There was an uncanny ease with which Indra Bania moved from being cute country bumpkin affectionately called Gobar by his wife, to being Rokheswar, the deprived farmer who tears to shreds the poster of a ruthless politician from a tree, shouting that even wolves and dogs would not touch the cadaver of such scum when he died.

The ease was uncanny as he moved from being that voice in Gobardhan Sorit on All India Radio, to the big screen, to Jahnu Barua's Halodhiya Soraye Baodhan Khai that brought him laurels from his state, country and beyond.

As they bore him in for a state funeral at the Nabagraha cremation ground here today, the tears flowed in abundance as well as the admiration for Punada, as he was affectionately called.

'He was a person who could show you how effortless and natural acting could actually be,' said Baharul Islam, actor and National School of Drama alumni. 'Here was a man who was genuinely involved in passing on what he knew to the younger lot. The result of that love for the generation after him was the Axom Abhinay Pratisthan, through the gates of which many would walk to learn the art of acting.'

'He was everybody's actor and everyone loved him,' chief minister Tarun Gogoi said as he visited the family at Bamunimaidam in the city. And Bania, who died of cancer at the Hayat Hospital here last night, did give in to a good act himself.

'We hadn't let him know of his ailment,' Inu Barua, actor and Bania's sister-in-law, said. 'So we spent our time laughing and joking with him. So much so that it was only the day before that he asked us to get an autorickshaw so he could go see an Assamese film.'

The autorickshaw bit, though, would underline a financial crisis that the Assamese artiste and creative industry has suffered from, the earnings from their art rarely enough to pay their bills.

'Rather than gift us japi and gamosa at felicitations, I would much rather that they give us 5kg rice or pumpkins,' Arun Lochan Das, the film critic who brings out the annual Limelight cultural directory for the state, quoted Bania as having told him.

In attendance at the final rites this afternoon, apart from the men who offered the 21-gun salute to the departed, were a host of dignitaries, friends, fraternity and family.

The cortege that brought him home from hospital later took him to Jyoti Chitraban, the state's only state-run film studio, Doordarshan Kendra, Rabindra Bhawan and the Asam Sahitya Sabha office where they adorned him with his last garlands.

And as the flames rose high on the pyre, 126 representatives of a people stood in silence for a minute at the state Assembly, and the truth hung heavy in the air: that Indra Bania was one of a kind - a man, a magician of an actor and a mentor to so many.

Bania's constituency was complete.