Born a century ago into an old and illustrious family that had migrated to Assam from Rajasthan, Jyoti Prasad Agarwalla was a multi-faceted genius in the truest and widest sense of the word. Living and working in Assam at a time of great social and political changes, his was a romantic vision imbued with a revolutionary fervour, a fervour that drew sustenance from his compassionate, humanist view of life. Through his songs, of which there are at least three hundred and fifty, his plays, his essays, indeed, the very melodies that he created for his songs, and also through the medium of cinema, he sought to convey his vision of an ideal world, where people would be free from all oppression, and would follow the path of Beauty or Culture, twin themes which Jyoti Prasad, like Keats, equated with Truth.

What was it about that bygone era that produced creative artistes who were proficient in so many different fields of endeavour? Off hand, one can name several people, beginning with Rabindranath Tagore, who excelled in several creative genres. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the time, an ambience of ferment, when one could not help but feel that one was part of stirring times. This perhaps became a catalyst for creativity to work overtime, not just in one genre, but in several at the same time, within the mind of a single person.

The air was, indeed, thick with soul-stirring calls for freedom during the time of Jyoti Prasad’s creative life, and many Indians bestirred themselves and worked towards it in the ways that were best suited to them. It is but natural, therefore, that Freedom and Liberty form a strong and recurrent theme in Jyoti Prasad’s lyrics. Like Shelley, he is an iconoclast in his lyrics, a person who wishes to break up the existing order before creating a new world that will be as socially equitable as it will be beautiful. Indeed, in many of Jyoti Prasad’s works, social equity is beauty. This is possibly the reason why images of earthquakes, storms, whirlwinds, even raging cyclones are such powerful and recurrent metaphors in his work. And even after India attained its hard-won independence, Jyoti Prasad’s creative insight saw things that left him highly dissatisfied. He saw the rot around him, a rot that set in too swiftly for idealists like him to come to terms with. Till his dying day in 1951, he kept exhorting his countrymen, through the medium of his incandescent songs, to shatter existing social mores and create a better life for all people, across all social structures. The Motherland for him was not just the land, it was Mother, the Maternal Principle personified, a selfless woman who has been ill served by her self-serving progeny. In such songs as Jononir Sontaan, for instance, this point comes out quite clearly:

    Children of the Mother,
     Awake, awake!

After spending several years abroad, he returned to the home of his birth. What struck him, as soon as he set foot once more in this green and fertile valley after his sojourn, was something that perhaps he, like most of us, had taken for granted - that is, the astonishing verdure of the place, the glowing greenery that envelops everything in a soft emerald mantle. The green of this valley, nurtured on its fertile and moist soil, is unique in hue, unlike anything that can be seen in any other part of the world. The heart-stopping physical beauty of the place, its gentle climate, and its magnificent and powerful river are recurring themes in his work. So, too, is the word Seuji or green. In Jyoti Prasad’s lexicon, the one word to describe the valley, literally, as well as, in his poems about the place, metaphorically, was the colour green. Green and, sometimes, gold were the colours of the valley for him. And the wonderful thing was that it was not just a Romantic’s view - though, indubitably, Jyoti Prasad was a Romantic. The vision was rooted firmly in the physical reality of that time.

    Seuji, seuji, seuji o
    Seuji dhoroni dhuniya.

    [Green, green, how green!
    Beautiful is the green earth…]

The heartstopping beauty of Nature that he saw all around him, in the tea garden that was his home, and the vast river that is never too far away from any place in Assam, all inspired him to heights of lyricism that have rarely been equalled.

The colour green was also a metaphor for him. It embodied fecundity, ripeness, rightness, an ecological balance that showed that all was right with the world, in spheres other than the physical, up and down the lengthy chain that connects all life and all fields of activity on this planet. To have a world in which the colour green predominated, and was shot through with the gold of sunshine, was to have a world that was close to the ideal.

The poet in Jyoti Prasad found a creative outlet in his hundreds of moving lyrics, his chosen mode of expression. As with so many lyricists of the time, he preferred to set to tune his own lyrics. This is undoubtedly the best thing to do if it can be done, for who knows better than the creator of the lyric the mood that needs to be translated from the medium of words to that of music? Jyoti Prasad’s tunes are varied, and always in consonance with the mood of the lyric. The rousing beat and the melodic lilt of his patriotic songs were designed to effectively rouse the too-often dormant feelings of love for one’s country that lay in the hearts of the people. A firm believer in the virtues of revolution rather than the evolutionary process, the melodies that he created for these lyrics were fervent, sometimes even to the point of being feverish.

