The Cloud-Capped Star: [Meghe Dhaka Tara] 9781838719999, 9781838719982, 9781838719975

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BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics series introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles in the series, please visit https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/bfi-film-classics/

Dedicated to the memory of my aunts, Gita Sengupta and Aparna Sengupta, who were among the millions uprooted by the Partition of 1947, and to their unrealized dreams.

The Cloud-Capped Star [Meghe Dhaka Tara] Manishita Dass

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of film-makers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Manishita Dass, 2020 Manishita Dass has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover artwork © Avik Kumar Maitra Series cover design: Louise Dugdale Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from The Cloud-Capped Star/Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960), Chitrakalpa; Jukti Takko Gappo/Reason, Debate, and a Story (Ritwik Ghatak, 1977), Rit Chitra All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii Prefatory Note/Synopsis

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1 Introduction: Echoes of a Cry

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2 Chronicler of Troubled Times

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3 A Familiar Face

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4 Cinematic Theatricality

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Notes98 Credits102

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Daniela Berghahn and John Hill for encouraging me to write this book; Rebecca Barden at the BFI, for commissioning it and attentively steering it to publication; Sophia Contento for preparing the visual material for it; and Maitreesh Ghatak for going beyond the call of family duty in helping me weather the emotional cloudbursts that – not surprisingly, given the personal resonances of the book’s subject – accompanied the process of writing it. The book draws on archival research supported by a British Academy Research Grant, and on material from two of my essays: ‘Unsettling Images: Cinematic Theatricality in Ritwik Ghatak’s Films’ (Screen 58:1, Spring 2017) and ‘The Cloud-Capped Star: Ritwik Ghatak on the Horizon of Global Art Cinema’ (in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, Oxford University Press, 2010).

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Prefatory Note/Synopsis

Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, Ritwik Ghatak, 1960, Bengali) has been hailed as ‘a modern masterpiece’ and ‘one of the great classics of world cinema’ (BFI), ‘an extraordinary, revelatory work’ (Adrian Martin) and ‘one of the five or six greatest melodramas in cinema history’ (Serge Daney).1 It is arguably the best-known film by the visionary Bengali film-maker Ritwik Ghatak (1925–76), whose ‘seismographic renderings of trauma’2 have come to haunt world cinema and whose shadow looms large over India’s alternative film culture. The BFI’s decision to release a DVD version in 2002

Neeta in Meghe Dhaka Tara/The Cloud-Capped Star (1960)

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and the recent digital restoration of the film undertaken by Criterion in collaboration with the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project indicate the film’s exalted position in the canon of world cinema. Meghe Dhaka Tara tells the story of Neeta (Supriya Chaudhuri), the eldest daughter of a downwardly mobile middle-class Hindu family from East Bengal, displaced by the Partition of India and struggling to survive in a refugee settlement on the outskirts of Calcutta in the 1950s. Even as a postgraduate student, Neeta largely bears the burden of keeping the family financially afloat. Her older brother Shankar (Anil Chattopadhyaya), who would normally have assumed the responsibility of supporting the family, spends his days practising Indian classical music and dreaming of becoming a great singer, with the encouragement of Neeta, who believes him to be a genius. Their mother (Geeta Dey) is apprehensive about what would happen to the family if and when Neeta leaves home to marry her long-time suitor, Sanat (Niranjan Ray), an ex-student of her father’s and a research scientist. Sanat describes Neeta as ‘a cloud-capped star’ (‘meghe dhaka tara’) in a billet-doux: ‘I didn’t appreciate your worth at first. I thought you were like others. But now I see you in the clouds, perhaps a cloud-capped star veiled by circumstances, your aura dimmed.’ This romantic metaphor acquires a poignant irony as a chain of events not only reveals the shallowness of Sanat’s love for Neeta but also invests this seemingly ordinary young woman with a tragically mythic aura. Through various twists and turns of the plot, Neeta finds herself trapped within her dual role as a provider and a nurturer as her family becomes even more dependent on her earnings. Her father (Bijon Bhattacharya), an eccentric schoolmaster emblematic of a waning Bengali liberal humanism, and her younger brother, Montu (Dwiju Bhawal), a millworker representative of the newlydéclassé Bengali petit bourgeoisie, have debilitating accidents and lose their jobs. Now the family’s sole breadwinner, Neeta abandons her postgraduate studies in order to take up full-time employment and postpones her marriage to Sanat. Unwilling to wait for Neeta, who

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cannot bring herself to forsake her family, Sanat ends up marrying her younger sister, Geeta (Geeta Ghatak), with the tacit support and connivance of Neeta’s mother, who sees this as a perfect solution to her dilemma. An indignant Shankar leaves home in protest and Neeta’s doting father watches helplessly while Neeta continues to shoulder her burden in stoic silence. The strains of her life eventually take their toll. When Shankar returns from Bombay after establishing his reputation as a classical singer, he finds Neeta wasting away with tuberculosis, a condition that she has managed to conceal from the rest of the family. He whisks her away to a sanatorium in the hills but it is too late to save her. The film connects Neeta’s individual predicament to the traumatic aftermath of the Partition of India (1947) and a gendered critique of the family through an aesthetic that combines the emotional jolts of melodrama with a neo-realist concern for the everyday and modernist strategies of fragmentation. Note: While the city of Calcutta was officially renamed Kolkata in 2001, I have used ‘Calcutta’ when referring to the city in the pre-2001 period.

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1 Introduction: Echoes of a Cry

Towards the end of Meghe Dhaka Tara, we see the protagonist, Neeta, on the grounds of a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in the hill station of Shillong, far away from the grimness of her family home in a refugee colony near Calcutta. She sits quietly on a rock as her brother, Shankar, who has come to visit her, tries to distract her with cheerful chit-chat about the family, especially about the mischievous antics of their young nephew, Geeta and Sanat’s son. Suddenly, the usually stoic and reserved Neeta cries out, ‘But I did want to live!’ and breaks down, clinging to her brother, imploring

Neeta’s outburst: ‘I want to live!’

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him to assure her that she will live: ‘Please tell me that I’ll live, just tell me once that I’ll live! I want to live! I want to live!’ Her desperate yet defiant cry echoes through the landscape, as the camera pans across the surrounding mountains in a dizzying 360-degree turn. Even after her visual image disappears from the screen, Neeta’s disembodied voice reverberates in an empty space – and continues to do so in the Bengali cultural imaginary. A recent Bengali newspaper article claims, in appropriately melodramatic terms, that Neeta’s piercing cry ‘has not only echoed through the hearts of Bengalis as a lament but over the last fifty years, continued to inspire cornered men and women whose hopes have been extinguished’.3 For many viewers familiar with the film’s historical and cultural milieu, including myself, Neeta’s final, uncharacteristic outburst of anguish evokes the thwarted desires and shattered dreams of a generation of displaced Bengalis caught in the crossfire of history. This generation was not a historical abstraction to me as my parents and some of our closest family friends belonged to it. On seeing Meghe Dhaka Tara for the first time in my teens, I was struck by the haunting parallels between Neeta’s story and the lives of two of my favourite aunts: one of my mother’s dearest friends and her older sister. Brilliant, articulate and imaginative students who were encouraged by their liberal middle-class family to pursue higher education, they had to give up on their dreams of becoming a historian and an economist, respectively, in their late teens to Original poster (Artwork: Khaled shoulder family responsibilities Choudhury)

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in the wake of the Partition and their father’s death. They worked as schoolteachers as they put themselves through college and raised their younger siblings, and then until retirement; never married; and spent their twilight years in a rented apartment, not having managed – despite their frugal lifestyle – to save enough to afford the security of a home of their own. Of course, they did not die young, like Neeta, nor were they crushed by their circumstances. They lived long lives, translating their left-liberal and proto-feminist principles into everyday practice; had a formative impact on the generations of high school students they taught and their surrogate nieces (my sister and I); and never spoke of their disappointments or displayed any hint of bitterness. Nonetheless, their faces get transposed onto Neeta’s every time I watch Meghe Dhaka Tara, and her final scream always reminds me of the broken dreams and lost horizons of hope that my aunts – and countless other women and men – had accepted in silence, with a quiet courage and heart-rending grace akin to Neeta’s habitual response to adversity. Not surprisingly, given its social and emotional resonances and unsettling power, Neeta’s climactic lament is routinely invoked in tributes to the film’s director Ritwik Ghatak and in conversations about his films. It is perhaps fitting that this cry of pain and defiance has become emblematic of the oeuvre of a film-maker who repeatedly described cinema as a means for ‘expressing my anger at the sorrows and sufferings of my people’4 and as a medium that let him ‘shout out’5 and give voice to ‘the screams of protest’6 that had ‘accumulated’ in his psyche as a result of observing the iniquities around him. Ghatak, who came of age in Calcutta in the 1940s, tended to blame the social, political and economic woes of contemporary Bengali society on what he called ‘the great betrayal’: the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in August 1947, which led to the creation of the new sovereign nation-states of India and Pakistan and was accompanied by widespread communal violence, resulting in the deaths of approximately 500,000–1 million people, and one of the largest mass displacements in modern history, involving an estimated 12–15 million people. Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Urdu poem ‘Subah-e-Azadi’ (‘Dawn of Freedom:

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Ritwik Ghatak (1925–76)

August 1947’) captures the widespread sense of disenchantment, on both sides of the newly drawn border, over the traumatic terms on which independence from British rule had finally been won: These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light – This is not the Dawn for which, ravished with freedom, We had set out in sheer longing… Night weighs us down, it still weighs us down. Friends, come away from this false light. Come, we must search for that promised Dawn.7

The horrors and the tragedy of the Partition – the loss of lives, livelihoods and ancestral homes, and the abrupt sundering of families, communities and emotional bonds – darkened the long-awaited ‘dawn of freedom’ on the Indian subcontinent. Like Faiz and many others of his generation (including my left-liberal parents and their

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extended family of friends), Ghatak was deeply disturbed by the way in which the Partition seemed to negate or vitiate the promise of the nationalist movement for independence. Until his untimely death in 1976, he continued to agonize over its far-reaching social, cultural and political consequences, especially for the people of Bengal, his home province and one of the regions hardest hit by the Partition. Undivided Bengal, which occupied a total area of 78,389 sq. miles and was perceived in British India as a region where religious differences between the Hindu and Muslim segments of the population were subsumed within a Bengali cultural and linguistic identity, was carved into two separate territorial entities in 1947: Muslim-majority East Bengal, which formed the eastern wing of Pakistan, and West Bengal, which became a state of the federal republic of India. Bengal’s muchvaunted cultural unity lay in tatters, unravelled by sectarian sentiments and Hindu-Muslim riots, and overnight, Bengalis such as Ghatak, who lived in or migrated to West Bengal but had deep roots in East Bengal (or vice versa), saw part of their homeland become a foreign country. While nearly 42 per cent of undivided Bengal’s Hindu population remained in East Pakistan at first, continuing communal tensions led to a steady influx of Hindu refugees, including a large number of middle-class migrants, into West Bengal from 1948 onwards, creating staggering problems of resettlement by the 1950s and exacerbating the socioeconomic troubles of an already overcrowded, resource-strapped state. This process continued throughout the 1960s; in 1981, the number of East Bengal refugees in the state was estimated to be 8 million or onesixth of the population.8 A large number of these refugees settled in or around Calcutta, taking over marshy land in the eastern fringes of the city to build ‘refugee colonies’ – ramshackle settlements similar to the one we see in Meghe Dhaka Tara – and struggled to rebuild their lives from scratch with little or no assistance from the state.9 The government’s failure to create an effective refugee rehabilitation programme not only impinged on the everyday lives of millions of displaced Bengalis but also significantly contributed to West Bengal’s economic decline, political turmoil and social anomie in the post-1947 period.

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The post-independence plight of a ‘divided, debilitated Bengal’ haunted Ghatak. It was a plight made all the more poignant by his memories of the cultural and political vibrancy of Bengal in the 1930s: In our boyhood, we have seen a Bengal, whole and glorious. Rabindranath [Tagore], with his towering genius, was at the height of his literary creativity, while Bengali literature was experiencing a fresh blossoming with the works of the Kallol group [a group of modernist writers], and the national movement had spread wide and deep into schools and colleges and the spirit of youth. Rural Bengal, still reveling in its fairytales, panchalis [narrative folk-songs], and its thirteen festivals in twelve months, throbbed with the hope of a new spurt of life. This was the world that was shattered by the War, the Famine, and when the Congress and the Muslim League brought disaster to the country and tore it into two to snatch for it a fragmented independence. Communal riots engulfed the country … Our dreams faded away. We crashed on our faces, clinging to a crumbling Bengal, divested of its glory. What a Bengal remained, with poverty and immorality as our daily companions, with blackmarketeers and dishonest politicians ruling the roost, and men doomed to horror and misery!10

As the eminent writer and activist Mahasweta Devi (who also happened to be his niece and childhood playmate) pointed out, Ghatak’s view of a prelapsarian Bengal was tinged by his childhood experiences and class privilege, and the seeds of Bengal’s postindependence predicament had actually been sown long before the Partition. Nonetheless, as she also acknowledged, after the Partition ‘the problems did become more acute … and the situation disastrous’.11 To be fair to Ghatak, he was fully aware of how class divisions and the dominance of the Bengali Hindu middle classes over Muslim peasants and labourers had partly paved the way to the Partition of Bengal, and also deeply critical of middleclass political and social stances.12 What bothered him most about the Partition was not the loss of class privilege that it entailed for

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the middle-class refugees from East Bengal (whose plight features prominently in his films and in contemporary literature about the Partition) but what he described as ‘the division of a culture’ and its radioactive cultural and emotional fallout.13 In his director’s statement on Subarnarekha, he said that he used the word refugee or displaced person, not to ‘mean only the evacuees of Bangladesh’ but in a ‘more generic sense’ as well: ‘In these times all of us have lost our roots and are displaced – that’s my statement.’14 The problem, as he saw it, was not only socio-economic but also one of cultural deracination and spiritual homelessness. His preferred Bengali word for ‘refugee’ was udbastu, which literally means someone displaced from an ancestral home (bastu) or foundations and emphasizes the violence of uprooting rather than the act of seeking refuge. He ascribed farreaching consequences to the resultant sense of rootlessness: ‘People’s ways of thinking have changed, their hearts have changed, their souls have changed … their cultural consciousness has putrefied, and their umbilical ties with their past completely severed.’15 An abiding preoccupation with the Partition’s corrosive impact on the intimate and quotidian aspects of middle-class life in postindependence Bengal marked Ghatak’s cinematic oeuvre (and, indeed, his life). In almost all of his films, and especially in the three that came to be seen as constituting his Partition trilogy – Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha – the foundational national trauma of the Indian subcontinent – ‘the nightmare from which the subcontinent has never fully recovered’, as historians Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal put it – is seen through the lens of this specific regional reality. He took it upon himself ‘to present to the public eye the crumbling appearance of a divided Bengal, to awaken the Bengalis to an awareness of their state and a concern for their past and the future’.16 This thematic obsession drove the visionary experiments with film form that have secured Ghatak the admiration of cinephiles not just in India but worldwide, and a reputation for reinventing the grammar of cinema.17 Ghatak’s experimental urge ‘to find the limit,

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Cinema in the shadow of the Partition: ‘The Outsider’ (Artwork: Avik Kumar Maitra)

the end, the border, up to which the expression of film can go’18 was also a deeply political one, stemming as it did from what he described as his ‘commitment to contemporary reality’ and his desire to ‘portray my country and the sorrows and suffering of my people to the best of my ability’.19 Rather than being ends in themselves, his formal innovations were part of an attempt to forge a cinematic idiom capable of not only registering the devastating emotional impact and continuing socio-economic aftershocks of a historical

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trauma often assumed to be beyond the scope of conventional codes of representation, but also of jolting Bengali viewers, his primary target audience, into a critical engagement with their contemporary reality. This dual objective partly accounts for the stylistic hybridity of Ghatak’s films, which combine melodramatic force with a modernist aesthetics of fragmentation, and move with a disorienting fluidity between the representational logic of screen realism and the expressive potential of stage performance. In my reading of Meghe Dhaka Tara, I locate its unsettling power in the ‘cinematic theatricality’ that emerges from this kind of dynamic oscillation between seemingly antithetical modes. I use this term to refer to a theatricality – or an ensemble of visual and aural effects evoking the artifice and drama of theatrical performance – that is also intensely cinematic, contrary to conventional understandings of the theatrical as anti-cinematic. It is ‘a mode of address and display’20 that, as I show in Chapter 4, emerged out of a creative collision between the stage and the screen, between Ghatak’s ideas about film form (partly shaped by Calcutta’s incipient film society movement of the 1940s) and his experience as an activist in the leftist theatre movement of the late 1940s to early 1950s. Using the lens of cinematic theatricality to analyse Meghe Dhaka Tara brings into view not just Ghatak’s modernist experiments with melodramatic devices (the chief focus of scholarly writings on Meghe Dhaka Tara so far21) but also the originality of his cinematic language, the film’s fluid movement between the theatrical and the cinematic, and its musical allusiveness, none of which can be fully grasped only in terms of melodramatic excess. My close reading of Meghe Dhaka Tara is informed by archival research on Ghatak’s theatrical practice and the film’s production history, and by insights drawn from his theoretical writings and interviews. I focus on his theatrical manipulation of film form (cinematography, editing, mise en scène, music and the sound-image relationship); his fusion of theatrical modes of staging, including an expressive use of the body, with cinematic modes of mobility and emotional access; and his

