Forty-five years after its release, Bhabendra Nath Saikia‘s Anirban remains an overlooked cinematic masterpiece. Released on 6 February 1981, it was the director’s second film after Sandhya Raag, and like every other film he made, it won the Rajat Kamal for its year. That is a record few filmmakers anywhere can claim. Yet while Assam rightly celebrates its better-known classics, Anirban sits in the margins of memory, rarely screened and seldom discussed.
I came across it recently while browsing YouTube, where a channel has uploaded it in parts. That such a film survives only in fragments, at the mercy of an algorithm, says something uncomfortable about how we treat our cinematic heritage.
A Story Born in 1960
Like much of Bhabendranath Saikia’s work, Anirban is adapted from his own writing, the 1960 story Prahari. He wrote the screenplay himself, and his wife Preeti Saikia produced the film, making it a domestic enterprise in the best sense. The English subtitles were prepared by Dhirendra Nath Bezboruah, the celebrated journalist and writer who founded The Sentinel. There are no songs. The film asks nothing of its audience except attention.
The Plot of Grief
The story follows Rajani, a school master, and his wife, who lose three newborns in succession. The couple, played by Bhola Kotoky and Runu Devi, accept their fate and slowly grow accustomed to a childless life. Then, late in life, they dare to try once more. Shaking off anxiety and fear, they welcome a daughter, Nisha, and begin life afresh.
Rajani has by then lost his school job, so he teaches children privately at their homes. An affluent family employs him as tutor to their four children, one after another. Their daughter Jonali is Nisha’s age, and the two girls grow up as friends. Jonali and her mother give Nisha hand-me-downs, old clothes and nearly finished face creams, so that her father need not buy them. The gestures are loving, but for the adolescent Nisha they become a daily reminder of what poverty has denied her, including a boy who might admire her as one hovers around Jonali.
Rajani then engages a former student, Dibakar, to tutor his daughter. Nisha falls for the studious young man, and the two begin an affair that her parents disapprove of. Dibakar stops coming. Nisha stays calm on the surface while quietly declining, and a prolonged fever eventually takes her life. The old parents have lost their only child.
Years later, Dibakar’s family arranges his marriage and invites Rajani and his wife. She goes to the bride carrying a pair of silken clothes she had bought for Nisha, who never had an occasion to wear them. The bride tells her she knew about Nisha and Dibakar. The heartbroken mother hands over the silks and blesses her. It is one of the most restrained and devastating endings in Assamese cinema.
Performances Without Performance
What strikes you is the absence of artifice. Runu Devi, returning as another docile Assamese wife, never tries to impress the camera. Neither does Bhola Kotoky, a native of Jamugurihat in Sonitpur, who plays Rajani, known to everyone as Rajani Master. His character is a teacher who punishes pupils when they refuse to listen or study, a stern figure whose hardness is slowly dismantled by loss. Kotoky lets that irony breathe without underlining it.
This is the beauty of Bhabendranath Saikia’s direction. He trusts silence, faces and ordinary gestures. The children, especially Rajani’s schoolboys, perform with an ease that is rare in Assamese cinema today, where child actors are often coached into mimicry. Here they simply behave like children, and the classroom feels real.
Symbols Rooted in the Soil
Bhabendranath Saikia’s imagery comes from lived folk knowledge rather than from film school. The Ahot tree, the sacred fig, is planted as a blessing for expecting parents, a gesture of hope that the film allows to curdle into irony. The feeding of crows, another potent symbol, carries the weight of ritual, remembrance and the unseen dead. These are not decorative touches. They place the couple’s private tragedy inside a shared cultural world, where grief has customs and hope has trees.
Why It Matters Now
Its quiet social observation deserves attention. Nisha’s pain is not only bereavement but class: the borrowed clothes, the secondhand creams, the sense of watching life through a window. Bhabendranath Saikia understood that poverty wounds through small humiliations as much as through hunger. The parents’ disapproval of the romance, too, is not villainy but fear, the fear of people who have already lost too much.
Assamese cinema today often chases spectacle and borrowed formulas. Anirban reminds us that a film can be devastating without raising its voice. It needs no songs, no villains and no melodrama. Forty-five years on, the film’s title feels almost prophetic. Anirban means unextinguished, and that is exactly what this film has proved to be. What it needs now is a proper restoration, a legitimate rerelease and a new generation of viewers. A cinema that forgets its masters risks forgetting how to make masterpieces. Anirban deserves better than scattered uploads. It deserves to be remembered whole.