r/AssameseHub

Goalporiya (গোৱালপৰীয়া) dialect of Assamese is classified as the westernmost variation of the Assamese language.

The Assamese language is broadly divided into three main dialects.

Ujoni (Eastern) spoken in Upper Assam and nearby regions like Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland etc, Kamrupi spoken in the former undivided Kamrupi region and Goalporiya spoken in the former undivided Goalpara region of Assam.

The dialect has unique features of its own and shares similarities with the Kamtapuri and Rajbangshi languages.

Post-independence, the dialect has seen distortion in its speech due to the invasion of Bengali, English and Hindi loanwords into the dialect, shifting it away from Assamese.

It has been noticed that in recent years, due to the rise of online content in Hindi and Bengali, Goalporiya speaking youth have been noticed to have distortion in their Goalporiya speech.

Moreover, many have increasingly become insecure about their variant, shifting to Hindi or in a few cases, standard Assamese.

This combination has led to difficulty in preserving the richness of the dialect.

A few influences from standard Assamese in the modern day Goalporiya speech can also be seen, reflecting the growing continuity of the standard Assamese language across Assam.

This has, both positive and negative effects on the Goalporiya dialect.

While many Goalporiya dialect speakers can have ease in using standard Assamese, this influence has also affected the original form of the dialect leading to rising insecurity among its younger speakers.

This however, can be solved if the Goalporiya dialect is accepted into mainstream Assamese culture just like how in recent years, the Kamrupi dialect has become an inseparable part of Assamese culture.

The Goalporiya dialect is rich, and it is beautiful sounding. It is well known across Assam for its 'Lokageets'.

Late singer, Pratima Barua Pandey in particular has helped in the popularity of Goalporiya Lokageet. Her most popular song was 'Komola Sundori', which is one of the most beautiful Assamese folk songs, sung in the Goalporiya dialect.

In conclusion, Goalporiya dialect is a legitimate variant of Assamese that should be preserved, protected and promoted among the Assamese people.

Goalporiya symbolises the beauty and diversity among the various variants of Assamese

In 1935, a man named Jyotiprasad Agarwala wanted to make Assam's first film. There was no film industry there to work with — no studio, no crew, nothing. So he built his own studio out of bamboo mats and banana stumps on his family's tea estate, and basically did every job himself: writer, director, editor, composer, set designer, the works, because there was genuinely nobody else trained to do it.

The film, Joymoti, told the story of a 17th-century Ahom princess tortured for refusing to betray her husband's hiding place — one of the first Indian films built around a politically assertive woman as the actual center of the story, not a supporting character.

It flopped commercially and mostly disappeared for decades. Then in the early 1970s, Agarwala's brother was cleaning out his garage and found seven surviving reels sitting there. A more complete print later turned up in a studio in Lahore, having apparently traveled there before Partition, and got tracked down and recovered in Bombay in the 1990s.

It's a genuinely wild production and preservation story, and We wrote it up in more detail here (including what happened to the film's lead actress, which is its own complicated chapter):

https://talkiesdb.com/stories/he-built-a-studio-out-of-bamboo-and-banana-stumps-to-make-this-film