Page:History of Asamiya Literature.pdf/7

PREFACE by Dr. SUNITI KUMAR CHATTERJI [Doctor of Literature (on Origin and Development of the Bengali Lar- guage), London, Emeritus Khaira Professor of Indian Linguistics and Phonetics, and Head of the Department of Comparative Philology in the Calcutta University, Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, Bengali Hony. Member, Soclete Asiatie, Paris and American Oriental Society] Assamese is one of the 14 main literary languages of India, taking its place beside lindi, Urdu, Bengali, Oriya, Nepall, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi on the one hand, and Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam on the other. For the last one thousand years, Assamese has been the cultural vehicle of the inhabitants of an important part of India, the valley of the Brahmaputra river; and this New-Indo-Aryan Speech has been the most important factor in welding together the various peoples of the North-Eastern corner of India Into a single unilingual unit, peoples of diverse ethnic origin, like the Aryans, the Dravidians, the Austrios (Kol or Nishada peoples), and most important for Assam and North- Eastern India, the Indo-Mongoloids (or Kiratas, as they were known to ancient Hindus). The three eastern-most speeches the great Indo-European family of languages, Assamese, Bengali and Oriya, are closely linked with each other; in fact they are like uterine sisters within the family. A thou- sand or twelve hundred years ago, Assamese, Bengali, and Oriya, virtu- ally formed one single speech. Their differentiation into three distant literary speeches as vehicles of three slightly different forms of the same Pan-Indian took place as a result of the ethnological, political and economic conditions in Assam, Bengal and Orissa during the last few hundred years. Grammatically this agreement is very close indeed. It is mainly in the recently accentuated habits of pronunciation that the differences are noteworthy. The literary output in these three languages have a very close family resemblanco. All these three have a number of common metres amongst themselves particularly the metres Inown as Payar and