Cinema was in his genes. Padum Barua was an avid reader of books; books on literature, music, art and certainly film. An accomplished flute player, he did listen to music with rapt attention. But for him nothing did matter more than cinema; it was just his all-pervading interest, a dying passion. A great lover of everything called art, he did try to trace them in cinema and when found them in plenty he became content and fulfilled. Cinema was his every second’s fascination, oxygen for his libido, breath for his soul and he lived his life with cinema until his death. “This is my life, this alone is my life”- Adoor Gopakrishnan’s this remark resonates throughout his life. Till the time cinema gave him strength and hope, he was vibrant and cheerful. But then when hope did fade away he did sink. Sink into that well of morbidity and a mysterious silence, and then he retired from life on 25th July, 2006. Some dreams fulfilled and many more never saw the light of the day.

 Padum Barua was drawn towards filmmaking after viewing Joymoti (1935) of Jyotiprasad Agarwalla. Padum Barua shared the overt patriotism, nationalism and Assameseness, which were the pillars of Jyotiprasads’ love for art, with equal ardor. His love for cinema and eye for the details of technique and aesthetics can be gauged from the foreword of his book Chalachitra Prasanga (About film) where he writes: “I was drawn towards films when I saw Joymoti in my adolescence. That was the first talkie I had seen. I had also seen quite a few films made by Calcutta’s New Theater and Pune’s Prabhat Company while a school student in Jorhat. The patches of creative camera work, dramatic use of the sound track and interesting editing found in the works of Pramathesh Barua, Devki Kumar Basu and V Shantaram gave me inexplicable joy and satisfaction. In the same book, elsewhere he writes-” In just as he was anxious to project the distinctive aspects of Assamese art and culture, Jyotiprasad made Joymoti to put a distinctive Assamese stamp in this new art form”. He also states in the preface of his printed version of Ganga Chilonir Pakhi(The Wings of Albatross) that “It is after viewing Joymoti, I realized that depiction of nuances of any society is possible only through cinema and not in a artificial situation with overstated dialogue and melodramatic acting as does in a staged drama. Actually the seed sown as I saw Joymoti bore fruit when I completed Ganga Chilonir Pakhi four decades later after an eight-year long struggle.” In the context of Indianness in Satyajit Ray’s film, renowned critic of Bengal Chidananda Dasgupta also comments in his book “The Cinema of Satyajit Ray” (Page. XI): “Ray was a classicist, an inheritor of a traditional Indian approach in art in which beauty is inseparable from truth and goodness. Despite his fine understanding of a wide range of Western culture- ­which Renoir in 1949 used to find ‘fantastic’- it is his Indianness which gives him his value in India, and for the medium imported from the West in which he worked.”

When asked by an interviewer of Assamese daily ‘Dainik Janasadharan’, which published a special supplement in his eightieth birthday on 9th July, 2006, just one month before his death, Sahitya Akademi award winner litterateur late Chandra Prasad Saikia said, his only regret in life was non-realization of the dreams they saw as young freedom fighter. It is natural that Padum Baruah, belonged to the same generation of young dreamer, bore the same pain and anguishes in his heart since he too witnessed the rule of British and state of subordination and by some way was part of the freedom struggle. Like Saikia, he too had perhaps envisioned an egalitarian, progressive and democratic nation, as usual for the youths of that period; which however greatly shattered after India attained independence, in the maze of post-liberation chaos and stark reality. Incidentally, the novelist of Ganga Chilanir Pakhi Dr. Lakhinandan Borah belonged to the same generation as well and Borah beautifully incorporated this frustration of his generation in the novel very aptly, by illustrating a true state of social realty and in this setting, narrating a tragic love story and the agony and precariousness of the characters. Undoubtedly the poignant portrayal of the socio-economic reality of an Assamese village in the post-independence India and destiny of the characters in that milieu impressed Barua, so much so that he considered filming the novel for his debut Ganga Chilanir Pakhi. It is in the films’ fourth scene itself that the social reality of the post-independence era surfaces, when the small time trader responds to protagonist Dhanajay’s query on his well being: “How can you do business? The time of doom is approaching for the small traders.” On Dhanajoy’s request for elaboration, Bhogram says again:  “After the country attained independence only the big traders of the town are earning huge profits by making the village roads. How can we compete with them with our little capital”. Few shots later Dhananjoy comments: “The root of the problem is the money lenders. Only they earn profit from cultivation while the farmer shed their sweat in the paddy field.” Bhogram then responds: “But our people are ignorant, they consider the money lenders to be very useful. They simply don’t know who is sucking their bloods.”  Padum Barua studied Marxism, but he never believed the ideology.  The Marxism however must have endowed him with class-consciousness and with that consciousness he summed up beautifully with minimal dialogue, the malady of the system in the post-independent India where the divide between rich and poor was growing menacingly. Barua however did not consider it necessary to stir up a revolution or struggle as its solution, rather Dhananjay pronounces: “We have to set up a cooperative at Pavasila.” 

