Pratima Pandey (also known as Pratima Barua Pandey) was one of the popular folk singers amongst all the folk singers Assam has produced and from the royal house of Gauripur in Dhubri District in Western Assam. There’s an interesting phenomenon here in that, she not only assisted in the revival and consolidation of a folk form facing imminent demise, but also became the focus of contemporaneous folklore in vibrant detail. Her life shown through various stages of the ongoing and evolving Assamese identity in which the folk acted as a syncretic energy in working out the meaning of the Assamese. Best known for her immortal Goalpariya songs Hastir Kanya and Mur Mahut Bandhure, Pratima was a niece of the filmmaker Pramathesh Barua also of Devdas fame.
Her goalparia songs (popularly known as Goalparia Loka geets) are part of cultural community, largely the Rajbanshis, whose communities have historically been spread out over a vast territiory including Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Southern Nepal and even Bangladesh. When Pratima Barua was collecting songs, they were in a sense, in their last moments of existence in memory of the public, as the histories dating back in the land of the Rajbanshis took a dramatic turn and forced all communities on the edge living on the periphery of boundaries to somehow abandon their cultural bindings to shape themselves and their new identities to conform to the de-disambiguation of the changed legacy of the colonial cartographers.
Barua Pandey was born on October 3, 1935, in Kolkata. She pursued her early education in the city’s Gokhale Memorial School, after which she came to Assam to study at the Girls’ High School, Gauripur, home of the royal family. She mostly spent her early years in between the din of Kolkata and the soothing environments of riverside “Gadadhar” at Gauripur.
Although she learned Rabindrasangeet at school, but she never took any formal training or teaching in music except the encouraging words from her father Prakitesh Chandra Barua (Lalji). Dr. Bhupen Hazarika made the most significant contribution in bringing Pratima Barua to the fore as an artist of repute in Assam.
The pivotal moment in her life came, when in 1955, Dr. Bhupen Hazarika visited Gauripur and attended a jalsa arranged for a social occasion during which, Pratima, the timid young girl, fearful of being exposed, overcame her fear and allowed her voice and lyrics in a local dialect of Goalpariya folklore, flow along with the strings and beat of a dhol, junuka, dotora, darinda, dahuluki and Bashi, on the tunes used for each of their respective instruments to accompany and signify all the musical instruments in Goalpariya folk culture. Dr. Hazarika was very impressed and predicted this voice will definitely take Goalpariya locageet to glorious heights. Later, he continued to provide both moral and material support tirelessly to establish identifiably that Goalpariya locageet was part of a larger Assamese geet.
Pratima Barua’s way and rendition of folk songs were both significant not only in reviving a folk form but also language of the then Goalpara district of Assam, presently four suitable districts of west Assam namely, Goalpara, Bongaigaon, Kokrajhar and Dhubri.
Importantly, Bhupen Hazarika was the first one to presented Goalpariya folk song in his film Era Bator Sur. Along with the mahout songs, Barua Pandey used to sing Paul Robeson’s evergreen hit We are in the same boat brother in stage performances. She married to Gauri Shankar Pandey, a retired principal of the Gauripur P. B. College.
She was died in 27 December 2002 in GNRC hospital at Guwahati
Pratima Barua Pandey was awarded the Padmashree and Sangeet Natak Akademi, for her ground-breaking works for popularizing Goalpariya lokageet. A documentary flim made on her life and works, by noted filmmaker Prabin Hazarika, Hastir Kanya, won national award for the best biographical film in 1997, earned immense praise and made ripples at the South Asia film festival in 1998.
