New Delhi: Ninety years ago, on this day, a page of history was written in the ever so remote north-eastern part of what was then British India.
That page from the past must be remembered on this date – March 10 – with absolute awe, as much for having been written against all odds in a dim and distant land far from the mainstream, as also for what one man’s dream and belief in a never-to-give-up school of thought can do to a region as a whole.
Today, the north-eastern region just can’t be ignored when it comes to discussing the arc of Indian cinema and its achievements on the world stage. Some of the top films to be recognised in the recent decades not just in the annual national film awards but in various international film festivals come from the Northeast.
That regional bandwagon has often been led by Assamese cinema. This, also because the language was exposed to the medium much before than others in the Northeast. But the first seeds of that journey was sown with great difficulties, mainly due to the fact that Assam under the colonial rule, found itself on India’s margins.
Way back on March 10, 1935, the north-eastern region got its first talkie, in Assamese language. No mean feat considering the film, Joymoti, was produced just four years after the first Indian talkie Alam Ara was released (1931) in what was Bombay Presidency then. It becomes even more impressive if you take into account that Joymoti’s director-producer, a young Europe-returned maverick Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, began working on the talkie in 1933 itself.
Agarwala could well have been the first in India to produce a talkie had the famous Universum-Film-Aktein Gesellschaft (UFA) agreed to produce his Assamese play Xonit Kuwori, translated into English as The Dance of Art. Parthajit Baruah, in the excellent book on the history of Assamese Cinema, Jyotiprasad, Joymoti, Indramalati and Beyond, had reproduced a letter sent by UFA to Agarwala on June 18, 1930 about its inability to take the manuscript forward as it dealt “through out with Indian scenes” which it was not capable of producing at its studio then.
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The founder of the film studio, Bombay Talkies, Himanshu Rai, had helped Agarwala enrol himself as an intern at Berlin-based UFA towards the end of 1929, impressed by his thirst to make a talkie. Baruah writes that a sad Jyoti Prasad, thereafter, returned to Edinburg where he was pursuing a degree in economics; and that a few pages of the English script of his play is still preserved under his daughter’s care.
While the history of cinema in Bengal, then the umbilical chord for Assam and the rest of the Northeast to mainstream India, began with a silent film before graduating to the level of a talkie (in the same year as Alam Ara was released), in Assam, the course of cinema was set in motion straight from a talkie.
Even though noted actor from the silent era, Pramathesh Barua was from Goalpara, and went on to produce groundbreaking silent films including Aparadhi in 1931, which became the first Indian film to be shot using artificial lights, he never made an Assamese silent film except remaking only in 1937 the superhit Devdas in Assamese after producing it in Bengali and Hindi.
Joymoti is a significant milestone of the cinematic journey of the Northeast, primarily for the odds against which it was made. No doubt being the son of Paramananda Agarwala, a prominent businessman of Assam then, came handy to Jyoti Prasad as far as financing the expensive venture was concerned. But a talkie, needs way more wherewithal than just funds.
Unlike his counterparts in Bengal, Jyoti Prasad had zero technical support to pull it off in Assam. With the silent era film-making almost non-existent in Assam, there were also no actors exposed to acting in front of a camera, let alone a cine-going audience. In the dawn of the 20th century, it was sheer grit and resolve of Jyoti Prasad then that had helped the Northeast get its first talkie.
Interestingly, on return to India in 1932, while Jyoti Prasad was mulling over how to make his dream of making the first Assamese talkie a reality, he found himself thrown into jail for 15 months on the charge of taking part in the Civil Disobedience Movement. He could resume work on Joymoti only after his release in 1933.
In 1933, Jyoti Prasad set up a makeshift studio at his residence inside his father’s tea estate in Bholaguri, near Tezpur, his home town. It called it Chitraban. Much later, the name Chitraban, would be picked by Assam government to set up the Northeast’s first film studio, Jyoti Chitraban, in Guwahati. After the tea estate’s factory hours, it became the space for rehearsals for the male actors.