But Dhanajoy, the confident, supposed flag bearer of a social awakening could not however bear up the reality of Basanti offering him to own her, his past lover and a widow now, which invariably suggests unless free from prejudice and superstition no individual can bring about any social reform and rather yearning for social change remains hollow and innocuous. It must be mentioned that Basanti also experienced Achilles' heel when invited for an elopement by her lover Dhanajay and as feeling of committing sin, fear for social proscription and pain of familial estrangement grew stronger, she finally returned from the river ghat.  The scene’s musical tonality and cinematic richness makes it one of the most memorable parts of the film. Renowned critic Dr. Hiren Gohain also sums up beautifully Barua’s deft selection of the story as well as his dexterity in shaping it to a brilliant film. He says “The selection of the story for the Ganga Chilanir Pakhi proves Baruas' knack for it, since the tragic failure of a social evolution reflected movingly in a story of a crushed dream of individuals. This is not just an issue of village vis-à-vis town; rather this is a story of a tragic premature death of a possibility of a complete society.”

There is no doubt that the heart-rending tale of Joymoti played some role in prompting Padum Barua to select the novel Ganga Chilanir Pakhi for his debut film. Set to a time 300 years later than Joymoti, the story as illustrated above, narrates how Basanti’s reverie of a dream-family never materializes in a society still fraught with prejudice, superstition, gender disparity and social injustice. When after successive bludgeons a widowed Basanti musters courage to propose to her one time love Dhanajay, a homeopath, She comes to realize how deep the bearing of shallow social norms in her society. Dhanajay flees. A villager sums it up: “The doctor has left, my dear, he’s sold everything to a fisherman and left for good.”

In another scene, Basanti’s letter to Dhanajay read out in Basanti’s voice as monologue as Monbori goes to deliver; it speaks much about the timidity of the situation. “We haven’t grown old as yet. We have many years to live. How can we spend these days? Isn’t there any way out?” Basanti says again: “….I have read the scriptures. But I cannot make me believe that the god who has made me suffer like this will be kind to me in my next birth. I know people will be shocked when they hear that I have become yours, But will it do if we go on fearing the society….” Since the days of freedom struggle many have tried to remove the stigmas about remarriage of a widow, however even after three decades past India’s independence, the alacrity for a revolt by a shattered woman of an isolated village peters out because of the cowardice of the escapist man. This farce of Ganga Chilanir Pakhi, the tragedy of the tale lingers. It lingers long after one has seen the film and continues to haunt. It gives Ganga Chilanir Pakhi a classic dimension.

Many say that Satyajit Ray has inspired Padum Barua and that Pather Pachali has influenced the making of Ganga Chilanir Pakhi. Baruah was always in favor of linear narration in films mainly understandable to the masses. That does not mean he was against experimentation and against the new wave films of the seventies and eighties. He was an ardent follower of this new wave movement. He was of his firm view that since film is a visual art form having universal appeal, narratives in this format should be simple and linear, at least for those in India or Assam. Undoubtedly the lyricism of Pather Pachali, its’ poetic flavor, austere realism and distinct Indianness and above all the pioneering effort of Ray appealed him immensely, so much so that he perhaps had visualized the shape of things to come- the Ganga Chilanir Pakhi and later infuses in it a distinct Assameseness a la Pather Pachali and Joymoti. This was perhaps determined and even ensured by one article of Satyajit Ray, published in ‘The Statesman’, which Barua might have come across. Ray stated in the article: “It should be realized that the average American film is a bad model, if only because it depicts a way a life so utterly in variance with our own. Moreover, the high technical polish, which is the hallmark of the standard Hollywood product, would be impossible to achieve under existing Indian conditions. What the Indian cinema needs today is not gloss but more imagination, more integrity and more intelligent appreciation of the medium….what our cinema needs above everything else is a style, an idiom, a sort of iconography of cinema, which would be uniquely and recognizably Indian.” (Page- 15-16, ‘My Years with Apu’) come across   One however should not overlook the fact that in Ganga Chilanir Pakhi, there are elements those never find place in a Ray-film, except perhaps in Sadgati (1982). On the other hand, Padum Barua by that time was exposed to wide array of international classics as well and as he stated somewhere, the pictorial beauty of Russian films, characterization of the French films and neo-realism in the post- world war films of Italy also mesmerized him enormously. While viewing Ganga Chilanir Pakhi, one could sense that, there had been an effort to engrain all these elements in the structure of the film.

