Banhi

Banhi was an Assamese-language monthly literary magazine founded in 1909 and edited by Lakshminath Bezbarua, one of the central figures of modern Assamese literature. Its name, rendered in Assamese as Banhi or Bahi and sometimes transliterated as Bãhi or Baahi, literally means "flute". Initially published from Calcutta and later from Guwahati, in what was then British India, the magazine carried writing on literature, language, science, religion and society. It is regarded as one of the most influential periodicals in the development of modern Assamese literature after Jonaki, the magazine that had opened the modern era of Assamese letters two decades earlier.

Banhi belongs to a distinctive feature of Assamese literary history: its periods are named after magazines. Literary histories speak of a Jonaki period, a Banhi period, an Awahan period and a Ramdhenu period, because successive journals did not merely report Assamese literature — they organised it, gave new writers a place to appear, and set the terms on which language and literature were debated. Within that sequence, Banhi was the platform through which Bezbarua, by common critical consent, reached the height of his literary maturity.

Founding and Publication History

Banhi was founded in 1909. Bezbarua was both its editor and its publisher, an arrangement that gave the magazine an unusually direct relationship with its guiding intelligence: the man who decided what Assamese literature should become was also the man responsible for printing it each month. The magazine was first published from Calcutta, the city where Bezbarua had studied and where Assamese literary journalism had been born a generation earlier, and it was later published from Guwahati.

Sources differ on exactly when publication ended. One standard summary records that Banhi continued into the 1930s, while an account of modern Assamese literature gives its run as 1909 to 1940. What is not in dispute is the length of its life by the standards of Assamese little magazines, many of which survived only a handful of issues. A monthly that endured for roughly three decades, through the First World War, the non-cooperation era and the deepening freedom movement, had become an institution rather than an experiment.

Lakshminath Bezbarua, Editor

To understand Banhi it is necessary to understand its editor. Lakshminath Bezbarua dominated the Assamese literary world for about half a century and devoted himself to reviving the standing of the Assamese language and literature. His literary career had begun while he was studying in Calcutta, where he came into contact with Chandra Kumar Agarwala and Hemchandra Goswami. Together with other Assamese students in the city, they established the Oxomiya Bhaxa Unnoti Xadhini Xobha, the Assamese Language Development Society, and launched the literary magazine Jonaki in 1889 as its mouthpiece. In the first issue of Jonaki, Bezbarua published his first farce, Litikai.

Bezbarua went on to contribute to virtually every branch of Assamese literature — poetry, drama, fiction, satire, biography, religion and philosophy — and to publish in virtually all the major Assamese journals and newspapers of his time. He served as president of the Assamese Students' Literary Conference at Guwahati in 1916, became the founding president of the Asom Chattra Sanmilan, the All Assam Students' Conference, the same year, and presided over the seventh annual session of the Assam Sahitya Sabha at Guwahati in 1924. Banhi, founded between the Jonaki apprenticeship and these public honours, was the mature editor's own instrument.

Contents and Editorial Range

Banhi was a literary magazine, but not a narrow one. Its pages carried writing on literature, language, science, religion and society, reflecting an era in which a single monthly was expected to serve as a general reader's window on the intellectual world. For Assamese readers in the early twentieth century, a magazine such as Banhi performed work that would later be divided among many specialised publications: it printed creative writing, argued about the language itself, explained new knowledge, and debated the condition of society.

Bezbarua's editorials were a central feature. They addressed contemporary social, cultural and linguistic questions, including the standardisation and development of the Assamese language. The editorial in such a magazine was not a formality; it was where the editor spoke directly to his public, month after month, and where the magazine's positions were argued out. In Banhi those editorials formed part of a lifelong campaign, conducted by Bezbarua in print, to secure Assamese as a language of literature, education and public life.

The Language Question

The language question in Assam had a long and contested history. Assamese had been displaced by Bengali in schools and courts during part of the nineteenth century before being restored in 1873, and the question of which regional form of Assamese should serve as the written standard remained live. Banhi entered that debate directly. An article published in Banhi in January 1910, titled in Assamese "Axomiya Bhaxa Xombondhe Aru Keitaman Kotha" — a few words about the Assamese language — presented Bezbarua's argument that the dialect of Sibsagar had been privileged because Sibsagar had been the capital of the Ahom kings, and the language of a capital becomes the language of the whole kingdom.

