ABILAC & Oil India Limited sign MoU for ethnography project

GUWAHATI: The Anundoram Borooah Institute of Language, Art & Culture (ABILAC), Assam, will publish a 6-volume encyclopedia on the ethnography on the people living in Assam.

For this ambitious project, the ABILAC and Oil India Limited (OIL) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in the ABILAC office on Thursday.

Under this project, an encyclopedia of all the tribes and communities living in Assam will be published.

The Oil India Limited has partially funded the project, while ABILAC is organizing the remaining part of the required fund from various sources. For the ABILAC, it director, Prof Dilip Kumar Kalita and for the OIl, General Manager Debasish Bora signed the MoU.

Prof Nagen Saikia is the chief editor of the project, while Mrinal Talukdar is the executive editor and Ismail Husain is the assistant editor. Prof Dilip Kumar Kalita is the editorial adviser of the project. The preliminary work of the project started almost a year back and henceforth the formal work will commence.

A large number of scholars, who are authorities on the communities and tribes, are being roped in for this ambitious project for a detailed cataloguing of all people living in Assam.

A total of 77 tribes and communities living in Assam will be documented in the project.

It is noteworthy that the Anundoram Borooah Institute of Language, Art & Culture was established by the Assam Government way back in 1989 as an autonomous institute for working in the fields of Language, Art & culture.

The Institute is recognized by both Dibrugarh University and Gauhati University as a Research Institute. The Institute has four Departments namely - Language & Linguistics, Literature & Translation, Folklore & Oral Traditions, and Culture, Art & Music and a Sanskrit Studies Cell.

The Institute has been working on a few major as well as minor Research Projects apart from supervising research scholars for attaining PhD degrees. It has taken keen interest in preparation of dictionaries also. Pursuing its mission on working on the development of indigenous languages of North-East India, the institute has taken up projects on compiling and publishing dictionaries for the indigenous languages. It has also been publishing Anandam, Journal of the Anundoram Borooah Institute of Language Art and Culture, edited by Prof Dilip Kumar Kalita, which is a UGC CARE indexed journal.

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