Guwahati, Oct. 11 -- Forty-five years after its release, Bhabendra Nath Saikia's Anirban remains an overlooked cinematic masterpiece. Released on 6 February 1981, it was the director's second film after Sandhya Raag, and like every other film he made, it won the Rajat Kamal for its year. That is a record few filmmakers anywhere can claim. Yet while Assam rightly celebrates its better-known classics, Anirban sits in the margins of memory, rarely screened and seldom discussed.

I came across it recently while browsing YouTube, where a channel has uploaded it in parts. That such a film survives only in fragments, at the mercy of an algorithm, says something uncomfortable about how we treat our cinematic heritage.

Like much of Bhabendranath ...