Joymoti

The story is set in the late seventeenth century, during the troubled years when the Ahom court was rocked by the purge of its princes. Joymoti, the wife of the fugitive prince Gadapani, is seized by agents of the king's powerful minister, the Borphukan. She is pressed to reveal where her husband is hiding. She refuses.

What follows is a long ordeal. Joymoti endures torture rather than betray Gadapani, and she dies without giving him up. Her silence protects the prince, who survives to return to the kingdom's politics, and it turns her into one of the most honoured figures in Assamese memory.

The film also gives space to Dalimi, a tribal woman from the hills who shelters the fleeing prince. Through her, Agarwala pleads for harmony between the communities of the hills and the plains, a theme he held to be as urgent in his own time as in the seventeenth century.

Agarwala came to film after studying the craft abroad. He spent roughly six months at the UFA studios in Berlin on his way home from England, and on returning to Assam he set up Chitraban Studio on the grounds of the Bholaguri tea estate. Actors lived in two camps, women near the manager's bungalow and men near the tea factory, and rehearsed at night once the day's tea manufacture was over. A property room filled with traditional costumes, ornaments and hats grew so large it became a small museum.

Skilled technicians had to be brought from Lahore, and ice for the set travelled all the way from Calcutta. When the footage reached Lahore for editing, Agarwala found that half of it had no usable sound. Gathering the scattered cast again was impossible, so he hired a sound studio and dubbed the voices of every male and female character himself, recording around six thousand feet of film in a single day. That improvisation is why the film is remembered as an early Indian talkie to rely on dubbing and re-recording.

The screenplay draws on Lakshminath Bezbaroa's play on the same subject, with music and direction by Agarwala, who also produced the picture under the Chitralekha Movietone banner.

Joymoti was not a commercial success on release, but critics and historians have long valued it for its politics and its choice of a woman as the moral centre of the story, which was unusual for Indian cinema of the 1930s.

Its survival has been uncertain. The original full-length print was feared lost after the partition of India in 1947. In 1995 the documentary maker Arnab Jan Deka found a complete copy at a studio in Bombay and alerted the Assam government, while some reels from another print kept by Hridayananda Agarwala were partly restored by Altaf Mazid.

As the first Assamese film, Joymoti is the reference point for the whole industry, and 10 March 1935, the date of its release, is treated as the birthday of Assamese cinema. It has been shown at universities and festivals around the world, including Northwestern University in 2011, UCLA in 2010, festivals in Rome, Stuttgart and Munich in 2006 and Delhi in 2008, and the Indo-Bangladesh centenary of Indian cinema celebrations in Dhaka in 2012.