23:T4f0,

Assamese cinema, though not a very visible category in most of the works of film historians and critics, started with a note of nationalistic sentiment in the early half of the twentieth century. In subsequent times, amidst the commercially driven Assamese entertainment movies which were more numerous, a number of Assamese directors were successful in creating a ‘serious’ genre of Assamese cinema. Bhabendra Nath Saikia was one of the prolific directors of the latter category during the last three decades of the twentieth century. On the basis of their various characteristics, his films can be placed under the category which has been named by the critics as Indian ‘parallel cinema’ or ‘innovative cinema’. This article is an attempt at a descriptive analysis of the narrative contents and other cinematic features of Saikia’s films, with an aim to locate this regional filmmaker within the broader domain of Indian parallel cinema. It is argued here that while most of his films can be read as critical commentaries on the various issues which engulfed the post-Independence society in the specific socio-historical conditions of Assam, some of his films also bear much wider frames to hold timeless and space-less features of mankind.

24:T462,

In 1935, Jyotiprasad Agarwala released Joymoti, the first film in Assamese language. In this article, we will attempt to disengage the analysis of Jyotiprasad’s aesthetics from its monumentalization, situating the film within a particular ideological–political conjuncture that forms the horizon of both its conception as well as reception. We will take up two major renditions of the story of Ahom Princess Joymoti—one a drama by Lakshminath Bezbaruah, Joymoti Konwari (1915), and the other, Jyotiprasad’s film—as texts that stage significant conjunctures in the biography of nationalism in Assam. We take up, first, how the theater as an institutional space and the historical drama as a genre become sites of nationalist cultural politics and then, draw upon notions of ordinary language and popular representation to resituate Joymoti’s sacrifice. With Jyotiprasad’s Joymoti, we will see how the cinema facilitates reformulation of these issues as it maps new senses of landscape, materiality, and historicity in the cultural and political field.

Search results

The Assamese Films of Bhabendra Nath Saikia

Coming Back to Life: Jyotiprasad’s Joymoti and Nationalist Politics in Assam,1890s–1940s