Jorhat, Oct. 10: Three rare Assamese manuscripts tracked to the British Library in London by a research team from Jorhat and transformed to a compact disk (CD) format, have been brought back to the state.

Thee manuscripts, written on xansipat (bark of a tree) with one dating back to the 13th century, are expected to throw new light on Assamese language, especially words and spellings.

Chief editor of the biggest-ever Assamese lexicon (Asomiya Jatiya Abhidhan), Devabrata Sharma, told reporters here today that Raktim Ranjan Saikia, a member of the research team of his new project, a book on complete national history of undivided Assam, came across the rare manuscripts in British Library.

Sharma said Saikia, a teacher of geology department at JB College here, who has immense interest in history, corresponded with the library and got a CD of the manuscripts by spending about Rs 17,000 from his own pocket.

He said the three manuscripts numbering 169 barks (pages) have about 10,000 Assamese words and about 1,000 of them are totally obsolete now.

Sharma said the manuscripts would open up new vistas of research for scholars of Assamese orthography (study of spellings).

He said it has been found that spellings of Assamese words centuries ago followed a simplistic manner compared to the complex nature followed at present. Sharma said he and his organisation have advocated the simplistic style of writing spellings.

Saikia said according to the British Library records, one T. Rodd gave the three manuscripts, kept in a single lot, to the library in 1842. He said a royal poet called Sridhar Kandali wrote one of the manuscripts running into 49 pages on different eras of Hinduism.

Saikia said the text said Kandali was a poet in the court of Durlav Narayan, who was the king of Kamtapur during the 13th century.

The Kamtapur kingdom comprised some areas from present day north Bengal, parts of present-day western Assam districts of Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon and undivided Goalpara and parts of Bangladesh.

Saikia said the manuscript throws light on another Sridhar Kandali before the birth of Vaishnavite saint, philosopher and social reformer Srimanta Sankardev, as till date it was known that Sridhar Kandali was a scholar in the post-Sankardev era.

Another manuscript, which is undated and unnamed and runs into 103 pages, is about dialogues between Lord Shiva and Parvati. Saikia said the third manuscript was written by a scholar called Ram Chakravarty who requested Ahom king Pramatta Singha in 1744 to write a book on Hindu goddesses.