Recently, I came across Itihas (The Exploration), the 1995 Assamese family drama directed by filmmaker Bhabendra Nath Saikia. The film, which received the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Assamese in 1996, is now available on Luit OTT for Rs 150 for a two-day streaming period.
Featuring Nikumoni Barua, Tapan Das, Mridula Barua and Biju Phukan, Itihas offers a sharp observation of social behaviour beneath the polished exterior of modern urban living.
At the centre of the story is a domestic worker, played by Nikumoni Barua, who works in a newly constructed apartment complex inhabited by affluent families. Her lively personality, confidence and outspoken nature soon attract the attention of several men living in the flats. Some of them are married, yet they attempt to pursue her. She refuses to compromise her dignity, confronting their advances with courage.
Tapan Das plays her lover, while the character’s experiences expose the unequal relationships and moral contradictions hidden behind the respectable appearance of the apartment community.
Bhabendra Nath Saikia’s portrayal of the maid is particularly significant. Like in Sandhyaraag, the director places a working-class woman at the heart of a story about social structures and human behaviour. But here, the setting has shifted from rural Assam to a modern residential complex.
The contrast is revealing: the residents may possess comfortable homes and material prosperity, yet their conduct exposes the fragility of the values they publicly uphold. Through the maid’s encounters with the residents, Saikia examines how class privilege can coexist with entitlement and the exploitation of women.
The film’s most striking recurring symbol is the community well. At the beginning, when labourers clean it, they uncover discarded household objects, some of which are taken away by children. The well initially appears as a repository of ordinary remnants from everyday life.
By the climax, however, its contents have changed dramatically. Beer bottles, condoms and other refuse point towards a different kind of social waste, suggesting the erosion of restraint and responsibility beneath the community’s modern façade.
The well becomes more than a physical feature of the apartment complex. It functions as a silent witness to the society developing around it. Saikia’s use of this image gives the film much of its force: the residents’ outward progress is set against the moral debris accumulating in their shared surroundings.
The symbolism reaches its darkest point when the heroine is raped and killed by men from the neighbourhood. Her fate exposes the violence concealed beneath the community’s respectable image and brings the film’s critique of social decay to a devastating conclusion.
Mridula Barua plays an ailing flat owner who lives with her husband but, because of her illness, is unable to meet his emotional and physical needs. Her restrained performance adds another dimension to the film’s exploration of loneliness and strained relationships.
As in several of her other roles, she conveys suffering through a quiet, stoic presence rather than exaggerated expression. Her character also complicates the film’s portrait of the apartment residents, showing that private distress can exist alongside outward comfort.
At the Indian Panorama section of the International Film Festival of India, Itihas received a mixed assessment from The Hindu’s S. R. Ashok Kumar. He acknowledged its family sentiment, emotions and dramatic twists, while observing that Nikumoni Barua, Tapan Das and Biju Phukan had not fully risen to the occasion. This response offers a useful counterpoint to the film’s thematic ambition.
Itihas remains a compelling example of Bhabendra Nath Saikia’s interest in the social consequences of changing lifestyles. Its apartment complex, its vulnerable heroine and, above all, its symbolic well combine to question whether modernisation necessarily brings moral progress.
The film’s disturbing climax leaves that question hanging over audiences like me and compels me to write even after 30 years have passed since the film’s release.