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dramatic use of sound, music and mythic motifs, which is central to his reinvention of film grammar. Paradoxically enough, many of the motifs and allusions (verbal, visual, historical, mythic and musical) that make Meghe Dhaka Tara an extremely powerful exploration of displacement, betrayal, social disintegration and historical trauma, and thus endow it with the potential to resonate across cultural or temporal boundaries, are precisely the elements that can get lost, or at the very least obscured, in translation. The emotional and intellectual impact of the film depends, in part, on very specific cultural knowledge, e.g., knowledge of the specificities of Bengal’s regional history, the Partition’s impact on Bengali society, the Bengali middle-class habitus, the folk music of East Bengal, the songs of Rabindranath Tagore, or the nuances of the Bengali language. The internationally reputed Bengali film-maker Satyajit Ray (1921–92), a contemporary of Ghatak’s, famously and admiringly described him as ‘a wholeheartedly Bengali film-maker and a Bengali artist’: Those of us who have been watching films for almost forty years now have spent almost thirty of these watching Hollywood films, as there wasn’t much of an opportunity to see anything beyond that in Calcutta. Between 1903 or 1925 to almost 1950–55 or 1960, we weren’t able to see too many nonHollywood films. As such, we have all been influenced by Hollywood to some extent. But Ritwik was mysteriously impervious to this influence – Hollywood left no mark on his films. How this happened is still a mystery to me. Speaking of influence, some Soviet films did seem to have an impact on his cinema but this was not a matter of imitation as Ritwik’s main characteristic was his originality and he retained that till the end. The influence of Soviet cinema, and that of theatre on the dialogue, themes, and endings were discernible. And the foundation on which these influences rested was laid in the soil of Bengal. Ritwik was a wholeheartedly Bengali filmmaker and a Bengali artist – he was much more Bengali than me. For me, that is his biggest identity and his most valuable and remarkable quality.22

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Ray’s comment should not be taken to mean that Ghatak was untouched by or disconnected from the world. Ghatak’s creative practice, writings and interviews reveal a cosmopolitanism that is very rooted and marked by an active engagement with the world outside Bengal while standing ‘on his own ground’. This mode of engagement, which Ghatak shared with many other Bengali artists, writers and intellectuals of the 1930s to 1950s, cannot be reduced to a mimetic notion of influence or adaptation but involved an organic process of fusion and remarkable originality. He derived sustenance and inspiration as much from the ideas of Jung, the tenets of Marxism, the theory and practice of Soviet film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevelod Pudovkin, the films of Luis Buñuel and Carl Dreyer, and imagery from canonical English literature, as from Bengali folklore, Indian classical and folk music, the songs and writings of Rabindranath Tagore (a prolific writer and thinker who had dominated early twentieth century Bengali literature), contemporary Bengali theatre and the poetry and fiction of progressive Bengali writers. His films forge connections between seemingly disparate forms and ideas, fusing, for instance, Brecht’s ideas about epic theatre with forms from the Indian epic tradition, Bengali melodramatic tropes with Dreyer’s use of close-ups in Joan of Arc, the lyrics of Tagore with English Romantic poetry, Hindustani classical music with Bengali folksongs, and Eisensteinian ideas of montage and expressionist cinematography with neo-realist impulses. As the following statement by Peter Wollen indicates, the first encounter with Ghatak’s films – which are at once intensely personal and deeply political, shaped by an eclectic and cosmopolitan cinematic and critical sensibility, yet steeped in Bengali history, literature, folkways and culture, and equally indebted to the popular and the experimental – can be fairly disconcerting for a viewer not acquainted with the director’s specific context or distinctive approach to film-making:

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When I first came across Ritwik Ghatak’s films about ten years ago, I was puzzled. I was very impressed by them, but I did not know how to approach them. It was only later that I discovered that Ghatak was not only a director, but also in his own idiosyncratic way, a teacher and a theorist. As I have read his writings, I have not only come to appreciate his films more, but I have also realized that his outlook on filmmaking is one which [sic] has begun to affect my own thinking.23

This book tries to facilitate close encounters with Meghe Dhaka Tara by teasing out some of its cultural, aesthetic and contextual nuances; shedding light on the historical and social subtexts of pivotal scenes; and using archival research, Ghatak’s own writings and interviews, and the lens of cinematic theatricality to help make sense of the film’s rhetorical complexity, stylistic hybridity and cultural density. While the extraordinary degree of creative control he had over his films, and their distinctive style and recurring themes call for an auteurist emphasis, I have tried to highlight some of the conditions, alliances and creative collaborations that shaped Meghe Dhaka Tara and some of its intertextual resonances, and to approach Ghatak’s work in the manner in which he recommended approaching myth: ‘shorn of mysticism’. On a more personal level, it is an homage to a film that speaks not just to the cinephile or the film scholar in me but also to my inheritance of loss, and reminds me, time and again, that my roots lie in the love, hopes and heartbreaks of uprooted people.

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2 Chronicler of Troubled Times

In Ghatak’s reminiscences, East Bengal, where he spent much of his childhood, features as a lost arcadia – a magical land of open spaces, majestic rivers, rooted communities and madcap adventures. The youngest of nine children, he was born in 1925 into a liberal, uppermiddle-class, culturally privileged Bengali family in Dhaka in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). His father, Suresh Ghatak, a high-ranking civil servant, and his mother, Indubala Devi, shared a keen interest in education and literature. His eldest brother, Manish Ghatak, in whose household he spent a considerable part of his childhood and youth, was a well-known and iconoclastic modernist writer of the 1920s to 1930s. Another of his older brothers, Sudhish Ghatak, trained as a cinematographer in England in the early 1930s and worked in the Bengali film industry in Calcutta and the Hindi film industry in Bombay from the late 1930s to the 1960s. Through his extended family network, Ghatak had access to some of the influential intellectual and literary circles in contemporary Bengal, including the group of left-liberal writers who came to be associated with the PWA (Progressive Writers’ Association) in the 1930s, as well as to the worlds of Bengali and Hindi cinema. After a teenage escapade in the early 1940s when he ran away from home to work in the billing department of a textile mill, Ghatak moved to Calcutta as a young student in the early 1940s. There he witnessed an influx of refugees from the countryside and especially from East Bengal – uprooted by the man-made famine of 1943, the ravages of World War II, and then by the communal violence preceding the Partition of India in 1947, and the Partition itself – irrevocably change both the urban landscape and the fabric of Bengali society. The political turmoil and socio-economic crises of these years radicalized Ghatak, along with many other young

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men and women from similar backgrounds. He became a Marxist activist by 1946 and started writing short stories in Bengali, driven by an ‘urge’ to ‘vociferously protest, as a political animal, against the oppression and atrocities’ he witnessed.24 Though many of his stories were published in leading Bengali periodicals of the day, a desire for a wider audience and ‘immediate reaction’ propelled him to the theatre via the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA), the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Abandoning his postgraduate studies in English Literature, he worked within the IPTA as an actor, playwright and director until ideological conflicts and his discomfiture with Party orthodoxies led him to leave the organization in 1954. However, some of his IPTA connections endured, as evidenced by his creative partnerships (e.g., with the musician-composer Jyotirindra Maitra), and his reliance on actors and singers he came to know through IPTA (e.g., Bijon Bhattacharya, Anil Chattopadhyaya, Debabrata Biswas). Ghatak’s interest in film dates back to the late 1940s, when he started frequenting the now mythic Paradise Café in south Calcutta, where young, left-leaning Bengali cineastes and aspiring film-makers, equally impatient with the conventions of mainstream Bengali and Hindi cinemas and oppressive socio-economic structures, would gather to discuss films from all around the world and books on film-making that pointed towards alternative, socially engaged modes of film practice.25 In subsequent interviews, he credited the incipient film society movement that both fuelled and was fuelled by such discussions, as well as films such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Pudovkin’s Mother and the Italian neo-realist films screened at India’s first international film festival in 1952, and the writings of Eisenstein (whom he acknowledged as his guru), Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, Ivor Montagu and Bela Balazs (among others), with ‘opening up a completely new world’ before his eyes.26 The emerging alternative film culture of Calcutta in the 1940s to 1950s, shaped by a cosmopolitan outlook, left-liberal sympathies, and a desire to bring about fundamental changes in the Indian cinematic landscape,

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provided a common context for Ghatak’s as well as Satyajit Ray’s initial forays in film-making, even though their stylistic paths would soon diverge. Ghatak’s direct involvement with cinema began in 1949–50, when he assisted director Manoj Bhattacharya on his film Tathapi (Nonetheless, 1950, Bengali), and acted in and assisted in the making of Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul (The Uprooted, 1950, Bengali). The latter film anticipated the neo-realist style (before the director and his colleagues encountered Italian neo-realist films) in its depiction of the predicament of a group of displaced peasants adrift in Calcutta and in its use of location shooting and non-professional actors. Ghatak’s first completed film, Nagarik (The Citizen), signalled his thematic preoccupation with the Partition’s aftermath. Shot in 1952–53 on a shoestring budget, it traced the downwardly mobile trajectory and growing politicization of a young man from a lower middleclass Bengali family and was acclaimed as a bold experiment in social realism by his contemporaries such as Ray. However, Nagarik failed to find commercial distribution during Ghatak’s lifetime and was released for the first time in 1977, twenty-four years after its completion. In the six years that elapsed before Ghatak made his second film, he worked briefly in the Bombay film industry (the epicentre of Indian commercial cinema) as a scriptwriter and assistant director, even scripting a major box-office hit, Madhumati (Bimal Roy, 1958, Hindi). On his return to Calcutta, he directed Ajantrik (Pathetic Fallacy, 1957), which focused on a cab driver’s emotional attachment to his ramshackle old car; Bari Theke Paliye (The Runaway, 1958), which explores post-independence, post-Partition Calcutta from the perspective of a young runaway; Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960); Komal Gandhar (E Flat, 1961), a quasi-autobiographical, backstage drama about the travails of a leftist theatre group that also functions as an allegorical commentary on the division of Bengal; and Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, completed in 1962, released in 1965), which narrates the story of two siblings whose lives are disrupted by the

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Partition and warped by a haunting sense of loss, irrational prejudices and tragic coincidences. All but Meghe Dhaka Tara were commercial failures and their contemporary critical reception was mixed, at best. Critics were, for the most part, baffled by Ghatak’s cinematic idiom, at once fiercely formalist and excessively melodramatic, conforming neither to the hegemonic styles of Bombay cinema and mainstream Bengali cinema, nor to the emerging modernist-realist aesthetic of restraint pioneered by Ray that was setting the parameters of art cinema in India. Alcoholism and nervous breakdowns also plagued him since the early 1960s, making it increasingly difficult for him to find financing for projects, or to complete the ones that he had started. He joined the newly established Film and Television Institute of India (India’s first state-run film school) in 1964 and during his short stint there (1964–65), first as a lecturer and then as the Assistant Director, left a lasting impact on a group of students who would go on to become key figures in the ‘New Indian Cinema’ of the 1970s to 1980s (e.g., Mani Kaul, John Abraham, Saeed Mirza and Kumar Shahani). While he made a number of government-funded short and documentary films between 1967 and 1971, he would complete only two more feature-length films: Titash Ekti Nadir Nam (A River Called Titas, shot in 1971–73 in Ghatak’s beloved East Bengal, now Bangladesh, released in 1973), a lyrical and elegiac evocation of the lifestyle and ultimate dissolution of a fishing community in Bangladesh, and the essayistic, explicitly autobiographical Jukti Takko Gappo (Reason, Debate, and a Story, shot in 1974, posthumously released in 1977), in which Ghatak casts himself as a frustrated, alcoholic intellectual and tries to articulate his politics of dissent and artistic credo against the volatile political backdrop of West Bengal in the early 1970s. Jukti Takko Gappo turned out to be Ghatak’s last testament to what he often described as his ‘troubled times’. His health ravaged by years of alcoholism, emotional pain and a bout of tuberculosis, Ghatak died in Calcutta at the age of fifty-one on 6 February 1976, before the film could be released.

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Ritwik Ghatak in Jukti Takko Gappo/Reason, Debate, and a Story (1977)

True to his ironic predictions, Ghatak’s critical reputation has soared in India and elsewhere in the decades since his death. While this upward swing has not yet succeeded in dispelling the threat of oblivion that still looms over his cinematic legacy, he has become a legendary figure, mythologized as a cinematic prophet and tortured genius. Embraced as a guru by a younger generation of Indian cineastes and leftist and experimental film-makers in their quasi-Oedipal rebellion against Satyajit Ray’s aesthetic of restraint, seamless realism and liberal humanism, he is now revered as one of the few truly radical figures in the history of South Asian cinema who attempted to reinvent film language from a uniquely local standpoint. Ghatak’s visionary approach to film-making, distinctive cinematic style, personal charisma, anti-establishment stance, radical politics and anarchic lifestyle in his later years lend themselves to a certain

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kind of adulatory auteurism and a personality cult (perhaps best encapsulated in the title of a Bengali book, ‘Ritwik-tantro’, which literally means ‘Ritwik-ism’ and has connotations of mystic cultworship and an ideology demanding loyalty). This can, at times, eclipse his imbrication in his times and especially in the cultural matrix and networks created by the vibrant left cultural movement that emerged in the 1930s to 1940s under the banners of the PWA and the IPTA. Retrospectively described as ‘the only instance of a cultural avant-garde in contemporary Indian history’, the IPTA movement was based on a left-liberal coalition of progressive writers and artists, and dominated debates on literature, the arts, and social change in India between the 1930s and the early 1950s.27 IPTA was formally established in Bombay in 1943 by a group of progressive writers, artists and theatre workers who recognized the potential of theatre, music and art as weapons in the fight for national liberation from British imperialism, the international battle against fascism and the struggles of peasants and workers. The primary aim of the IPTA was to mobilize ‘a people’s theatre movement throughout the whole of India as the means of revitalizing the stage and the traditional arts and making them at once the expression and organizer of our people’s struggle for freedom, cultural progress, and economic justice’.28 While it was organized under the aegis of the then-undivided Communist Party of India (CPI), its membership and influence was much wider than an exclusive emphasis on the CPI’s role would suggest. As memoirs, interviews and scholarly accounts show, the IPTA movement was not the result of a party directive but emerged out of the activities of several local, left-leaning cultural groups (e.g., the Youth Cultural Institute in Calcutta) that used performance to mobilize political opinion and support. Moreover, many of the IPTA activists were either unaffiliated with the party or, like Ghatak, worked in a kind of fractious solidarity with its aims.29 The IPTA movement consolidated itself in the context of the Bengal famine of 1943 (a product of administrative failure and wartime profiteering that led to the death of some two million people

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from starvation30) and the CPI-led peasant and workers’ movements in Bengal, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. By 1945, it had expanded into a nationwide movement, particularly active in the metropolises of Bombay and Calcutta and in the countryside in Bengal, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, as well as in Punjab, Assam and Orissa. Squads of cultural activists, mostly in their late teens and twenties, went out to perform for mass audiences in villages, towns and mill areas, using agitprop theatre, protest songs, skits, puppetry, pantomime and posters, and drawing on regionally specific, popular traditions of dramatic performance, such as tamasha of Maharashtra and jatra of Bengal, to disseminate their political views. While responding to local predicaments ranging from the ravages of famine and the exploitation of peasants and workers to the trauma of communal violence and the tensions of post-independence democracy, the IPTA movement also shared a wider horizon of protest and cultural activism created by the rise in resistance to fascism among writers, artists and intellectuals across the world. The initial phase of the IPTA movement, which came to an end in the early 1950s, is still widely remembered as a heady moment of cultural ferment, radical idealism and political fervour. In veteran film-maker Mrinal Sen’s words, ‘something called hope was just around the corner’31: the hope of using art, performance and folk culture as tools for change, weapons in struggles for social justice, and a means of bridging the gap between middle-class radicals and the ‘people’ and creating a genuinely popular culture. Thus the 1940s in Bengal – and many other parts of India – was not just a time of political conflicts, economic hardships, social upheavals and great human misery, but also an era of cultural vitality, artistic innovation and creative synergies fuelled by mass movements of resistance, democratic and secular impulses, and a politics of hope. The creative energies harnessed and bolstered by the left cultural movement of the 1940s spilled over into the 1950s, making this a particularly productive period in theatre, literature, music, film and the visual arts in Bengal. A preoccupation with the everyday and the impact of social

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and economic pressures on individuals, families and communities was noticeable across these domains, along with an interest in balancing artistic experimentation with social commitment. Before it lost its initial impetus, the IPTA movement inaugurated an experimental yet accessible theatre that mingled contemporary themes and the codes of naturalism and realism with stylized performance elements drawn from folk and melodramatic traditions.32 Ghatak’s film-making was motivated by the same political and artistic impulses that had driven his work in leftist street theatre. He always claimed that he had been drawn to the cinematic medium merely as a means of reaching and ‘viscerally’ affecting a much wider audience than he could through the theatre, rather than by any special fondness for cinema: I liked theater because it could create an immediate reaction but soon even that seemed inadequate and limited. When we did street theater, we could reach out to four to five thousand people at most. That’s when I thought of cinema and of how it could viscerally affect millions of people at once. [The Bengali word that Ghatak used, ‘mochor’, has connotations of twisting or wrenching.] That’s how I came into films … not because I wanted to make films. Tomorrow if I could find a better medium, I would throw away cinema. I don’t love films … I have used the cinema as a weapon, as a medium to express my views.33

Despite his oft-repeated protestations about his immunity from cinephilia, Ghatak’s films and writings on film are animated by a heightened awareness of film form and a passionate interest in experimenting with it. His experiments in film form also bear traces of a cultural politics of the left forged in the face of the traumatic events of the 1940s and are partly shaped, as I show in the next two chapters, by his prior engagement with political theatre and his continuing involvement in the networks of collaboration and intermedial exchange fostered by the IPTA movement.

