The International journal of analytical and experimental modal analysis ISSN NO: 0886-9367

Film and Accountability: Ghatak's „Image Discourse' on Bengal's Partition Dr. Sravani Biswas Associate Professor, Department of English Tezpur University Napaam, Tezpur: 784028, Assam Email: [email protected] Mobile: +91 8638750574

Title: Film and Accountability: 's „Image Discourse' on Bengal's Partition Abstract: The objective of the paper is to closely examine Ritwik Ghatak‟s film Subarnarekha, to analyse the partition-discourse that forms the centre of his directorial consciousness. The paper addresses Ghatak‟s narration in terms of film semiotics. Two more films of Ghatak have been cited for further illustration. It is observed that the river Subarnarekha (Golden Streak) is the leitmotif of moral degeneration undergone by the refugees. It is a unique and bold take on the historical tragedy which had naturally led to filmic depictions of the refugees as victims. Ghatak steps beyond the cliché in a soul searching venture to identify why this partition continues to inflict decadence. The dislocated refugees resist any paradigm shift. Romantic nostalgia turns them blind to all the ingrained social and moral weaknesses that had, in the past, led to the Partition. In order to keep alive the past, they carry the germs, which, in hostile conditions erupt to destroy. The camera goes on searching for the river Subarnarekha which, most of the time remains invisible. It comes back with all its life only when the story reaches that point of possible paradigm shift, which Ghatak had envisioned for the refugees. Keywords: filmsemiotics, refugee, decadence, paradigm shift. *****

The name of Ritwik Ghatak acquired international recognition through his sensitive and unique rendition of Bengal‟s Partition, of which he was a victim. The films clapped together as his Partition Trilogy are Meghe Tara (1960), Komol Gandhar(1961), and Subarnarekha

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(1965). Critics have dealt with his revival of the melodrama, his use of myths, and his Marxist leaning as a filmmaker. Sayantan Chowdhury connects his films to European visual avant- gardism. He underscores “the “distinctive visual appeal of engaging the real”(2015,260), which he likens to Soviet determinism- “a determinism that was historicised within Soviet cinema of the time, especially in the iconic repertoire of Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and,before them, Dziga Vertov.”(260). In my article I will explore the visual in the form of raw nature that affects the common audience with an appeal no less significant. As Bengal‟s partition is already inseminated in the Bengali psyche through everyday negotiations with idioms, jokes, abuses, folk-songs, novels or stories, as well as the everyday struggle for existence, it is not difficult even for a spectator unaware of film theories to connect images to meaning. Determinism which precludes free will is ingrained in the Partition project where the people hardly had any choice. Ghatak ably uses landscape to put forward this sense of fatedness. This article examines Ritwik Ghatak‟s film in relation to the experience of landscape and the tension it creates vis a vis the human subjects and their lives depicted through melodrama. It begins with the hypothesis that the river Subarnarekha, which flows through an arid landscape, acts as the leitmotif of hope and possibilities of regeneration during a time historically blacklisted as one of the bleakest tragedies of Bengal. When it comes to Bengal‟s partition in 1947, rivers like the Padma, Arial Khan or the Ichamati entered narrations of migration and escape. In partition novels like Arjun or Keya Patar Nouko these rivers have been depicted as deep, dark, and dangerous which the migrants had to cross at the risk of their lives.It may be noticed that particularly in case of themes of Bengal‟s partition, the landscape plays an important role to convey the complexities of the refugee‟s life more than words or dialogue. In Bengal‟s partition literature, depiction of familiar landscape, its flora and fauna has been a conscious literary device on the part of the writer or filmmaker. But Ghatak‟s choice of the river Subarnarekha itself creates a space for a new discourse, because nowhere is this river and the arid landscape related to the established motifs of Partition. Ghatak chooses to use this cinematic landscape as the objective co-relative for a problematized perception of the Bengali partition experience. On the other hand Ghatak uses songs, both classical and Romantic from Tagore, that invoke nature‟s plentitude , both in terms of physical nature as well as human emotions. This oxymoronic combination creates a schizophrenic experience for the audience. Partition had uprooted thousands, and the emptiness of the „raad‟ landscape easily slips into the role of an

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objective co-relative to depict despondency. Yet the mind imagines and hopes. The elusive Subarnarekha keeps appearing and disappearing and so do the songs reiterate. This article probes into such presences and absences in order to delve into meaning.

