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.
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