Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara: Woman, Patriarchy & Melodrama
Re-research Paper
Ritwik Kumar Ghatak’s films are the most powerful artistic articulations of trauma and tragedy of exile and displacement after Partition. The radical potential of melodrama to critique the dominant culture is pressed to high service in the films of Ritwik Ghatak, which meditate on the central theme of exile and displacement. With its accent on the point of view of woman protagonist, melodrama favors female subjectivity and locates the gendered violence of patriarchy. His most celebrated film Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star 1960) endeavours in a realistic way to evaluate the position of woman and patriarchal society in the perspectives of contemporary socio-economic and political scenario. With Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Ritwik Ghatak took the genre of melodrama along with its coherent, casually driven plot- structure and relegated it as the backdrop of something much further removed from the conventional. The appreciation of this film through the analysis of women’s position in patriarchal society and melodrama presented in the film shall be stated in this term paper.
Re-research Paper
Ritwik Kumar Ghatak’s films are the most powerful artistic articulations of trauma and tragedy of exile and displacement after Partition. The radical potential of melodrama to critique the dominant culture is pressed to high service in the films of Ritwik Ghatak, which meditate on the central theme of exile and displacement. With its accent on the point of view of woman protagonist, melodrama favors female subjectivity and locates the gendered violence of patriarchy. His most celebrated film Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star 1960) endeavours in a realistic way to evaluate the position of woman and patriarchal society in the perspectives of contemporary socio-economic and political scenario. With Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Ritwik Ghatak took the genre of melodrama along with its coherent, casually driven plot- structure and relegated it as the backdrop of something much further removed from the conventional. The appreciation of this film through the analysis of women’s position in patriarchal society and melodrama presented in the film shall be stated in this term paper.
Eminent Bengali novelist Shaktipada Rajguru’s many novels were adapted into Hindi and Bengali films like Amanush(1975), Meghe Dhaka Tara(1960), and Barsaat Ki Ek Raat(1981). Rajguru had written more than a hundred novels and was a particular favorite with the filmmakers particularly 80s. Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara is an adaptation of Shaktipada Rajguru’s Bengali social novel of the same name. It also has the distinction of being the only film by him that had been well received by the audience on its release. The film is made in 1960 and is regarded as his masterpiece.
Meghe Dhaka Tara is built in a simple story-line: How the eldest daughter of an uprooted family from East Pakistan, in a stifling, desperate environment turns into the breadwinner and ultimately sacrifices her life. In fact, Nita (Supriya Chaudhary), the protagonist of the film, has become a deathless symbol of Partition itself and the uprooted women’s tragic struggle against it. Thus, it is a story about a young woman Nita, forced to become the bread-winner of her refugee family, who sacrifices all her desires, falls terminally ill wherein she desperately wanted to live. At the heart of the story is Supriya Chaudhary’s character Nita, the daughter of a retired school teacher. She is the sole bread-winner of her family that includes her parents and three siblings- elder brother, played by Anil Chatterjee, and a younger sister played Geeta Ghatak, and a younger brother played by Dwiju Bhawal. So, it is also the woman centric narrative of labor, of poverty, of displacement and its accompanied in sufferable, pain loss and devastation.
The majority of Ghatak’s films focused on the post- Independence Bengali family and community, with a sustained critique of the emerging petite- bourgeoisie in Bengal, especially in the urban environment of Calcutta. As Erin O’Donnell says in her article “‘Woman’ and ‘Homeland’ in Ritwik Ghatak’s Films: Constructing Post-Independence Bengali Cultural Identity”, “In his films Ghatak constructs details visual and aural commentaries of Bengal (located in north- east India) In the socially and politically tumultuous period from the late 1970s. Twice during his lifetimes Bengal was physically rent apart-in 1947 by the Partition endangered by the departing British colonizers and in 1971 by the Bangladeshi War of Independence”.
India’s moment of liberation from the British was also a moment of rapture: with independence came partition in 1947. Partition did not mean quite the same thing for Punjab and Bengal- the two provinces that got divided on the eastern and western borders of India- but there was one aspect that was common to both: most ordinary citizens found it difficult to accept the fact of partition and their lives challenged beyond recognition once they became refugees. The ‘refugee’ population transformed Calcutta from a city of arm-chair babus devoted to genteel culture into a militant, angry, leftist city where middle-class women uprooted from the shelter of their village homes came out to work.
Melodrama is characterized by the extravagant action and emotion. It often features “stock characters such as noble hero, the long-suffering heroine… the melodrama focuses not on character development but on sensational incidents and spectacular staging” (Britinica). Melodrama which was originally a form of musical romantic play later came to be used to index works of experiments that contained emotional intensity, exaggeration, sensationalism, strong action, rhetorical excesses, moral polarities, unappeasable villainy and the triumph of good over evil. Historically melodrama’s attributes have been changing and evolving and has drifted away from its initial coordinates and is marked at present be emotional excesses and sentimentalism. Moreover, melodrama has been identified beyond its generic potentialities, as a mode, a style and form. The melodramatic repertoire generally consists of women- centric narrative, hyper-dramatization, moral polarization, multiple plots/sub-plots, co-incidents, closure and exaggerated emotions of spectacle.
