Anundo Ram Barooah Hostel

Oct. 18: The hundred-year-old journey of Anundo Ram Barooah Hostel will be preserved for posterity in a book to be released as part of Cotton College hostel’s yearlong centenary celebrations from January 7.

The celebration will turn the hostel premises into a grand meeting ground of past and present boarders.

Set up in 1913, Anundo Ram Barooah (ARB) Boys’ Hostel, earlier known as Hindu Third Mess or simply the Third Mess, was constituted with the erstwhile 4th and 5th blocks of Hindu Boys’ Hostel. The hostel comprised two blocks with 17 rooms in each block.

Since 2004-05 academic sessions, the hostel has exclusively been reserved for students of higher secondary classes. At present, it has only one block; the other has been given to Swahid Ranjit Borpujari Boys’ Hostel, earlier called Second Mess, because of restructuring of the hostel.

In 1985, the hostel was rechristened in memory of Anundo Ram Barooah, a multi-faceted genius and renowned Sanskrit scholar of the state. Barooah, the fifth Indian and the first Assamese ICS officer, was born on May 21, 1850, in north Guwahati and studied in Guwahati Government Seminary (which is now known as Cotton Collegiate School) and Presidency College in Calcutta.

“On January 7, we will take out a procession in the city where hundreds of present and past boarders of the hostel will take part. The celebration will be inaugurated by the oldest boarder of the hostel. Till now, Mahesh Chandra Bhuyan, who was in the hostel in the forties, has been identified as the oldest boarder of the hostel,” said Param Prakash Gogoi, an executive member of the celebration committee, at a news conference today.

“We are ready with the material, collected from various sources, to publish the book tracing the history of the hostel,” Gogoi said.

The decision of the college to demolish the present structure of the hostel and build a new multi-storey hostel triggered a hue and cry among the people and finally the idea has been put on hold.

Bhuyan said he was a boarder of the hostel from 1946 to 1950 and was its superintendent for four years when he joined the college as a teacher. “In our time, there were no table and chairs like today. We had our food sitting on a pira (a low wooden stool),” he said.

Several prominent personalities of the state such as dramatist Arun Sarma, former president of Asam Sahitya Sabha Mahendra Bora, littérateur Medini Choudhury had stayed in the hostel.

“Three vice-chancellors of Dibrugarh and Gauhati University and three principals of Cotton College were boarders of the hostel,” Gogoi added.

On November 20, the boarders of the hostel will decide the programmes of the yearlong celebrations.