The Indian Partition and the Making of a New Scopic Regime in Bengali Cinema

European Journal of English Studies ISSN: 1382-5577 (Print) 1744-4233 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/neje20 The Indian Partition and the Making of a New Scopic Regime in Bengali Cinema Sayandeb Chowdhury To cite this article: Sayandeb Chowdhury (2015) The Indian Partition and the Making of a New Scopic Regime in Bengali Cinema, European Journal of English Studies, 19:3, 255-270, DOI: 10.1080/13825577.2015.1091220 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2015.1091220 Published online: 30 Mar 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=neje20 Download by: [210.212.93.46] Date: 01 April 2016, At: 19:59 Sayandeb Chowdhury THE INDIAN PARTITION AND THE MAKING OF A NEW SCOPIC REGIME IN BENGALI CINEMA Invested in a mimetic approach, scholarship on Partition narratives in Indian cinema rarely addresses the films in terms of the body of culture memory they produce. In addition, it often disregards popular cinema. Thus, while the films of Ritwik Ghatak have been widely discussed, they have rarely been considered alongside popular Bengali cinema of that decade, films which often refer to Partition within the broader frame- work of popular melodrama. This article will read the two ‘rival’ bodies of work for their potent engagement with the production of memory within the cinematic poetics of partition. In relation to images of the city as a cinematic trope, this essay aims to offer fresh insights into Partition within the broader scopic regime of visual modernity. Keywords: Partition; Calcutta; Bengali popular cinema; Ritwik Ghatak; cinematic city; postcolonial; cine-poetics The article examines a series of film narratives produced during the early years of postcolonial India with the aim of understanding: first, if the act of Partition, which created the postcolonial Indian federation and, more particularly, the fragmented state of Bengal, gave rise to a specific cine-poetics that extended from art-house cinema to popular melodrama; second, if that cine-poetics betrays any crisis of rep- Downloaded by [210.212.93.46] at 19:59 01 April 2016 resentation and memory, especially in trying to artistically engage with something as obviously traumatic as Partition; third, how the metropolitan space of postcolonial Calcutta came to operate as the primary locus of both kinds of work, thereby producing a liminal and critical space of narrative; and fourth, whether metropolitan narratives of Partition provide any new understanding of cinematic memory that might serve to subvert conventional film genres and classificatory codes. I. The cinematicity of modernity Before I proceed to discuss how the Indian Partition had spatialised Bengali cinema, I want to locate a certain moment in European modernity when the metropolis began to emerge as the spacio-visual centre of the moving image. Much recent European Journal of English Studies, 2015 Vol. 19, No. 3, 255–270, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2015.1091220 Ó 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 256 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES work in critical cultural studies has drawn on a range of theorists (Bachelard, 1969; Benjamin, 1999; de Certeau, 1992; Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1989) to re-or- ganise the debate around city space. The effort has been primarily to understand why production of the image-form in modernity’s self-fashioning as essentially metropolitan in its ideas. Thanks to this ‘spatial turn’, not only has spacialisation become the intellectual category for understanding the composite nature of ‘how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatial- ity of social life’ (Soja, 1989: 12), but also for how cinema has come to share a complex, often indiscernible and unconscious proclivity for formal intervention in the possible spatial denomination of the real. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (2011: 5) explain the relevance of the turn as follows: Cinema is a peculiarly spatial form of culture, of course, because (of all cultural forms) cinema operates and is best understood in terms of the organisation of space: both space in films – the space of the shot, the space of the narrative setting; the geographical relationship of various settings in sequence of a film, the mapping of a lived environment on film; and films in space – the shaping of lived urban spaces by cinema as a cultural practice; the spatial organisation of its industry at the levels of production, distribution, and exhibition; the role of cinema in globalization. Also recent historiography of early cinema theorises the limits and powers of cinema as a cultural technology that can represent metropolitan reality with unprece- dented imminence, while at the same time making the nature of that reality somewhat suspect. Though treating city-space as foundational to the moving image is comparatively new, historically cinema has demonstrated a metropolitan