BY KAUSHIK NATH
Mridupawan Bora’s Assamese telefilm Protyasha now streams on the Doordarshan Kendra Dibrugarh YouTube channel after its original run on DD Assam. It is set in Niz Moidumia village in Dibrugarh, and it tells a story that anyone who has spent time in rural Assam will recognize without needing it explained. Two young girls want to study. Their father, an alcoholic whose fear of abandonment has curdled into control, would rather not let them. The elder one ends up in a city kitchen scrubbing someone else’s dishes. A local teacher tries to intervene and fails.
The father’s logic is not presented as the reasoning of a monster. It is the reasoning of a man shaped by a social order that has always treated daughters as liabilities and sons as assets. He is a product of a system old enough that most people around him would not even recognize it as a system. This is simply how things are. This is simply what daughters are for.
Bithika, in the role of the elder daughter, carries the film with a restraint that is harder to pull off than it looks. She is not playing a victim who weeps on cue. She is playing a girl who has learned early how to hold herself together in a house that keeps taking things from her.
The teacher who intervenes represents every well-meaning person who has believed that reason and goodwill would be enough to move a situation like this one.
Assam has announced schemes, printed slogans, and given speeches about the girl child with great feeling. And still, in villages whose names nobody outside the district knows, girls are being pulled from classrooms and handed a broom because a frightened man decided their futures were an inconvenience. Protyasha means hope. The film is honest enough to show how fragile that hope remains.
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