The Partition of India (1947) along religious lines was accompanied by genocidal violence which led to 2 million deaths and displaced over 12-16 million people. Analyzing the role of Partition film as cultural memory work, I will situate the cinema of avant-garde Bengali filmmaker Ritwick Ghatak (a survivor himself) as a counter discourse to the hegemonic constructions of the Partition in Hindi language national cinema/ Bollywood. I argue that Ghatak’s cinematic work in its focus on how the Partition was assimilated into the fabric of the everyday depicts the unspectacular “slow violence” of shattered, discontinuous lives unable to assimilate in the aftermath, complicating how violence has been theorized in Partition studies. Focusing on Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star (1960) as a trauma narrative and its representation of the experience of cross-border migration and displacement, I will analyze the representation of refugee experience as a perpetual homelessness, a forced silencing/forgetting accompanied with an attendant disciplining of the body in its habits of diet, dress and language in alternative cinema. The compressed, richly allusive film, a part of Ghatak’s Partition-trilogy, explores the shifting social landscape in post-Partition Bengal as refugee women were compelled to emerge in public spaces as breadwinners. The action transpires in a filthy, makeshift refugee colony on the outskirts of the megapolis of Calcutta, a dystopia replete with social decay, economic and political decline and ethical erosion as the film details the physical and psychic breakdown of the central female protagonist Neeta. Neeta’s enactment of a self-destructive though normative femininity makes visible the “technologies of gender” underpinning post-Partition Indian identity while functioning as a critique of the Indian nationalist project and its quest for a mythical “home” with a radical unraveling of familial relationships underwriting the trauma at the heart of the film.
About the presenterShumona Dasgupta
Associate Professor of English and Postcolonial literature at the University of Mary Washington.