Roopkar

About Roopkar

Roopkar was the first Assamese-language, tabloid-sized magazine devoted to Assamese cinema, theatre and culture. Founded in 1975 in Guwahati by the journalist and humour writer Pabitra Kumar Deka, it was published monthly by Roopkar Prakashan and quickly became the most popular entertainment magazine in Northeast India. With the legendary singer-composer Dr. Bhupen Hazarika and the esteemed writer Nirode Choudhury as its advisers, Roopkar instituted Assam's first popular film awards — the Roopkar Awards — in its founding year, and served as a training ground for a generation of cultural journalists. The monthly magazine ran until the early 1990s; in 2025, in its fiftieth year, it was revived as an annual special issue under the editorship of Prodyut Kumar Deka, the founder's son.

Birth of Assam's first film magazine

When Roopkar appeared in 1975, there was nothing else like it in Assamese. General-interest magazines and literary monthlies existed, and newspapers covered cinema fitfully, but no Assamese publication was devoted to film, theatre and culture as its central beat — let alone in the large, tabloid-sized format that Roopkar adopted, which gave its photographs, layouts and film coverage a visual impact the smaller literary magazines could not match. The timing was significant: Assamese cinema was entering a productive phase, the state's theatre tradition was vigorous, and a growing urban readership wanted serious, sustained coverage of the arts. Roopkar filled that gap immediately, and its success demonstrated that a market existed for cultural journalism in Assamese — a proposition that had not previously been tested at this scale.

Pabitra Kumar Deka, founder-editor

The magazine was the creation of Pabitra Kumar Deka, an eminent journalist and humourist who founded it and edited it through its monthly years. Deka was a pioneering figure in Assamese cine-journalism — the first journalist in the state to treat cinema as a beat demanding its own publication — and his editorship gave Roopkar both its editorial direction and its distinctive voice. He ran the magazine as a one-man institution in the classic style of the Indian little magazine: founder, editor and driving force in a single person. His death left a gap that the magazine, in its original monthly form, did not survive; but his legacy proved durable enough to sustain memorial awards, a film festival, a documentary short and, eventually, the magazine's own revival.

The advisers: Hazarika and Choudhury

Roopkar's masthead carried two names that guaranteed its cultural seriousness. Dr. Bhupen Hazarika — the legendary singer, composer, lyricist and filmmaker, arguably the most famous Assamese cultural figure of the twentieth century — served as an adviser, as did the esteemed writer Nirode Choudhury. Their involvement was more than ornamental. Hazarika wrote a column for the magazine titled Anyamat, and the novelist Lakshmi Nandan Bora contributed a column titled Brittor Bahirot. For a new magazine, securing contributions of this calibre was a coup; for readers, it was a signal that Roopkar intended to treat cinema and culture as subjects worthy of the state's finest minds, not as gossip-column fodder.

The Roopkar Awards, 1975

In its very first year, Roopkar instituted the Roopkar Awards — the first popular film awards in Assam, established in 1975. The move was bold: a fledgling magazine setting itself up as an arbiter of cinematic excellence. But it worked, and the awards became one of the magazine's signature institutions, cementing its influence within the regional film industry. By creating a popular awards mechanism, Roopkar did for Assamese cinema something analogous to what Filmfare had done for Hindi cinema — it gave the industry a yearly ritual of recognition, voted on and celebrated in public, and it gave the magazine itself a central role in the film calendar. The awards are remembered as a landmark in the institutional history of Assamese film culture.

Columns, serials and the magazine's contents

Beyond film reporting, Roopkar published a rich mix of cultural journalism: news, articles, stories, fiction, poetry and reviews by new and veteran writers, intellectuals and literary figures. Writers such as Padma Borkotoki and Lakshmi Nandan Bora wrote social novels serialised in the magazine, extending its reach beyond cinema into mainstream Assamese fiction. The columns by Hazarika and Bora gave readers regular, reflective prose from two masters, while the reviews and features kept the magazine current. This breadth — the "all-encompassing wrap-ups of Assam's art and culture" that readers remembered — is what made Roopkar more than a fan magazine. It was, in the judgement of its admirers, a fundamental pillar of art and literature in the state.