„Subarnarekha' is the name of a river that in the past, had attracted the as if it held all their dreams of the ideal pastoral life. Myths around the river that one could find gold dust on its bed enhanced the aura of the idyllic as the source of paradisiac joy. Ghatak uses the name of the river which, when translated into English means „the golden streak' as a metaphor for the migrant's elusive dream. The camera goes on searching for the river, which, most of the time, remains almost invisible, like a faded line in the far horizon. Thus the use of the river as a visual discourse is dialectic; while representing the dream or desire it constitutes absences. The act of creating a utopia here is in effect reaching a dead end. The film ends with the disappearance of the water, leaving the viewer's eyes parched at the endless view of sand. Ghatak subverts the romantic notion of nature as hope and nostalgia. Instead, it underscores a future that will continue to degrade human quality and culture in the context of Bengal's partitition. Bengal was amputated in 1947 by the British. This division seemed hurried and whimsical in nature and did not address true and practical issues like economic discrepancy or unequal development. So the crisis continued. Whenever the partition of 1947 is depicted in Bangla literature or film, the continuous reverberation of its aftermath haunt the work. It is analogous to the never-ending continuity of Revenge Tragedy. Though Ghatak had experienced the first partition before he made the films, he had already foreseen the bleak future in the form of gradual degeneration of human relationship in the context of the growing social and economic crisis. Ghatak‟s violent reaction to the destiny of the particular group of Bengali victims could find expression in a melodramatic style, a style consciously avoided by his famous peers. His films remind us of the „yatras‟ of Bengal that are native to its grass root culture. To depict a state of mind that is shaken to its core requires a form that is flexible enough to accommodate unrestrained emotions. And where would one find this capacity to deal with the raw instincts if not in the carnival modes of art. Unlike who is restrained, Ritwik opted for a complete ventilation of the wild emotional side of the artist. His films sweep the viewers into the unhindered flow towards the climax. After reaching the climax he stops and the viewers are enabled to feel the heart beating fast-as if he would drag them into the crux of extreme human

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experience in order to shorten the distance between the characters and the audience. Ghatak‟s sensitive use of human melodrama against the backdrop of an arid dry landscape helps to render a language capacious to capture not only the complexity of human consciousness but also, at the same time the project of the director. At the end Ghatak often returns to repeat a scene depicted earlier but in a different context. It impresses the reader to feel both stasis and change. It is as if tragedy in the refugee‟s life is not unusual, and the surrounding landscape remains callous to the pain and loss.

Ghatak‟s films defy and question the separation of melodrama and realism in filmmaking. Ghatak successfully used melodrama to portray a historical crisis, the partition, suffered only by a particular group of people when the rest of was engaged in celebrating the freedom of India. This dichotomy of experience is the crux of the melodrama in his films. From the point of view of the other Indians the refugees were an eyesore, a burden. When the nation was waking up to the Nehruvian dream of a new India, the anger, hatred and hopelessness of the refugees seemed melodramatic to the distanced onlooker. At the same time the artist has to depict the extreme experience of the refugee and melodrama is unavoidable

