Writer and Art Critic, Moushumi Kandali has been writing since 1993. She was awarded the Yuva Purashkar of Bharatiya Bhasa Parishad in the year 2005 and Munin Borkatoky Memorial Prize- 2000 for her collection of Short Stories LAMBADA NACHOR SESHOT. In March 2006, she toured Germany as part of a delegation of Indian writers to the Frankfurt World Book Fair Curtain raiser.  Her stories have been translated into English, German and several Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Nepali, Oriya etc.

She has also done several translations; Salvador Dali’s DIARY OF A GENIUS into Assamese and poetry of the Missing tribe of Assam to English are notable amongst them.   Born Diphu, Karbi Anglong autonomus hill district, Assam Moushumi did her masters in Art Criticism from MS University of Baroda passing out at the head of the class of 2001. Earlier she had obtained Masters Degree in Philosophy from Gauhati University winning the KK Handique Gold Medal.  

Moushumi is a regular contributor of art and literature related pieces for various newspapers, magazines and periodicals both in English and Assamese. She was also entrusted with writing the entries on modern art for the encyclopedia published by Assam Sahitya Sabha. She collaborated in translation of the oral literature of the Missing tribe under the aegis of Sahitya Academy. At present she is registered as a research fellow in the faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda.

Poetic vision:the art of Hemanta Mishra

Washim Rahman :

Assamese Muga patented

Shakuntala Mahanta :

Specialises in phonology, a field of linguistics which deals with the mental representation of sounds produced by humans. She was awarded a fellowship by the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS to pursue a PhD in Linguistics. As a result of her research in the Netherlands from September 2003, she recently received a doctoral degree from Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Her dissertation entitled “Directionality and locality in vowel harmony (with special attention to vowel harmony in Assamese) shows for the first time that Assamese (Standard Colloquial) displays regressive vowel harmony, a process where vowels on the right hand side of a word influence all the vowels on the left to become ‘similar’ in a certain way.

   Shakuntala’s dissertation is shortly going to be published by Utrecht University, but a draft version of the dissertation (defended by her on June 15, 2007)can be downloaded fromhere:http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2007-0620-202151/index.htm

She is now focused on the minority languages the North-East and is looking at some aspects of the phonology of some languages in the Tibeto-Burman group. She has published and presented her work in many places in Europe, U.S.A, and the U.K Shakuntala is currently affiliated to the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS as a post‑doctoral guest researcher.

Vowel harmony in Assamese-Do we or should we all know about it ?