A training ground for journalists

One of Roopkar's most lasting contributions was as a nursery for cultural journalism. Many young journalists contributed to the magazine and learned the trade in its pages, including the Assamese film critic Apurba Kumar Das, Kamal Lochan Das, Shekharjyoti Bhuyan, Rejek Ali Ahmed, Utpal Datta and Arun Lochan Das; the magazine's Kolkata correspondent was Nitai Ghosh. For aspiring writers interested in cultural journalism, Roopkar served as both classroom and showcase — a place to develop a byline, learn the disciplines of reporting and criticism, and reach an audience. Several of these contributors went on to significant careers, and the magazine's role in forming them is part of its institutional legacy.

The heyday: 1975 to the early 1990s

Through the late 1970s and the 1980s, Roopkar was the most popular entertainment magazine in the Northeast, a position it held without serious challenge. It chronicled Assamese cinema through some of the industry's most interesting decades, covered the state's theatre, and provided a platform where the region's cultural debates could be conducted in print. The magazine's tabloid format, its film coverage, its awards and its roster of contributors combined to make it unavoidable: for anyone interested in Assamese culture, Roopkar was essential reading. The monthly continued into the early 1990s, when — like many Indian print magazines of its generation, squeezed by rising costs and changing media habits — it ceased publication.

After the closure: festival, award and film

Roopkar's afterlife kept its name alive in Assamese cultural life. In April 2013, the Roopkar Film Festival was held at the Rudra Barua Auditorium in Guwahati's Jyoti Chitraban Film Studio to mark one hundred years of Indian cinema, screening twelve selected Indian classics — from Satyajit Ray's Nayak and Bimal Roy's Madhumati to Guru Dutt's Kagaj Ke Phool and Dr. Bhabendra Nath Saikia's Anirban — under the magazine's banner. In 2011, the Roopkar Award was instituted in memory of founder Pabitra Kumar Deka, given yearly to a distinguished personality in stage and cinema; early recipients included the writer and stage director Ratna Oza (2011) and the actor-director Tapan Das (2012). And in 2014, the film critic Utpal Datta — himself a Roopkar alumnus — made a short film on Pabitra Kumar Deka titled "Bye Lane 2," which was selected for the Goa International Film Festival. Each of these kept the founder's and the magazine's memory in circulation.

The 2025 revival

In April 2025, to commemorate fifty years since the magazine's founding, Roopkar was revived — republished as an annual Special issue rather than a monthly. The revival was undertaken by Pallabi Borah on behalf of Roopkar Prakashan, with the filmmaker and author Prodyut Kumar Deka, son of the late Pabitra Kumar Deka, as editor. The decision to return as an annual special was a pragmatic recognition of the changed media economy: a yearly collector's issue could honour the magazine's glorious past while documenting Assamese cinema, theatre and culture for a new generation, without the punishing economics of monthly print publishing. The revival issue positioned Roopkar as a bridge between the magazine's historic readership and younger readers encountering the title for the first time.

Roopkar today

The revived Roopkar has settled into its new identity as a prestigious yearly literary publication. Its 2026 Special Mystery Edition — a 260-page collector's volume edited by Prodyut Kumar Deka — brought together short stories, novellas and film screenplays exploring suspense, intrigue and mystery, alongside special features on Assamese suspense films, Bollywood mystery and thriller cinema, the Ramsay Brothers' pioneering Indian horror films, and an overview of the complete James Bond film series. The edition's appearance on major retail platforms confirmed that the Roopkar name still carries commercial weight half a century after the magazine's founding. From a tabloid monthly that invented Assamese film journalism, through two decades of silence punctuated by festivals and memorial awards, to an annual special issue — Roopkar's trajectory mirrors the larger story of Indian language magazine publishing, and its survival is a tribute to the institution Pabitra Kumar Deka built in 1975.