A portrait of Bishnu Rabha

Guwahati, Jan. 30: History does repeat itself, after all.

Seventy-two years after Bishnu Rabha produced the first Assamese film, Joymoti, with Jyotiprasad Agarwalla, his son Hemraj is ready to launch the first audio monthly magazine of eastern India. And what better day to launch it than on Bishnu Rabha’s birth anniversary tomorrow.

Hemraj, in fact, has revived the defunct Argo Picture Corporation — it produced Joymati in 1939 — for his audio magazine Shruti.

The company is now called Argo Audio Productions.

“We thought it would be a fitting tribute to the man who inspired us all,” Hemraj said over phone from Tezpur today.

The first issue of Shruti — the magazine will be available on CDs — will be released at the end of February.

“The first chapter of the magazine will be recorded tomorrow at our own studio. The chapter will be a short story by Bishnu Rabha, Mamir Har,” Hemraj said.

Loosely translated, Mamir Har means “my aunt’s necklace”.

Shruti will be like any other conventional monthly literary magazine, containing excerpts from novels, short stories, poems and literary reviews — only the format will be an audio one.

The launch, in Tezpur, will be a “brief affair,” Hemraj said.

“Nowadays, almost every household has a CD player. As CD players are quite inexpensive these days, even people in rural areas can afford them. Our magazine will be priced at Rs 35 per CD, so we hope it will not be a burden on buyers,” he added.

Shruti is inspired by a web portal, www. librivox.org, which stores literary masterpieces in audio format and is accessible to all.

Each issue of the magazine will be of 80-minute duration.

The idea of using “voice” as a medium was to “give listeners the exact emotions a writer wants to convey”, Hemraj said.

“A writer narrating his own story has a different flavour altogether. He or she can bring out the emotions and sentiments exactly as he or she has put it in the story.”

Writers, both established and new, will be asked to narrate their stories for the magazine. “We will also use our own narrators in case any writer is not in a position to come for recording,” Hemraj said.