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3 A Familiar Face

A face in the crowd In a 1969 essay about how art originates in the sudden, illuminating flash of an image, Ghatak described the image that formed the core of Meghe Dhaka Tara: A young woman carrying a sheaf of papers and a bag, a very ordinary young woman, tired after a hard day’s work, often waits at the bus or tram stop near my house. Her wavy hair creates a halo around her face and head, some of it damply clinging to her forehead. I see history in the fine lines of pain on her face and my imagination takes me into the very ordinary yet unforgettable drama of a life that is determined, unshakeable yet gentle, sensitive, and marked by infinite endurance.34

Ghatak’s description of a young working woman – exhausted, buffeted by circumstances, seemingly ordinary yet surprisingly resilient – brings together an everyday scene from contemporary urban reality with a lyrical vision from modern Bengali poetry. The latter is explicitly invoked in Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar, when the two main characters, Bhrigu and Anusuya, liken their beloved homeland, Bengal – verdant yet beset with troubles – to the young woman compared to a soulful musical note called ‘Komal Gandhar’ in Tagore’s poem, ‘Naam Rekhechhi Komal Gandhar’ (‘I have named her Komal Gandhar’): ‘A young girl just like a lilting yet pensive tune in the midst of tempests.’ In Ghatak’s imagination, a familiar figure from post-Partition Calcutta, where middle-class Bengali women joined the workforce in unprecedentedly large numbers and became much more visible on the streets of the city, acquires ‘the attributes of an idealized Bengal’35: poise under pressure, a quiet dignity, an

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A working woman: Neeta in Calcutta’s office district

ethereal grace and a paradoxical combination of tenderness and endurance that transfigures a history of pain. Surprisingly, the flesh-and-blood woman does not disappear behind the metaphor. Her everyday struggles remain visible in telling visual details – the sweat making her hair damp, the hands clutching papers, the bag on her shoulder, the lines on her face, the tiredness and patience embodied in the act of waiting at the bus stop at the end of the day. This fluid interplay between the mundane and the mythic is characteristic of Meghe Dhaka Tara (and Ghatak’s cinema at its most effective): metaphors and mythic motifs are not imposed on the everyday but emerge out of it, endowing it with a heightened significance and connecting the individual to the collective without transforming the real human being into a metaphorical cipher. In the process, a familiar but anonymous face in the crowd – that of a person suspended in a moment within the life of a city – comes

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into sharper focus even as it becomes iconic in its very ordinariness, illuminating the epic dimensions of an everyday struggle and Ghatak’s belief that ‘all art ends in poetry, a poetry drenched with the sweat of the woes and troubles of working people’.36 The refugee woman Despite its undeniable element of romanticism, Ghatak’s image of the young working woman – as well as the film inspired by this image – is rooted in a complex material history of displacement, deprivation and shifting gender norms. In this respect, Meghe Dhaka Tara anticipates some of the themes of recent feminist scholarship on the experiences of refugee women in India. Moving beyond the conventional focus on the sexual violence directed at women during and in the aftermath of the Partition, historians, sociologists and literary scholars have pointed out how the social and economic ruptures of the Partition ‘intertwined great loss with new beginnings’ for many displaced women: ‘forced into new public and political roles and identities, they also came to possess spaces that have been denied to them in more secure and sheltered times’.37 This was particularly visible in West Bengal, where economic need pushed many young refugee women out of the confines of the home and into the role of the breadwinner, which had traditionally been reserved for men, even in middle-class households invested in educating daughters: ‘Young girls from dislocated families of East Bengal were forced to ignore the social stigma and plunge into whitecollar jobs; frequently they went to college for graduation, not to groom themselves as future brides or housewives, but rather to qualify for jobs as clerks, typists, sonographers, sales girls etc.’38 Jasodhara Bagchi and S. Dasgupta have noted how ‘the historic assertion of the “refugeewoman” as the tireless breadwinner changed the digits of feminine aspiration’ in Bengal and ‘altered the social landscape irrevocably’.39 Their entry into the workforce and contribution to the family, however, did not automatically liberate these women from all patriarchal strictures or expectations, or tilt the power dynamics within the family in their favour.40 Gendered norms of family,

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domesticity and publicness made their transition into more public roles fraught with challenges and contradictions. Middlebrow Bengali fiction of the 1950s and 1960s played a crucial role in tracing some of these tensions through stories about women from refugee families negotiating changes, new roles and new forms of patriarchal control both at home and in the world outside. It was one such story – titled ‘Chenamukh’ (‘A Familiar Face’) and originally published in Ultorath, a popular periodical specializing in film news and fiction – that formed the nucleus of Meghe Dhaka Tara. From story to script The author of the story, Shaktipada Rajguru (1922–2014), a prolific writer of middlebrow fiction, was not from a refugee family himself but claimed that his childhood experiences gave him an instinctive understanding of, and an abiding interest in, the trauma of displacement: I was born in Bankura but grew up in my father’s workplace, a small village in Murshidabad that I came to know as home … After fourteen years there, my father was suddenly transferred and the ground beneath my feet shifted. There was no place there for me any more … I felt like an uprooted tree. I carried that sense of loss in my heart, so the pain of the refugees moved me.41

His interest in the lives of the displaced (like Ghatak, he uses the word udbastu) prompted him to spend time in transit camps with refugees in 1959–60 and to write a number of novels (such as Keu Pherey Nai, Tobu Bihango, Dandak Thekey Marichjhanpi and Desh Kal Patro), as well as stories, about the refugee experience. ‘Chenamukh’ focuses on the eldest daughter of a refugee family who uncomplainingly takes on the financial responsibility of supporting her ageing parents as well as her siblings, only to be exploited and betrayed by her loved ones. Supriya Chaudhuri, the actress who played the role of Neeta in Meghe Dhaka Tara, remembered reading the story by chance one night, before she was offered the role: ‘When I finished reading it, tears welled up in my eyes … Bishu [her then husband] woke

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up and asked me why I was crying. I smiled and told him it was the story, and then added that it would be wonderful if someone turns the story into a film and asks me to play the woman’s role.’42 A few days later, a friend put her in touch with a director named Ritwik Ghatak, who offered her the lead role in a film – ‘a role without make-up as it is that of a refugee girl with a very hard life’, quite unlike the glamorous roles that Chaudhuri played in commercial cinema. Much to her amazement, she realized that Ghatak was planning to adapt the story that had recently moved her to tears. The story itself was hardly novel; variations of it could be found not only in mainstream Bengali theatre or fiction but also in cinema, such as Agradoot’s 1954 film, Anupama. By all accounts, Ghatak’s first reaction to ‘Chenamukh’ was much less positive than Chaudhuri’s. He claimed to have ‘hated the original story when I first read it’43 even though he conceded that he was struck by ‘something in it’.44 It was brought to his notice by some younger associates and acolytes – notably the cinematographer Dinen Gupta (who would work with him on the film), the actor Dwiju Bhawal (who plays the role of Neeta’s younger brother in the film) and Samiran Dutta (who would assist him with the screenplay and direction) – in the hope that a film based on this story would achieve the commercial success that had eluded Ghatak’s first three films, and thus could enable him to make more films in the future. They eventually persuaded Ghatak to ask the distributor Mahendra Gupta of Janata Pictures, who was sympathetic to him, to finance ‘a commercial film’ based on ‘Chenamukh’. Gupta was interested enough to accompany Ghatak, his wife Surama, and some of the crew members to Shillong for three days of initial shooting and finalized the deal upon their return to Calcutta. The choice of Shillong for location shooting was partly dictated by necessity; most of the crew could stay for free in Ghatak’s father-in-law’s house in Shillong. According to Pijushkanti Gangopadhyay, the chief controller, the estimated budget for the film was Rs.1,15,000 or Rs.1,20,000 (approximately, £8,000–£9,000); while a few thousand

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rupees were borrowed from friends and family, Gupta’s Janata Pictures provided the bulk of the financing.45 First-person accounts of the making of the film emphasize the spirit of camaraderie and ‘collective endeavour’46 in which the cast and crew approached the challenges of shooting on a limited budget. Before going to Shillong to shoot the scenes at the sanatorium, Ghatak asked Rajguru to collaborate on a script that he warned would be quite different from the original story, even though it would use the names of the characters and some plot points. Rajguru, who was happy to do so and would go on to write screenplays for several Bengali films, including major commercial hits like Amanush (1975), credited Ghatak for initiating him in the art of screenwriting. He wrote glowingly of long evenings spent discussing and drafting the script at Ghatak’s house and of ‘the erudite and talented people’ who would gather there and possibly participate in the process: not just members of the crew but also luminaries like the classical musician Ustad Bahadur Khan and the modernist poet Bishnu Dey.47 The film was meant to retain the title of the short story but was rechristened as a Bengali film called Chenamukh was already in the works. Ghatak came up with the title Meghe Dhaka Tara (literally, ‘The Cloud-Covered Star’), inspired by the phrase ‘cloud-capped towers’ in Prospero’s famous monologue (‘Our revels are now ended’) in Act IV, Scene I of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Encouraged by him, Rajguru went on to publish a novel largely based on the film script and under the same title in July 1962. According to Dinen Gupta, the cinematographer of three of Ghatak’s films, Ghatak always worked with a script but not an elaborate one with sketches or fully worked-out shot divisions: ‘the totality of it was in his head, not in the script … what he wanted was clear to him, so he could get what he wanted done on the spot’.48 Samiran Dutta, who assisted him on Meghe Dhaka Tara, also wrote about Ghatak’s tendency to ‘not always follow the script’ even though he wrote excellent screenplays: ‘He repeatedly improvised, veered away from his own script.’ Meghe Dhaka Tara, Dutta said, was a notable exception as it was shot more or less ‘following the screenplay’.49

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The final screenplay of Meghe Dhaka Tara involved a radical recasting of Rajguru’s story, ‘a process of chiselling away’ through which Ghatak said he came to realize he could ‘express something’ through the predictable story.50 This process, however, was not entirely smooth. As accounts by Rajguru, Surama Ghatak, Supriya Chaudhuri and others indicate, the ending became a major point of contention between Ghatak and his producer Gupta, splitting the unit into two camps, during the initial phase of shooting in Shillong.51 Rajguru, who had accompanied Ghatak to Shillong on the latter’s insistence, describes how the entire screenplay was read out to the unit one rainy evening shortly after they arrived there. At the end of the reading, the producer objected to Neeta’s death, in the fear that ‘the audience will not accept a tragic ending’ (‘darshak nebe na’).52 A heated debate ensued, culminating in a vote on whether Neeta should die or return home at the end of the film. Rajguru, Surama Ghatak, and the actors Anil Chattopadhyaya and Supriya Chaudhuri supported the existing screenplay, while the others voted for a happy ending. According to Rajguru, Ghatak confided in him later that night that he had anticipated the producer’s objections and planned ahead: He told me behind closed doors, “I had a hunch in Calcutta that this could happen – that’s why I brought you here. You’re the only person I’m telling this now: the last shot of my film will have someone like Neeta walking down a stony path in torn slippers – people like Neeta don’t die but remain part of a struggle for life. If I tell them this now, no one will understand and the film won’t be made. That’s why I’ve brought you here, to write an episode that brings Neeta back, along a trajectory that they would like. I will shoot the ending in two ways. They will understand the ‘impact’ of my preferred ending when I show it to them later but won’t get it now. So, for now rewrite the ending according to their preference.”53

Rajguru complied, coming up with a happy ending, which met with the producer’s approval and was filmed by Ghatak without much ado. Anil Chattopadhyaya remembers Ghatak telling him

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that he did not intend to include the happy ending and that the film would actually ‘end in tragedy, with the sister dying as she cannot survive’.54 While shooting at Sati Falls, Ghatak asked his cameraman to take a 360-degree shot of the surrounding pine-covered mountains from below. This shot would later be incorporated, along with postproduction sound effects, into the conclusion that Ghatak had in mind all along. The actor Narayan Dhar, a close associate of Ghatak who also had a small role in the film, recounts how Ghatak finally managed to convince the producer to go with his tragic ending: After the film was finished, Ritwik-da [the honorific ‘da’ is a short form of the Bengali word ‘dada’ meaning an elder brother] invited all our friends and families and started screening the film for different groups of forty or fifty. This went on for ten days or so. During the last scene, Ritwik-da would stand facing the audience, in order to gauge their reactions. Then he told Mahendra [the producer]: “If you make this film a comedy, the public won’t accept it [‘lokey nebe na’]. It has to be a tragedy – that would also bring it commercial success.” Mahendra said, “You do what you deem best.”55

Ghatak’s ‘refusal to compromise’ on the ending (as Chattopadhyaya put it) was vindicated not just by the reactions of audiences before the screening but also by the box-office figures. Meghe Dhaka Tara, which was the only one of Ghatak’s films to be commercially successful, apparently ran to full houses right from the beginning.56 The commercial success of the film is all the more striking given Ghatak’s resolutely anti-commercial approach. Chattopadhyaya, who remembered Ghatak frequently lamenting that ‘these guys are getting me to make a commercial film’ during the shooting of Meghe Dhaka Tara, felt that the film owed its box-office success not to an approach that could be described as ‘commercial’ but to its ability to move people through an innovative blend of content and form.57 Despite his initial reservations, Ghatak also came to regard Meghe Dhaka Tara ‘as my life’s best work’58 and Neeta as ‘my favourite amongst the characters I have created so far’.59 He regarded the film as marking a turning point

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in his film-making career in terms of his use of myth and overtones: ‘It [the film] might be somewhat sentimental but it is through this that the practice of throwing overtones comes into my cinema. This is where I start using Indian mythology, which is a part of my life.’60 Mythical motifs Much has, of course, been written about Ghatak’s use of mythic motifs. It makes his films particularly attractive to critics and film-makers looking for a film language that is entirely and uniquely ‘Indian’, and is, indeed, one of the elements that make his films in general and Meghe Dhaka Tara in particular so compelling. However, given the widespread association of myth with religion and the risk of Ghatak’s work being misinterpreted as nativist or as reflecting a belief in some ossified and pure ‘Indian tradition’, we need to remember that his use of myth and India’s epic tradition was radically secular, shaped by his reading of Marx, Jung and Jungians as well as his work in the theatre, and motivated by the same desire that brought him into film-making: to reach out ‘to millions of people at once’ and ‘to viscerally affect’ them. As his films, interviews and writings make it abundantly clear, he used myth as he professed to use the cinema and melodrama – ‘as a weapon, as a medium to express my views’. For Ghatak, ‘India’s ancient heritage’ (oitihyo) resided in its myths and philosophy: ‘the Rigveda, Sanhita, Bramhan, Aranyak, all of Shruti, Upanishad, Smriti, the Puranas, and the epics [the Mahabharata and the Ramayana]’. He saw these, especially the epics, not as a body of sacrosanct and abstruse texts but as a living tradition that had seeped into the everyday and the imaginary of rural India through stories, folklore and music; as a repository of wisdom and remarkably modern insights about the human psychology; and as ‘a treasuretrove’ of creative resources for artists who wanted to ‘convince the people of our country and to win them over much more quickly’.61 In interviews and writings, he spoke of an ‘epic tradition’ that he shared with millions of fellow Indians, especially Indian villagers whom he credited with ‘a profound knowledge of the themes, concepts, messages

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of our epics’, acquired through their lived experience of folk art-forms rooted in the epics: ‘There is an epic tradition which dominates the Indian mentality. It has seeped into the Indian subconscious … I am a part of it. I cannot think of myself without the epic tradition, I am all for it.’62 His aim, however, was not to simply use the epic tradition ‘to make my film acceptable’ or to display its ancient glories or purity, but to use it to illuminate and stage a confrontation with the present. To this end, he emphasized the need to approach myths and epics ‘shorn of mysticism, from the vantage of our world’ and to ‘bring these face to face with our present’.63 In Meghe Dhaka Tara, as in his subsequent films, Ghatak interweaves the mythic with the modern and the secular with the sacred in deliberately disorienting ways, grounding archetypes, notably those of the mother-goddess, in materialist critiques of gender and the family, and using these to simultaneously reinforce and interrupt such critiques. Ghatak’s understanding of the archetype – as an idea, image, setting, or story pattern with universal legibility and the power to evoke strong emotional responses and a host of cultural associations (across but more importantly within cultures) – is coloured by his interest in comparative mythology, especially his reading of Jung and Erich Neumann, and his intimate knowledge of Indian myths and Bengali folklore. He freely admitted to an obsession with the archetype of ‘the Great Mother’ (about which Neumann wrote at length), wisecracking that a friend had told him this obsession would end up consuming him.64 As a 1963 essay indicates, he believed that the Great Mother archetype and its duality – reassuring benevolence and terrifying cruelty – haunted the collective unconscious of the world and was embedded in the Indian cultural imaginary in the iconography of the mother-goddess.65 In Hindu cosmology, the mother-goddess is a manifestation of the female principle of Shakti (power), and can take the benevolent form of Jagadhhatri, the eternal giver, or the monstrous form of the destructive Kali. In an interview about Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ghatak took pains to clarify the precise nature of his use of these Indian

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iconographies of the mother-goddess: ‘I use the image of the mother in a poetic and not in any religious way.’66 Many scholars (e.g., Ira Bhaskar, Jisha Menon, Ashish Rajadhyaksha) have pointed to the thematic and audio-visual elements that link Neeta to the munificent goddess Jagadhhatri (an incarnation of Durga), whose name means ‘the one who supports or nurtures the whole world’ in Sanskrit. We learn that Neeta was born on the auspicious occasion of Jagadhhatri puja (ritual worship of the goddess, the exact date of which varies from year to year as it is determined according to a lunar calendar) when her indulgent father takes her on an early morning trip to the countryside on that day as a birthday gift. Right from the opening sequence, Neeta is also linked to prokriti or a feminized vision of nature through visual associations with leafy trees, which provide shelter, and water, which is seen as a source of life. On her way to and from work, she is shown walking past Shankar as he sits in a tranquil, tree-lined spot by a jheel (a narrow, elongated lake) near the colony, singing a song invoking the mother-goddess.67 In crucial moments of pain and heartbreak, the camera tends to focus on Neeta’s expressive eyes in close-ups, as if invoking the wide-eyed stylized faces of traditional idols of the goddess Jagadhhatri or Durga, and on her upturned face, which brings to mind the faces of idols floating in the water after ritual immersion. Supriya Chaudhuri’s strong yet soothing features – her long neck, large eyes, the resolute yet gentle contours of her mobile face – lend themselves to these searing close-ups and had partly driven Ghatak’s decision to cast her in Neeta’s role. The film invests Neeta with an aura of divinity not in an attempt to transform her into an icon of feminine virtue but in order to highlight the epic dimension of her everyday struggle (epic in the sense of being both heroic and collective, or transcending the individual) and the sheer weight of the traditionally feminized labour of nurturing and caring. As Jisha Menon rightly points out, ‘the symbolism of the benevolent mother goddess converges on the material particularity of Neeta’68 – her role in providing for her family, supporting her fiancé Sanat’s doctoral studies, and sustaining the dreams of her loved ones.

