Print Culture, Nationalism, and the Postcolonial Subject

Abstract

This study examines Indigenous print culture in relation to nationalism and literary modernity in Assamese intellectual history (1846–1900). It specifically analyzes Arunodoi, the first Assamese periodical, launched at Sibsagar in 1846 by American Baptist missionaries. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities and Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the third space of enunciation, the article rethinks the emergence of vernacular print and how it operationally defined “Assamese” and “Assamese culture” as distinct identity categories under colonial rule. Methodologically, the study is a qualitative, interpretive synthesis: rather than an issue-by-issue analysis of the original Arunodoi corpus, it works through the existing secondary scholarship and the primary excerpts reproduced and closely cited within that scholarship (notably Barua, Kakati, Kar, and Sengupta). The lexical, thematic, genre, and intertextual observations offered later in the article are therefore framed as a theoretically guided reconstruction based on this secondary and reproduced-primary evidence, and are explicitly flagged as pending verification against the full archive. In essence, it argues that Arunodoi functioned not only as an organ of religion but also as a catalyst for socio-literary change: it contributed to the standardization of the Assamese language, helped foster a nascent linguistic nationalism, and provided part of the aesthetic and intellectual groundwork for the Jonaki Renaissance of 1889. These findings enrich ongoing academic efforts to retrieve regional, peripheral, and marginal literary modernities in South Asia, and highlight the importance of Northeast Indian print cultures in global postcolonial cultural studies.