Three of Ghatak‟s films- , Komol Gandhar and Subarnarekha stand out as films that directly address partition and the after effect. Nature plays an important role in them, either in absence or as presence. It is an image of the victim‟s yearning and place attachment, showing an innate bond that is not only biological but also psychological. Ghatak‟s cinema uses the camera to capture particular perspectives of nature to not only put across the idea of memory of the bygone which turns utopian in the nostalgic desire of the refugee, but also enters the arena of the human conscience which knocks at the door of the reader or the viewer‟s mind. Ghatak skilfully uses the binaries of open space in the form of the ideal landscape and claustrophobic places when depicting the refugee colonies. In Meghe Dhaka Tara the colony, especially the house of Nipa grows smaller, darker and suffocating along with the gradual degeneration of her family around her. She suffers from tuberculosis as a result of exerting herself to bear the material burden of her family. When she discovers that she had tuberculosis, she shuts herself in a dark room. She waits for her only friend, her elder brother to release her. She is sent to the TB Sanatorium in Shillong. Ultimately the camera captures her in a huge open space, a tiny and lonely figure amidst the undulating and beautiful mountainscape. She pines to live again but it is

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too late. Her cry-“Dada, but I wanted to live” resonates around and in a melodramatic climax the landscape whirls round her like the deranged state of her mind. The landscape here achieves symbolic power to convey Nita‟s inability to access that utopian state of free, stable and harmonious life that a refuge aspires to find.

In his second film the river Padma symbolizes both apocalypse and hope. Padma is the river which stands for East Bengal. It is the river that the refugees cross, this crossing being both physical and psychological. This crossing is an enactment of estranging from one‟s root and identity. In India they struggle to build a home away from home. Meghe Dhaka Tara had depicted the failure of the refugees to stay united. They fall apart and transform into lonely and selfish creatures. In Komal Gandhar a group of young and creative youths take up creative means, as if art could give them back that organic life they had left behind. They formed a theatre group. But the lost harmony and meaningfulness they try to reinstate is beyond their reach. Partition had a disastrous effect on the human mind-it turns hollow. It is only when they come out in the open facing the river Padma their memory returns to a past that they had shared together. The feeling of loss unites them temporarily and the futile hope for the unrecoverable past mellows their bruised mind like the autumn sunset. The tune of such a moment is „Komal Gandhar‟. Ghatak‟s camera captures this tune with the help of the vision of the river Padma.

Ghatak‟s thrust in his partition films is on the idea that rootlessness affects the psyche, and the effort to build another home in some strange land is futile. According to Raymond Williams nature contains an extraordinary amount of human history. Nature is the concretization of human affect and attachment. Usually, displaced people, victims of colonial violence try to recreate their lost home or root in a strange land. The refugees coming from the east to the west of Bengal suffer pain and nostalgia for their lost homes. But it is interesting to note that the land they come to, though to some extent hostile towards the refugees, offers the same cultural meaning related to nature; they negotiate with the same Bengali landscape. It is like a paradox; they are refugees in their own land. Therefore the role of environment or landscape is complex. Partition victims are also victims of circumstances; they degenerate hopelessly in a hostile host- land. Ghatak carefully builds this dichotomy of utopian landscapes the refugees carry in their minds and look for, and the inevitable dystopia when they fail. This failure is due to internal degeneration which is not only circumstantial but also related to the refugee psychology. The

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migrant attempts to idealize the forsaken home in memory, thus growing blind to all the weaknesses of the past that had led to the Partition. In order to keep alive the past, they carry the germs, which, in hostile conditions in a strange land erupt to destroy. The last of what we can call his partition trilogy Subarnarekha spells out this idea of Ghatak in a well- defined discourse of words and visuals.

