The Archivist Behind 40 Years of Film at Gauhati Cine Club

For nearly four decades, one member of the Gauhati Cine Club has arrived early to each screening, settled into a back-row seat, and opened a battered ledger. He has been writing down every film shown in the club's halls since 1985, building an archive that now stretches across tens of thousands of entries. His work has become a quiet institution in its own right, an invaluable record of cinema culture in Assam and a reference point for cinephiles far beyond the region.

The catalogue began as a personal hobby and grew into something the club could never have anticipated. Researchers, journalists, and filmmakers now consult his notes when they need to trace a particular screening, recover the history of a forgotten filmmaker, or understand how tastes in regional cinema have shifted over time. In an era when physical records are increasingly fragile, his persistence offers a rare window into the everyday practice of film viewing.

From Ledger Pages to Living Record

The archivist, a retired schoolteacher named Dipen Baruah, first picked up the habit of note-taking in 1984, a year before he formally began logging screenings. He attended a Bimal Roy retrospective at the club's old hall near Panbazar and left with the feeling that something important had passed unrecorded. He wanted to remember every frame, but he knew he could not trust his memory alone.

By 1985, the year he joined the committee, Baruah had already prepared a system. He kept the format simple: date, title, director, country of origin, language, source of the print, and a short descriptive line. Each entry was written in blue ink in a series of bound notebooks that he replaced every two years. The system has remained essentially unchanged, which makes the archive remarkably consistent. Scholars working through the notebooks often comment on how reliably the handwriting and layout hold up across decades.

In the early years, Baruah would often type summaries on a manual Remington when he returned home. Later, he began scanning his notebooks and sharing them with younger volunteers. A small group of club members now helps digitise his older records, but the master logbook itself remains handwritten and lives at his desk in Guwahati.

Building the Catalogue

This archive is more than a list of films. It is, in many ways, a portrait of the club itself. The earliest notebooks record black-and-white classics and Soviet-era Eastern European films, reflecting the cine club movement's solidarity with socialist cinema in the 1980s. By the 1990s, the listings show a steady shift toward Indian art house and parallel cinema, including works by Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mrinal Sen, and a growing roster of Assamese filmmakers returning home after studying in Pune and Kolkata.

As the club grew, so did the variety of formats. VHS tapes entered the catalogue in the early 1990s, followed by DVDs in the 2000s, and digital files in the past decade. Baruah updated his method each time, adding columns for format, file size, and source. The archive has, in effect, become a record of films and of the technologies through which they have circulated. Researchers interested in how Indian film culture absorbed new media have begun to cite his notebooks as primary evidence.

The catalogue also reflects the personalities who shaped the club. Recurring names appear in the margins, including guest speakers, visiting critics, and the projectionists who handled the prints. Some of those projectionists are gone now, and their notes occasionally provide the only surviving memory of a particular screening.

What the Archive Has Revealed

The notebooks have surfaced patterns that even long-time members had not noticed. The archivist himself points to a few that he finds especially rewarding. Among them are:

• A 1987 Japanese film series that brought anime screenings to Guwahati years before they were widely available elsewhere in India.
• A forgotten 1993 documentary on the Brahmaputra riverbanks that has since been used by environmental researchers.
• An unbroken chain of regional film festivals from the mid-2000s that the archive helped the club date precisely when reissuing programmes for a recent anniversary.

Each discovery has made the archive feel less like a private hobby and more like a shared resource. Several filmmakers whose early work appeared in club screenings have visited Baruah's home to consult the records, and a few have used his notes to verify dates for retrospectives in Mumbai and Delhi.

Voices from the Catalogue

The archive has its own way of speaking to the present. A young documentarian from Dispur recently used Baruah's records to trace the screening history of an experimental short by a filmmaker who later moved to Mumbai and stopped making films. The information helped her secure funding for a biographical project. Local actors who began their careers at the club's open casting sessions have likewise returned to the logbooks for confirmation of milestones. An interview-with-a-local-actor-about-the-club-s-impact-on-his-career published on the Gauhati Cine Club website captures one such conversation in detail.

Journalists working on long-form pieces about Assamese cinema have also come to depend on the archive. Some entries describe audiences by approximate size, giving a rare quantitative sense of how popular a particular film was at the time. Other entries include short audience reactions, transcribed in Baruah's careful handwriting, that scholars have begun quoting in academic papers.

A Connection Across Hemispheres

The work of careful cataloguing is familiar far beyond Assam. In Australia, organisations such as the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, ACMI in Melbourne, and the Brisbane Powerhouse cinema programs all rely on detailed records to trace how films have travelled across decades. Australian cinephiles visiting the Gauhati Cine Club have sometimes compared notes with Baruah, finding that the same kind of patient record-keeping has helped reconstruct histories of touring Indian prints in Sydney and Melbourne during the 1980s.

The parallels run deeper. Just as patient research has recently debunked myths in West Africa about missionary work, so too has Baruah's archive quietly corrected long-held assumptions about which films reached Assamese audiences first. A well-circulated story about an Italian neorealist screening in 1986, for example, turned out to have happened in 1989, two years later than the local lore suggested.

Australian film historians attending the recent South Asian cinema programme in Adelaide have reached out to the club. Several asked whether the archive could be cross-referenced with their own records, a project the club's younger members are now exploring.

Lessons from Four Decades of Cataloguing

For all that the catalogue offers, Baruah is the first to admit it has limits. He has not always caught every guest screening, especially during the busier festival months, and he has relied on his own handwriting, which can be hard to decipher. A new effort to digitise the older notebooks, supported by the club's publication fund, is now underway. Volunteers in Melbourne and Sydney have offered remote assistance with transcription, a gesture that has deepened ties between the cine club and Australian cinema communities.

What has kept the archive useful across changing technologies? A few principles stand out. Among them:

• A simple, consistent format will outlast any number of fancy databases.
• Handwritten notes carry a personal texture that digital records rarely match.
• The value of an archive often appears decades after the records are written.

The archive is also a reminder that film culture is sustained by the small, repeated acts of people who show up. For Baruah, showing up means arriving early, opening the ledger, and writing the next line.

If you would like to support this work, consider joining the Gauhati Cine Club, contributing to the digitisation fund, or attending one of the upcoming screenings listed on the club's website. Members receive the quarterly bulletin, where excerpts from the archive are regularly shared with a wider readership.