Guwahati: The All Assam Students' Union (AASU) will confer the Padmashree Pratima Baruah Pandey award 2020 to noted artiste Pabitra Rabha on December 27 at Chandmari.
Pabitra Rabha was the General Secretary of Tangla Regional Students' Union. After receiving the news of conferring the award, he was felicitated by the local organisations of his hometown.
Rabha is an established theatre personality in India. He hails from Tangla in Bhutan border and was born in the year 1976.
He is an alumnus of Guwahati University and had passed out in the year 2003, after which he took an acting diploma from the National School of Drama (NSD) which helped him in bringing a change in the society he lived in.
After returning back to his hometown, Tangla, from Mumbai after having various gigs done, he had opened 'Dapon' meaning 'mirror' in English.
Dapon is an all dwarves theatre group which had started with a handful of 27 people and now, it has a count of over 70 people and more. The dwarves, who are not accepted by the society without jeering at them, have found a home set up by Pabitra, however, they do earn their income from other sources like farming, daily wages etc. some have even enrolled in the National School of Drama (NSD).
Pabitra Rabha has also acted in Bollywood like Mukhbir, Mary Kom, Tango Charlie etc but according to him, he would choose theatre over films in a heartbeat.
The result of his sheer dedication and hard work towards thriving his theatre had received recognition when the Reliance Foundation identified him as a maestro in the theatre world and honoured with the CNN IBN Real Hero Award in the year 2012 and the year before that, he was honoured with the Ustad Bismillah Khan 'Yuva Puraskar'.
His next planned project is to take up the biopic of Padma Shri awardee and widely known as the Forest Man of India- Jadav Payeng.