Memory and nostalgia are usually related to displacement in time and space, evoked in the condition of strange and foreign experience. In his filmSubarnarekha, Ritwik Ghatak creates this strangeness by presenting a particular rugged landscape known as „raad‟ of Bengal as an artistic tool. This bare plateau is different from the lush green pastoral that has been ideally related to Bengal. Usually, Bengal's partition narratives have mourned the loss of the natural cornucopia- the fertile paddy fields, the overflowing and wide rivers crowded with a rich aquatic life, the sky dotted with colorful birds. Subarnarekha presents a classical landscape which constitutes of an equal balance of land and sky, and the observer can follow the wide- angle view easily. In such a scene, it is easy to show humans as dots of life, emotional, fragile in contrast to the rugged and enormous cosmic view of nature. Thus Ghatak subverts the sentiment of the typical Bengali landscape, and as the film proceeds the viewer comes to realize, following the logic of his different shots of this landscape, that it works as a symbol to convey the complexity and ambiguity of the refugee experience. Subrnarekha is about Iswar, a young bachelor and his sister Sita who is still in her girlhood. The age gap between them makes it easy to fit the brother smoothly into the father's role. They have run away from East Bengal in the wake of partition. In the confusion and hurried escape, the refugees coming to India face a bleak and blank future. But the children were promised a home away from the home they left. The image of a cozy shelter was the only device to protect their tender innocence from the shock. In the refugee colony, Sita, astounded by the chaos, continues to ask her brother - "Is this our new home!" The question is enough to convey her disillusionment. Iswar takes under his wing a boy of Sita's age named Abhiram who lost his mother during strife between the landlord and the settlers. She was bundled away with many others on a truck by the landlord's men to prevent the forced occupation of land. The camera then focusses on a formal function in the colony where the Indian flag is hoisted to inaugurate the colony life. It begins by giving it a name - "Nabajibon Colony" meaning „new life' and the promise of a school where the children will learn History, English, and Sanskrit. A self-

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appointed leader and enthusiast, Haranath is an idealist who dedicates himself to the construction of the colony as an ideal replica of their lost motherland. But Iswar betrays the people of the settlement and leaves to work in a foundry in Chhatimpur that Rambilas, a wealthy friend had offered him. He does this to gift Sita a better life. He settles comfortably by the side of the river Subarnarekha and immediately gets immersed in middle-class complacency, and political apathy. The rugged and desolate landscape reflects this stasis as if it was an unreal, ideal world. It is an elusive world, and to the viewer this is made clear when the foreman Mukherjee points at the horizon where the river looks like a thin streak, and tells little Sita that her new home is beside the river Subarnarekha. He tells her that she would find trees, flowers, birds, light, and music.1 When they reach the quarter, it is shockingly prosaic. But the children soon build their imaginary world of imagination as they explore the rugged and almost empty landscape. Sita learns music, Abhiram is sent to a hostel, and Ishwar forgets Haranath and the colony. The refugee colony was disillusionment to Sita with its daily quibbles. Iswar believed that by being selfish, he had finally given Sita the ideal home. It is left to the end of the film for the viewers to find out if Haranath won with his self- sacrifice and idealism or Iswar with his self- centered pursuit of a middle-class dream. The film Subarnarekha mostly uses the „raarh' landscape -- harsh, graveled, undulating, and with sparse vegetation. Human habitation looks sporadic with plain, bare structures scattered here and there. It does not allow the viewer the comfort of a close-knit community. The industry is a human-made monstrosity defying the dreaminess lurking in the name of the river. There is an abandoned airfield used during the Second World War with a dilapidated fighter aircraft endowing the place with the dead silence of a museum. The presentation of this landscape is such that the viewer is immediately aware of its symbolic nature, especially when characters begin imposing their ideas of the ideal home on it. But in reality, this landscape is incapable of giving anything; instead, it inflicts degeneration. The manager of the foundry is deranged and very soon Iswar, after he replaces his manager loses his peace of mind. Is it that Ghatak here is making a strong comment against the Bengali ideological fanaticism which sentimentalized the home as ideal? Or is he aware of the existential fatalism imbricated in the refugee's life? The film is layered, and the real and ideal landscapes are constitutive of each other. With dialogues, songs, and visual images of land Ghatak successfully delves deep into the architectonics of the relation between the ideal and the real. The connection here is complex and