To trace these influence and above all the influence of cinema in the mind of Padum Barua, it is imperative to trace his life, albeit briefly. Padum Baruas’ childhood was confined to viewing films screened in the regular Jorhat circuit. He was aware of the patches of technical brilliance contained in those works of Pramathesh Barua, Devki Basu and V Shantaram, which he rightly recognized to be not exactly cinematic in those formative years. However, he appreciated some of the films of pre-Pather Pachali era like Himanshu Rais' Light of Asia, Dhamle Fatehlals' Sant Tukaram and Sant Gyaneswar, Bimal Roys' Do Bigha Jamin, Chetan Anands' Neecha Nagar, K A Abbas's Munna and Shantarams' Amarjyoti to be comparatively goods film in terms of technique and social relevance. It was only in 1943, when Padum Barua went for higher studies at the Benaras Hindu University that he could see films made by Pudovkin, John Ford, Victor Fleming and realized that film is indeed an art form. When he joined government service at Shillong in 1948, he could still see lot of American, British and the occasional Russian film to further hone his cinematic sense and vision. The post World War II works of Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Belly Wilder, Lawrence Olivier enriched him immensely, and when one day he laid his hand on a book called ‘Film’ by renowned film critic Roger Manville, it enriched him even more. In 1962 after having joined hands with a group to found the Shillong Film Society, that the world of serious cinema further opened up to him. His involvement was not confined to viewing films alone. There were those seminars, conferences and festivals held in Shillong and Kolkata, which were attended with religious ardor and regularity to enrich his knowledge about the art of cinema. Very keen from the beginning to share his knowledge with the society, in June 1965 Padum Barua published an article titled Film Silpar Abhash (An idea of film art) in which he dwelt at length on the various elements of film and filmmaking that marked the beginning of a drive he undertook with a missionary zeal to propagate cine-literacy in the Assamese society. He was convinced that it was his solemn responsibility to spread cine-literacy and in particular, to develop a consciousness about meaningful cinema he believed and pursued. He was also assured that the era of ‘admixture of literature, theater and opera’ in Indian film was brought to a logical end by the onset of film society movement in Bengal, with the formation of Calcutta film society, which was instrumental in shaping the distinct ‘Indian film’- the Pather Pachali. He along with others borrows inspiration from Calcutta film society and formed the Shillong film society in 1962, the first in whole north east India. There is no doubt, in bringing about a consciousness, in spreading cine-literacy by writing innumerable article on cinema, and as a whole propagating the cause of good cinema in this part of the country, Barua rendered yeomen service throughout his life. Sadly though, none of the subsequent serious filmmakers have exhibited the same zeal.

Though the works of Satyajit Ray inspired Padum Barua, there is no doubt that this did not blind him. In an article titled Bharatiya Chalachitrar Natun Dhara (New trend in Indian film), he writes, “Satyajit Rays’ films of those days do not reflect the contemporary society of the day. The cacophony of the post independence period, with its communal riots, influx of refugees, food shortages, inflation, injustice, black-marketing, and exploitation are nowhere to be found in his films. Rather, what finds reflection is an essence of Bengal’s cultural renaissance of the beginning of the century.”  He rather rightly observed the reflection of social issues and concerns in Ghataks’ film, which formed the underlying contour of Ganga Chilanir Pakhi. Elsewhere in the same article, he mentions that Ritwik Ghatak had the courage to pick up sensitive and socially relevant issues for his films, something no one had done thus far in Bengali cinema. About Ajantrik he states that more than its subject matter, the beauty of the film lies in its sensible portrayal of the subject with an exceptional poetic opulence. About Komal Ghandhar, Subarnarekha and Meghe Dhaka Tara he writes: “ Even though the subject matter of these films were contemporary issues of local relevance, Ghatak is not satisfied by depicting the decadent moral decay alone, he attempts to explore the role of collective sub-consciousness in the mental evolution of the people of both Bengal and India since the past.” Padum Baruah once stated that though Ray himself claimed to be influenced by Hollywood movies, in his films, there was no trace of that, what was there essentially an aesthetic influence. It must be said Ray and Ghatak, both flag bearer of meaningful cinema in Indian milieu influenced Barua, but it was nothing more than an aesthetic influence, with which he rather gave birth to a new ‘Assamese’ cinema.

Despite his strong fascination to portray an Assamese identity in his debut film, Barua however stops short of taking recourse to gimmicky, making visuals spectacular and in particular, using flashy musical score for Ganga Chilanir Pakhi. Instead he uses the sound elements of rural Assam- the toad’s crackle, the vixen’s howl, the clicking of the loom, the pounding of the husking pedal, chirping of birds, hymns from the prayer hall and which not. There is hardly any other instance of such a lively account of an Assamese village unfolding in any other film before Ganga Chilanir Pakhi.