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A traditional idol of Durga (Photograph: Bishnupriya Basak); a recurring motif: Neeta’s upturned face and anguished eyes

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Ghatak does not use this symbolism to glorify Neeta’s role as nurturer or to extol ‘the sacrifice and self-service that in India we are all taught to embody but that is becoming scarce’, as a surprising misreading of the film claims.69 Instead, he wields it to expose the workings of the exploitative mechanisms – gender roles, familial structures and socioeconomic forces – that trap Neeta and many other refugee women like her in a self-sacrificing dual role as nurturer and provider. As the film progresses, the imagery of the divine reveals the restrictive nature and contradictory demands of this role. Arguably, it is Neeta’s socialization as a dutiful daughter that prompts her to take on the economic responsibility traditionally reserved for sons; her public identity as a salaried worker is but an extension and intensification of, rather than a release from, her role as a nurturer within domestic space. The film is unsentimental in its depiction of the self-abnegation involved in the kind of maternal nurturing that Neeta embodies. She devotes herself to enabling others to pursue their dreams, sacrificing her own desires (for a postgraduate degree, a family with Sanat) and well-being – and ultimately, her life – in the process. In an insightful reading of Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ira Bhaskar connects the consuming nature of Neeta’s role as nurturer, which entails a constant effacement of her own needs for the sake of familial welfare, to the Hindu myth of the sacrificial fire that locates the genesis of Jagadhhatri in the transmutation of human desires. This myth pictures the goddess as taking shape from the smoke generated by the sacrificial flames of the havan, a ritual that involves the burning of everyday objects (such as ghee and grains) in a consecrated fire but symbolizes the renunciation of human cravings and aspirations. Significantly, some of the pivotal scenes that establish Neeta’s role as the selfless provider of her family and depict the selfish demands repeatedly made on her by her mother and her younger siblings are played out in the central courtyard of the family home, traditionally the site of the havan and now the stage for Neeta’s self-sacrifice.70 Neeta initially occupies a fairly central position in these courtyard scenes but gradually, as her sacrifices both enable

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her loved ones to prosper and take a toll on her health, she retreats to the margins of her home, in a spatial as well as a metaphorical sense. Suspecting that she might be suffering from tuberculosis – a contagious disease that, in mid-twentieth-century India, was also potentially fatal, especially for people lacking access to adequate nutrition, healthcare and rest – Neeta exiles herself to a room near the entrance of the house, normally reserved for outsiders, and to a life of solitude. When her mother angrily asks her why she has moved to the bar-bari (a colloquial Bengali term literally meaning ‘outer quarters’), Neeta says in an anguished voice, ‘This is a friendless house (nirbandhab puri) – what’s the difference between its outer quarter and its inner quarter (andar-bari)!’ By this point, the film has made it clear that home, for Neeta, is not a haven in a heartless world but a site of entrapment, exploitation and alienation. This is emphasized not just by Neeta’s words to her

A central figure: Neeta with younger siblings in the courtyard in an early scene

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Marginalized: an ailing Neeta watches her family from afar after Shankar’s return

mother or by the melodramatic twists and turns of the plot, but also by repeated shots of Neeta framed against the bars of a window or looking out through the bars at the courtyard or the world outside, or of her face enclosed within a constricting frame. One of the most dramatic instances of this kind of captive framing occurs at the end of a key sequence about midway through the film, when Neeta discovers, after paying a visit to Sanat’s new apartment, that he is involved with another woman. As she leaves his flat, the camera lingers on her upturned face and her dilated eyes, gently moving to an extreme close-up. This image then dissolves into a shot of the shadows in the courtyard of Neeta’s house, creating a sense of confinement and claustrophobia. The courtyard, traditionally the centre of the Bengali household, here becomes a space of enclosure and exploitation, one that can, in fact, be seen as a microcosmic version of a dystopic nation-space.

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A sense of confinement

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In keeping with Ghatak’s belief that the destruction of a society proceeds through, and manifests itself in, the splintering of human relationships,71 the socio-political chaos and moral confusion of the times are indexed through their warping effect on familial ties and interpersonal loyalties in the film. It is perhaps most apparent in the characterization of Neeta’s mother. Bitter, grasping, querulous and acid-tongued, she represents a striking departure from the stereotypical image of the saintly mother in mainstream Indian cinema. The daily grind of her impoverished existence hardens her heart, making her increasingly selfish and cruel in her dealings with Neeta; she demands – and through her covert actions, ensures – that Neeta sacrifices all her aspirations for the family’s survival. She tacitly encourages Geeta to seduce Sanat and happily makes arrangements for their wedding, overruling her husband’s objections and paying no heed to Neeta’s heartache. Her apparent ruthlessness reminds us

The angry mother

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of the dark side of the Great Mother archetype but as with Neeta’s character, this archetypal symbolism is grounded in her material circumstances. The shock of dislocation and the unrelenting pressures of poverty have, as she herself says in a moment of introspection, made her bitter and coarsened her sensibility. Her angry, anxious face (only fleetingly shadowed by remorse or softened by solicitude), her tense body language and the strident, habitually accusatory tone of her voice, along with the aural motif of sizzling oil that is associated with her, evoke a life smouldering with vexations in which finer sentiments, such as altruistic maternal love, can get burnt to a crisp. The archetypal mask of the monstrous mother thus shades into the harried face of a woman transformed by her everyday travails. A similar combination of archetypal symbolism and materialist critique is evident in the film’s use of the symbology of Uma to underline the pathos as well as the ironies of Neeta’s predicament. It draws on a rich vein of Bengali folklore that reimagines and humanizes the demon-slaying mother-goddess Durga, who ‘rids the world of obstacles’, as a much-loved daughter, Uma, also known as Gauri: ‘The Bengali Durga is a combination of the classical Mahisamardini – she who kills the shape-shifting demon Mahisa – and the gentle daughter Uma [wife of the god Siva], who returns home to her parents once a year, accompanied by her four children.’72 In the Bengali regionalization of the myth of Siva and his wife Parvati, Parvati is reimagined as Uma, the only daughter of her parents, Giriraj (Lord of the Mountains) and Menaka, who regret giving her away in marriage to Siva. Siva features in this retelling as an irresponsible and much older husband. Uma’s parents thus constantly worry about Uma’s well-being and look forward to having her back home, even if briefly, every autumn. The autumnal festival of Durga Puja, when idols of Durga are worshipped all over Bengal for four days, celebrates Uma’s return to her parental home but is also suffused with melancholy over her imminent departure (ritualized through bisorjon or an immersion of the idol of Durga in a river): ‘Agamani songs celebrate her coming and bijaya songs, sung at the

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end of the three-day festival, lament her imminent departure.’73 The presence of the daughter in the Bengali goddess tradition renders the divine ‘uniquely tender and affectionate, even weak’74 and is reflected in the use of the word, ‘Ma’, which means ‘mother’, as an affectionate mode of address or term of endearment for young girls and women (this is how Neeta’s father often addresses her). Literary scholars and historians have argued that agamani and bijaya songs, together known as Uma-Sangit (songs of Uma), reflect the real-life experience of many Hindu families in early medieval Bengal, where social orthodoxy led to little girls being given away in marriage before puberty, often to husbands much older than them. The young bride would usually be sent away from her natal home to live with her husband’s family, often in a town or village far away from her parents. Customarily, the Durga Puja was the one time she would be allowed by her in-laws to visit her parents. Ghatak wrote movingly of the emotional fallout from the practice of child-marriage, known as gauridaan (literally, giving away gauri, or an eight-year-old girl): The eight-year-old child, who was transported from her playground to an unknown house in an unknown village, would be even more scared to see the frowning faces around her, and yearn for her own home. This pain is preserved in our folk culture and permeates our songs of agamani and bijaya. This is why Durga is our daughter, this is why our autumns are so poignant. This is a peculiar manifestation of the Great Mother archetype.75

Ghatak said he imagined ‘Neeta as a representative of the young Bengali girls given away in gauridaan over hundreds of years’. Neeta’s father explicitly compares a variation of this shameful practice to the family’s exploitation of Neeta as he watches the preparations for Geeta’s wedding to Sanat with a sense of helplessness and selfloathing: ‘In the past, people would marry their daughters off to dying men. They were barbarians. Today, we are educated and civilized, so we educate our daughters and then wring them dry, put them to

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the grind, and wipe out their futures! That is the only difference.’ The phrase ‘marrying their daughters off to dying men’ also alludes to the sacrificial practice of sati in upper-caste Hindu communities in the pre-modern era, which involved the voluntary or forced immolation of a widow in her husband’s funeral pyre. His comment disrupts a linear narrative about social progress and women’s rights in modern Bengal, and points to the persistent lack of autonomy for women across and despite all the changes initiated by a reformist Bengali intelligentsia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite her apparent independence, access to the public sphere of education and employment, and all the other attributes that distinguish her from the helpless child-bride of a previous era, Neeta is still subject to exploitative, albeit new, forms of patriarchal and familial control. Even though she assumes the responsibilities traditionally borne by adult sons, gendered norms of nurturance and self-sacrifice continue to circumscribe her agency and undermine her individual aspirations – and ultimately destroy her. Right at the end of Meghe Dhaka Tara, Banshi Dutta, the neighbourhood grocer who plays a choric role in the film, refers to the crushing weight of the multiple burdens that Neeta had to bear, using the Bengali word ‘maiya’ that can mean either a young girl or a daughter and reminds us of her father’s allusion to a helpless girl-child: ‘Is such a gentle girl [shanto maiya] meant to withstand such pressures?’ This image of Neeta as a gentle girl-child is reinforced by a haunting musical motif in the second half of the film that also reimagines the mother-goddess in the form of a daughter: a bijaya song, ‘Ai lo Uma, koley loi’ (‘Come to my lap, Uma’) lamenting the imminent departure of Uma or Durga and sung in the voice of Uma’s mother, Menaka. The lyrics (translated below) and lugubrious tune evoke a mother’s heartache over having to bid her daughter farewell and being unable to protect her from the hardships of married life: Come to me, my darling Uma, Let me take you in my lap

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And keep you safe. I know of your sorrowing heart. Go, my daughter, to your husband’s home.

The song is heard at four pivotal points in the film. We first hear an instrumental version of this song during the preparations for Geeta’s wedding, when the mother asks Neeta to give her share of the family jewellery to Geeta; it continues in the next scene where the father makes an explicit connection between gauridaan and the family’s exploitation of Neeta. The words of this farewell song are heard on the soundtrack – as a foreshadowing of death – when Neeta coughs up blood for the first time and realizes that she has tuberculosis, which will eventually claim her life. It is heard again in the sequence in which Neeta’s father, upon learning of her ailment, comes into her room on a stormy night and tearfully implores her to leave home. His seemingly heartless act is actually driven, in equal measure, by love for his daughter, impotent rage at parasitic family members who now see her as a burden, and grief over his inability to protect her. He asks Neeta to go away as he does not want her to face the humiliation of being pitied and shunned by those who owe their very survival and current prosperity to her. The subtitles do not quite capture the anguish and despair that are palpable in his tone and phrasing, or the subtle inflections of his words. For instance, ‘ei gharey ma, nabojatok asey’ is translated as a flat statement, ‘A child will be born to this house’ or ‘This room is for a newborn’, which indicates that he is concerned that Neeta could infect the child, even though his intonation and expression suggest that he might be querying his family’s suitability as a nurturing environment for a newborn (‘Is this a house fit for a newborn?’). Half-crazed with grief, Neeta’s father hands her a bundle of clothes that he has packed for her and she picks up her most cherished possession, a childhood photograph of herself with her brother in the mountains. As her heartbroken father leaves the

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room, a sorrowful female voice starts singing Menaka’s lament, as if from a distance, while the camera focuses on Neeta as she stands in the middle of the dark room, clutching the bundle and cradling the photograph, her face tilted to one side, as if she is listening to the non-diegetic song that is punctuated by diegetic sounds of thunder and rain. The dramatic staging and visual details of this scene give it an allusive force beyond its immediate context, evoking received memories of the Partition, and now-familiar images of refugees fleeing their ancestral villages with bundles in hand, often at the dead of night, carrying only what they could with them. Intriguingly, a slight hint of a smile fleets across Neeta’s face as she turns towards the door and opens it, moving very slowly, as if keeping pace with the slow-moving tune. We see her from behind, a slight figure framed by the door and against the night, in a moment’s pause before she steps across the threshold and into the storm.

‘She is leaving home’: Neeta as she prepares to go away

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A quick, almost imperceptible cut to a frontal shot of Neeta follows. She stands in the rain, looking around with an expression of almost childlike delight that is in stark contrast to the mournful song and the sense of grief conveyed by the hunched posture of her father whom we glimpse over her shoulders in the top left corner of the frame. Her rain-drenched face, which dominates the right half of the frame, is criss-crossed by moving shadows cast by the storm-tossed branches of a tree we cannot see, and intermittently, almost rhythmically, lit up and rendered nearly masklike by flashes of lightning. Breaking into a smile of joy that reaches her eyes and transfigures her upturned face, Neeta draws one end of her sari over her head. A natural gesture in the rain, it also evokes the practice of married Hindu women covering their heads as a sign of modesty and, in conjunction with the song, reminds us of the ironies of the situation. Neeta’s filial duties had prevented her from marrying, which would have led to her leaving her parents, as Uma does in the myth. Her illness in the wake of her success in helping her family attain economic stability has finally released her from her responsibilities and also made her redundant, leaving her free at last to leave home – not to join a husband but to meet her death. Menaka’s lament acquires an additional layer of ironic poignance in this context, given that the god Siva, Uma’s husband, is also associated with mahakal or eternity in Hindu cosmology. In another ironic inversion, as Neeta smiles and prepares to walk away to the strains of a mother’s farewell to her daughter, a close-up shows us the father’s grieving face, aligning him with the maternal concern and sense of helplessness voiced in the song and reminding us of the solicitude and tenderness that he had displayed towards Neeta throughout the film, unlike her mother, and of his incapacities. The song is heard again at the very end of the film, when Shankar sees a young refugee woman who reminds him of his sister and her struggle. This leitmotif thus links Neeta not just to the myth of Uma but also to the material travails of countless other women in the post-Partition era, and situates their predicament within a

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‘Stepping outside, she is free’: Neeta in the rain; the grieving father

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wider socio-historical context as well as a network of archetypal associations. The linkages established through the song operate on a conceptual as well as an emotional level, shaping the film’s symbolic meanings. Ghatak wrote and spoke at length about the process through which archetypes became symbols (which he defined as ‘essences taking shape’76 and ‘archetypes expressed through images’77), but he was also wary of explaining the symbolism of his films solely in terms of ‘a conscious use of images’: … there are times when a symbol can suddenly possess you, bypassing all processes of conscious reflection. You are hard pressed to fathom its workings or connections. When people later ask you, you can come up with a neat and clever explanation but actually even you do not know why you are using this symbol. It spontaneously thrusts itself on you and haunts you, it is the unconscious at work. So the last word in art is that old-fashioned word, the unconscious – something that is beyond the grasp of rational comprehension or language. [my italics] There is something circling out there, beyond the reach of language or thought, which you will encounter, shake hands with, perhaps ten or twelve times in your life, and those ten or twelve instants are enough for you to live. That is a genuine symbol.78

While the complexity of the creative process might elude ‘rational comprehension or language’, as Ghatak argued, the methods he used to convey the ‘haunting’ power of the symbols that ‘possessed’ him were both precise and poetic, involving an interplay of theatrical effects, cinematic plasticity and musical principles. Musical allusiveness Ghatak’s deft development of the mythic motifs exemplifies a crucial aspect of his approach to cinematic storytelling in Meghe Dhaka Tara: a method that the poet Bishnu Dey described as ‘musical’ in his effusive review of the film. Dey, a connoisseur of both Western and Hindustani classical music, was one of the first to comment on how the film achieved a ‘musical allusiveness’ through a symphonic