Yet for his other songs, such as the devotional ones, the tunes were soft and soothing. The moving More Jibonore Sokha Krishna (Krishna, The Companion of my Life), for instance, begins almost in the centre of the mandra saptak, and soars to the middle notes of the taar saptak, like a prayer ascending through the spire of a church, or the dome of a temple, to the very heavens. The songs with which his plays are peppered also have a variety of tunes, in total consonance with the themes.

There is a uniqueness about the tunes of Jyoti Prasad’s songs that are strongly rooted in the melodies of this valley. The melodic features of the various genres of songs of this valley are different from those found in the rest of the country, for the simple reason that this valley has assimilated the culture of the lands to both its West (that is, the rest of India) and its East - that is, places such as Myanmar, Thailand and China. And yet Jyoti Prasad was also open to influences from the West, where he stayed for several years. These various skeins have all contributed to the freshness inherent in his tunes, a freshness that is felt even today like a zephyr on a hot summer’s day.

No doubt it was also his sojourn in the West, in addition to his own mental makeup, combined with his birth in a forward-looking family, which made him receptive to outside influences. He looked on the scientific and technological achievements of the West, for instance, as welcome tools to be used in hacking out the path to progress. His was not a shuttered vision, always looking to the remembered glory of the past as a consolation for an unsatisfactory present, but an open and progressive one whose windows faced the future, with its hope of a better life for the people. It was this binding together of the old and the new that gave depth and a varied dimension to his work.

Jyoti Prasad’s plays , in spite of their varied themes, also show these same chara-cteristics. Sonit Kunwari deals with the romance of Usha and Aniruddha in Sonitpur. Karengar Ligiri is a powerful play, written when the playwright was still in his early twenties, which sets forth ideas which were truly revolutionary for the time, especially in the areas of domestic relationships, women’s emancipation, and social change. Lobhita is the story of a firebrand nationalist, which has its roots in a real incident. Indeed, Jyoti Prasad himself was a strong and staunch nationalist who served a jail term under the British. No wonder this play is so brilliantly-lit with a fervent patriotism. Rupalim, another play written by Jyoti Prasad, has perhaps influenced later playwrights most strongly, because of its unconventional structural treatment.

The far-reaching vision of the man can be seen in the two films he made in Assamese, the two first motion pictures in the language, in fact. Film-making being a far cry from penning poetry in terms of work content, the fact that Jyoti Prasad actually undertook to work in this then new-fangled and expensive medium shows his courage as well as his innate modernity. Freshly returned home to Assam after several years in the West, he undertook, in the early 1930s, to make a full length feature film. This was courage bordering on foolhardiness, for Assam at that time was a remote backwater, cut off quite effectively from the rest of the country as far as access to facilities for making movies was concerned. Undeterred, Jyoti Prasad converted a portion of a tea garden owned by his family into a film studio which he named Chitraban. Not well equipped even by the standards of the day, he created the first motion picture not just of Assam there, but of the entire North-East region of India, as well. The sets were simple ones made of locally available materials such as bamboo, cane, wood, and banana stumps.

For a person of his time, and a man, the choice of theme for this first picture of his, a venture in which he staked an enormous amount of his own monetary resources, was quite revolutionary. He named the film Joymoti. It was adapted from renowned Assamese playwright Lakshminath Bezboruah’s play about the eponymous Ahom queen, a valiant and courageous person, the story of whose life has made her into a kind of regional folk heroine. To make a film was a path-breaking endeavour enough - but to have as the protagonist a female was borderline amazing. The choice of theme for the project also created a new problem, in addition to the ones already extant: there was no actress available to play the role. In the conservative society of the times, no girl would come out to actually act, that too with male co-stars, in this new medium films, and face social ostracization. Finally, after a time-consuming and thorough search, Aideu Handique, a teenaged girl from a village in Upper Assam was selected for the role, and the movie was made. Unfortunately, when the film was released in 1935 - first in Calcutta and then in the theatres of Assam - it was not a box-office success. Perhaps it was too avant-garde for its time, for Jyoti Prasad had to face quite a bit of criticism for this endeavour of his.

Jyoti Prasad Agarwalla editing Joymoti

Besides, there were the huge financial losses which making the picture had entailed. With the aim of recouping some of them in mind, Jyoti Prasad made Indramalati, the second Assamese feature film, with a small budget. He was involved in the project not just as a producer and director, but also as script and storywriter. Thankfully, with this project he managed to recover some of his finances, as the film was a comparative success. Finding the actors and even actresses for this project was not as punishing an experience as it had been for the earlier film, for Joymoti had been a path-breaker. It is noteworthy to recall that Bhupen Hazarika, then a child artiste of thirteen, acted as well as sang in the film.

