Akashitora Dutta

Dr. Akashitora Dutta has a pleasing personality and talent with which she has lent glamour and substance to many television programs and films. She has tragedies in her life which she hides behind the façade of journalism and acting in serials and films.

Model, actor and writer Akashitora Dutta, whose father Kamala Saikia was the first journalist to be killed by militants. She has written many novels. Her second novel was about the erosion of the values which the banned militant group claims to uphold. Coming 15 years after her father’s death, the novel is based on real-life events from the journalist’s murder to the kidnapping and killing of social worker Sanjoy Ghose.

Her literary works represent the stories of sufferings because of militancy. It has to be told not only to those who read Assamese, but to all in the country and outside. Her works have been published in Assamese and Bengali. Her first novel Xei Prem, was moderately successful.

Akashitora, who earned a PhD from Gauhati University for her thesis on the “Changing Profile of the Educated Assamese Housewife”. Her father, who was a fountainhead of inspiration, was killed in a brutal manner just because he opposed and fought against some of the wrong ideologies adopted by the outfit. She vividly remembers the days when the outfit threatened my father not to write a single word against them.

After Kamala Saikia was killed on August 9, 1991, his shocked daughter moved away from the limelight for a while. But acting was too close to her heart and she has appeared on telefilms, films and Serials.

Akashitora’s started to appear on stage in Sivasagar town her birth place when she was just four. Playing the role of little Krishna, she impressed the audience so much that one admirer gifted her a gold coin. She never looked back after being adjudged as the best actress and debater in a Gauhati University youth festival in 1987. So convincing was she as a Naga woman, Kemi, in a drama staged during the festival that the name “Kemi” became her moniker, her cognomen. As a writer, Akashitora focuses primarily on women.