Homen Borgohain is a brilliant essayist, a modernist poet, a good short story writer, a minor literary critic, a major Assamese novelist and by profession a journalist. As a journalist, he has edited several newspapers, each of which has created a new chapter in the history of Assamese journalism. As a writer of the fifties and associated with the literary journal Ramdhenu edited by Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya, Borgohain wanted to bring into Assamese literature the best that was thought and known in the world. Early in his literary career Borgohain was attracted by the French symbolists and the English modernist poets. He translated into Assamese a poem of Baudelaire in Ramdhenu. This deserves mention because his love for symbolists countinues to exist in an inchoate form in all his creative writings.
One striking feature of the post-independence Assamese novel is the vast panorama of political debauchery, growing poverty and illiteracy of the masses, rapid erosion of age old values and institutions. The dream of freedom lifted the hopes of the masses to dizzy hights but the rampant corruption, tyranny, and crisis in leadership following the transition to independence dashed all their hopes to pieces. Borgohain's novels also fall into this category. Like many of his contemporaries, he is basically concerned with social realism. As a committed journalist, he had a rare insight into the working of political leader-ship. In his creative writings, he always strove to expose their callous indifference to the needs of the people.
Besides Pita Putra first published in 1975, Subala (1963), Tantrik (1967), Astarag (1968), Kushilov (1970), Timir Tiriha (1975), Haladhiya Choraye Bao Dhan Khay (1973), Matshyagandha (1987) and Saudor Puteke Nao Meli Jay (1987) are the other novels of Borgohain. Borgohain's realism is not just photographic. He as a novelist has always addressed major issues of Indian society like poverty, unemployment, inflation, casteism, and corruption at the top level. He began his literary career as a short story writer and a poet in the fifties and later in the seventies established his reputation as one of the finest Assamese novelists. His Pita Putra is a very significant work in Assamese literature.
Pita Putra as the title suggests, is the story of two generations and of generation gap. But it is really the narrator of the novel who gives the story its life and pattern. The novelist understands and feels rural Assam. He catches its strange and irregular rhythm and pattern of life it breathes. The drama of the novel takes place in a remote village of Assam called Mohghuli, at the back-drop of transition to independence. But as we follow the narration of the protagonist we find that it not only conveys a life to us, tells us something about life, but also gives us a big slice of that life.
The tone and the environment of the novel have been carefully set in the opening chapter. The tone is a sad strain of loneliness and isolation of the central character, a sense of inaction and inactivity. Sivanath thinks and feels, he can smell and see but he cannot rouse himself into action. Не is stirred by memory and desire but ideas flit across before he can spring into action. His attitude to life is one of resignation. He is obsessed with the dirt and filth, the reek and the stink, with anything that rots, decays and decom-poses. The countryside is no longer idyllic; it is not the freedom of the field and the sky. The environment is stuffy and suffocating. It is reeking with the rotting smell of the earthworms, the cockroaches and their droppings. A schoolboy comes from school plodding through knee-deep mire under a pitiless sun. The sights and smells are nauseating. Children use any open space as latrines and human excreta keeps floating on creeks and drains filled with the summer shower. Everything is ugly and sordid except for the wild flowers that grow luxuriantly to rise above and to drown the squalor that is man's making. But the flowers fail.
There are two worlds in the novel. One is the external world of action and events of Mohghuli and the other, the largely inner and private world of the central character. A large number of facts have been faithfully documented to show how Sivanath reacts to the events that take place, around him. He studies them, argues, analyses, reduces things to their logical conclusions, and when it comes to decide and to act, he just recoils to his familiar shell. As time passes by and things begin to change, Sivanath feels further alienated by the emerging pattern of change. The gap between his expectations and the realizations steadily widen to break his heart in silence. His inability to come out and participate in the world of action makes him live in one world while believing in another. His continuous withdrawal into an isolated world of ideas corners him to disparately seek refuge in values he does not believe in.
Pita Putra is a carefully planned and an ambitious work of the novelist. In a remote village like Mohghuli things do not happen in a big way and the novelist is determined not to transmute things with the help of lofty ideals to some mystic height. But neither does the novelist belittle small things. Episodes after episodes are narrated either by the author or by some characters and however trivial they might look, each of them reveals one or another aspect of the old ways passing through a process of dissolution or the new ways emerging from conflicts.
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