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ironic. The ideology that the migrant carries with him or looks for is born within the same paradigm of beliefs, habits, and worldview that he has lived. But is not it the same paradigm of socio-political relation which had led to this historical disaster named Partition? Will Ghatak be able to release the victims from such entrapment? Will he be able to unwind the Gordian knot? The title of the film is the name of a river that flows from Bengal to Bihar. The film initially shows it as a thin line, its water hardly perceptible in the desolate and rocky landscape. That the river plays a symbolic role is clear from the focus of the camera. When Sita comes to Chhatimpur in search of a new home, the foreman of the foundry points out to a distance in the direction of the elusive river and constructs for her an imaginary fairy tale house. But the quarter, in reality, is a shock. However, the children continue with the illusion. They are fascinated with the ruins of the colonial past and the Second World War scattered around. They are innocently unaware of the atrocities of the Second World War and its effects on their destiny in the form of the artificial famine of 1943. They are incapable of connecting it to the British partitioning India before leaving in a hurry. When Abhiram leaves for his hostel in Jhhargram Sita walks on the abandoned airfield singing a song of Tagore2 – Today the sun and shade play peek a boo In the paddy field so lush and green In the stream of the vast blue sky I know not who sailed the white rafts of clouds. (Translated) The camera captures the irony of the song when it focuses on her young feet walking on the parched and cracked ground. This visual is a contrast to the romantic Bengal landscape with its verdant nature in abundance. The scene evoked by the song is that of the ideal Bengal which the migrants carry in their longing. The viewer immediately gets tuned to the idea that Subarnarekha is an imaginary river and not real. It is a dystopia. Later, when Abhiram and Sita grow up and discover their love we for the first time see the river in a close shot.3 It is no longer a thin illusory line but proud and beautiful with its water flowing. Abhiram and Sita's love belong to a different paradigm for they cross all barriers of caste, class, and creed. Sita's melancholy song turns into a song of joy. The surprise of the high pitched song and the sudden appearance of the river take the viewer to the climax of expectation, almost visceral, purgatorial. Is it their power of imagination that saves them from the hopeless quagmire of materialism in which Ishwar had immersed himself? Is it a paradigm shift from complacency,

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self-centredness of the Bengali middle-class? Abhiram is not impressed by the prospect of going to Germany to study engineering. He will never feel comfortable until he wrote down his first novel. It is the story of a refugee boy, he tells Sita. It is also about his lost mother and his lost motherland, which, he remembers, was by the bank of a vast river. The Bengali viewer would immediately know that it is the Padma, the river almost synonymous to East Bengal. Sita supports his project, telling him that he should follow his heart. Iswar is not happy when he gauges their relation. His disapproval turns into a family crisis. Rambilas offers him two percent share of his business on the condition that Iswar should get rid of the orphan boy as his caste was unknown. In a tragic twist of coincidence they find Abhiram's mother on the railway station platform. Thus his low-caste origin is revealed. Iswar, fearing to lose the prospect of rising in his career, turns insensitive to the feelings of Sita and plans to marry her away as soon as possible. When Abhiram, broken down by this turn of fate, decides to move to Calcutta to fend for himself, Iswar is relieved. There is a scene where Iswar and the foreman Mukherjee take a dip in the crystal clear water of Subarnarekha. They make the old ritualistic gestures of shoving away the imaginary unclean water to bathe in clean water. In the context of the film, this ordinary ritual looks meaningful. This unconscious gesture strikes the audience as meaningless, and symbolically gets connected to the artificial divisions we create in terms of clean unclean, pure impure, insider-outsider. We remember Haranath, the idealist who was also entrapped in such a worldview. While constructing his Nabajiban colony, he had not allowed Abhiram's mother to find refuge in his colony on the ground that the colony was only for the people of Pabna. He tells her-"If we cannot keep alive the differences what is left of our identity?" Here perhaps the idealist Haranath and the self- centered Iswar come together; they are stuck in the same paradigm. During their forced migration, they have carefully carried this socio-cultural baggage with them. Haranath's ideal home away from home stagnates in its own stasis, its inability to reach beyond that which was there in the past. He tries to create a replica. The past wrongs of sectarianism, caste division accumulated through generations had turned society sterile and were the root causes of Partition. To build a home again on the ruins of the old one without a paradigm shift in the ideal would fail. This is proved immediately when Binod from Nabajibon colony turns up with the news that Haranath's wife had committed suicide. Iswar faces the same destiny. Sita elopes with Abhiram. He tries to commit suicide, but in a