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use of visual and aural echoes, symmetries and counterpoints: ‘The musical texture of the film transforms the imagery into symbols and a simple, banal story into an almost sublime allegorical image (uchhito rupakmurti) of life as we know it.’79 As in a musical composition, visual and aural motifs do not simply repeat across the film but interact, overlap, collide and evolve, weaving a cohesive web of symbolic associations that cannot be reduced to linear correspondences. Ghatak, who felt that ‘music is innately related to drama’,80 not only harnesses the expressive power of music for dramatic effect, emotional impact and implicit commentary on the image but also relies on musicality as a method, developing the themes and rhythmic form of the film through devices typically associated with musical composition, such as the repetition, resonance and reworking of aural and other motifs (e.g., melodies, sound effects, the tree by the lake, the torn sandal, the mountains and phrases used by the characters). His use of music as both medium and method emerged out of a close collaboration with the music director Jyotirindra Maitra, a gifted musician and composer who was trained in both Western and Indian classical music and had a keen interest in musical experimentation and folk music. Some Indian commentators have found a more locally specific musicality at work in Meghe Dhaka Tara’s structural resemblance to the vocal performance of ragas (a raga is a melodic mode thought to be capable of evoking specific emotions or moods) in Indian classical music.81 A raga performance, whether vocal or instrumental, typically starts with a slow, unmetered exposition (alaap) that establishes the melodic contours of the raga and then moves into a more expansive, rhythmic mode, gradually increasing in tempo to reach an impassioned climax before subsiding into silence. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ghatak takes about half an hour to establish Neeta’s everyday world, establishing lines of dramatic tension and introducing motifs (such as the tree, Shankar’s devotion to music, Neeta’s torn sandal and Banshi’s choric role, as well as specific ragas) that will accrue significance through modes of musical patterning in the course of the

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film. This section comes to an end with the father’s accident, which forces Neeta to abandon her studies and take up a full-time clerical job. Her life starts unravelling through a series of betrayals and humiliations in the next section, which culminates with preparations for her sister’s wedding to Sanat and Shankar’s decision to leave the family as a gesture of protest. Misfortunes pile up, at a much quicker pace, in the last third of the film, which reaches a crescendo of dramatic intensity with Neeta’s final cry of anguish before ebbing into a quiet but piercing coda. In addition to its structural development, the film’s elaboration of motifs, aural as well as visual, also connects it to performances of Indian classical music, in which repetition always adds new meaning and fragments are seen not as discrete entities but as ‘building towards evoking, sculpting and defining an idea, a thought, an association or a mood – all at the level of embodied experience, rather than as concrete representation’.82 The motif of the raga Hamsadhwani (literally, the call of swans) in Meghe Dhaka Tara exemplifies Ghatak’s use of music as both method and medium. We hear fragments of this raga, at various stages of its development, in the course of the film, beginning with Shankar’s tentative alaap in the opening sequence by the lake. His voice sounds unsure in this segment and he stops midway, only to pick up the melody again at a faster pace and with more confidence during a subsequent practice session by the lake when he sings the bandish (a short composition set to a raga), ‘Jai Maatey’, an invocation to the mother-goddess. The melody reaches its most complete expression with the ebullient ‘Lagi Lagan’, the song Shankar sings as he returns, triumphant, to the refugee colony after establishing himself as a singer in Bombay. The gradual development of the raga through fragments thus traces his progress as an artist, his increasing confidence as a singer and his journey to success (which is in stark contrast with his sister’s downward trajectory). In contrast with the bright notes of Hamsadhwani, associated in the film with daylight and open spaces, the solemn sound of Malhar,

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a raga traditionally associated with rainclouds and the rejuvenating power of monsoon showers, fills up the dimly-lit confines of the home when Shankar sings the bandish ‘Karim Naam Tero’ in his room at night, after a particularly bruising encounter with Banshi, who berates him and his family for exploiting Neeta. Despite differences of register, the bandish seems to echo the mood of a haunting folk song – in a dialect of East Bengal and associated with a form of Sufism or Islamic mysticism – from the previous sequence. Sung by Ranendra Narayan Raychaudhuri (who also plays the itinerant singer shown in the film as singing the song on the street), a gifted folk music enthusiast known in IPTA circles for the ‘authenticity’ of his singing style and a voice that evoked the riverine spaces of his native Sylhet (a district of East Bengal), it begins as Banshi’s tirade renders Shankar speechless, and continues through a series of tense exchanges within the family: ‘Kandiya akul hoilam bhabo-nodir parey/Mon torey ke ba

A cry from the heart: itinerant singer

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paar kore?’ (‘I cry helpless tears on the banks of the river of life/Who will take you across, my heart?’). Its melancholy lyrics and melody not only bring memories of a lost homeland into the refugee colony but also convey a sense of being adrift on turbulent waters and a yearning for deliverance only deepened by the certainty that it will not come. As the plaintive notes of the folk song fade away, we hear Shankar’s subdued voice and the sound of a tanpura in the background while the mother talks to Neeta about their family’s vicissitudes. Like the folk song we just heard, the bandish he sings is also a cry from a grieving heart, a plea to a higher power (or allah) for help. The juxtaposition of the two songs brings out the profound sense of helplessness engendered by displacement, as well as the surprising emotional affinities between two seemingly disparate musical compositions, one associated with courtly culture and the other with a marginalized folk tradition. The song is interrupted as Neeta enters Shankar’s room and a poignant conversation ensues, with Shankar confiding in Neeta about his guilt over ‘exploiting’ her and Neeta assuring him of her unconditional love for her family, and her faith in him and a brighter future for all of them. After a cut, Shankar resumes singing, with a plea for the alleviation of sorrows and poverty, and the granting of happiness to all. The camera first focuses on Shankar’s face as he sings, his eyes closed as if in prayer, and then on Neeta’s, the chiaroscuro lighting endowing their faces with an ethereal quality. Just as the monsoon brings welcome relief from the scorching heat and grime of summer, the soothing notes of Malhar seem to provide them with an escape from the indignities of their daily lives, even while its sombre undertone seems to hint at a gathering storm. The bandish in Malhar, as well as the snatches of Hamsadhwani and other ragas that we hear in the film (e.g., the brief phrase of Bhairon, reminiscent of an anguished cry, which combines with expressive camerawork and dramatic shot-composition to express Shankar’s distress on discovering that Neeta has tuberculosis and

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A cry from the heart: Shankar singing in the dark; escape through music: Neeta listening to Shankar sing

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on hearing her sudden outburst at the sanatorium), are sung by A.T. Kanan, an acclaimed vocalist of Hindustani classical music. Instead of recording these piecemeal, Ghatak taped Kanan’s extended renditions of Hamsadhwani, Malhar, Bhatiyar and a few other ragas in a studio setting, and then used fragments from these recordings in the film, with an ‘aptness’ that overcame the latter’s initial scepticism about the short-duration use of ragas that are meant to unfold over an extended period of time.83 While the use of Hindustani classical music in the film is diegetically tied to Shankar’s musical aspirations, it is not limited by the rules of verisimilitude or the secondary role of acoustic underscoring. Instead, snatches of ragas, as well as folk songs, choric chants, and Rabindrasangeet (lieder-like songs written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore that are an integral part of the everyday lives of middle-class Bengali families) are interwoven with instrumental music, ambient noise and sound effects, creating a densely layered soundtrack. The soundtrack gives dramatic voice to the unarticulated thoughts and emotions of the characters, situates individual heartbreaks in a wider social or cultural context and complicates, reacts to, and, at times, counters or transforms what we see on the screen – as we shall see in the next chapter.

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4 Cinematic Theatricality

Nostalgia for the light Unexpectedly for a film about displacement and deprivation, Meghe Dhaka Tara opens with a majestic evocation of rootedness and plenitude: a striking shot of a huge tree silhouetted against the morning sky, its spreading, densely-leaved branches filling almost the entire screen and shadowing the ground beneath it. Glimmers of sunlight caught in the ‘close-woven sieve’ of its leaves remind us of the star-shaped flickers of light on the dark surface of flowing water against which the credits unfold in the title sequence. Our eyes are then drawn to a flickering

Opening shot

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movement in the bottom right corner of the frame: a tiny figure emerges out of the shadows cast by the tree, as if summoned out of the darkness or the earth by the alaap – the slow, wordless singing introducing a raga in Hindustani classical music – heard on the soundtrack. As the figure moves into the light and closer to the camera, we see a woman in a white sari, looking towards the left of the frame though her face is still not clearly visible. This is our first glimpse of Neeta. After a sudden cut across a sound-bridge formed by the noise of an approaching train, a tightly framed close-up focuses on the back of Neeta’s head, turned away from us and towards the jheel or the lake that dominates the top half of the frame. The camera’s position, behind Neeta, makes the object of her gaze – a young man (who, we later learn, is her adored older brother, Shankar, an aspiring musician) sitting on the ground by the lake and practising his scales – appear diminutive, almost like a figure on a far-away stage, outlined by the light. Turning

A smile of indulgence

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her face sideways towards the camera, Neeta smiles indulgently, as one might after seeing a little boy at play, and then exits the frame to the left, just as a train thunders past on the tracks on the other side of the lake. Following another quick cut, the camera moves closer to Shankar, who continues to sing as the train passes out of the frame, his back turned to us and his voice mingling with the sound of the train and bird calls, but then stops abruptly, moving his head so that we see him in profile and rubbing his stubbled cheeks as if in some discomfort. Instead of providing orienting information or creating a sense of place, the opening sequence invests the landscape with an ethereal aura and an element of abstraction; it seems quite remote from the everyday world of want and worries – the world of the refugee colony – into which the film will then take us. It is significant that we are introduced to Neeta and Shankar, the two characters who are able, to an extent, to escape the pressures of this world through their respective dreams and their intimacy, in this luminous open space. As the film progresses, this space, to which we frequently come back and through which Neeta passes every day on her way to and from work, grows darker and less expansive on each return, and the sheltering presence of the tree less prominent.84 By the end of the film, both the tree and Neeta, who is visually associated with it in the first shot, have disappeared from our field of vision. The initial image of the tree, as well as the narrative trajectory of the film, is reminiscent of a Bengali short story Ghatak published in 1947, titled ‘The Tree’ (‘Gaach-ti’). An anthropomorphic tree is the central character of this story: A big banyan tree leaning over a stream near a village … On moonlit nights, the tree would create an exquisite chiaroscuro effect around it and dream of some mystery in the changing waters of the stream … Little boys would play in its branches, playing truant from school, and dive into the stream from the tree. The villagers would congregate near the tree from their childhood days. On summer afternoons, some of them would sit under the tree, in the hollow created by its tangle of roots, and listen to the soft burbling of the stream …85

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The emotional core of the film: Neeta’s relationship with her brother

The story ends with the tree being cut down to make room for a government project and quickly forgotten by the villagers: ‘After having sheltered so many people for so long, the banyan tree has now silently vanished from their minds.’86 The fate of the banyan tree in this short story foreshadows that of Neeta, who protects her family from penury and makes it possible for Shankar to dedicate himself to his art, but is then forgotten by almost everyone, as Banshi, the neighbourhood grocer, laments at the end of the film. While introducing Neeta’s symbolic association with the tree, her bond of affection with her brother, the contrast between Shankar’s absorption in music and the brisk pace of Neeta’s workday routine, and a major musical motif (the Hamsadhwani raga), the opening sequence also draws attention to the composition, editing, lighting and aural layering of images, signalling a deliberate departure from the representational codes of seamless realism. The film’s tendency to disrupt these codes by foregrounding the medium of

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A darkening space

representation marks it as modernist but its concern with capturing the minute, quotidian details of displaced lives aligns it with Italian neo-realist cinema and contemporary Indian experiments in realism.87 Its realist impulse becomes evident right after the opening sequence, as a fade-in from the scene of Shankar singing by the lake transports us to the world of the refugee colony. A series of vignettes then situate Shankar and Neeta in their everyday life and evoke its experiential texture and inherent tensions through a deft use of elements of the mise en scène (the setting, performances and linguistic nuances), wide-angle lenses, suggestive framing and ambient sound. The difference between the unconstrained, music-saturated expanse of the opening sequence and the cramped, noisy spaces of the refugee colony sets up a central theme of the film: an ever-present contrast between the life-sustaining, expansive possibilities of art (music, poetry) and genuine, reciprocal affection (as between Neeta and Shankar) on the one hand, and the harsh, coarsening imperatives of everyday life and instrumental rationality on the other.88

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The meshes of the everyday We are plunged into the world of the everyday through a brief interaction between Neeta and the neighbourhood grocer, Banshi, who accosts her as she passes by his roadside shop on her way home (he would take on a choric role as the film proceeds). The dialect of Bengali he uses to speak to Neeta and in which she replies would have immediately identified them as Bangal (a word used in West Bengal to denote both Bengalis from the eastern part of Bengal, now Bangladesh, and the variety of dialects spoken in that region) and signalled their refugee status to a contemporary Bengali audience. Banshi addresses her as Didi-thairan (literally, elder sister), even though he is clearly much older than her; while his use of the honorific gestures towards their difference in social status and cultural capital, his brusque demand that she ask her father to settle his outstanding dues indicates that her middle-class family has fallen into hard times and no longer receives much deference from their erstwhile social inferiors. Neeta’s face and body language betray her sense of humiliation but her brief, measured response before moving away conveys her characteristic poise and gentleness. The camera follows her as she walks down an unpaved road and suddenly stumbles when one of her worn-out sandals gives way; she kneels down to inspect and then pick up her sandals, and continues barefoot. This gesture and the torn slippers, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of worn-out boots, disclose a history of toil, tenacity and economic hardship; their reappearance at the end of the film, in a poignant echo of the initial scene, will bring the collective dimension of this history to the fore. As Neeta walks away, another cut takes us back to Banshi’s roadside stall, to witness a brief exchange between him and Shankar. Banshi treats Shankar with overt disrespect, responding to the latter’s request for a razor on credit and his sheepish plea – ‘Can’t go without a shave any longer’ – with a taunt and a reminder about his father’s unpaid bills for groceries. Shankar’s lack of surprise and resigned look indicate that he is used to this kind of dismissive treatment,

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The grocer demands payment; Neeta’s torn sandal

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partly spurred by his insistence on continuing his training in classical music instead of working to support his impecunious family, as the eldest son was expected to do. A conversation between his parents in the next scene reveals that Neeta has stepped into his role and supports her family by working as a private tutor in the mornings while studying for her MA. The father, about to leave for work, extols her sense of responsibility and gently chastises his wife for describing her as ‘kalo maiya’ or a dark-complexioned girl, concerned about the hurtful impact of this phrase, reflective of Indian society’s longstanding obsession with fair skin, on Neeta. His affection for his daughter is palpable in his words to his wife, as well as in his solicitous query about Neeta’s torn sandals on her return and the tenderness with which he addresses her as ‘Khuki’, a colloquial Bengali term that literally means ‘little girl’ and is often used by parents as an affectionate nickname for daughters. The conversation between Neeta’s parents establishes not just their economic situation but their socio-cultural locations and contrasting personalities as well. While their exclusive use of Bangal instead of the standardized Bengali spoken in West Bengal (and by their children, who have come of age there) marks them as refugees from East Bengal, the father’s idiolect is characterized by the slightly didactic tone of an idealistic schoolmaster and a tendency, widespread among Bengalis of his background (middle-class, collegeeducated, well-versed in English literature but not overtly Anglicized, working in white-collar jobs), to intersperse colloquial Bangal with more formal Bengali words (e.g., the Sanskrit chormo instead of the colloquial chamra for skin) and the occasional English word. The mother’s speech patterns are more rustic, reflecting her confinement to the private sphere of domesticity, and inflected by an acerbity that hints at a life fraught with worries. Her sarcastic attitude towards her mild-mannered husband speaks not just of a familiarity bred by decades of companionship but also of the erosion of patriarchal authority brought about by his inability, after the Partition, to properly provide for his family.

