Inside an ill-decorated, palatial bungalow two people stand facing away from each other, one by will and the other by force. It's roughly ten minutes into the movie. A few scenes earlier, a child is born amid anxiety and expectancy. The mother dies giving birth, and the child is subsequently abandoned by her father for being her mother's 'murderer'. It is this child, now grown, who is forced to avert her gaze from her father.
Assamese film director Ramesh Modi's 2006 hit Deuta Diya Bidai works on premises familiar to those who grew up watching Bollywood movies in the 1980s or later. A disastrous time for admirers of 'sensible' commercial cinema, films of the 1980s and early 1990s swung between the chest-thumping machismo of Loha and the weepy sentimentality of Ghar Ek Mandir. Modi's film falls into the second genre of sentimentality, predominant in contemporary Assamese cinema.
In another scene in Deuta Diya Bidai, we see one of the leads lecturing a girl at his college. Having returned from abroad she is apparently devoid of knowledge and moral values because of 'Western influence', and finds Assamese people stupid and beneath her. In a dramatic shift of mood, the hero resorts to singing and dancing to explain to her the importance of Kaziranga National Park, Assam tea, and the Assamese hero Lachit Borphukan. The song, curiously reminiscent of Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, with an ensemble cast of small-time Bollywood actors, superimposes regional patriotism onto the errant girl's head. The plot and scenes might have been directly lifted from a series of similar-looking Bollywood movies, but there's an honest acceptance of imitation, and it comes from the mouths of two petty goons who, in order to provoke the leads, say to each other: "Villains in Hindi cinema at least get to molest the heroines."
A sense of insecurity runs deep in the minds of Assamese filmmakers. Even when they try hard to hide this insecurity under a patriotic garb, Bollywood or its symbols – Mumbai, the big city, money – assume an image of evil in their narratives. Another case in point is Jibon Bator Logori, released in 2009. This deals with the loss of traditional values in contemporary Assam. The kids of a village school teacher abandon their parents in search of greater goals in Guwahati, later moving on to Mumbai and the United States. It is significant that the son marries a Marathi girl. In the end the father survives on the support of the villagers, who are earnest, independent, and rooted to the earth, unlike his own children.