ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the impact of language codification on narratives in modern Assamese novels and short stories, the predominant Assamese literary forms of the 19th and 20th centuries. When the ethnographic contradiction in modern Assamese and narratives in fiction writing is seen in isolation, its peculiarity dissolves in the generality of the problem common to numerous languages and literatures in modern South Asia. Such approaches classify literatures that deviate or seek alternatives from the linguistic/narrative standard as ‘regional’ literature. It can be argued that modern Assamese literature, even in the late 19th century, did indicate that the larger Assamese universe was comprised of enormous ethnic diversity. It was only that Seuji Patar Kahini was one of the first to make a case for it vis-à-vis the tea plantation world. Such contemporary research played a pioneering role in opening up the analysis of state and nation formation and its practice at the frontier.
