Recognition too late
SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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Assamese filmmaker, Arup Manna, talks about his film on Aideu Handique, the first Assamese woman to act in films.
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Not a regular film: Arup Manna
TIME, they say, is the biggest healer. But time can be a tormentor too. Moving with the times, we learn to forget. And yet, time teaches us to recall moments.
The story of Aideu Handique, the first Assamese woman to act in films, is trapped somewhere in between. If in her later days, time taught her to forgive (she couldn't quite forget); at age 14, fresh from enacting the lead in the first Assamese feature film, "Joymoti", Aideu tried to fight the times.
Ostracised
In Assam of the 1930s, Aideu was ostracised. The times didn't allow a girl from a respectable family to perform before camera. Worse, in the film, she addressed a stranger (her co-actor) as bangahar deu, a term married women used to address their husbands in the Ahom community. So her maiden status was questioned. Explicitly.
As a punishment, the village panchayat debarred her from entering her house. So, the family erected a rickety outhouse for her. The village pond, the main source of water, was also out of her bounds. Aideu had to tread miles to get water for her daily use. Living in an outhouse, with no one to talk to, parents and three brothers helplessly gazing at her from a distance, she remained unmarried. Aideu died unsung on December 17, 2002. She was 82.
Almost five years after her death, a young Assamese filmmaker, Arup Manna, has just completed a feature film on Aideu. "Not because her story has a lot of drama" but because he wanted to pay obeisance. "Aideu: Behind The Scenes" was screened at the Mumbai International Film Festival, but is not being released in the theatres because it is not a "regular" film. Manna elaborates, "The film doesn't have a producer. I couldn't find any. Because it doesn't have dance sequences and songs, something that the producers feel will attract audience to the halls."
Dire straits
The Assamese film industry is in dire straits. Halls are closing down and who will take the risk of screening a film without any entertainment value? Even if the film is about a person who faced the social mores of her time to make an outstanding contribution to the medium.
So Manna decided to mortgage his house in Nagaon to complete the film under his own banner, Trinayan Productions. It took him five years. "Besides funds, I looked for the right faces. All the 43 artistes are new to cinema. I wanted that raw energy of the 1930s."
Inputs from Aideu
With not much written material available, Manna had to get his inputs straight from the subject. "She was bed-ridden then but was so excited that someone was willing to speak to her about her life. I can't forget the sparkling eyes in that frail frame when my camera threw light on her for the first time," he recalls. His film ends rather poignantly with a close shot of "those sparkling eyes in that frail frame". With silence, she seems to ask a question about a right lost, the right to live her life.
A scene from "Aideu: Behind The Scenes".
Manna feels he too had failed her in a way. "Like her director, Jyotiprasad Aggarwala. Looking back, it seems strange that Aggarwala never thought of finding out what happened to her after she did `Joymoti'. After all, he knew the times. After struggling for months to find an actress, he met Aideu. A villager had lured her to his Tezpur residence with the excuse of taking her on a ferry ride on the Brahmaputra, a novelty then. Aggarwala convinced her father to let her play the role. Yet, when she struggled against society, he didn't look back," points out Manna. Aggarwala, an eminent name in Assamese literature, made other films later but never thought of casting Aideu again. Why?"
Manna couldn't visit Aideu in her last days, as he was busy "running around to finish the film". He recalls, "I remember vividly my last moments with her. Touching her hand, I told her that I am leaving as the shooting is over. She looked at me, and said, Now that your work is over, you too will not look back. Every director is the same'." Six months after that fateful farewell "one day I heard that she is gone. I had a dream of bringing her to Delhi and screening the film in her presence. But... ." he rues.
Last days
Aideu, during her last days, stayed with her nephew in a village near Kamargaon in Golaghat district. As a symbol of recognition for her contribution, The East Indian Motion Picture Association had gifted Aideu a wheelchair. By then, she was too weak to sit up.
The Assam Government, much later, gave her Rs.1,500 a month as pension. It also recommended her name for Padmashri. "She was denied the award because she had done only one film. If this is not irony, then what is" asks Manna?
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