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Assam cinema?s mascot
Saikia?s death has gone unnoticed perhaps because his output as a filmmaker, wasn?t particularly prolific says Saibal Chatterjee.
Nothing could ever reflect the mainstream media’s lack of judgment more than the manner in which it has largely chosen to ignore the passing away of Dr Bhabendranath Saikia on Wednesday morning in Guwahati after a long battle with cancer. He deserved better.
The avuncular Saikia was a physicist, lecturer, short story writer, novelist, magazine editor, filmmaker and cultural icon who brought a deep understanding of the complexities embedded in a society in flux to bear upon all his creative endeavours. He was a towering, well-loved figure in Assam but, sadly, he never got his due at the all-India level.
Indeed, Saikia’s death has gone unnoticed perhaps because his output as a filmmaker – he preferred to exist outside the marketplace and, therefore, wasn’t particularly prolific – never made it to the national mainstream.
But nobody who has had the good fortune to savour his films, especially Sandhya Raag, Agnisnan and Kolahal, can ever deny that Saikia was most certainly one of the ten most important players in the parallel cinema movement of the country.
In a nation and society where kitsch is not only passed off with impunity as entertainment but is also not infrequently rewarded generously in the form of box office returns and reams of space in the media, life for filmmakers of Saikia’s ilk is a constant struggle for survival. He faced that struggle with fortitude and grace and came up trumps with virtually every film he made.
A physicist with a doctorate from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London and a Guwahati University lecturer for close to 20 years, the unassuming, media-shy Saikia made his first film, Sandhya Raag, in 1977. It immediately established him as a director of remarkable quality.
Adopting a naturalistic mode of storytelling in his debut feature, he brought out the lack of conjunction between a poverty-stricken village and a modern city with rare subtlety.
Sandhya Raag also revealed his felicity with characters: two sisters, daughters of rustic widow, are sent to the city to work as domestic servants in upper class households. While one of them fits in quite easily with a sympathetic family, the other has to contend with the amorous advances of her employer’s son. When they return home years later in the hope of marriage, neither is able to adjust to a life of deprivation in the village.
Saikia’s storytelling style hinged as much on his own literary moorings – he ranks among Assam’s leading short story writers and radio playwrights and several of his films are based on his own tales – as on the exposure he had to quality cinema early in life.
Saikia was in his early 20s when he chanced upon Satyajit Ray’s epochal Pather Panchali. Thanks to his subsequent stint in England, the young Saikia was able to devour the best of European cinema.
Although it took him a while to make his directorial debut, Saikia authored some of the finest films ever produced in Assam but he never made any profits from them. But as he was fond of revealing, he never lost any money either. He would plough whatever he made from his literary works into his low-budget films, which, as inevitable National Award winners, would be picked up and aired by Doordarshan. That would guarantee subsistence-level returns.
Though he made several other films before and since – Anirban, Sarothi, Abartan and Itihaas – Saikia will be remembered primarily for the hard-hitting Agnisnan (1985) and Kolahal (1988).
Agnisnan, based on his own novel set in pre-Independence Assam, narrated the story of a woman who asserts her right to be treated as an equal when her husband, a wealthy rice mill owner, marries a second time. The indignant woman starts an affair with the village thief and becomes pregnant.
Though Saikia delivered his statement about women’s emancipation without flinching, what stood out in Agnisnan were the nuances of characterisation, the complexities inherent in a patriarchal society and subtle skills of storytelling.
Even more powerful – and stark – was Kolahal, which was based on an original radio play written by Saikia. The film was about a boy who steals rice from trucks in order to feed himself and his mother. He dies under the wheels of one of the trucks and the owner tries to buy the mother’s silence by giving her a sack of rice stained with her son’s blood.
In the late 1990s, Saikia made his only film in Hindi, Kalsandhya, featuring Ashish Vidyarthi and Debashree Roy. It dealt with the question of militancy with characteristic realism and precision.
Saikia’s significance as a filmmaker essentially rests on the role he played as a chronicler of social change in Assam. From feudal-colonial Assam to strife-torn contemporary Assam, his films traversed the entire spectrum and provided sharp insights. As a craftsman, he stuck to the basics at best. But as a storyteller and humanist, he had few peers. Without him, Assamese cinema will never be the same.