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spectacular use of coincidence the distraught Haranath turns up, and Iswar gives up. Haranath is finally resigned to the fact that whatever path is taken, the refugee's life is doomed. This degeneration is due to the sentimentality that the migrator attaches to the idea of home, which is elusive, like the river Subarnarekha. The memory of the refugee is a false utopia as it uncritically glorifies the past. They have captured the past as an ideal and have willfully wiped out history that had been continuously tarnished with blood, hatred, and betrayal. The new home, like the river Subarnarekha is deceptive, and the camera captures its character like that of Eliot's wasteland, where nothing grows. For only a short moment, Sita and Abhiram come together, and the film is illuminated with the truth of love and the power of imagination. To qualify that precious moment, the river as a symbol comes close to disappear very soon, never to appear again. Ghatak uses a particular template of storytelling which uses a myth popular around the Indian subcontinent. It is the myth of Sita, the daughter of the earth who suffers in her earthly life and in the climax of her humiliation returns back to the lap of Mother Earth. Many critics like Aneek Chaudhuri and Erin O' Donnel have found the story of Sita, the female protagonist of the film fitting quaintly into the myth of the Ramayana. The tale that relates Sita the girl to the character in Ramayana is made clear. The old manager tells Sita, the little girl, that Sita of the Ramayana had returned to the lap of mother earth after suffering humiliation from her dear husband. Years later, Sita commits suicide when her brother inadvertently enters her den as her first customer. But the resemblance ends here. Ghatak is too sensitive a director to allow such clichéd idea to mar his sensibility when depicting the fortunes of the refugees of Bengal. He first establishes the link with the Ramayana only to break it, and this point of departure is essential. While the Sita of the Ramayana lives forever in immortality, Sita of Subarnarekha becomes a nonentity. Her destiny gets linked to millions of women during partition who were raped, maimed, or forced to prostitution and who suffered to oblivion. Now there is no benevolent mother earth. The film has established the landscape as indifferent and illusory. Near the end of the film, benevolent nature is remembered again with the repetition of the song of Tagore. Binu, the child of Sita and Abhiram had learnt it from his mother in their dark house in a slum and had asked his mother how a paddy field looked like. A song is a non- representational register which can often reveal more than the representational. The beauty and benevolence of nature in Tagore's song was never there, not even for Sita in Chhatimpur. The

