ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, one of the consistent features has been the giving up of attempts at defining ‘Assamese’ and increasingly moving towards describing ‘Assamese’. This chapter presents four examples. The first two are cases when attempts at defining Assamese’ were critically assessed. The latter two are cases when the focus was on describing the north-east frontier, Assamese language being a descriptive tool in this regard. The latter two narratives are on the shared relation across communities in the trans-Brahmaputra Valley, and how any language or narrative can only describe the totality that they together comprise rather than represent. In this regard, it remarkably brought back the fundamentals of the historical Buranjis tradition, possibly the most successful textual tradition of the trans-Brahmaputra Valley. Also importantly, it raises the greatest possibility of once again picking up the broken threads of pursuing a common politics from within which Rabha had emphasised in the mid-20th century.
