The Long Continuity: Assamese Popular Science Writing as a Vernacular Knowledge Ecosystem, 1846–2018

This article presents a sociohistorical analysis of Assamese popular science writing (bigyan sahitya) over nearly two centuries (1846–2018), arguing that what has often been described as a regional literary tradition is more usefully understood as a durable vernacular knowledge ecosystem—a sustained institutional, periodical, and discursive infrastructure through which scientific modernity has been linguistically mediated, socially circulated, and culturally embedded in Assamese-speaking publics. Drawing on Assamese-language archival sources and engaging international scholarship on the public understanding of science, vernacular modernity, and postcolonial knowledge circulation, the article reconstructs three interlocking structures through which the ecosystem has operated: the print public sphere consolidated by the missionary newspaper Arunodoy from 1846; the civic-scientific institutional architecture of Pashupalan (1925), the Asom Bigyan Samiti and Bigyan Jeuti (launched in 1961), and the Asom Bigyan Lekhak Sangstha (1999); and the literary-scientific mediation that produced the science-fiction tradition (kalpabijnan). The ecosystem has reproduced itself through workshops, handbooks, and terminology projects, navigating four political–economic ruptures without institutional collapse. The case offers a productive empirical basis for theorising how societies vernacularise scientific knowledge over the long term.