Ritwik Ghatak uses melodrama primarily as a style or mode rather than coherently developed genre. He artistically develops his melodramatic style within the general Indian popular cinematic context of 1950s and 1960s Hindi ‘Social’ films of directors like Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor and the specific, regional context of 1950s and 1960s Bengali neo-realist ‘art’ films of directors like Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. In a 1974 interview Ghatak himself clearly states, “I am not afraid of melodrama. To use melodrama is one’s birthright, it is a form”. In fact, Ritwik Ghatak relied on epic melodrama to address displacement, patriarchy and other inequalities we can see the events that happened in the film on an ‘epic’ scale- “a scale mush larger that what an ordinary individual can usually handle ”, as this point has already been argued (Mullick). Ghatak largely constructed his melodramatic style of cinema when he was a playwright, actor, and director during the 1940s and 1950s in Indian People’s Theater Association. The variety of both indigenous and foreign theatrical style that Indian People’s Theater Association incorporated- such as the Bengali Folk form, Jatra and Bretch’s ‘epic’ form – greatly contributed to theatrical shape of Ghatak’s melodramatic style . His films are frequently characterized as ‘epic’, he often inverts and recontextualizes Indian traditions and myths.
Myth, woman, landscape, sound and music are the key components of Ritwik Ghatak’s melodrama. Regarding the acting style he combined the traditional and classical Indian performance style with ‘Stanislavskian acting and Bretchian theatrical techniques’ (O’ Donnell, 2005). In this context, O’Donnell mentions some of the significant details of Ghatak’s technique as follows: “The technical details of Ghatak’s melodramatic style include the following stylistic traits: fragment use of wide angle lens, placements of the camera at very high, low and irregular angles, dramatic lightning compositions, expressionistic acting style, and experimentations with songs and sound effect. In her essay, “Indian Melodrama: Ghatak’s Melodramatic Style” (2005), Erin O’Donnell describes, “Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha are the open-form, claustrophobic interiors used in the mise-en-scene and setting, and the filmic way of eliciting dysphoric, euphoric, or nostalgic structures of feelings, specifically through song, music and sound effect. These stylistic components shape Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, and resonate with the technical characteristics of Ghatak’s melodramatic style”. However, Raymond Bellour(1992) mentions Serge Daney in his article, “The Film We Accompany”, who has described the film as “one of the five or six greatest melodramas in cinema history”.
Meghe Dhaka Tara is a true melodrama with meanings expressed through music, sound, effects, framing compositions and mise-en-scene. Meanings are also expressed editing of course, the film is certainly a melodrama but its ‘excess’ is not about beautiful colours or lush music. Ghatak’ uses nourish lighting for interiors contrasted with the brash sunlight outdoors. Sacrifice, connivance, thwarted desire, the passing of unfulfilled years in dreary workaholic misery, and eventually even a blatantly psychomatic disease, tuberculosis for Nita: These are the familiar melodramatic ingredients as for the Lady of the Camellias, or the heroine’s ‘weak heart’ in Max Ophuls’ The Earrings of Madame de… (1953). The film dwells in an almost unrelieved somberness, with a deeply felt sadness welling up everywhere , particularly as Nita cries towards the end of the film to the echoing hill: “Dada ami baanchte cheyechilam” (Brother, I wanted to live!). Ghatak’s emotional but analytical storytelling drenches the events with music, sound effects and references to poetry scattered through the dialogues.
Ritwik Ghatak’s way of presenting the melodrama in Meghe Dhaka Tara is really special. He is famous for his unusual stylistic experiments, no matter the limitations of the technology at his disposal in his time and place. Many of his experiments now seem as if they were years, even decades ahead of their time. On the one hand, there is a classical side to Ghatak’s art. We can see this solid sense of
structure in his work on the images. There are evenly placed, lateral tracking shots that choreograph the characters and their emotions in relations to one another as in the films of Mizoguchi, the Japanese film director. There’s strikingly –angled close-ups of a face against a ceiling, as in Orson Welles. There is a strong use of physical symbols and dramatic metaphors, such as a train roaring through the background of an image and breaking the snatched idyll of lovers, like we might see in Elia Kazan’s Hollywood melodrama of the same period. There is no need to explore further the details of Ghatak’s melodrama and its use in this film, because a lot of works has been done by the scholars and literary critics on the melodramatic style that Ghatak used in this particular film.