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little Sita could only imagine it and be happy. Now we see a glimpse of a paddy field.4But soon it gives way to a scene that is bleak and tiring. We see Iswar trudging slowly on the endless sand holding the hand of little Binu. Will he have the energy to begin anew? Will he be able to keep pace with the boy's happy flight of imagination? This moment of joy that had come in the child's parent's life was short-lived. The paradigm shift was not complete because Abhiram had died of an accident. The tension never leaves the audience because the experience of the film shows the impossibility of that Copernican leap. Till then, Subarnarekha will remain elusive. Partition narration constitutes an integral part of the Bengali culture in the postcolonial era because of Bengal's unique history. It formed a counter-discourse, questioning the euphoric celebration of India's independence. According to William Dalrymple, India's partition saw one of the greatest migrations in human history and a mutual genocide between the Hindus and Muslims, which was unprecedented. More than fifteen million people were uprooted, almost two million killed, seventy-five thousand women raped and mangled and infants roasted on spits. Thus, the partition continues to be part of Bengali identity, influencing the language, life, culture, and art. Ghatak, who was a displaced person from the newly formed Pakistan, created his unique brand of filmic discourse of partition. According to Antonio Schimid, visual images exert influence on the ways of thinking from their position at a certain discourse constellation, their function for that discourse and their relationship to other images, especially their dialectical work of constructing absences while representing.5 Ghatak's representation of the partition victim is enmeshed in the filmic image discourse. The image of the river Subarnarekha throughout the film is dialectical-its expected presence in the film constitutes the desire of the victims to find the ideal home which they had carried with themselves while migrating. But this, in its dialectical turn reinforces its absence. The discourse constellation is created in Iswar's selfish material pursuit, in Haranath's selfless pursuit of reconstructing an ideal colony for his fellow victims, in the innocent love of Sita and the foundling Abhiraam and their disowning Iswar's fatherly overtures. The river Subarnarekha's conspicuous absence from the film comments on the sterility of these different subject positions or dialogues. The complex interrelations of these different dialogues lead to pertinent questions- if Iswar's selfish materialism is self-destructive, why do the selfless acts of Haranath fail to realize the innate desire of the refugee to find stability? This requires a reading of the pictures or images and their context. The absent river, we should note, appears twice in close up. Once it

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appears occupying half the screen when Iswar is bathing in the river and ritually shoving aside imaginary unclean water from around him. This image gets connected metaphorically to his caste bias which too is related to the question of unclean blood when he adamantly refuses to acknowledge the foundling Abhiraam as his sister Sita's husband. Again this is linked to the scene where Haranath refuses Abhiram's mother a place in his ideal colony on the ground that she belonged to a different community of Bengal. Both Iswar and Haranath are soon led to a state of hopelessness and degeneration. The river appears in close up again when Abhiraam and Sita share an ideal moment of togetherness, crossing all boundaries of caste and community. But since it is part of the discourse constellation it is negatively affected and ultimately turns null and void. Ghatak's unique technique of using the image of the river Subarnarekha as an absence requires not only the visual but also the absence of the visual, thus playing upon the viewer's positedness as a participant onlooker. Therefore this technique saves the analysis of filmic images from narrowing down the arbitrariness of meaning, so essential for understanding Bengal's partition. Another technique adopted by Ghatak is melodrama. The most melodramatic scenes are around the two failed characters, Iswar and Haranath. In a scene, they are seen wearing...and drinking alcohol. From serious strugglers, they have degenerated to mere jesters.6 The melodrama here is created in represented body images and their translability to figurations created by the camera. This also entails disfiguration-obscuring and disclosing at the same time. The self-reflexivity inscribed in the image actually subverts the stereotype of the melodramatic scene and the viewer is exposed to the stark reality of refugee experience. Here what is present in the image - the lightness of the mood of the visual turns on itself to relate extreme pain, a pain that is purged of melodrama in its starkness. References: 1. Choudhury, A. 2013. “Analysing Life, Feminism and Melodrama in Ritwik Ghatak's Cinema: Meghe Dhaka Taara and Subarnarekha” International Journal of Innovative Research and Development 2 (13):130-135. 2. Choudhury,Sayandeb.2015. “The Indian Partition and the Making of a New Scopic Regime in Bengali Cinema”in European Journal of English Studies,19:3,255-270, DOI:10.1080/13825577.2015.1091220. 3. O'Donnell, E. 2004. ““Woman” and “homeland” in Ritwik Ghatak's films: Constructing

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post-Independence Bengali cultural identity” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 47. (Online) 4. Ghatak, R. 1961.“Komol Gandhar”. (Film) 5. Ghatak, R. 1960. “Meghe Dhaka Tara”. (Film) 6. Schmid, A. 2012. “Bridging the Gap: Image, Discourse, and Beyond – Towards a Critical Theory of Visual Representation” Qualitative Sociology Review VIII (2): 76-89. 7. Ghatak, R. 1962. “Subarnarekha”. (Film)

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