Soon, Jyoti Prasad formed his film company, Chitralekha Movieton and made use of his family’s money to hire the services of the welknown Faizi Brothers to record the sound of the film. It is well-known in Assam that for developing the film, Jyoti Prasad had to ferry ice blocks from Kolkata in a steamer which would land after days at Jamugurihat on the Brahmaputra. The ice blocks would then be sent via train to Rangapara,about 16 miles from Tezpur. Thereafter, his car would wheel the blocks some 50 miles to reach his studio.
With no electricity in the tea estate then, the Faizi Brothers had to run their sound system with the power of Agarwala’s car battery.
Prafulla Prasad Bora, in his book, Cinema In Assam, has recounted the story while also highlighting that one part of the makeshift studio became “a living museum where Jyoti Prasad collected hundreds of traditional costumes, about 40 varieties of Assamese traditional ornaments for the lady characters, Japi, Sarai (Xorai), and other decoration material.”
One of the biggest challenges that Jyoti Prasad faced was to hire female actors. No family would allow their daughters to feature in a medium it barely knows. Stories about Jyoti Prasad and a few friends being chased away by villagers suspecting to be suwali sur (stealing girls) in parts of upper Assam is common knowledge.
Ultimately, Jyoti Prasad got lucky in Golaghat, in upper Assam. All the three top female actresses for the film could be picked from the area – Aideu Handique to play the role of Ahom queen Joymoti; Mohini Rajkumari to act as the queen mother (Rajmau) and Swargajyoti Baruah as the Naga woman Dalimi who would hide Ahom king Gadadhar Singha from his enemies.
Swargajyoti Baruah ended up as one of my grand-aunts. However, what needs to be highlighted here is also that, while Swargajyoti, after the film’s release, could leave her husband and re-marry a top lawyer (my grandfather’s brother) from a respectable Assamese family of the times, Aideu and Mohini Rajkumari were ultimately ostracised in their villages for having sullied the reputation of their villages by featuring in a film. Aideu, for having called Assamese actor Phunu Boruah who played her husband in the film as bongohordeu (husband), could never find a match to marry and remained single all her life.
Ismail Hussain, in his Assamese book, Jyotiprasad Agarwalar jibon aru darshan, had quoted Mohini Rajkumari recounting the days after the release of Joymoti, “Even relatives ostracised us; I was offered food at their courtyard saying I had lost my Jaat (caste). I ate that food… some people even came home with a gun to kill me for going against societal norms. If I had to attend a wedding, I had to first undergo the purity ritual (porasit). As if from that day onwards, my freedom was lost.”
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Such hostile reactions from the Assamese society must also be juxtaposed against the initial reaction to the film in itself, particularly by a section of Assamese intellegensia on technical grounds. The film, after it was first screened at Raunak Theatre in Kolkata on March 10, 1935, was screened ten days later at Kamrup Natya Mandir in Guwahati’s Uzan Bazar area with the help of a Philips portable projector. The Natya Mandir as then the hub of Assamese theatre. Negative remarks by a section of Assamese critics made the film a flop in Assam. Terms like Japioti (because of the large presence of Assamese cultural item Japi in the film’s sets) were used by critics against the film’s name Joymoti.
Jyoti Prasad was devastated. It made Assamese literary luminaries like Lakshminath Bezbaruah to write that while he heard people in Bengal praise Joymoti “for being much better than their first film,” a section of Assamese “came out determinedly to deride it.”
The film did have technical snags. Primarily in terms of sound. Baruah’s book highlights that Jyoti Prasad, along with the film’s assistant director Rajen Barooah, travelled to Lahore for its post production work. Unhappy with the sound, he ended up dubbing not just the male voices but the female voices too, all by himself.
Jyoti Prasad’s peeve with the Faizi Brothers for bad sound ended up in a legal battle whereby the film’s negatives remained in Lahore. He returned to Calcutta only with one positive print of Joymoti. The case remained unresolved. In due course, Partition came in the way too to access the negatives of the first Assamese film. Jyoti Prasad passed away in January 1951.
Baruah rightly writes, “This bitter episode with Mr Faiz (Mohammad of the Fezi Sound Recording System) remains a dark chapter in the history of Assamese cinema.”
More on the trajectory of Assamese Cinema can be accessed in Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty’s The Assamese — A Portrait of A Community, published in 2023 by Aleph Book Company.
