ABSTRACT
In Part I, I discussed how textual traditions of the pre-colonial and those from the colonial period onwards mapped socio-spatial relations. I also showed how textual traditions have been part of the region formation, whether of pre-colonial continental crossroad or colonial frontier. I argued that region formation in the trans-Brahmaputra Valley needs to be seen in terms of the nature of socio-spatial relations. The issue I tried to explore, therefore, was where, in the mapping of such relations, could literature be situated. I also showed how texts could develop narrative tensions when negotiating these socio-spatial relations. In the pre-colonial period, such narrative tensions became evident in the neo-Vaishnava texts. In the colonial period, the very idea of modern Assamese language and literature came to be riddled with the tension. I tried to identify the moments when such narrative tensions develop in texts. My answer was that when textual traditions faced erosion of the shared domains of socio-spatial relations across differences among the communities, the narrative tensions became evident. Whereas neo-Vaishnava literature and its attempted Sanskritisation created narrative tensions in Sankari culture, the ethnographic contradictions in the making of modern Assamese language and literature created such tensions since the 19th century. On the other hand, I discussed that narrative tensions did not emerge in the Buranji tradition in the pre-colonial period or in texts such as those of Bishnu Rabha’s in the 20th century. In both cases, texts tried to locate themselves in the shared mapping of socio-spatial relations that had historically characterised region formation in the trans-Brahmaputra Valley. The dialectics that I was trying to identify was the relation among the diverse and how it was mapped and negotiated in the pre-colonial and the colonial/postcolonial periods. In literature, I tried to identify how this dialectic operated and how texts tried to address or negotiate with this dialectic. I argued that for the Valley, the principle of correspondence between text and context needs to be situated in this paradigm.
