Those were the burning days of the national movement and there were hardly any buyers of foreign stuff. The enlightened section of townspeople began favoring Kurkutch salt to Liverpool salt, Benaras sugar to foreign sugar and desi cloth to Manchester-made loincloth. The head priest of the Kamakhya temple also appealed to the pandas (priest), grocers and sweetmeat sellers not to accept foreign goods or indulge in their sale and purchase in the Nilachal hills. Around the same time, in some quarters, a demand was raised for boycotting Cotton College and Cotton Collegiate School and establishing a national school.
On July 15, 1930 the school began functioning with 53 students, with lessons being imparted in both Bengali and Assamese. Since the school failed to go get affiliated to a recognized board within the year, the first batch of the students, backed by Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, appeared at the Matriculation examination as private candidates. Akshay Kumar Dutta, Dwijesh Sengupta, Satish Chandra Kakati and Bharat Das were among the six students who passed the Matriculation examination from the Academy that year. In 1937 at the initiative of Gopinath Bordoloi and Gaurikanta Talukdar, the school was shifted to its present premise in Chenikuthi. An amount of Rs 17,000 was collected by way of public donation and was used to construct the present U-shaped building. Devendranath Sharma, Keshav Narayan Dutta, Ishwar Prasad Chowdhury, Sureshwar Gohain and Golap Chowdhury headed the school in its nascent stage and nurtured it in all possible ways. When Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the then Education Minister of India, visited the school, he was so impressed that he remarked in his public address, “What India needs is man-making education as prescribed by Swami Vivekananda. Nationalist institutions like Kamrup Academy should serve as the model for the country.” Soon after its establishment the Academy grew to be a hub of nationalist activities. In tune with the swadeshi spirit a handicraft section headed by Gyananda Choudhury and Girish Mali was sent to Sodepur in Bengal for advanced training in paper-making. Four digestor machines and one calendar-making machine were installed in the school premises. Once, Sarat Chandra Sinha, headmaster of Chapar High School, and later Chief Minister of Assam, spent an entire summer vacation at the Kamrup Academy - just to learn the art of paper-making for application at his school.
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