Wordspin books of the year 2025: Celebrating language, land & imagination

Yearning for what's past and the desire for what's ahead hold our attention, and the world of books is no exception. Books that connect us to the portals of understanding as well as to our imagination have lives beyond their time. 2025 saw same exciting books make their mark, in forms that bear the creative potential and inheritance of our shared cultural heritage.

As such, the sense of place forms part of what we configure our lives through, sometimes as imagined reality and otherwise by defining our quests in both familiar and new ways.

Reality does no always ensconce materiality. If that were the case, there'd hardly be any room for thought or imagination.

In taking up the purpose and subject of poetic composition, Anubhav Tulasi wonders how the craft of poetry can find its place in human history. For him, poetry is not independent of the language that is grounded in the land it emanates from. He believes that even dreams have their origins in the contours of the words which bear the signature of the land.

Anubhav Tulasi's Jumuthir Sourojug

Land provides the template for culture to imbibe its mark, oftentimes through the language of silence. He talks about the genesis that opens up conversations with the world. The essay in which Tulasi offers his discourse on poetry, poets and poetics comes from Jumuthir Sourojug, his anthology of critical writings on literature and culture.

Posthumously published this year, this collection carries interviews as well, especially one where he presents his take on his evolution as a poet and writer. Reading this book is an eye-opening experience even for those accustomed to his verse because the deep contemplative orientation behind his wordsmithery takes us to the vital sites of a creative mind.

"From the points of language and location, I am on Assamese. That is what poetry has taught me. To make the living resourcefulness of Assamese converse with the world, that's what I yearn for," writes Anubhav Tulasi.

Prasun Barman's Unaish Satikar Asamiya Grantha aru Mudran Sanskriti is an outstanding example of how book history and print culture in Assam can be approached as an area of study and documentation. Barman's focused mapping of the field is not a mere exercise in a statistical display of facts and figures. It introduces the reader to a rich history of print and book publishing culture whose genesis lay in the early nineteenth century in Assam.

In the section titled "Language Thought and Print Culture", for example, Barman builds upon the work of preceding scholarship to bring to light little-known circumstances about seminal publications of the time such as Anandaram Dhekial Phukan's Asomiya Lorar Mitra and Gunabhiram Barua's Geography for Assamese Children.

Of even more interest is the elaborately structured appendices that provide considerable historical details about the conditions that prevailed at that time.

Reading a book such as this opens a world of extreme cultural richness to modem eyes, and only more scholarly and informed contributions of this kind can converse fruitfully without shared pasts.

Preeti Barua's Sangrahita Prabandha: 1949-2009

As a testimony of a lifetime, Preeti Barua's Sangrahita Prabandha: 1949-2009 is a landmark in contemporary Assamese thought.

The voluminous collection is more than a congeries of assorted writings: it is a veritable cultural history of our times, more importantly of the lived actualised heritage we recognise today as our own.

Preeti Barua's writings evoke deep conviction and compassionate understanding, which find resonance in the essays that cover a remarkably extensive field.

In an exposition on the Assamese short story where the place of women practitioners is the frame of reference, Barua presents a cultural critique of the preoccupations governing the worlds that we live in.

Literary and cultural historiography constitute a common thematic concern in Preeti Barua's engagement with words. It isn't a commonplace in modern Assamese discourse to find life-accounts to be imbued with the sense of the critical where evaluation of the context forms a major aspect of portraiture.

Preeti Barua brings the cultural historian's viewing lens in her analyses, enabling readers thus to have a critical overview of the subjects she takes up for discussion.

This feature - the eschewal of plain eulogistic narrative - epitomises the pursuit of a perspective that is both modern and contemporary. Some of her portraits deal with pioneers whose achievements were not confined to the fields they were associated with, but the ways in which they broke many a glass ceiling stand out as exemplary.

Barua's writing is tailored to meet the requirements of the subject, exemplifying her understanding of the wieldiness of the pen as well as circumstance.

Writing the past, more specifically, the net of its recovery, is not commonly associated with a sustained and systematic engagement with the archive in Assamese.

Kuko, an exciting addition to the genre of science fiction for children, is an eminently readable book.

At the heart of the story is the figure of Kuko, a human like robotic entity whose data driven 'mind' in conditioned to respond to situations, both familiar and unfamiliar.

This novella by Biswajit Das has a pacy narrative which does not slacken even when the plot pauses to accommodate its twists and turns.

For instance, we can see the variance in orientation and the subtlety in perspective in a passage like this: "With the headphone plugged to his ears, Kuko lay down supine on his bed. He felt drained: it was fatigue.

Tiredness for Kuko - do you know what that is- he was losing charge. That's why he sought his bed to rest. His room was an advanced repository of instrumentation- he had only to lie down, charging will take place automatically through wireless."

The humane dimensions of pain, and yearnings that encapsulate desire for fulfilment, find articulation here. The narrative can be read as a testament to the human endeavour to understand reality, including that which is now part of an evolving instrumentalist worldview.

For books in Assamese, 2025 has been an exciting year. We eagerly look forward to newer publications that would occupy minds and make their mark in 2026 as well. Happy reading!