Satyen Babu

-Avinibesh Sharma |

৷৷ Diary of a Chronicler ৷৷

Situated twenty-five kilometres away from Jorhat is Melamati village, located in Titabar tehsil. If you take left from what the locals refer to as “Teliya Potti” and travel a five kilometres further, you will see on the way an old, dilapidated, ramshackle Assam-type bungalow. If you meet a person named Tarun Dutta and another person named Ajay Nayak, they will tell you about their association with a gentleman they all revered. They will give you a vivid account of the man walking down to the bed of the Kasojan river with his German Shepherd early morning; humming either an English song or Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s “Luitor Parore Ami Deka Lora, Moriboloi Bhoi Nai”. They will also tell you how fortunate they are to have seen the gentleman’s famous study which had more than a thousand books and a table made by Burmese carpenters, positioned in the centre. They saw at first-hand how he concentrated all his energies in writing one book after another – always with a whisky at hand.

He is none other than the flamboyant bureaucrat, Satyen Barkataki, called “Satyen Babu” by the locals. Barkataki had a busy official tenure in the 1950s and early ‘60s, serving as the Superintendent of Lusai Hills, Chief Commissioner of Pondicherry, Member of Neutral Nation’s Repatriation Commission at Laos and finally as the Chairman of Assam Public Service Commission. Sometime in the 1960s, he retired to Melamati and spent the rest of his life in this bungalow, which belonged to his father-in-law, Surjyakanta Barooah. He opened a piggery and poultry farm here and soon became the centre of attraction. The locals were in awe of him and so were the planters and officers posted nearby.

It was during his stay here that Barkataki penned his famous books – “Phoolbibi”, “Rohojogyo”, “Ascending Kumjelekua”, “Escapades of a Magistrate” (some people opine that it is the first fiction in English written by an Assamese) and its Assamese translation “Hakimor Tighilghiloni”, “Napoleon Bonaparte”, “Adolf Hitler”, “Assam at a Glance”, “The Khasis”, “Tribal Folk Tales”, “Fables and Folk Tales of Assam”, “Folk Tales of Assam for Young Ones”, “Jogolimuhon”, “Rohosyo Kahini”, “Forasi Golpo”, a history text for kids et al. He was a prolific bilingual writer. Barkataki had learnt French when he was in Paris in the 1930s to pursue his higher studies. It came to use when he translated Maupassant’s stories into Assamese and also while penning down the three volumes of Napoleon Bonaparte’s biography (first published in 1973).

He lived his life as a non-conformist and this cottage, albeit dilapidated stands as a testament to his incredible legacy.