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The family’s straitened circumstances become clearer in the next few scenes, which acquaint us with the interior of their home – a makeshift residence comprising a few cramped rooms, arranged around a small central courtyard and made of mud, bamboo and corrugated tin – and the extent of their reliance on Neeta’s meagre earnings. When the mother chides her two younger, college-going children – pretty, frivolous Geeta and athletic, self-centred Montu – for thoughtlessly demanding a fashionable sari and a new pair of soccer boots, respectively, while the family can barely make ends meet, they turn to Neeta, who cheerfully gives in to their entreaties, even though it means that she cannot buy a new pair of sandals for herself. The unemployed Shankar depends on Neeta not only for pocket money but also for moral support, in the face of the scorn he receives from other members of his family for pursuing a musical career instead of a nine-to-five job incompatible with his self-image as an artist. Their mother disapproves of Neeta’s habit of spending almost all her income on her siblings but mainly because she herself needs the money for household expenses. Besides situating Neeta in a network of familial relationships and responsibilities and illustrating her tendency to put her family’s needs above hers, this extended sequence also evokes the lifeworld of a refugee colony in minute detail. In the interest of authenticity, Ghatak had wanted to shoot the film in an actual squatter settlement on the outskirts of Calcutta but changed his mind after crowd control turned out to be a major challenge, given the film’s limited budget and tight shooting schedule. While the scenes at Banshi’s shop and on the road near it were filmed on location, in the Azadgarh refugee colony, and the scenes by the lake were shot in a swampy area in Taratala – both on the outskirts of Calcutta – the family home in the film was actually a studio set built from scratch by a pond in the outdoor lot of Technicians’ Studio in Tollygaunge (the Calcutta neighbourhood that was the epicentre of the Bengali film industry).89 Rabi Chattopadhyay, the art director on Ajantrik and a graduate of the reputed art school (Kala Bhavan) at Biswabharati, the international university set up by Tagore, worked

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The refugee colony

closely with Ghatak on set design, basing it on observations and photographs of everyday life in actual refugee colonies, and on extended discussions about the relationships between the characters of Meghe Dhaka Tara and their domestic environment, and the spatial implications of cinematographic choices (especially that of wide-angle lenses). Their goal was to produce an authentic depiction, rather than a stylization, of a typical dwelling in a refugee colony: ‘We used objects which had been used by people – the fence, the bamboo walls, etc. – to build the space of the family home and the refugee colony. While we also used new material, we bought secondhand objects to create a realistic effect.’90 Beyond realism: the symbolism of space and sound The realism of the set was crucial to the expressive and symbolic design of the film. While considerations of authenticity dictated the choice of material – mud, thatch, bamboo and reed – and the layout of the house,

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their physical properties also influenced the film’s use of lighting and ambient sound. The external world is not only part of the roofless central courtyard of the house but impinges on the interior scenes: visually, in the form of light filtering in through narrow doorways, latticed windows and chinks in the bamboo walls, and aurally, through ambient noises that might be described as the ‘soundmarks’ or the distinctive sounds of everyday life in refugee colonies of this period – the ringing of the school bell, the voices of schoolchildren reciting their tables or singing the national anthem, the distant din of the neighbourhood market, the muffled declamations from evening rehearsals at the community centre, the chirping of crickets, the howling of foxes and the hooting of an owl at night, and the quacking of ducks in the pond right outside Neeta’s window. This interplay between the inside and the outside, typical in a makeshift home of this nature, contributes not only to the film’s realistic tenor but also to its symbolic subtext about how socio-historical forces pervade and reshape the intimate space of the personal. As with the mythic motifs, the symbolism is not imposed on, but emerges from, the material conditions of life in a refugee colony. The mundane materiality of the set is also harnessed in suggestive shot compositions and through theatrical staging and an expressionistic use of natural light. Doors and windows are often used as frames to visually convey or reinforce a sense of entrapment or claustrophobia. In the scene that introduces the parents, for instance, the open doorway at the centre of the frame creates a narrow rectangle of light around the father’s figure in the foreground, as if he is hemmed in from all sides. Windows convey a similarly acute sense of confinement in repeated images of Neeta framed against the latticework of a window or looking out through it at the world outside in the course of her everyday activities. Similarly, Ghatak’s practice of shooting daytime scenes in daylight and nocturnal scenes at night not only enhanced the realistic look of the domestic set-up through the use of available light (e.g., the sunlight reflected from the pond outside Neeta’s room in the first scene set there), but also involved a deft manipulation of realistic light sources and the physical features of

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A constricting frame

the set, especially the gaps in the walls and the ceiling, to set in motion highly stylized patterns of expressionistic lighting in pivotal moments. Take, for instance, Neeta’s encounter with Shankar right after he has been humiliated by their younger brother and she has seen Sanat flirting with Geeta, or her tense exchange with her mother as she tries to hide her illness, or the scene where Shankar and Neeta sing together one night shortly before he leaves, or the one in which he discovers, after his return, that Neeta has tuberculosis. An atmospheric use of shadows, low-key lighting, and strong contrasts in these scenes – along with unexpected framings and camera angles – transforms the realistic mise en scène of a dimly-lit room into the characters’ internal landscape of anguish and despair, and amplifies the expressive nuances of the faces in focus, gestures and body language. Similarly, the otherwise naturalistic, minimalist soundtrack of the film is dotted with sudden, theatrical eruptions of sound and music

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Interplay between the inside and the outside: making use of available light

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In a dark place: expressionistic lighting and framing

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that interpret, comment on, or provide counterpoints to the visuals and the dialogue: sound not only becomes a character who ‘even acts and reacts intermittently’,91 as Jyotirindra Maitra put it, but also a narrator. These sonic detonations disrupt the flow of the narrative, transporting the domestic drama onto a broader figurative or socio-historical plane. While I have touched on the centrality of music to Meghe Dhaka Tara in the previous chapter, its sound design – viewed by Ghatak as instrumental in illuminating the subtextual level of any film narrative92 – encompasses much more than what is conventionally understood as music. As Ghatak’s close associates, such as the renowned composer Bhaskar Chandravarkar, noted, he ‘was of the view that the whole sound track, flowing alongside the visual track, must be treated as the music track’.93 In a 1966 essay on film sound, which demands to be read as a theoretical companion piece to his films, Ghatak emphasizes that the ‘suggestiveness’ (dyotona) of ‘incidental noises’ (visibly or plausibly originating from the diegetic or off-screen space), ‘effect noises’ (extradiegetic sound effects) and silence are just as important as music in making audible ‘the story that flows beneath the literal story’.94 A film was ‘conceived’ and ‘fully born’, he felt, through patterns emerging from the synthesis and collision of words, music, different sounds and silent pauses – in the film-maker’s head and in the process of sound-mixing in the laboratory, respectively. Instead of pursuing the ‘audiographic realism’ of location recording as Satyajit Ray often did, Ghatak preferred to do a pilot recording on location to get a guide-track and capture discrete elements of environmental sound, and then to compose his soundtrack on the editing table from the assembled sounds, and thereby redesign the film.95 The soundtrack of Meghe Dhaka Tara and its interactions with the image not only illustrate Ghatak’s indebtedness to Sergei Eisenstein, whose films and writings he acknowledged were the cornerstones of his education as a film-maker, but also constitute one of the most striking and original applications of Eisenstein’s idea of montage as collisions generating new and unexpected meanings. Take, for instance, Ghatak’s ‘ornamental’ use of sound, as opposed to background or diegetic music. Largely absent in the first half an

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hour of the film, which is devoted to creating a naturalistic sense of the everyday world of the characters, this becomes audible for the first time when Sanat visits Neeta’s home. A medium-shot shows Sanat and Neeta chatting in her room, as well as Neeta’s mother standing right outside the window in the background. The diegetic sound of bird calls in the distance and the soft, non-diegetic notes of the sitar and the flute provide an appropriately romantic acoustic backdrop for the conversation on which the mother is eavesdropping, but come to a sudden halt, to be replaced by a crackling noise – presumably of oil heating up in a wok or something burning in the kitchen behind her – as a jump-cut takes us to a close-up of her worried face. We hear the same sound again a little later, as Neeta and Sanat go for a walk and the mother watches them leave, clearly anxious, as she admits to Neeta in a later conversation, about what would happen to the family if Neeta marries Sanat. This searing anxiety, aurally conveyed through an everyday sound from a

The mother eavesdrops on Sanat and Neeta

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Bengali kitchen, drives her, in a subsequent scene, to tacitly encourage Geeta to lure Sanat away from Neeta. The crackling noise is heard here for the third time, indicating her state of mind and serving as an acoustic approximation of the idiomatic Bengali expression (purey khaak hoye jawa, to be burnt to ashes) that uses the metaphor of incineration to indicate a mind or a life ravaged by extreme hardship.96 Other everyday sounds also acquire a symbolic significance in the course of the film. As the film becomes darker, the ordinary night-time noises in a settlement outside city limits – the chirping of crickets and the cries of owls, foxes and stray dogs – are deployed to reflect and reinforce Neeta’s impending sense of doom. A particularly striking – and serendipitous – instance of this can be seen in the wordless scene in which Neeta realizes that she has tuberculosis. The silence in Neeta’s room, periodically punctuated by the barking of dogs and foxes in the distance and a hacking cough that she is trying to muffle with her hand, is suddenly pierced by the shrill screech of an owl, evocative of a woman’s anguished scream, right after she coughs up blood for the first time. According to Chaudhuri, who played Neeta, this scene was shot late at night and an owl happened to cry out as she coughed, prompting Ghatak to shout ‘Cut!’ and run to the sound van, saying ‘I want that owl’s screech.’97 As Ghatak’s essay on film sound (and silence) also indicates, he had a keen ear for the creative possibilities of ‘incidental sound’ arising within the diegetic universe as well as the pro-filmic space, and of the process of soundmontage through which ‘they cease being just sounds accompanying the visuals and rise to the level of suggestive sounds’.98 This is what happens to the loud noise of the actual steam train we see rushing past the lake in the opening sequence, providing a harsh counterpoint to the melody sung by Shankar. It emerges as an acoustic leitmotif, often submerging or interrupting significant conversations. We hear it for the second time in the scene by the lake where Sanat and Neeta talk about their future. As Neeta is about to leave, Sanat reaches for her hand in an intimate gesture and she slowly sits down again; even though the camera is fairly close to them, the rest of their conversation

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is drowned out by the clattering wheels, piercing whistle and screeching brakes of a train passing by in the background. The noise of the train, unreasonably loud given the distance between the train and the couple, seems to overwhelm the image as well as the protocols of verisimilitude, and surges through the soundtrack with an unstoppable force, as if portending disaster or mimicking the inexorable impetus of history. In the context of the Partition, the sound of trains was overlaid with traumatic memories as trains not only transported millions of displaced people from India to Pakistan and vice versa, but often became sites of violence as refugees were attacked and killed en route. This acoustic motif retrospectively acquires an ominous colour with the father’s debilitating accident on the railroad tracks, which effectively makes Neeta the sole breadwinner and forces her to abandon her postgraduate studies and take up a full-time clerical job that requires her to commute to Calcutta by train. We again hear the menacing sound of a train racing by, even though this time there is no train in sight, when Neeta tells Sanat, while awaiting a train at the station, that they will have to postpone their marriage, and he responds with a brusque, ‘Why should I wait?’ Much later, when a repentant Sanat, now married to Geeta, accosts Neeta as she walks past the lake on her way to work and implores her to hear what he has to say, grabbing her wrist, a train again rushes into the frame from the right and thunders past, filling up the sonic space, as if underscoring the impossibility of a dialogue between them at this juncture. The emotional gulf between them is mirrored in the camera’s distance from them and the noise of the train is accompanied this time by an eerie, echoing sound effect – a cross between a high-pitched chorus of night-crickets and a mechanical buzz – that has, by this point in the film, become the acoustic sign of Neeta’s deepening distress and physical decline. A striking instance of the transmutation of ambient sound into an uncanny aural motif (partly by transposing nocturnal sound into daylight hours and modulating it through sound-mixing), this echoing ‘effect noise’ is first used to create a sense of foreboding as Neeta reads a letter that, we learn soon after, informs the family of

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Trains and dangling conversations

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Montu’s crippling accident at the factory where he works. Its frequent repetition in the last third of the film, sometimes in conjunction with background music or incidental noise (such as the groans of hospital patients), conveys a sense of an unfolding catastrophe. We hear it again when Neeta feels dizzy while visiting Montu at the hospital; after her troubling encounters with Geeta and Sanat; when she coughs up blood; during her final outburst at the sanatorium; and perhaps most unsettlingly, in the final scene of the film, which connects Neeta’s tragedy to an ongoing process of social disintegration. One cannot but wonder, given Ghatak’s familiarity with Romantic poetry, if this uncanny reinvention of the nocturnal noise of crickets is an ironic inversion of an image from ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket’, the well-known poem by John Keats that Neeta’s father quotes in the early part of the film when he proclaims that ‘The Poetry of earth is never dead’: On a lone winter evening, when the frost      Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills     The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever …99

Instead of the reassuring warmth of ‘the Cricket’s song’ in this poem – ‘in warmth increasing ever’, hinting at the presence of an ‘invincible summer’ in the midst of winter (to paraphrase Albert Camus) – the sinister, almost unrecognizable chorus of crickets that we hear in the last part of the film conveys an existential chill and a feeling of dread over everyday imperatives wiping out the lyrical possibilities of life. While this sound effect plays a central role in creating a sense of impending disaster, it gets eclipsed in discussions by a more flamboyant example of Ghatak’s use of non-diegetic sound to disrupt narrative immersion and link Neeta’s agony and sense of betrayal to a larger historical trauma: the amplified and looped sound of a whiplash. Interestingly enough, this memorable acoustic motif, used at three of the dramatic high points of the film (twice

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to underscore Neeta’s humiliation and once to emphasize Neeta’s contemptuous rejection of a now-married Sanat’s self-indulgent fantasy of making amends) was the brainchild of music director Jyotirindra Maitra: Rather than using the wails of a violin to express pain, I proposed two alternatives to Ritwik: the sound of clothes being dashed against the ground in the course of washing, and the swish of a whiplash. Ritwik chose the latter. I had put the whip in his hands but when he couldn’t get the rhythm right even in four or five takes, I took over from him. Thanks to my training in classical music, I could get the beat right.100

The idea of the whiplash came from ‘Madhu Banshi-r Goli’, a long Bengali poem that Maitra had written in 1943. Since its publication in 1944, his poem – an anguished reflection on the socio-economic turmoil that darkened the cityscape of wartime Calcutta, as well as a paean to revolutionary dreams of a brighter world – gained widespread popularity, beyond Calcutta’s elite left-liberal circles, and was frequently recited in political meetings and performances. At least some of the Bengali viewers who saw the film in 1960 might have connected the sound of the whiplash in Meghe Dhaka Tara to these oft-quoted lines from the poem, which conjure up an image of a city struggling to cope with the effects of the 1943 famine, wartime economic scarcity and the unsettling presence of US Army and Air Force units: Shadows of war-scorched lives march on, The roar of hunger drowns out wayward songs. The lustful whistle Of an American captain in a rakish cap Lashes the cheeks of a maiden night.101

A narrowly auteurist approach to Ghatak’s cinema thus risks downplaying the vital role of creative collaborations in his films. Maitra, for instance, had spoken in interviews of working closely with

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Ghatak on the ‘musical map’ of Meghe Dhaka Tara (as well as Komal Gandhar), and of their working relationship as being characterized by mutual respect, animated discussions and a compatibility of aesthetic visions. In addition to directing the music for the film, he also made significant contributions to the sound design; it bears the clearly audible imprint of his fondness for mining the melodic possibilities of bird calls, his interest in symbolic and created sounds, and his predilection for orchestrating the natural noises and ‘music’ of a given environment, as well as silence (guided by the belief that ‘any environment has its own melody’ and ‘silence is a vital part of the orchestra’).102 One can see traces of Ghatak’s interactions with Maitra in the former’s essay on film sound, especially in its emphasis on the imaginative use of incidental sound and created sound, and on the suggestiveness of silence and its importance in any ‘ribbon of sound’: We can use silence before introducing any suggestive sound. Just as silence can generate affect, it can also control the pace and rhythm of a scene, and usher in a complete absence of affect. It depends on the positioning of sounds before or after. Imagine you want to create a stir through a strikingly loud sound. You need silence before that. Or if you want a stunned pause in the middle of a lively movement, you have to resort to silence. If you need to evoke the slow pace of an idle afternoon, it is best expressed through silence. Silence is as essential for slowing down the movement of a scene, as for capturing the dynamism of an intense moment.103

Ghatak’s suggestion that silence forms the ground for sound design, reminiscent of Maitra’s remark about the orchestral role of silence, can be applied to the broader formal design of Meghe Dhaka Tara as well. Just as a background of silence helps to throw figures of sound or the figurative use of sound into sharp relief, the film’s densely woven texture of naturalistic detail (which often gets glossed over in discussions of Ghatak’s cinema) makes the instants when the realist surface is torn apart all the more memorable.

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An aesthetic of rupture The film abounds in moments of rupture that emerge out of a theatrical manipulation of film form, or a careful orchestration of two or more of the following elements: expressionistic cinematography, interventionist editing, cinematic staging, nuances of performance, a dramatic use of sound and music, a musical use of leitmotifs, and a fluid yet disorienting movement between an aesthetic of proximity and an aesthetic of distance. Instead of consistently adhering to the protocols of cinematic realism, Ghatak drew on a creative vocabulary forged in live performance, the writings of Brecht, Stanislavski and Eisenstein, the allusiveness of Indian music and mythology, conventions of Bengali and Hindi melodramatic fiction, theatre and film, and the films of his two cinematic heroes, Eisenstein and Buñuel, to create a hybrid cinematic idiom that moved fluidly between the representational logic of screen realism and the expressive potential of stage performance. What I am calling cinematic theatricality emerges out of this dynamic oscillation; it is a political intervention, a deliberately disruptive move designed to provoke a critical engagement with both cinematic image and contemporary reality. In Ghatak’s view, such an engagement – a genuine ‘involvement’ – could only be achieved by alienating the audience or jolting them out of what he saw as a short-lived absorption in the narrative or with the lives, loves and losses of specific characters: I am going to constantly jostle you [the spectator] around so that you understand that it is not an imaginary story and that I am not here to deliver cheap pleasures to you. I am going to hammer it into your head that you are watching an imagined incident on the screen but do try to understand what I am trying to convey through this – my thesis, which is entirely true. I am going to keep on alienating you in order to draw your gaze to that truth. I would succeed as an artist only if you become aware and get involved in the task of challenging that social obstacle or injustice in the world outside after seeing the film, if I can transmit my protest to you.104

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Ghatak’s agenda of alienating the spectator was partly shaped by the Brechtian theory of alienation or verfremdungseffekt – emphasizing anti-realist staging, narrative non-linearity, and rational rather than emotional appeals – that he first encountered as an IPTA activist, through Brecht’s plays (some of which he translated into Bengali) and writings on epic theatre, and the creative appropriation of Brechtian ideas in IPTA’s agitprop practice.105 This, however, was a hybrid practice that combined elements from ‘several models ranging from the realist to the Brechtian to Bengal’s living folk and popular forms’.106 The Brechtian emphasis on disrupting the verisimilitude of realist performance resonated with Ghatak’s keen interest in the ‘epic form’ of the indigenous folk traditions of performance (e.g., the jatra, a traditional form of Bengali theatre particularly popular in rural areas) to which IPTA activists continually turned for inspiration: a form that he described as ‘kaleidoscopic, pageant-like, relaxed, discursive’,107 unlike more linear, plot-driven drama. Ghatak’s arsenal of alienating strategies was thus assembled from an eclectic array of sources and elective affinities. His use of the word ‘hammer’ in the interview quoted above indicates the forcefulness with which he wielded these techniques, leading some critics to accuse him of hyper-theatricality (oti-natokiyota in Bengali), and others to celebrate his self-reflexive use of melodramatic clichés like coincidences, the suffering of the virtuous, and acoustic underscoring. Such criticisms and celebrations often focus on moments in which an aesthetic of either excess or fragmentation tears apart the continuum of realist time and space. Take, for instance, the use of tableau-like formations in pivotal scenes in Meghe Dhaka Tara (e.g., when the family gathers round the injured father after his fall or when they learn about Montu’s accident), or the film’s reliance on expressionist cinematography, characterized by the frequent use of extreme camera angles and shifting frames, rack focus, wide-angle lenses, exaggerated chiaroscuro effects and dramatic close-ups to fragment and unsettle shot compositions. Critics have also pointed to the

