Page:Assamese-Its formation and development.djvu/40

 4 tNTfcODTJCriOtf powerful neighbour Bengal, the Assamese language is com- monly believed to be an off-shoot or sub-dialect of Bengali. This misunderstanding is largely due to the territorial redistri- bution under the British rule. The whole of North Bengal in- cluding Koch-Bihar, Rangpur, Jalpaiguri and also perhaps Dinajpur, should have been included with Assam and the modern district of Sylhet which forms a part of political Assam should have been joined to Bengal, if the territorial readjust- ment were to be made on the basis of linguistic homogeneity. Such territorial distribution would have given a proper pers- pective to the formation and development of the Asssamese language. 6. The province was differently called in different histori- cal periods. Its most ancient name was Prag-jyotisapura. By this name it is referred to in the two great epics — the Rdmdyana and the MahabMrata and in the main Puranas, — the Harivamsa, the Visnupurdna and the Brahmdndapurdna. In classical literature both Prag-jyotisa and Kamarupa occur as alternative names of the country. Kahdasa refers to it by both the designations {Raghuvomsa : Canto 4 : Slokas, 81, 83). In epigraphic records the name Kamarupa was first mentioned in the Allahabad Inscription of Samudra Gupta in the fifth cen- tury. (Fleet : Corpus Insert ptionum Indicarum. Vol. III. p. 8). When Hiuen Ts'ang visited the country in 643 A.D. he knew it as Ka-mo-lu-p'o (Kamarupa) . Its western boundary was the river Karatoya in North Bengal. "The pilgrim crossed a large river and came to Ka-mo-lu-p'o ". "The river Ka-lo-tu (Karatoya) may be the large river of the present passage " (Watters: Vol. II. pp. 186, 187). According to the authority of Sanskrit Kdlikdpurdna (supposedly of the 10th century) and of Yogini Tantra (supposedly of the 16th. century ) -—both mainly devoted to giving geographical accounts of the land, the name of the region east of the river Karatoya in North Bengal to the river Dikkara (Dikrai) in Eastern Assam, was Kama- rupa and its permanent western boundary had been the river Karatoya since the times of Narakasura and Bhagadatta of Kuruksetra fame.