Finding a lost Assamese film soundtrack in a Melbourne junk shop

For more than forty years, members of the Gauhati Cine Club had searched for the original soundtrack of a forgotten Assamese film. Every few years, a postcard arrived from a private collector in Calcutta, or a family member in Tezpur claimed to have a reel. None of them did. Then, on a wet Saturday in late winter, a volunteer from our archive committee found the disc wedged between a Kenny Rogers LP and a Readers Digest box set in a Brunswick op shop, twenty-two Australian dollars on the price tag, no one the wiser.

The discovery did not feel momentous at first. It felt like the quiet treasure-hunting that keeps Australian second-hand culture alive, the browsing that happens every weekend in neighbourhoods from Fitzroy to Fremantle, in church halls in Sydney's inner west and at the monthly trash and treasure market in Hobart's Salamanca Place. Only after the sleeve was slipped off and the label held up to the pale fluorescent light did the name Rupkonwar Jyotiprasad appear in faded Assamese script.

This is the story of how a junk shop record ended up on a curator's desk in Canberra, what was actually on the grooves, and why a small film society more than nine thousand kilometres away is treating a Melbourne Saturday as a turning point in its seventy-year effort to keep Assamese cinema alive.

A long route from Guwahati to Melbourne

I had flown out of Guwahati via Singapore for a research residency at the University of Melbourne, partly funded by the Australia India Council and partly by a small grant from our own membership fund. The plan was simple: three weeks at the university's screen studies collection, a few screenings at the Melbourne Cinematheque, and notes for a paper on regional language film restoration in South Asia.

Melbourne in July is a city of grey skies and short afternoons, and the locals speak of the weather the way Guwahati residents speak of the Brahmaputra's mood. I rented a small flat in Carlton, walked each morning through the lanes near Lygon Street, and gave myself one task per weekend: explore a suburb. Brunswick, with its long stretch of Sydney Road thrift stores, was always going to be on the list. The charity shops in that strip are treated as serious browsing destinations rather than mere donation points.

A grey Saturday in Brunswick

By the time I reached the shop, my hands were numb and the trams on Sydney Road were throwing up curtains of spray. The place had no proper sign, only a hand-painted board reading Records, Books, Misc. Inside it smelled of cardboard and Milo. The owner, a man in his seventies who told me he had been buying estates since the late seventies, was listening to test cricket on a small portable radio.

I had already sifted through three crates of seven-inch singles, mostly Australian chart hits and a surprising amount of Slim Dusty, when I came to a box of unsorted LPs at floor level. Most of the sleeves were water-stained. The disc that caught my eye had no sleeve at all, only a brown paper inner with a hole punched in the wrong corner, and a faint smell of old shellac. The label was bilingual, half-English half-Assamese, with the title Kapiliir Kathare and the composer credit in script I recognised from my grandfather's collection.

The shopkeeper shrugged when I asked who had brought it in. A house clearance in Pascoe Vale, he said. People clear out parents' homes every week. The price was twenty-two Australian dollars, roughly what a vegetarian thali costs in a small Melbourne eatery.

The needle drop and the voices it carried

Back at the flat in Carlton, after a flat white from a cafe on Rathdowne Street and a borrowed turntable, I heard the first bars. The opening cue was unmistakably the work of Bhupen Hazarika, a voice I had grown up hearing on All India Radio, but the orchestration was thinner, clearly recorded for a film rather than a concert. A woman's voice sang a Borgeet. A man's voice answered in verse. The sound quality was rough, but the recording itself was complete.

The disc turned out to be a 78 RPM transcription disc pressed in Calcutta in 1963, intended for cinema owners rather than the public. Such discs were distributed alongside reels so that exhibitors in small towns without their own sound systems could sync the audio to the projected image using a separate turntable. Most were destroyed after a season of screenings. The fact that one had survived at all, let alone turned up in Brunswick, seemed statistically improbable.

Tracing the disc to a forgotten film

Over the next week I borrowed reading access to the State Library of Victoria and traced the disc's likely path. A Bengali film distributor who had toured eastern Australia in the early nineteen-seventies, bringing Indian films to small migrant communities in Footscray and Surry Hills, had almost certainly brought it with him. When his tour ended and he returned to Calcutta, a box of unsold promotional records had been left behind with a friend. The friend moved to Pascoe Vale, married, raised children, and at some point the records were filed away in a garage.

Australia's Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act, since folded into the broader cultural property framework administered by the Ministry for the Arts, governs the export of items of significant cultural value. The rules around heritage objects entering or leaving the country are stricter than many visitors realise. I contacted a small heritage law firm in Melbourne's CBD, paid a modest consultation fee, and received written confirmation that the disc could be exported under a standard cultural property permit provided I declared it at Tullamarine and supplied provenance documentation.

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in Canberra was an obvious first stop. Their sound conservators cleaned the disc, made a digital transfer at twenty-four-bit, and offered to keep a preservation copy on the understanding that the original would eventually return to Guwahati.

Laws, labels and the long road back to Assam

The bureaucratic half of the adventure was, in its own way, as unlikely as the find itself. Australian customs officials at Melbourne Airport were courteous but careful, asking for the permit, the loan agreement, and a written statement from our club's secretary. I had imagined a long argument and instead received a stamp and a polite wish for a safe flight. The disc travelled home in a foam-lined case inside my checked luggage, wrapped in a copy of the Melbourne Age for insulation, a small absurdity I will confess to.

Back in Guwahati, the committee received the disc in our small office above the bookstore on GNB Road, a building that has housed the club since the late seventies. We held a small listening session the following Sunday. Members who had been children when the film first screened in 1963 sat in folding chairs, eyes closed, and heard a river song they had not heard in over half a century. The film itself is still missing as a moving image. The voice, though, has come home.

What the find means for our archive

A soundtrack without its picture is not a film, but it is the closest thing we have had in a generation. The discovery has prompted us to begin a new survey of every member's home for reels, tapes, and discs that might once have belonged to a touring distributor. We have also opened talks with the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia about a long-term exchange programme for South Asian regional cinema, an idea that would have seemed fanciful six months ago.

This September, on the Saturday closest to the club's founding date, we will play the cleaned transfer through our old reel-to-reel at an open-air screening near Dighalipukhuri. The film print will not be there. The voice will be. Members of the public are warmly invited to bring their own recordings, photographs, and memories, and to consider joining the club as life or student members. Anyone with information about other surviving discs from the same era is asked to write to our archive committee at the address listed on the membership page.