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A tableau of disaster: the family learns of Montu’s accident

Theatrical framing: after the father’s accident

A dramatic use of light and shadows: the scheming younger sister

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film’s disorienting juxtaposition of naturalistic and expressionistic performance styles, as exemplified by the contrast between the understated quality of Chaudhuri’s performance as Neeta and what Bhaskar Sarkar calls the ‘studied melodeclamation’108 of Bijon Bhattacharya in his role as her father (and his roles in other Ghatak films). The unsettling effect of the film is, of course, accentuated by the strategies discussed in Chapter 3: the use of song, both diegetic and non-diegetic, at critical moments, to reveal the emotions or thoughts behind the dialogue, silences and actions; an intricate layering of images with songs (including choral chants), dialogue and sound effects; and a mode of developing aural and visual motifs that is both musical, involving repetition, alteration and sequencing, and arrestingly dramatic. All of these techniques are profoundly theatrical – in the dual sense of being emphatically dramatic and dramatically emphasizing the artifice at the heart of cinematic storytelling, and in terms of recalling the space and conventions of theatrical performance. Yet the theatricality of these techniques relies not so much on a direct borrowing from the theatre as on a theatrical manipulation (masterly at times, less smooth at others, but almost always inspired) of film form: cinematography, editing, mise en scène, and the soundimage relationship. Take, for instance, the sequence on the stairs, immediately after Neeta discovers Sanat’s involvement with another woman. As she makes a dazed exit from Sanat’s apartment and starts going down the staircase, her figure seems to dwarf Sanat’s. Then we suddenly hear the non-diegetic sound of a whiplash on the soundtrack and see Neeta at the right edge of the frame, in a shot taken from an extremely low angle. The extravagance of the nondiegetic acoustics of the whiplash disrupts our illusionistic absorption in Neeta’s story and can prompt a viewer familiar with the history of contemporary Bengal to read the betrayal perpetrated by Sanat (and, later, Neeta’s family) in the context of the larger socio-political betrayals and injustices that led to the Partition. As she slowly, unseeingly descends the stairs, the camera lingers on her upturned

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face, gently moving to an extreme close-up as she raises her hand to grasp her throat, as if to stifle a cry. This image dissolves into a shot of the courtyard of Neeta’s house, which seems to engulf and obliterate her face as her eyes close. The theatricality of this sequence is largely created through the cinematic means of camerawork, editing and sound-montage; it is, in fact, a kind of theatricality only achievable on the screen. Reminiscences about Ghatak’s work in the theatre (which remains largely undocumented) indicate that his approach to the theatrical, especially as a director, was marked by a desire to move beyond the constraints of the stage and towards a kind of visuality and mobility associated with the cinema. According to the renowned musician and lyricist Hemanga Biswas, the prize-winning performance of Ghatak’s play Dalil (Document) at the IPTA national conference in Bombay in 1954 was praised not only for its moving depiction of the plight of refugees from East Bengal but also for its stage design and lighting, which ‘broke the dimension of the stage’ to present a panoramic view of the fields and rivers of East Bengal.109 Sajal Raychaudhuri, another IPTA veteran, remembered the applause that greeted the first scene, which was lit in such a way as to ‘really make it appear that a man was sitting on the banks of the river Padma and singing a song’.110 Interestingly enough, Tapas Sen, who was in charge of the lighting of Dalil and would go on to become an acclaimed light-designer, later claimed that ‘Ritwik was never a man of the theatre’ as his vision of the theatrical was often too ‘exaggerated’ and ‘poetic’ to be credibly implemented on the stage. The dramatist and actor Bijon Bhattacharya and actor-director Utpal Dutt, both of whom had worked closely with Ghatak in the IPTA, agreed that Ghatak’s imagination found its most effective expression on film, suggesting that his aesthetic of exaggeration was perhaps better suited to the cinema than to the theatre.111 We do not have sufficient information about Ghatak’s actual practice as a theatre director to assess the comparative strengths of his cinematic and theatrical practice. However, the evidence of his films implies

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The shock of betrayal: a dazed Neeta on the stairs

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an organic connection between the two. The unsettling power of his films emerged out of the fusion of theatrical and cinematic forms – more specifically, out of a productive friction between an aesthetic of distance and artifice traditionally associated with the stage and an aesthetic of intimacy and naturalism predicated on the cinema’s ‘appeal of a presence and proximity’.112 An essay that Ghatak wrote on the disparate demands of stage and screen acting indicates that he saw distance – or lack thereof – as being a crucial determinant of the formal specificities of the theatre and the cinema. His perception of the distinction between the cinematic and the theatrical revolves around a contrast between the distance separating the stage performer from her audience and the film viewer’s illusion of proximity to the images on the screen: The biggest challenge in stage acting is that the distance between the spectator and the performer is not changeable but constant … the actor’s gestures and words have to reach the last viewer in the last row. The actor is thus compelled to depart from naturalism and take recourse to artifice. He has to declaim at the top of his voice even when he is supposed to be whispering into another actor’s ears, or exaggerate the act of raising an eyebrow in order to convey surprise … Theatrical conventions are born out of the need to capitalize on the distance and the artifice … There is no such distance in the cinema. The camera will amplify even a slight raising of the eyebrow. A whisper can be uttered as a whisper … There is no need to exaggerate speech or gestures. The cinema demands a return to naturalism … Theatrical conventions become a burden here.113

Theatrical conventions, however, become a creative resource rather than a burden in Ghatak’s films, which derive some of their emotional and intellectual force from repeated collisions between the theatre’s aesthetic of distance and the cinema’s aesthetic of intimacy. A striking example of this can be seen in one of the most moving sequences in the film, the visceral impact of which also relies on a specific kind of cultural knowledge on the part of the audience and on

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a cinematic staging that harnesses the dramatic power of music. One night shortly before Geeta is about to get married to Sanat, Shankar informs Neeta of his decision to leave the household as a gesture of protest against the family’s treatment of her. Instead of responding to his statement, she asks him to teach her a song as she would be expected to sing at the wedding. A visibly disturbed Shankar lashes out at her for accepting her fate in silence but teaches her a song by Tagore: ‘Je ratey mor duarguli bhanglo jhorey’ (‘The night the storm tore down my doors’), a song about loss and desolation that nonetheless holds out the hope of eventual transcendence through suffering: The night the storm tore down my doors You came to my home, unbeknownst to me. The lamp went out, it all went dark, I reached out skywards, though I did not know for whom. I lay in the dark, willing this to be a dream, Not knowing the storm was the banner of your victory. As dawn broke I saw you standing there, At the heart of the emptiness engulfing my home.

The song is sung in playback by Debabrata Biswas (a former IPTA activist) and Geeta Ghatak (who plays Geeta in the film), both acclaimed for their soulful and distinctive renditions of Rabindrasangeet. Coupled with the lyrics, the restrained intensity and harmonic intertwining of their voices articulate the siblings’ shared sense of distress and spiritual kinship, which seems much stronger and emotionally more central to the film than the romantic relationship between Neeta and Sanat, more eloquently and poignantly than any dialogue possibly could have. In keeping with the musicality of melodrama, the cinematography and the editing in this sequence take their cues from the song and follow its rhythms, evoking both the darkness of despair and the possibility of soaring above it through the solace of music (or art) and emotional communion. While Shankar and Neeta stay immobile, seated next to each other, the carefully

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choreographed movements of their heads trace a subtle dramatic arc and the camera creates a sense of almost balletic movement through its slow pans and fluid switching of lenses. As Shankar starts to sing, the camera, positioned to his left, holds his anguished face, occupying the right-hand side of the frame, in an intimate close-up. He turns his head towards the camera and then away from it, as if to hide his tears, before a cut brings us a more distant view of his right profile in the left-hand corner of a frame dominated by darkness. When he turns his head to the left of the frame and presumably towards Neeta, to encourage her to sing, the camera also pans to the left, focusing on Neeta as she joins in, her face turned to the left of the frame and half in shadow. The camera then pans to the right, bringing Shankar, his face turned away from her, back into the frame. As Neeta slowly turns her face in the same direction as her brother, the camera floats away from them to a tableau-like long-shot of the pair

‘The night the storm tore down my doors’: a tableau of desolation

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Shankar’s agonized face in close-up

from across the dimly-lit room: their faces are seen in profile, seemingly turned towards an unseen source of light. Glimmers of light (created by covering the chinks in the thatched walls and roof by a white cloth and then reflecting light through it) pierce the darkness, endowing the composition with a pictorial quality veering towards abstraction. Gradually, the camera glides back to them, as if drawn by their duet and the lines of pain on their faces, which appear to be etched by the light out of the surrounding darkness. A medium-shot of the two of them is followed by a tilted close-up of Neeta’s face as she looks up at the ceiling almost beseechingly, while the flickers of light in the background remind us of the star-shaped sparkles in the credit sequence. A cut takes us to a more distant view of Shankar’s grief-stricken face in the bottom right corner of the frame. After he sings the last line of the song with Neeta, Shankar closes his eyes and lowers his head in a gesture of resignation as Neeta repeats the refrain of the song in a tremulous voice.

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Suddenly, the non-diegetic sound of a whiplash is heard on the soundtrack, as Shankar opens his eyes and looks towards the right of the frame (presumably, in Neeta’s direction) with a startled gaze. A quick cut takes us to a low angle, medium close-up of Neeta’s upturned face, shimmeringly beautiful in its play of light and shadow, achingly vulnerable in its openness, and surrounded by a faint halo. She stops singing and clutches her neck with her hands in a now familiar gesture of pain and seems to gasp for air, as if flayed by the sound of the whiplash that grows louder, almost mocking the promise of redemption offered by the Tagore song. For the first time in the film, Neeta breaks down in tears, sobbing uncontrollably. Her sobs mingle with the melancholy strains of a sarod (a stringed instrument used in Hindustani classical music) and continue across a cut to the next scene, fading away as the camera pans across the houses and trees of the neighbourhood; the echoes of her pain seem to spread through the environment. Once again, Ghatak’s use of the extra-diegetic sound of the whiplash manages to convey not only Neeta’s suffering but also a sense of the lacerating historical and social forces responsible for her individual predicament and the collective wounds that she comes to embody. This sequence lays bare not only the mechanisms of musical allusiveness in Ghatak’s cinema but also another process that is crucial to the production of cinematic theatricality in it: a fluid yet deliberate movement between the simulation of proximity that we associate with the cinema and the creation of distance through theatrical staging. It derives its power, in part, from the fusion of theatrical ways of staging with cinematic modes of mobility and emotional access. Moreover, it illustrates that the cinematic theatricality of Ghatak’s films cannot be understood only in terms of rational appeals and a rupture of verisimilitude and emotional identification. It also involves the use of theatrical (though not always melodramatic, in the sense of being over-the-top) flourishes – in the performance, camerawork, editing, lighting and soundtrack – to create emotional jolts that compel close readings of images and sounds, and of the frequent disjuncture between the two.

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Etched by the light: Neeta’s upturned face

Shankar watches helplessly as Neeta breaks down

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The audience is simultaneously wrenched out of a state of illusionistic absorption and thrust into a space of heightened emotions, with a view to unsettling their habitual images of reality and confronting them with – or implicating them in – the post-independence plight of a ‘divided, debilitated Bengal’.114 This is made quite clear through a direct mode of address when Neeta’s father, upon learning of her terminal illness, shouts out ‘I accuse’ (in English) in a patently melodramatic manner, his arm outstretched and finger pointing at the audience. Shankar wheels around towards him and asks accusingly, ‘Whom?’ In response, the father only mumbles ‘No one’ as his lips quiver and his hand comes trembling down. No one in Neeta’s family, not even her doting father or beloved older brother, can be absolved of exploiting Neeta. Again, the film uses this melodramatic moment to pin the blame for Neeta’s tragedy not just on the oppressive structures of the family but also on

The father: ‘I accuse!’

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wider networks of exploitation in post-independence, post-Partition Bengal, and to implicate the audience in Neeta’s fate. The melodramatic note, of course, reaches its highest pitch in the penultimate sequence of the film, in which Neeta’s brother visits her at the sanatorium in Shillong. This sequence begins in a pensive key with panoramic shots of a misty mountain landscape, which had been a locus of yearning for Neeta in the film. Her most precious possession is a photograph of herself and Shankar taken during a childhood trip to a hill station. In a scene in the first half of the film, Neeta tells Sanat about her cherished childhood memory of watching an exquisite sunrise from a mountain peak after an arduous climb, and uses it as a metaphor for the vision of a brighter day that gives her the strength to battle present hardships. In another, she shares with Shankar her dream of visiting the mountains again with her family, once he is successful. Neeta’s wistful comments – and Shankar’s subsequent lament that people ‘are descending into the abyss instead of scaling mountains’ – transform the mountains into a vista of hope, and a landscape of expansive possibilities far removed from the constrictions and petty considerations of everyday life. Her childlike entreaty to her brother – ‘You will take me to the mountains again, won’t you?’ – might remind a viewer familiar with Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya’s Pather Panchali (The Song of the Road), the classic Bengali novel which inspired Satyajit Ray’s first film, of the haunting scene where Durga, an ailing teenaged girl in a remote village, asks her younger brother Apu whether he will take her to see a train, which she has never seen, when she recovers. In the novel (though not in Ray’s film), Durga dies without seeing a train. In Ghatak’s film, Neeta finally gets to see the hills again but as a terminally ill patient in a sanatorium rather than on a celebratory trip with her loved ones, as she had wished. These associations and the mists half-shrouding the mountains imbue the landscape in the sequence in Shillong with a sense of melancholy. Shankar looks sad and anxious as he wends his way through the local market to the sanatorium, pausing for a moment on seeing a little boy holding hands with his younger sister; it is as if Neeta’s cherished memento of her childhood trip to the mountains, the

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A scene in the hills (below) reminiscent of Neeta’s cherished photograph (above)

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photograph, has come alive. Once he reaches the sanatorium, a nurse takes him to Neeta, whom we first see as a lone figure dwarfed by the landscape, seated on a rock in the right-hand corner of the frame and staring into the distance, her isolation emphasized by the framing. In a reprise of the film’s opening sequence, Shankar now watches his sister from afar, just as Neeta had watched him earlier (though the sense of hope that imbued the earlier sequence has vanished by now), before moving towards her and making his presence known. While they both know that her tuberculosis is at an advanced stage and possibly incurable, Shankar tries to maintain a semblance of normality and to distract her with amusing details about the mischievous antics and vivaciousness of their nephew – Geeta and Sanat’s son, who is now a toddler. Neeta smiles at first but then abruptly cries out, ‘But I did want to live!’ and breaks down, clinging to her brother, beseeching him to assure her that she will live: ‘Please tell me that I’ll live, just tell me once that I’ll live!’ This is not just a cry of desperation; it is simultaneously a plea for a life worth living – a life of expansive possibilities and collective well-being beyond the confines of narrow self-interest – and, as Ghatak has claimed, a defiant assertion of Neeta’s will to live.115 Her voice echoes through the landscape, overlaid first by a clashing noise reminiscent of the sound of the whiplash, and then by the uncanny, quasi-mechanical buzz of the crickets. As the camera leaves Neeta to pan across the surrounding mountains, her disembodied and now wordless sobs reverberate in the landscape like a wailing wind. Ghatak’s haunting use of echoes in this sequence reminds me of a line from ‘Janani Jantrona’ (‘Mother Misery’), a well-known Bengali poem – about a generation buffeted by the gales of history – written in the 1950s by the leftist poet Mangalacharan Chattopadhyayay, with which Ghatak, an avid reader of contemporary Bengali literature, might well have been familiar: ‘I asked for life but only got the keening of the wind’ (‘Jiban cheye pelam kebal hawar ha-ha-ha-ha’). Through this hyper-melodramatic articulation of Neeta’s desire to live, Ghatak not only expresses his personal anguish over the Partition but also registers his protest against what he deemed to be a mockery

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A lone figure: Neeta at the sanatorium

Shankar trying to cheer Neeta up

An echoing cry

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of independence and the ongoing destruction of a collective way of life. A theatrical deployment of performance, cinematography, editing and sound transforms his sense of pain and disenchantment into unsettling social critique, and Neeta’s voice into that of a generation. Instead of ending on that high pitch, however, the film follows Shankar back home to the refugee settlement to confront him with the image that Ghatak claimed was at the core of Meghe Dhaka Tara. We see him in front of Banshi’s shop, visibly unsettled by the grocer’s inquiries about Neeta’s health and his subsequent lament about the burden she had to bear. As he moves away from the shop without speaking, his gaze falls on an unnamed young woman trudging wearily down a rock-strewn path that Neeta had walked many times in the film, dressed in a manner similar to Neeta’s and possibly on her way back from work. Her face is familiar to us from fleeting appearances earlier in the film; she is the woman who had asked Neeta what she was doing in the office district and whom Shankar had once mistaken for Neeta. She stumbles as her sandal breaks and bends down to inspect her torn sandal, as Neeta had done in one of the first scenes of the film, then smiles sheepishly at Shankar when she realizes that he is looking at her and starts walking again. Menaka’s lament about Uma plays on the soundtrack, underscored by the uncanny buzz of crickets that we have come to associate with impending doom. The camera stays with the woman’s retreating figure, reminiscent of Neeta, for an instant, then returns to Shankar, who moans and covers his face with his hands, as if to block out this poignant visual reminder that Neeta’s tragic saga was not an isolated one but reflected the experience of countless other young Bengali women like her and was doomed to repeat itself, time and again, right before our unseeing eyes, hidden in plain sight. Fittingly for a film that revels in the cinematic potential of the human face, turning it into a landscape of emotions and a plea for attention – in a manner akin to Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which Ghatak repeatedly cited as an inspiration in interviews and his writings – the film ends with a dramatic close-up of Shankar. Grief, guilt and helplessness overcome his face, framed

