Bhubaneswar: The Orissa government has announced that it will renovate the house of Assamese literature doyen Lakhminath Bezbaroa at Sambalpur and turn it into a memorial.
The announcement regarding this was made by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik Tuesday after Assam’s Cultural Affairs Minister Naba Kumar Doley and Media Adviser to Assam Chief Minister, Hrikesh Goswami met him at the Secretariat here.
Patnaik said the people of Odisha were proud of Bezbaroa. The Assamese writer had spent over two decades of his life between 1917 and 1937 in Sambalpur.
The CM said the Orissa government will bear the expenditure for renovating Bezbaroa’s abandoned house. The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) will execute the renovation, he said.
State Culture and Tourism minister Ashok Chandra Panda, who was present at the meeting, said the government will initially allocate `50 lakh for renovation and may spend more if required.
Assam Cultural Affairs minister thanked the Orissa government for its cooperation.
On Monday, the Assamese delegation had visited the house of Bezbaroa at the Nelson Mandela Chowk in Sambalpur days
after Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal wrote to his Orissa counterpart Naveen Patnaik requesting him not to demolish Bezbaroa’s house.
They had also called on the Collector of Sambalpur, Samarth Verma, to discuss about conserving the property of Bezbaroa at Sambalpur.
There was a plan to demolish two buildings of Bezbaroa, including the house where he had stayed and the house which he used as an office, to construct an approach road to the under construction second bridge over the Mahanadi River and development of the Rotary Junction at the Nelson Mandela Chowk.
Born in 1864, Bezbaroa is a celebrated pioneer of modern Assamese literature and one of the literary stalwarts of the Jonaki Era, the age of romanticism in Assamese literature.
Press Trust of India
