GUWAHATI: Arupjyoti Saikia, who teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Guwahati has landed in another controversy again. Prof. Saikia who was interrogated by National Investigation Agency (NIA) for allegedly instigating violence during anti-CAA movement in Guwahati has faced serious allegations of plagiarism.
In a review on Saikia’s book ‘The Unquiet River’ Sanghamitra Misra, a faculty member of Delhi University pointed out several instances of copying.
In the article published in ‘The Book Review’ recently, Misra alleged that Arupjyoti Saikia copied from the unpublished Ph.D thesis titled Rivers and History of former JNU scholar Ritupan Goswami which was submitted in 2010. On the other hand, Goswami has been missing for several years.
Unacknowledged ‘overlaps’ permeate and orient almost every chapter of Saikia’s book, alleged Misra.
She pointed out to “Unacknowledged summation of Goswami’s extensive research on rice cultivation and settlement in riverine belts and sub-montane tracts during the Ahom rule”.
Saikia’s chapter titled ‘Boats on the River’ is a brazen reproduction of Goswami’s section on boats (‘Boats and Boat Building’, ‘The Kind of Canoes’, Goswami 2010), without any reference to it whatsoever,” Misra alleged.
She has pointed out several other instances of plagiarism in the book by Prof. Arupjyoti Saikia.
