Goriyoshi

About Goriyoshi

Goriyoshi — also romanised as Gariyoshi — is an Assamese-language monthly literary magazine published from Guwahati, Assam, by Sahitya-Prakash. Founded in 1994 by the distinguished writer, journalist and Sahitya Akademi awardee Chandra Prasad Saikia, who served as its first editor, the magazine has spent three decades as one of the principal nurseries of new Assamese writing. Published monthly from the Tribune Buildings in Guwahati, Goriyoshi has been instrumental in nurturing and projecting a generation of talented short-story writers and poets, and its collaboration with the Katha International Short Story Festival produced the All-India Katha-Goriyoshi Awards for the best Assamese short stories. With the ISSN 2349-5324, it stands as a fixture of Assam's literary periodical culture.

Founding by Chandra Prasad Saikia

Goriyoshi was founded in 1994 by Chandra Prasad Saikia, a figure of unusual stature in Assamese letters. Saikia was a renowned writer and journalist, a winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, and a former president of the Asam Sahitya Sabha — the state's premier literary body. To found a literary monthly at that stage of a career was a statement of intent: Saikia was not merely lending his name to a masthead but creating an institution. As the magazine's first editor, he set its tone and its standards, and his reputation gave the new monthly immediate credibility with both established writers and the younger authors it hoped to attract. The magazine's later decision to institute a short-story competition in his memory testifies to how completely Goriyoshi's identity remained bound up with its founder.

Sahitya-Prakash and the Tribune connection

Goriyoshi is published by Sahitya-Prakash, operating from the Tribune Buildings in Guwahati — the home of The Assam Tribune group, one of the most respected newspaper houses in Northeast India. The connection mattered. The Tribune group's Dainik Asom was among the state's leading Assamese dailies, and housing a literary monthly inside that publishing ecosystem gave Goriyoshi access to printing infrastructure, distribution networks and a readership already in the habit of serious Assamese reading. The arrangement also reflected a wider pattern in Assamese publishing, in which newspaper groups sustained literary magazines as a cultural commitment alongside their commercial operations. For Goriyoshi, the Tribune Buildings address was both a practical base and a symbolic one: the magazine was literally published from the heart of Assamese journalism.

The founding editor's stature

Chandra Prasad Saikia's editorship defined Goriyoshi's first era. Described by his successors as a versatile and successful journalist and editor who had worked with many newspapers and periodicals of Assam, Saikia brought to the monthly the authority of a writer who had succeeded in every branch of the profession — fiction, journalism, editing and literary organisation. His presidency of the Asam Sahitya Sabha and his national honours meant that when Goriyoshi solicited contributions, it did so with the weight of its founder behind it. For young writers, publication in a magazine edited by Chandra Prasad Saikia was a genuine credential; for the magazine, his editorship was a guarantee that standards would be set high and kept there.

Editorial succession

After Saikia, the editorship of Goriyoshi passed through a series of distinguished hands, each of them a significant figure in Assamese literature. Harekrishna Deka, himself a major writer, took the chair; he was followed by Lakshmi Nandan Bora (Lakshminandan Bora), the noted novelist and short-story writer who also served as president of the Asam Sahitya Sabha. Rita Chowdhury (Rita Choudhury), the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novelist, also edited the magazine. The current editor is Kuladhar Saikia. This succession is itself a roll of honour: very few Indian literary magazines can claim to have been edited, in turn, by so many writers of national standing. It also ensured continuity of purpose — each editor inherited not just a magazine but a mission, the nurturing of new Assamese writing, and each pursued it in their own way.

Nurturing new voices

Goriyoshi's most important claim on literary history is as a nursery of talent. The magazine has been credited with nurturing and projecting a remarkable list of short-story writers and poets, including Dhanada Debi, Jayanta Kumar Chakraborty, Arnab Jan Deka, Manikuntala Bhattacharya, Birinchi Kumar Rabha, Jiban Narah, Neelim Kumar and others. For a regional literature, a magazine that consistently identifies, publishes and promotes emerging writers performs an irreplaceable function: it is the mechanism by which a literary generation recognises itself. Goriyoshi's pages gave these writers their first sustained public exposure, and the magazine's willingness to publish new names alongside established ones kept its contents fresh across the decades. In this respect it fulfilled, in Assamese, the classic role of the literary monthly.

The Katha-Goriyoshi Awards

In 2004, Goriyoshi entered into a collaboration with the Katha International Short Story Festival that produced one of the notable literary prizes in Assamese: the All-India Katha-Goriyoshi Awards for the best Assamese short stories. The awards carried winning stories beyond the state's borders — the prize-winning stories were translated into English and read out before an international gathering of story writers and literary critics at the Katha International Short Story Festival in 2004. The recipients included Dhrubajyoti Sarma, Arnab Jan Deka and Ratna Bharali Talukdar. For Assamese short fiction, the awards were a rare moment of national and international visibility, and for Goriyoshi they confirmed the magazine's standing as an institution capable of operating on an all-India stage.

The memorial short-story competition

Goriyoshi also instituted a short-story competition in memory of its founder, the Gariyoshi Chandra Prasad Saikia short-story contest, with awards presented at a ceremony in Guwahati's Pandit Tirthanath Sharma hall. At one such ceremony, the first prize went to Nisha Devi of Guwahati for her story "Ainat Aditir Adin," the second to Sumi Saikia of Morigaon for "Pretatma," and the third to Suprakash Bhuyan of Dikhowmukh, Sivasagar, for "Kanchanjangharoahan," with a consolation prize for Kulendu Neoh of Biswanath Chariali. The event drew the Assam Tribune group's chairman T. G. Baruah and leading literary figures including the critic Gobinda Prasad Sharma and Dainik Asom editor Jyoti Prasad Saikia, while Goriyoshi's then-editor Lakshminandan Bora used the occasion to urge writers to connect with the masses rather than overemphasising technique and style. The competition kept Saikia's name alive in exactly the way he would have valued — by encouraging new writers.

Content and format

As a monthly literary magazine, Goriyoshi's contents have centred on the core genres of the form: poetry, short stories, essays and literary criticism, with space for the debates and discussions that animate any living literature. Its ISSN registration (2349-5324) places it within the formal bibliographic record of Indian periodicals, and college Assamese departments across the state subscribe to it alongside Prantik and Satsori, treating it as essential reading for students of the literature. The monthly rhythm — twelve issues a year, every year since 1994 — has made it a steady presence in Assam's literary life, the kind of magazine whose arrival is a small monthly event for its readers.

Goriyoshi in Assamese literary culture

Three decades after its founding, Goriyoshi occupies a secure place in the ecology of Assamese letters. It is not the oldest Assamese literary magazine, nor the most politically engaged, but it has been among the most consistent in performing the essential labour of a literary monthly: finding new writers, publishing them well, and keeping the conversation of a literature going month after month. Founded by a Padma Bhushan awardee, edited by a succession of major writers, published from the Tribune Buildings and registered in the national periodical record, it carries the institutional weight to match its literary achievements. For the writers it nurtured — the Dhanada Debis, Arnab Jan Dekas and Neelim Kumars of Assamese literature — Goriyoshi was the door into print. For Assamese literature as a whole, it has been one of the rooms in which the literature keeps happening.