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Not just Neeta’s story: an anonymous woman and her torn sandal

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Trudging back from work: Neeta (an early scene), the anonymous young woman (final sequence)

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The grief and guilt of bearing witness

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Faces of suffering

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against a grey sky, before he covers his face with his hands, almost as if shielding himself against the piercing gaze of the camera, and the compulsions of bearing witness to an unbearable reality. His relationship with Neeta, which had formed the emotional core of the film, enhances the wrenching impact of the ending. It is tempting to see Shankar as a stand-in for Ghatak, in his dual role as an artist and an implicated witness, who felt compelled to document the continuing trauma of the Partition even while acknowledging the near impossibility of doing so. The parallel extends beyond the closing moments; Shankar also resembles Ghatak in his unwavering commitment to his art (one that even trumps his genuine affection for his sister or his guilt over ‘exploiting’ her for the sake of artistic self-realization). Moreover, his childlike quality, evinced in his delight in music and everyday interactions, and mentioned more than once by Neeta, reflects Ghatak’s oft-repeated belief that ‘all artists have to keep their capacity for wonder ever-green and ever-awake’, and manage ‘to keep their childhood in their pockets’.116 Shankar is, of course, able to do so – and to pursue his artistic goals – because of Neeta’s support and sacrifice. The film’s gendered critique of the family and social disintegration thus shades into an implicit commentary on the human costs of creating art and who gets to bear it, which acquires a retrospective poignance in light of Ghatak’s subsequent artistic and personal trajectory. Unlike Shankar, however, Ghatak refuses to look away from the crisis-stricken face of the fractured land that hurt him into filmmaking, and ultimately into self-destruction. Nor does he allow his viewers to look away from the horror and the misery around them, confronting them instead with the far-reaching consequences of displacement and with their ethical obligations through unsettling images, an unforgettable soundtrack, and the compelling power of the human face. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, the camera repeatedly lingers on the faces of the characters, trying to grasp their interiority and how they speak to and of their times. Faces of suffering, especially

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Neeta’s face, repeatedly fill up the screen, demanding our attention and insisting, through their emotional force, on the need for change. Theatricality in Meghe Dhaka Tara – and Ghatak’s cinema, more generally – is thus not simply a matter of Brechtian alienation but also a powerful mode of emotional engagement. More importantly, this engagement is brought about partly through Ghatak’s manipulation of a realist aesthetic and use of film form as an element of expressive performance, and not merely through the deployment of blatantly theatrical forms of direct address and declamation, or through melodrama’s dramaturgy of excess. Inherently cinematic, the theatricality of Meghe Dhaka Tara includes, but is not limited to, the melodramatic, and emerges out of a productive friction between ways of seeing and hearing associated with the cinema and the theatre. It transforms a predictable domestic drama into a haunting tragedy that continues to resonate in the present era of a global refugee crisis and new fears of displacement unleashed by burgeoning majoritarianism in contemporary India. Meghe Dhaka Tara thus situates an individual predicament in the theatre of history, foregrounding the extraordinary injustices and betrayals embedded in, and obscured by, the everyday, not just in Ghatak’s time but also in our own.

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Notes 1 Adrian Martin, ‘The Cloud-Capped Star’, March 2007, http://www.filmcritic. com.au/reviews/c/cloud_capped. html; Serge Daney, quoted in Raymond Bellour, ‘The Film We Accompany’, 2004, http://www.rouge.com.au/3/film.html. 2 Adrian Martin, ‘A River Called Titas: River of No Return’, 12 December 2013, https://www.criterion.com/current/ posts/2990-a-river-called-titas-river-ofno-return. 3 Chinmay Bhattacharya, ‘Neeta banchtey cheyechhilo’ (‘Neeta wanted to live’), 26 January 2018, http:// calcuttanews.tv/supriya-devi-passedaway/. All translations from Bengali sources are mine, unless otherwise noted. 4 Ghatak, interview (English) by Kalpana Biswas, Lekha 7–8, September 1978, reprinted in Sakhhat Riwtik, ed. Shibaditya Dasgupta and Sandeepan Bhattacharya (Calcutta: Deepayan, 2000), 138. 5 Ibid., 129. 6 Ghatak, interview by Ajay Basu, Abhinay 1970, reprinted in Sakhhat Riwtik, 33. 7 Faiz Ahmad Faiz, ‘Dawn of Freedom (August 1947)’, trans. Aga Shahid Ali, Annual Review of Urdu Studies 11 (1996). 8 Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000), 146. 9 According to a 1975 CMDA report, there were 1,104 such colonies in the state of West Bengal, of which 510 were in the Calcutta Metropolitan district. Monidip Chatterjee, ‘A broad Outline of Action Programme for the Development of Refugee Colonies in C.M.D.A.’, (CMDA, August 1975), 4, Table 2:0.

10 Ghatak, ‘My Films’, in Rows and Rows of Fences: Ritwik Ghatak on Cinema (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000), 49. 11 Mahasweta Devi, “Ritwik Ghatak o tar Prabandho” (“Ritwik Ghatak and his Essays”), in Subrata Rudra (ed.), Shei Riwtik (Kolkata: Pratibhash, 2011), 73. 12 Ghatak, interview by Sadhan Chakrabarti et al., Chitrabikshan, August–September 1974, reprinted in Sakhhat Riwtik, 79–80. 13 Ghatak, interview by Kalpana Biswas, reprinted in Sakhhat Riwtik,140. 14 Ghatak, ‘Subarnarekha Prasangey’ (‘About Subarnarekha’), 1966, reprinted in Chalachitra Manush ebong Aro Kichhu (Kolkata: Dey’s, 2005), 153. 15 Ghatak, interview, Chitrabikshan, August–September 1973, reprinted in Sakhhat Riwtik, 67. 16 Ghatak, ‘My Films’, Fences, 48. 17 See, for instance, Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Ritwik Ghatak: Reinventing the Cinema’, 2007, https:// www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2019/03/ ritwik-ghatak-reinventing-thecinema/, and Nabarun Bhattacharya, ‘Featuring Ritwik Ghatak’, 2014, https:// laljiperdiary.wordpress.com/2014/08/05. 18 Ghatak, ‘Experimental Cinema’, Fences, 30. 19 Ibid., 34. 20 Andre Loiselle and Jeremy Maron (eds), Stages of Reality: Theatricality in Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 4. 21 See, for instance, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1982), Geeta Kapur, ‘Articulating the Self into History: Ritwik Ghatak’s Jukti Takko

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Ar Gappo’, in When Was Modernism: Essays in Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000), Kumar Shahani’s articles on Ghatak collected in Ghatak: Arguments/Stories, eds. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Amrit Gangar (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1987), and Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 22 Satyajit Ray, ‘Ritwik o taar chhobi’ (‘Ritwik and his Films’), 1976, reprinted in Rajat Ray (ed.), Ritwik Ghatak (Kolkata: Pratibhash, 2011), 29. 23 ‘Ritwik Ghatak and Some Directions for the Future’, Sight & Sound 1, no. 5 (September 1991): 26. 24 Ghatak, “Interview,” Chitrabikshan August-Sept. 1973, reprinted in Sakhhat Riwtik, 57–58. 25 See ‘Paradise Café’ in Mrinal Sen, Montage: Life, Politics, Cinema (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2002), 105–109. 26 See, for instance, ‘Interviews’ in Ghatak, Fences, 85. 27 Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen (eds), Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 109. 28 Indian People’s Theatre Association Bulletin 1 (July 1945). 29 In this, as well as in other respects, the IPTA movement has a remarkable affinity with the Cultural Front in the United States. 30 The famine of 1943 exerted a radicalizing influence on a generation of Bengali artists, activists and intellectuals who came of age in the 1940s. 31 Reinhard Hauff, Ten Days in Calcutta/A Portrait of Mrinal Sen: A Film by Reinhard Hauff (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1987), 73.

32 Nandi Bhatia, Acts of Authority/ Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 93. 33 Ghatak, ‘Interview’, Sakhhat Riwtik, 60. 34 Ghatak, ‘Dui dik mon; Dibaswopno’ (‘Daydreams’), 1969, in Chalachitra Manush, 108. 35 Sarkar, Mourning the Nation, 215. 36 Ghatak, ‘Samprotik Natoker ekti Samasya’ (‘A Problem of Contemporary Drama’), 1968, in Chalachitra Manush, 20. 37 Tanika Sarkar, ‘Foreword’, in Gargi Chakravartty, Coming out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal (New Delhi: Bluejay Books, 2005), ix. 38 Chakravartty, Coming out of Partition, 87. 39 Jasodhara Bagchi and S. Dasgupta, in The Trauma & the Triumph: Gender & Partition in Eastern India (Kolkata: Stree, 2003), 8. 40 See Joya Chatterjee, The Spoils of Partition-Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 153. 41 Shaktipada Rajguru, Smriti-tuku Thak (Kolkata: Biswabani, 1965), 46. 42 Supriya Chaudhuri, Ajantrik 5: Special Issue on Meghe Dhaka Tara, January 2000, 81. 43 Ghatak, ‘Chalachittrey Parichalaker Boktobyo’ (‘The Director’s Message in Films’), 1972, in Chalachitra Manush, 176. 44 Ghatak, ‘Chalachittra Sahitya o Amar Chhobi’ (‘Cinema, Literature, and my Films’), 1967, in Chalachitra Manush, 166. 45 Pijushkanti Gangaopadhyaya, Ajantrik 5,104. 46 Surama Ghatak, ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara: Ekti Joutho Proyash’ (‘The Cloud-Capped Star: A Collective Endeavour’), Ajantrik 5, 11.

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47 Shaktipada Rajguru, Ajantrik 5, 92–95. 48 Dinen Gupta, Ajantrik 5, 97–98. 49 Samiran Dutta, Ajantrik 5, 108. 50 Ghatak, Chalachitra Manush, 176. 51 See Ajantrik 5, 11–12, 82, 91, 92–94. 52 Rajguru, Ajantrik 5, 92–95. 53 Ibid., 93–94. 54 Anil Chattopadhyaya, Ajantrik 5, 86. 55 Narayan Dhar, Ajantrik 5, 91. 56 Ibid. 57 Chatterjee, Ajantrik 5, 85–86. 58 Ghatak, Chalachitra Manush, 176. 59 Ghatak, ‘Manab-samaj, Amader Oitihyo, Chhobi-kora o Amar Procheshta’ (‘Society, our heritage, film-making, and my efforts’), 1963, in Chalachitra Manush, 151. 60 Ghatak, Chalachitra Manush, 166. 61 Ghatak, interview, Chitrabikshan 1974, in Sakhhat Riwtik, 73. 62 Ghatak, interview by Kalpana Biswas, reprinted in Sakhhat Riwtik, 138–139. 63 Ghatak, interview, Chitrabikshan 1974, in Sakhhat Riwtik, 73. 64 Ghatak, interview (published 1986 in F), in Sakhhat Riwtik, 154. 65 Ghatak, ‘Manab-samaj’, Chalachitra Manush, 149–150. 66 Ghatak, interview (published 1986 in F), in Sakhhat Riwtik, 154. 67 See Ira Bhaskar, ‘Myth and Ritual: Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara’, Journal of Arts & Ideas 3 (April–June 1983). 68 Jisha Menon, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59. 69 Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘Filmmakers on Film: Mira Nair’, The Telegraph, 10 January 2005. 70 See Bhaskar, ‘Myth’.

71 Ghatak, interview by Prabir Sen, September 1976–April 1977, reprinted in Sakhhat Riwtik, 122. 72 Rachel Fell McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1. 73 Ibid., 77. 74 Ibid., 90. 75 Ghatak, ‘Chalachitra-chinta’ (‘Thoughts on Cinema’), 1963, in Chalachitra Manush, 146–147. 76 Ghatak, ‘Symbol’, Chalachitra Manush, 105. 77 Ghatak, ‘Chalachitra-chinta’, 144. 78 Ghatak, ‘Symbol’, 106. 79 Bishnu Dey, ‘Bangla Filmer Porinato Roop, Amader Jiban o Meghe Dhaka Tara’ (‘The Maturity of Bengali Cinema, Our Lives, and The Cloud-Capped Star’, Dainik Swadhinata, 1960), in Rajat Ray (ed.), Ritwik Ghatak, 237. 80 Ghatak, interview (English) by Hameeduddin Mahmood, Kaleidoscope of Indian Cinema, 1975, reprinted in Fences, 82. 81 See, for instance, Boudhayan Chattopadhyaya, ‘Jeeban, Mrityu o Pratyaho – Megha Dhaka Tara’ (‘Life, Death, and the Everyday: The CloudCapped Star’, Sahityapatra, 1960), reprinted in Ajantrik 5, 113–120. 82 Aparna Sharma, Documentary Films in India: Critical Aesthetics at Work (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 222. 83 A.T. Kanan, Ajantrik 5, 108–109. 84 For insightful analysis of the changing aspect of this space, see Bellour, ‘The Film We Accompany’. 85 Ritwik Ghatak, ‘Gaach-ti’ (‘The Tree’, Abhidhara 1:2, September 1947), in Ritwik Ghataker Galpo (Kolkata: Dey’s, 2000), 9–10. 86 Ibid.

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87 See Moinak Biswas, ‘The neorealist encounter in India’, in Laura Ruberto and K. Wilson (eds), Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007). 88 Sambudha Sen makes a similar point in ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films (2015), 335. 89 Chaudhuri, Ajantrik 5, 82. 90 Rabi Chattopadhaya, Ajantrik 5, 98–100. 91 Jyotirindra Maitra, ‘Sangeet, Chalachitra o Ritwik Ghatak’ (‘Music, Cinema, & Ritwik Ghatak’, interview by Shamik Bandopadhyaya, 1977), in Ritwik Ghatak, 160. 92 Ghatak, ’Shabdo’ (‘Sound’), Chalachitra Manush, 123. 93 Bhaskar Chandavarkar, ‘The Man Who Went Beyond Stop’, Cinema Vision India 1, no. 4 (1980): 23. 94 Ibid. 95 Budhaditya Chattopadhyaya, ‘Sound Memories: In Search of Lost Sounds in Indian Cinema’, Journal of the Moving Image 6 (2007): 105. 96 Bhaskar Sarkar, ‘Epic Melodrama or Cine-Maps of the Global South’, in Robert Burgoyne (ed.), The Epic Film in World Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011), 286; Ghatak, ‘Shabdo’, Chalachitra Manush, 121. 97 Chaudhuri, Ajantrik 5, 83. 98 Ghatak, ‘Shabdo’, Chalachitra Manush, 121. 99 John Keats, ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket’, The Poetical Works of John Keats (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1859), 383. 100 Maitra, interview, Ritwik Ghatak, 159.

101 Jyotirindra Maitra, ‘Madhu-Banshi-r Goli’ (my translation), http://www. milansagar.com/kobi/jyotirindra_ moitra/kobi-jyotirindramoitra.html. 102 Maitra, interview, Ritwik Ghatak, 159. 103 Ghatak, ‘Shabdo’, Chalachitra Manush, 122. 104 Interview in Movie Montage, 1:2, 1967. Reprinted in Sakhhat Riwtik. 105 Ghatak, ‘Brecht o Amra’ (Brecht and Us), in Chalachitra Manush, 20–21. 106 Kapur, When Was Modernism, 185. 107 Ghatak, ‘Music in Indian Cinema and the Epic Approach’, in Fences, 23. 108 Sarkar, Mourning the Nation, 223. 109 Hemanga Biswas, ‘Smritir Chhinnopatre Ritwik’, in Subrata Rudra (ed.), Shei Riwtik (Kolkata: Pratibhash, 2011), 11. 110 Sajal Raychaudhuri, Gananatya Katha (Calcutta: Mitra and Ghosh, 1990), 133. 111 Samik Bandopadhyay, ‘Ritwik Ghatak: Theater-e, Cinema-ai’ (‘Ritwik Ghatak in Theatre and Cinema’), in Ritwik Ghatak, 135–140. 112 Christian Metz, ‘On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema’, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 5. 113 Ghatak, ‘Abhinoye Nabo Adhyay’ (‘A New Chapter in Acting’), in Chalachitra Manush, 59–61. 114 Ghatak, ‘My Films’, Fences, 51. 115 Ghatak, interview, Fences, 81. 116 Ghatak, ‘Dibaswopno’, 106–107.

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Credits Meghe Dhaka Tara/ The Cloud-Capped Star India 1960 Written, Produced and Directed by Ritwik Ghatak Original Story Shaktipada Rajguru Cinematography Dinen Gupta Editing Ramesh Joshi Music Direction Jyotirindra Maitra Art Direction Rabi Chattopadhyaya Playback Singers A.T. Kanan Debabrata Biswas Geeta Ghatak Ranendra Narayan Raychaudhuri Background Music Bahadur Husain Khan Lakshmi Tyagarajan Mahapurush Mishra ‘Je ratey Mor Duarguli’ (song) Written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore

CAST Supriya Chaudhuri Neeta Anil Chattopadhyaya Shankar Bijon Bhattacharya The father Gita Dey The mother Geeta Ghatak Geeta Dwiju Bhawal Montu Niranjan Ray Sanat Gyanesh Mukhopadhyaya Banshi Dutta