Sahitya Akademi releases volume on Pradip Acharya at Cotton University

Guwahati: The Department of English, Cotton University, in collaboration with the Sahitya Akademi, hosted a thoughtfully engaging book release programme to mark the launch of ‘Familiar Sensation of Strangeness’, a volume devoted to the critical and translational writings of eminent scholar Pradip Acharya, former professor and head of the Department of English at the erstwhile Cotton College.

Edited by Prof Jyotirmoy Prodhani (NEHU, Shillong Campus) and Prof Dwijen Sharma (NEHU, Tura Campus), the book was formally launched by noted literary critic Prof Hiren Gohain, who described Acharya’s oeuvre as “fugitive writing”—a phrase that resonated through the day’s literary engagement for its playful yet incisive capture of the author’s intellectual style.

Offering an insightful introduction to the volume, Prof. Rakhee Kalita Moral, Head of the Department of English, Cotton University, spoke of her long-standing academic association with Acharya, underlining his mastery as a translator whose rich renditions from Assamese into English made some of the finest literature of Assam available to a global audience. She elaborated on the structure of the book, published by Sahitya Akademi, which is organised into three thematic sections – On Translations, On Northeast Literature and On Contemporary Assamese Writings – followed by a transcript of an interview with the author at the end.

The literary mood of the event was enriched by recitations of poems translated by Acharya and orated by scholars of the department, Madhurjya Goswami, Samriddha Goswami and Shikha Sengupta, adding cadence and texture to the proceedings.

In his inaugural address, Prof. Hiren Gohain praised Acharya’s intellectual brilliance, quirky turns of thought and famously impenetrable jargon, seamlessly traversing literary landscapes from Edmund Wilson and William Blake to F. Scott Fitzgerald, while reflecting on what he evocatively termed “the inherited time” of literature.

Discussions revolved around the tactile sensation of translation, translation as transference, Acharya’s philosophy of translating texts, and his striking notion of translation as “the empty space between the lines”, where meaning emerges from fertile silences created by words before and after.

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