Scholars have since examined that debate closely, noting the friction between Assam's linguistic zones and the role of the American Baptist missionaries, whose printing had helped fix an early written standard. The point for a profile of Banhi is simpler: the magazine was a forum in which the future shape of written Assamese was actively argued, not a passive container for finished literature. Its editorials and language articles are among the reasons historians treat it as a document of Assamese linguistic nationalism as well as a literary journal.

Satire and Humour

A critical study of Assamese literary magazines from 1846 to 1985 singles out one of Banhi's particular contributions: edited by Bezbarua, it significantly enriched the tradition of satirical and humorous writing in Assamese. Bezbarua's own stories and sketches ridiculed hypocrisy, superstition, uncultured pretension and the follies of middle-class and rustic life, while keeping, as critics have noted, an emphasis on human values underneath the comedy. A magazine edited by such a writer naturally became a home for that mode.

Satire mattered in the Assam of Banhi's decades because it allowed social criticism to be printed in an entertaining form. The humorous sketch could say things about officials, priests, would-be moderns and village hierarchies that a solemn essay could not say as safely or as memorably. In giving that tradition a monthly platform over many years, Banhi helped make satire a permanent part of the Assamese literary repertoire rather than an occasional flourish.

"O Mur Apunar Desh"

Banhi's single most famous publication is a song. "O Mur Apunar Desh" — "O my dearest country" — written by Bezbarua and tuned by Kamala Prasad Agarwala, was first published in 1909 in the magazine, in its first year of life. The song became Assam's best-known patriotic lyric, and it was officially adopted as the state song of Assam at the Assam Student Conference held in Tezpur in 1927.

That a state song should have begun life on the pages of a literary monthly says much about the place of magazines in Assamese public life at the time. There was no separate world of "literature" sealed off from the world of public feeling. The same editor who argued about spelling and dialect in his editorials also gave his readers the words in which Assamese affection for the homeland would be sung for the next century, and he gave it to them in Banhi.

Place in Assamese Literary History

Assamese literary history is conventionally told as a succession of magazine-centred ages. The history begins with Orunodoi in 1846, the first Assamese magazine, published under American Baptist missionary auspices and edited principally by Nathan Brown, which promoted Christianity and modern education while carrying articles on science, current affairs and Assamese culture. Jonaki, from 1889, then ushered Romanticism into Assamese literature and inaugurated a new literary sensibility, led by the trio — Agarwala, Bezbarua and Goswami — often called the trimurti of modern Assamese literature.

Banhi followed Jonaki, and the sequence continued through Awahan, founded in 1929, and Ramdhenu, from 1951, through which Assamese writing moved from Romanticism towards modernism. As one modern assessment puts it, Assam's literature, culture, arts, traditions and folklore have been chronicled in the pages of its newspapers and magazines over the last one hundred and fifty years. In that chronicle, Banhi holds the position of the mature Bezbarua's magazine: the journal of the Jonaki generation grown into authority.

Writers and Influence

Banhi was influential in propagating many writers and poets of Assam. That was a structural function of the Assamese magazine system: before a large book trade existed, a monthly's pages were where a new poet was first noticed, where a story writer learnt the craft in public, and where reputations were made. An editor of Bezbarua's standing, running his own magazine for three decades, was effectively operating the central clearing house of a literature.

The magazine's influence also ran through its editor's own example. Because Bezbarua published across every genre and in virtually every contemporary journal, Banhi's standards — seriousness about language, openness to science and society as subjects, and a belief that humour was a literary instrument — radiated outward into the wider periodical culture of Assam. Later editors worked in a landscape that Banhi had helped to shape.

Preservation and Legacy

Early Assamese journals survive precariously, which is why preservation efforts have become part of Banhi's wider story. A community project, Digitizing Asom, launched at Guwahati with the support of the Nanda Talukdar Foundation and the Assam Jatiya Bidyalay Educational and Socio-Economic Trust, set out to digitise rare Assamese journals and books for public use. Its first phase covered journals published between 1840 and 1970 — the span that includes Banhi's entire life — encompassing 3,071 editions of 161 journals and some 245,680 pages.

Banhi itself ceased publication in the 1930s, or by 1940 on the longest account, around the end of its editor's life; Bezbarua, who had returned to Assam in declining health in 1938, died that year. The magazine did not need a longer life to secure its place. Founded in 1909, edited by the father of the modern Assamese short story, home to the first printing of the state song, and remembered as one of the most influential periodicals in modern Assamese literature after Jonaki, Banhi remains the clearest example in Assam of what a single determined editor, with a monthly magazine as his instrument, could do for a language.