con- sciousness, thanks to its dependency on advanced technology, labour-intensive production, proclivity towards mass appeal and inclination towards exploiting an increasingly industrialised society in the West. Cinematicity is hence both a theo- retical and a historical factor in the modern metropolis. But how is the cinematicity of moving images produced? Is it a work of narrative? Of technology-induced subjectivity? Or was it the cultural economy of European modernity itself that pro- Downloaded by [210.212.93.46] at 19:59 01 April 2016 duced the cinematicity of city space? Cinema has indeed been defined by modernist urban space but, as Sheil and Fitzmaurice (2011) point out, cinema has also re-imagined urbanity, virtually producing a new urbanism which they, like others (Barber, 2004; Clarke, 1997; Men- nel, 2008; Webber & Wilson, 2007) have termed the ‘cinematic city’. And it is in the production of this cinematic city that cinema’s spatial claims are revealed at their most complex and rewarding. How, then, is urban space, already steeped in cultural meaning and memory, re-created within the narrative space of cinema? A number of films readily lend themselves to such an inquiry – from the early avant- garde experimental docufeatures of Walter Ruttman (Berlin: Symphony of a City, 1927) and Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929); to Charles Chaplin’s city comedies (City Lights, 1931; Modern Times, 1936); classic Hollywood noir like Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949); Italian neo-realism of Roberto Rossellini (Rome Open City, 1945) and Vittorio de Sica (Bicycle Thieves, 1948); the French New Wave of Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, 1960) and Jacques Tati (Playtime, 1967); Woody Allen THE INDIAN PARTITION AND THE MAKING OF A NEW SCOPIC REGIME IN BENGALI CINEMA 257 (Manhattan, 1979) and Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, 1982). In each case and in a wide range of genres, the city – whether Berlin or New York, Venice or Los Angeles, Paris or Rome – is re-invigorated within the spatial dynamic of the narrative itself, imbued with an original spatio-cultural meaning which either amplifies or subverts the city’s reception within a larger productive capacity of what Martin Jay has called ‘the scopic regimes of modernity’ (1988). The dramatic possibility of each film is unlocked within the specific meaning that space in that city reproduces, both outside and within the narrative scope of the film. In the films above, the re-imagined city is not the backdrop but the primary logic of the film itself. Consequently, the city space emerges not just as a habitation but as a space of encounter. The relationship between cityscape and cinemascape can also be understood as fulfilling an original principle of modernity itself: the mobility of life and represen- tational images. As Giuliana Bruno (2002: 17) observes: On the eve of cinema’s invention, a network of architectural forms produced new spaciovisuality. Such ventures as arcades, railways, department stores, the pavilions of exhibition halls, glasshouses and winter gardens incarnated the new geography of modernity. They were all sites of transit. Mobility – a form of cinematics – was the essence of these new architectures. By changing the relation between spatial perception and bodily motion, the new architectures of transit and travel culture prepared the ground for the invention of the moving image, the very epitome of modernity. With its perpetually changing dynamic of encounter and mobility, the crepuscular alteration of strangeness and familiarity, of imminence and transience, of utility and reflection, the city space becomes the source of the original language for the experience of modernity. So it is important to understand the centrality of mobility, both as a lived experience of modernity and as a transient conceptual category that defines modernity itself. We need, then, to continuously interrogate the spatio-visual relationship between mobility in the modern metropolis and the narrative architectonics of cinema as a practice both of and within that spatio-visuality. As Downloaded by [210.212.93.46] at 19:59 01 April 2016 modernity globalised across former colonies of Empires, the same impetus of cinematicity travelled inter-culturally and across the divide of colonised and colonial governance. In India, for example, two colonial cities had the historical will to receive the emergent modernity of the western metropolitan centres: Calcutta and Bombay. Their fortunes were tied to global circuits of commerce, industry, mili- tarism and culture in complicated, historically sustained ways. It was hence no accident that the two cities of Indian modernity had the historical opportunity to lend themselves to a visuality specific to the moving images – a visual regime that could prospectively transform the civic into the haptic and the built environment into what Pierre Nora (1989) has famously defined as sites of memory.

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