Given the unique features of the Assamese language, there is no way `Assam' can be accurately transcribed in the English script.
THE Good Book says that In the Beginning was the Word, ... and the Word was God. However, it is the Sound, whether as sacred and celestial music prefiguring language or as the earliest incoherent articulations of speech, that has always preceded the more consciously formed Word, the building brick of that wonderful human artefact, language, as used and theorised by humans since unremembered times. Thus, even within the framework set by the cited text, nada brahma precedes shabda brahma.
When a sound or a combination of sounds acquires or is invested through an indefinable process of fusion and diffusion of material and cultural osmosis an identity, transcending from merely being a sound and becomes a word and a name or, as nomenclature, part of an organised system of names linked to and deriving from one another and so constituting a history in the broadest sense of that term, the result is magic. Such words and names hold meanings that may not be fully comprehended by even those who as a people have collectively given these names and words to themselves, or to the other sentient entities and inanimate objects associated with them
This is as it should be. Not merely is this true of names of individuals, but even of seemingly inanimate entities in public space, such as names of places, streets, and local habitations. Only this explains the routine changes in the names and nomenclature, individual and collective, of such entities following major shifts in the correlation of forces in societies that these inhabit. The phenomenon is not unique to India or other countries trying to constitute themselves as nation states following their release from colonial bondage. In the advanced Western countries, too, major political changes have been accompanied by changes in names supposedly reflecting the past (and a future) as defined by the winners of the moment. The only certain thing about such changes is that there is nothing final and certain about such transitions. The change from St. Petersburg to Petrograd to Leningrad and back to St. Petersburg is not the end of the process. Nor, for that matter, can there be anything final about the revision of the perspective of the events and circumstances that led to Yekaterinburg becoming Sverdlovsk in 1924 and its reversion to its old name in 1991.
However, much of this phenomenon of `new names for old' as is happening in India amounts to little more than a modification of an existing name with a view to restoring the original name rather than to a real and radical change, or the construction of a new identity even if this is based on remembered or imagined reconstruction of history. The change from Madras to Chennai is the exception; more to the rule is the change to or, more accurately, the reversion from, Bombay to Mumbai, from Calcutta to Kolkata, Baroda to Vadodara, Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram and similar reversions touching many smaller cities and towns as well.
Seen in this context, the recent decision of the Government of Assam to `change the name of the state from Assam to Asom', as rather inaccurately perceived even within the State, does not amount to any substantive and material restoration of an old name. Rather, what is being proposed (the required legislative process is yet to begin) is a minor rectification of distortions that have crept in the way the name is transcribed in English, to bring the usage closer to the way it is spelt and written by native writers and speakers of the language. The proposed change corresponds to the change from the old Gauhati to Guwahati. Rather like Bengluru in Kannada being more recognisably known in its English transliteration, orthography and pronunciation as Bangalore, the land known familiarly as Assam (the name is now an `international brand' and so should not be tampered with, according to those who believe above all in the orthodoxy of the `brand') is actually identified and known as Asam - or Asom - by those who claim its history, its material and cultural space, as their own. Other versions of the new transcription, like Oxom, claim to be in closer correspondence with the way the word is pronounced and written in Assamese, some of which may appear obscure to those unfamiliar with the complex nuances of the language as she is spoken - and written.
The earliest reference to the name in a European language, provided by Hobson-Jobson, is dated c. 1590. "The dominions of the Rajah of Asham join to Kamroop; he is a very powerful prince, lives in great state, and when he dies, his principal attendants, both male and female, are voluntarily buried alive with his corpse". The `Rajah of Asham' was part of the Ahom dynasty that ruled over the territory of what is now Assam for well neigh six centuries - and gave the land and the language its name.
While scholars disagree over the precise origins of the name, Assam, there is a consensus that the name, given to the land by the 13th century Shan invaders impressed by the valour of the people they conquered (or, in another reading, given by the conquered to the people who conquered them, being impressed by their generosity in victory), is derived from the Sanskrit word, asama, meaning unequalled, matchless, with the secondary meaning, uneven, undulating, with reference to the terrain of the land. The two standard Assamese dictionaries, Hem Kosha and Chandrakanta Abhidhan, offer broadly the same definitions.
Volume One of A Cultural History of Assam: Early Period by Birinchi Kumar Barua (Gauhati, 1951) gives a succinct summary of the origin and meaning of the word:
The modern name of the province, Assam, is actually of quite recent origin. It is connected with the Shan invaders who entered the Brahmaputra valley in the beginning of the 13th century A.D., and who were known as Ahoms. The tradition of the Ahoms, themselves, is that the present name is derived from Asama in the sense of `unequalled' or `peerless'. They say that this was the term applied to them at the time of the invasion of their valley by the local tribes, in token of their admiration of the way in which the Ahom king first conquered and then conciliated them.
Other origins suggested include the restructuring of the original Tai word, Cham, meaning `to be defeated', with the addition of the Assamese prefix, `a', to mean undefeated, the conquerors. Thus, the word used to describe the conquerors of the land later came to be applied to the very land they conquered. Barua also suggests a possible Bodo derivation.
Though considered to be part of the Indo-European family of languages, with cognates in every other north Indian language belonging to that family, scholars have noted that the growth and development of Assamese (morphology, spelling and pronunciation, to take note of major areas) was influenced by its unique environment marked by the vigorous prevalence of tribal languages and cultures outside the pan-Indian framework.
