitised now, with his son Mrinal, a senior journalist and author, driving the project. As a young student in western Assam’s Sorbhog town in the 1940s, Talukdar would pick up these journals and magazines on his way to school.

“I never got the opportunity to ask my father why. But I suspect it was just a deep affection for books and literature of the time,” said Mrinal.

What may have started as a hobby, soon became a conscious effort: by the time he was in his 50s, Talukdar was “consciously collecting” books, Mrinal said. The collection grew: from 100 books to thousands, and by the 1970s, it was no secret that the Talukdars’ home in Guwahati was a treasure trove of books of 19th and 20th century Assam.

Abahon, an important 20th century journal.

In the late 1990s, a decade-and-a-half after his demise, Mrinal inaugurated NTF in his father’s honour — the library and its precious collection of nearly 11,000 books became a draw for scholars and researchers alike.

“Since then, anyone doing research on Assam would come to our library — it was a space to learn, free for all,” said Mrinal.

But the books, delicate due to their age, bore the brunt. “It did not take me long to realise that these were precious books, and with each passing day, they were disintegrating,” said Mrinal. In 2003, he tried to salvage some of them, aided by the technology of the time: flatbed scanners and CDs. But without sponsors, servers and sufficient storage capacity, the project was called off. It resumed in 2021 — this time with financial support from the Assam Jatiya Bidyalay Trust, which runs a school, publishes books and works for the preservation of the state’s cultural and literary heritage.

Over the last two years, a team of three from NTF has been physically scanning pages of 19th century journals — which are then digitised and integrated online, and stored on a cloud server. The website, much like the NTF library, is free for use — in line with the fair use policy of the Copyright Act, 1957, which allows for non-commercial libraries and archives to make copies of copyrighted works for preservation and research.

“It is like JSTOR for Assamese journals, but without the paywall,” said Mrinal, in reference to the popular international digital library of academic journals, books and primary sources created in 1994.

Assam’s first magazine, Orunodoi, was published from Sivasagar in January 1846.

A rich repository

Scholars say that the merit of the project lies in its preservation and accessibility. Take for instance, Guwahati-based political cartoonist, Nituparna Rajbongshi, who remembers making multiple attempts to get his hands on a copy of Cartoon in the early 2000s, including seeking out its editor. “But even he did not have a copy,” said Rajbongshi. “Such a magazine was a milestone in the media landscape of Assam and reflected the spirit of democracy of the time… but not many people knew about it.” At least six issues (1968-70) of the magazine are now available on the Digitising Axom website.

Tanmoy Sharma, a research scholar at Yale University and a consultant to the project, described it as a “veritable archive for anyone interested in the history, culture and politics of Assam”.

“These journals and books have not only been out of print for decades but are not even available in most libraries… to digitise them is to preserve them forever,” he said.

While government archives, more often than not, house only official files and reports in English, periodicals and books published in the 19th and the 20th century are, in their own right, rich repositories of information and insights.

“For instance, if you are interested in understanding Assam’s society in the early 1900s, you would probably want to read the pages of Jonaki more than the minutes of an official meeting,” Sharma said, adding, “While the latter would give you a sense of what was in the deputy commissioner’s mind, the poetry and the prose of Jonaki would reflect the social currents of the time.”

A growing archive

While the project is entirely driven and funded by non-profits, with the support of some individuals, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma launched the website earlier this month. He appealed to the public, asking those who were in possession of such rare books to come forward and give them in for digitisation.

Mrinal stressed on how it was a “community” project. “Universities have already gotten in touch… We expect individuals or institutions, such as college libraries, to join in this community project and contribute,” he said.

Added Yale University’s Sharma, “It can enlarge and expand through continuous addition of new digitised materials without the mediation of bureaucracy.”

In the first phase, journals published between 1840 and 1970 have been digitised — a whopping 2,45,680 pages from 161 journals spanning 3,071 editions. The second phase of the project, which is under process, is set to cover books published between 1813 and 1962.

“The entire process is solely for preservation of literary heritage and academic research,” Mrinal said. “It can only grow from hereon.”