Film-making has always been a co-operative effort between many people, all specialists in their own jobs, under the overall charge of the director, who is responsible for the film’s focus. From actors to camerapersons, from advertising professionals to costume designers, from the creators of sets to scriptwriters, each and every person brings in his or her own specialised knowledge in specific fields, which the director melds and meshes into a cohesive whole that can be said to carry a particular vision, and a point of view, through a story. Jyotiprasad, however, worked in an environment where none of these professions were extant. As a result, he had to do everything practically single-handedly. From casting to story-writing, from visualising and supervising the set building at the Chitraban Studio to handling the publicity material, he did it all. It was he who took the first, difficult step in the arena of film-making in this region, and he did it with courage and great artistic finesse.

The towering and pioneering genius of Jyoti Prasad is being commemorated with enthusiasm in the State. The celebrations began on 17th June, 2002, the centenary of Jyoti Prasad’s birth, and are scheduled to take place for a full year, with a variety of programmes, all over the State. The man has already been bestowed with the title, Rupkonwor, or Prince of Beauty - Beauty here signifying, of course, the wider meaning of Aesthetics, and, ultimately, Truth - and as Rupkonwar he is known, loved and revered throughout the length and breadth of the beautiful valley that he felt so passionately about. The Government film studio has been named Jyoti Chitraban after the Rupkonwar. The actual day of his birth centenary was celebrated with fervour in Guwahati. A state-of-the-art sound recording studio, and an area for the housing of important archives, was inaugurated by the Chief Minister at the cultural complex of Srimanta Sankardeva Kalakshetra. Other noteworthy events scheduled to take place during the course of the coming year have also been chalked out. His songs are already widely known as Jyoti Sangeet, since they are acknowledged to form a genre of their own.

Programmes have been chalked out for the entire year. Indeed, some of the projects that have been taken in hand now, in this, the poet’s centenary year, ought to have been begun and completed long ago. It is generally agreed that far more than the three hundred and fifty songs that are now recognised as Jyoti Prasad’s oeuvre lie scattered among his many papers. It is sometimes said that these songs may border on close to a thousand in number. The official Committee that has been instituted for commemorating the celebrations during the centenary year of Jyoti Prasad’s birth will have to take charge of a project that will no doubt have to be launched to search out and preserve these valuable works. Indeed, besides the lyrics, there are many other works of Jyoti Prasad’s that remain undocumented, unpublished, and unknown. These valuable papers are in urgent need of preservation, for how long can they survive the onslaughts of time, the weather, and mandible-chomping insects? It is imperative that archival work should be carried out: not just begun, but brought to a satisfactory conclusion, within this centenary year.

Another aspect that needs to be worked upon is that of translation. The language that Jyoti Prasad used as his chosen medium of expression, Asomiya, is spoken by a comparatively small number of people. For Jyoti Prasad’s effulgent genius to be made available to a wider readership, it is vitally necessary that his works should be translated by competent and established workers in the field. A start can perhaps be made with the essays, which form a substantial and important body of work. The plays can be made available in translation next. His lyric poetry will no doubt be most difficult to translate. This is because his choice of words, and the fact that he is so rooted in the life and culture of Assam, pose a challenge to any translator who tries to transfer the unique flavour of this land, as felt in his poems, to the language of a totally different culture, that is, English. This does not, of course, mean that it is an insurmountable challenge. It can certainly be done, and Jyoti Prasad’s genius deserves a world-wide audience, which will be enriched for having known his works.

Perhaps, during this centenary year of Jyoti Prasad’s birth, we can once more see his plays staged, with modern theatrical and dramatic aids. Indeed, even a casual reading of those plays yields up many layers of meaning, even today. How much more will a proper, professionally-mounted production give to us!

An Asomiya to the core, even if answering to a name that was not Asomiya at the time, Jyoti Prasad was himself a brilliant product of the powerful assimilative forces which have given rise to, and greatly enriched, the composite Asomiya culture down the centuries. Indeed, his life and work can be viewed as a metaphor for Asomiya society itself, which is not a homogeneous one in its composition. The many parts that make up the whole can only enrich the entire construct of Asomiya culture if each part is allowed to freely contribute the beauty of its unique yarns to the warp and weft of the entirety of the fabric.

Courtesy: The Assam Tribune (2002)