Two of these unique features of the language, marking it off from other languages of the family, are spelling and pronunciation. With a phonetic home language (Kannada) having a near-perfect one-to-one correspondence between every sound of the language and every letter of the alphabet, this observer was hard put to understand on the first acquaintance with the Assamese the routine complaints of friends about spelling mistakes in the homework of children, in the newspapers and, with some honesty, even in their own writing. Spelling, one always thought, was a problem unique to the English language with more sounds than letters in the alphabet to represent them, viewed when young as specially designed to vex and torment foreign learners; how could an Indian language have spelling problems?
Unlike the case of English, the problem (if it is that) in the case of Assamese, whose script and alphabet are more or less identical to Devanagari, is one of abundance. The language as it is spoken has rather fewer sounds than is the case when it is written. For instance, there is little difference between the way the aspirated and un- aspirated medio-lingual affricates, `c' and `ch', are pronounced with the pronunciation corresponding more to dental fore-lingual `s' than to the affricate. Children learning the two letters by rote simply identify them as pratham `c' and dwitiya `c'. The first letters of both Chandra (moon) and chhatra (student) are pronounced identically; however, when they are written, the indistinguishable initial sound is represented by two different letters.
A similar abundance prevails in respect of all the four retroflex and cacuminal plosives, `t', `th', `d', `dh', as well as the retroflex plosive nasal, `n', whose sounds are identical with those of the five dental, alveolar and nasal plosives, `t', `th', `d', `dh' and `n', that follow in the Devanagari alphabet. The most complex of these is the case of the three palatal, retroflex and dental fricatives, (the initial letters of shakthi, meaning might and power, shodashi, meaning a 16-year-old girl, and simha, meaning lion). All these are pronounced the same way, the sound (sometimes represented by `x' and often inaccurately pronounced by non-native speakers as `h') being quite impossible to represent by any letter of the English alphabet.
The modification proposed in respect of the name, Assam, seeks only to remove the `Anglicisation' that has crept into the way the word is transcribed in English, by removing the extra `s'; and substituting the medio vowel `a' with `o'. Thus, Assam (which continues to be transcribed in Assamese dictionaries as Asam) is henceforth to be transcribed in English as Asom. The proposal has, however, provoked a variety of views where inasmuch as the transcription into English of the medial consonant and vowel, `s' and `a', the transcription of the initial vowel sound too has become a matter of contention. The highly respected freedom fighter of Assam of the last century wrote his name in English as Omeo Kumar Das (the same form adopted by a social science research institute in Guwahati) while in other parts of the country, the first name would be transcribed as Amiya.
Hence the argument that the sound of the first letter of the Assamese alphabet is best transcribed as `o' wherever it appears, initially or in a medial position. If the government has agreed that the word Asam is to be transcribed as Asom, where is the need to make an exception with the initial vowel? Should not the name be transcribed as Osom, not Asom?
This brings us finally to the most complex of these problems relating to the transcription of the unique way in which the three fricatives, `sh', `sh{circ}' and `sa' are articulated in Assamese. The `s' of Assam, a dental fricative corresponding to the initial letter of simha, and pronounced exactly like the other two fricatives preceding it in the alphabet, presents a most complex problem if the transcription is required to be as close as possible to the way the sound is pronounced.
The Sentinel, an English daily from Guwahati, proposed some years ago that the name of the State is best transcribed as Axom; that the fricative wherever it appears should be transcribed as `x'; and began implementing the proposal on its own pages. While the change was not implemented with extreme rigour especially in respect of personal names, the change was applied even in the case of acronyms of institutions like the Assam Sahitya Sabha which routinely was transcribed as AXX, no doubt in preference to the risible alternative.
At one point this practice was also pressed in the case of tribal organisations like the Bodo Sahitya Sabha, even though the core of the Bodo autonomist and nationalistic assertion (of which the Bodo Sahitya Sabha an important symbol, like the adoption of the Devanagari script for the Bodo language which was earlier transcribed in the Assamese script) is the distancing of the Bodos and all their institutions from Assam and the Assamese.
What is ignored in such rather hectic search for the most accurate way of transcribing the name, Assam, in the English alphabet is the simple fact that the unique sounds of the language, indeed even the way the single word, Assam, is pronounced and written in Assamese, cannot be transcribed accurately in the English alphabet. While it is true that Assamese has more letters in its alphabet than the sounds articulated by its speakers, it does not have letters to indicate faithfully some of the unique sounds of the language. When Assamese itself has not the required letters to denote some of its unique sounds, how can one find accurate ways of transcribing these in English?
When in the early part of the 19th century, the missionaries of the American Baptist Mission established their mission in Sibsagar (now Sivasagar) and began publishing their journal called Orunodai, they saw the anomalies between the language as it was spoken and as it was written; and tried to introduce a modified and simplified alphabet that eliminated all the unnecessary letters. However, while the labours of these missionaries to regain the language are recognised and their memory is honoured, the modified alphabet never caught on. Any radical reformation of the Assamese alphabet would necessarily mean the snapping of the umbilical chord that binds the land and the language to its pan-Indian origins.
So, the tension continues between, on the one hand, nationalistic assertions seeking to distance the land and its people from India, perhaps even strive and attain sovereignty; and on the other hand, the reluctance by the intellectual establishment (which also feeds separatist ideologies) to accept any modification of an unwieldy and unnecessarily complicated alphabet where some of the letters are identified by numbers, not sounds, because these sounds are exactly alike.
