Relic hunters find copper trove- New light to be shed on Assam's ancient script by archaeological quest The Daily Telegraph Kolkata, India, 3 March, 2006.

 Relic hunters find copper trove- New light to be shed on Assam's ancient script by archaeological quest The Daily Telegraph Kolkata, India, 3 March, 2006.

Relic hunters find copper trove - New light to be shed on Assam?s ancient script by archaeological quest OUR CORRESPONDENT File picture of Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi admiring the latest collections of the Assam State Museum in Guwahati. Picture by UB Photos Silchar, March 2: With the discovery of rare archaeological items in a long-neglected archives at a school here, new light is going to be shed on one of Assam?s oldest scripts ? the Hayungthal. A band of scholars, who were rummaging through a mass of musty documents and relics in the ramshackle century-old archives at a teacher?s training institute, stumbled upon the treasure trove, which includes an engraved copper plate. Amalendu Bhattacharjee, a senior lecturer of Bengali literature at a local college, is leading the scholars. The team has been engaged by the National Mission for Manuscripts, and is hunting for old but valuable manuscripts and relics now lying uncared-for in many nooks and crannies of houses and temples in south Assam. The find contained a worn-out copper plate engraved during the reign of King Harjar Barman of the Gupta era. King Harjar Barman?s name was first traced on a copper plate which, according to Bhattacharjee, was recovered from the south bank of the Brahmaputra near Tezpur town. The copper plate relics bore the telltale imprint of Guptaida age (the Gupta era). The copper plate had been preserved for so long at the Normal School, founded in 1905, and not much care has been taken of it. The scholars who had studied it came to the conclusion that it formed part of an array of such plates which were dug out from time to time from the sandy banks of the Brahmaputra. Attempts to decipher the scripts, engraved on the relics, were first initiated by a historian in erstwhile Sylhet district, now in Bangladesh, named Padmanath Bhattacharjee Vidyabinod. He wrote his masterpiece, Kamruper Shashanabali, in the last century. He had named this script Hayungthal since parts of the copper plate inscriptions written in this indecipherable script were discovered in the thirties of the last century at Hayungthal village, a hamlet in Karbi Anglong district inhabited by a Karbi tribe. Bhattacharjee said these relics were of immense historical value as they would definitely help unfold an almost forgotten chapter in the reign of the Gupta kings in Assam 1,100 years ago. Among the documents unearthed from Silchar?s neglected Normal School for the training of primary and middle-level schoolteachers is also a note ? a hand-written English translation of the Prithimpasa stone inscriptions, many of which had either been vandalised or lost. The landlords of the Prithimpasa zamindari enclave engraved these inscriptions. The enclave is now in Sylhet district of Bangladesh. Bhattacharjee said such new documents would provide a rare glimpse into the economic and social conditions of the people under the Sylhet landlords in the 16th century. The scions of the noble family of Prithimpasa arrived on Indian soil during the reign of the Lodi dynasty. They were granted rights to vast swathes of land on the banks of the Surma river. This family presided over a long lineage of zamindars, which reigned in this district in the 16th and 19th centuries. 

Bhattacharjee said the National Mission for Manuscripts, under the Union human resource development ministry, was now in the process of finalising a scheme for roping in many scholars to study these rare documents and relics with a view to ?filling in the gap in the continuity of Assam?s history?.