[Assam] Journal highlights Lachit Barphukan’s heroics (The Assam Tribune,13.02.2008)

[Buljit Buragohain]

              Journal highlights Lachit Barphukan’s heroics
By Ajit Patowary
 GUWAHATI, Feb 12 – A laudable attempt has been made to make the heroic pursuits of Assam’s renowned military general Lachit Barphukan known throughout the world. The Heritage India, a Pune-based quarterly English magazine, has carried an article on the great general in its maiden issue published this month.

The magazine launched by Manjiri Khandekar, a Poona University teacher in French, has focused on the great general in its Personality section. 

The article is based on renowned historian Dr SK Bhuyan’s magnum opus – Lachit Barphukan and His Times (1947). It throws light on the personality of the great general as an astute military strategist as well as as a leader. 

The Pune connection of the mediaeval Assamese general is not new. Dr SK Bhuyan, then a teacher in English in Cotton College and the honorary director of the State Directorate of Historical and Antiquarian Studies here, elaborately introduced him to Pune (then Poona) in June 1935 in his lecture at the First Session of the Indian History Congress. 

Dr Bhuyan had earlier introduced the land of Lachit Barphukan to the land of Shivaji Maharaja through an article— Shivaji from Assamese sources— included in the Shivaji Nibandhabali (Part-II), published from Pune in 1930. This article was based on the Assamese chronicles of the Delhi Badshahate, generally known as Padshah Buranji. Dr Bhuyan’s another article — New Lights on Mogul India from Assamese Sources—based on the same materials, was also published in the Islamic Culture published from Hyderabad in 1928. These two articles are believed to be the initial attempts to introduce Lachit Barphukan to the rest of the world.

On November 14, 2000, the bust of the great general was unveiled at the National Defence Academy (NDA), Khadakwasla, Pune by the then Governor of Assam, Lt General (Retd) S K Sinha, who also conceived this idea.

While projecting Lachit Barphukan and the battle of Saraighat, Dr Bhuyan, interalia, wrote: “ Lachit Barphukan’s success had nothing to do with the extent of his resources or the numerical superiority of his army but in his own focused and consistent determination and intrepid courage
 Though he was aware of the restrictive boundaries of the society in which he lived, he was able to exceed them and achieve unusual results, raising the Assamese army to exceptional levels of efficiency.”

Dr Bhuyan described the battle of Saraighat as Assam’s Trafalgar. Admiral Horatio Nelson, who led the British navy in 1805, defeated the combined French and Spanish navies at Trafalgar in a decisive battle that paved the way for British supremacy in Europe. 

The Heritage India has rightly described the battle of Saraighat as ‘one of Indian history’s most crucial river battles.’ The article has also carried sketches of the Saraighat battlefield and the portrait of the great general published by the Asom Chitra Prakashan several decades back. It also consisted a number of photographs of the Saraighat memorials, snapped by Bijoy Kumar Bhuyan, son of Dr S K Bhuyan and the Guwahati correspondent of the magazine. 

The magazine in its introductory (dummy) volume in June 2006 also had carried a ten-page article on the great Assamese general under the title— Assam’s Man of Destiny: Lachit Barphukan.

According to a January 20, 2008 letter from its editor Manjiri Khandekar to Bijoy Kumar Bhuyan, the Air India has agreed to keep the magazine in its lounges at Mumbai and Delhi Airports. If the Air India gets a positive response, it will ‘take it further.’ Besides, the Landmark and Crossroad book chain stores will also market the magazine, said Khandekar.
                  (The Assam Tribune,13.02.2008)




       
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