In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Nita is as a stencil cut apart from a bunch of stray newspapers and impressed upon unfitted surroundings. It seems as if, she is good, even to be compatible to her ongoing situations yet she leads a remorseful fight. The existential cry of Nita in this particular film where she wants to live, ‘echoes the cry of millions in India even today’ (Gangar, 2010). Sadly somewhere, we have lost our ability to hear this cry. Perhaps we don’t care Meghe Dhaka Tara remains ever so contemporary as it would keep asking us to question the state of our increasingly self-centered and fragmentary beings. Ritwik Ghatak himself in an interview said:
Ritwik Ghatak’s way of presenting the melodrama in Meghe Dhaka Tara is really special. He is famous for his unusual stylistic experiments, no matter the limitations of the technology at his disposal in his time and place. Many of his experiments now seem as if they were years, even decades ahead of their time. On the one hand, there is a classical side to Ghatak’s art. We can see this solid sense of
structure in his work on the images. There are evenly placed, lateral tracking shots that choreograph the characters and their emotions in relations to one another as in the films of Mizoguchi, the Japanese film director. There’s strikingly –angled close-ups of a face against a ceiling, as in Orson Welles. There is a strong use of physical symbols and dramatic metaphors, such as a train roaring through the background of an image and breaking the snatched idyll of lovers, like we might see in Elia Kazan’s Hollywood melodrama of the same period. There is no need to explore further the details of Ghatak’s melodrama and its use in this film, because a lot of works has been done by the scholars and literary critics on the melodramatic style that Ghatak used in this particular film.
In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Nita is as a stencil cut apart from a bunch of stray newspapers and impressed upon unfitted surroundings. It seems as if, she is good, even to be compatible to her ongoing situations yet she leads a remorseful fight. The existential cry of Nita in this particular film where she wants to live, ‘echoes the cry of millions in India even today’ (Gangar, 2010). Sadly somewhere, we have lost our ability to hear this cry. Perhaps we don’t care Meghe Dhaka Tara remains ever so contemporary as it would keep asking us to question the state of our increasingly self-centered and fragmentary beings. Ritwik Ghatak himself in an interview said:
A girl, a very ordinary girl, tried after her day’s work, waits near my house at the bus or train stop, a lot of papers and a bag in her hand, her hair forms a halo around her head and face, some clinging to her face because of perspiration. I discover a history from the subtle lines of pain on her face, my imagination reaches out to the most ordinary, yet unforgettable drama in her strong, firm and determined, yet soft, touching and infinitely patient life.(Banerjee,1982)
Meghe Dhaka Tara traces the exploitation of women through the life story of Nita, the refugee main character who is trying to take care of her family. The film locates Nita’s exploitation as a part of the social, class-structure to which Nita belongs. This powerful and melodramatic film depicts the mundane, everyday world for woman, not only in a post-partition refugee camp, but also in a
patriarchal society in ordinary everyday life. The theme of exploitation in this film is very relevant. We see Nita is exploited by her family, but she does not fight back and throughout the film no matter how bad it gets for her, she continues to allow others to exploit her. We can understand this fact as Nita in film once utters, “I have never protested against any injustice. That is my sin”. Nita’s eventual death could be seen as a punishment, for her unquestioning fulfillment to her family’s exploitation. The film is critiquing all the places women have in Indian patriarchal society. Under patriarchy, there are no options for women to be free. Here Ritwik Ghatak not only critiques the way the family has treated Nita, but also the way in which Nita has allowed herself to be treated.
patriarchal society in ordinary everyday life. The theme of exploitation in this film is very relevant. We see Nita is exploited by her family, but she does not fight back and throughout the film no matter how bad it gets for her, she continues to allow others to exploit her. We can understand this fact as Nita in film once utters, “I have never protested against any injustice. That is my sin”. Nita’s eventual death could be seen as a punishment, for her unquestioning fulfillment to her family’s exploitation. The film is critiquing all the places women have in Indian patriarchal society. Under patriarchy, there are no options for women to be free. Here Ritwik Ghatak not only critiques the way the family has treated Nita, but also the way in which Nita has allowed herself to be treated.
Ritwik Ghatak raises the exploited and consumed protagonist Nita into an emblematic figure of this momental suffering. As all three men in the family- Shankar, the elder brother, immersed in his passion of music, is completely oblivious of the family condition; the ailing father, is unproductive and losing his commanding over the family affairs, and the younger brother Montu, is adding to further immiseration after meeting an accident- fail to perform ‘patriarchal duty’ offending for the family, forcing Nita to give up studies and take up a job. Through the character of Nita , Ghatak privileges female subjectivity, with mythical, historical and quotidian resonances, and exposes the very fallacy of reification(as Mother Goddess ) through the phenomenal sacrifice.
As we have discussed earlier about how Ghatak characterizes his film as ‘epic’ and how he often inverts and contextualizes Indian traditions and myths. By examining deeper into her character, she is an actuality the manifestation of multiple goddesses- Durga as a Jagadhatri, the benevolent image of the eternal giver and universal sustainer, and Uma/Gauri, the mother goddesss. In her easssy, “Myth and Ritual: Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara”, Ira Bhaskar points out how Nita represents the benign manifestation of Durga:
As we have discussed earlier about how Ghatak characterizes his film as ‘epic’ and how he often inverts and contextualizes Indian traditions and myths. By examining deeper into her character, she is an actuality the manifestation of multiple goddesses- Durga as a Jagadhatri, the benevolent image of the eternal giver and universal sustainer, and Uma/Gauri, the mother goddesss. In her easssy, “Myth and Ritual: Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara”, Ira Bhaskar points out how Nita represents the benign manifestation of Durga:
“ A prevalent story about the genesis of Durga is the concept of Havyagni(oblation to the sacrificial fire).In the ritual of Havan(the act of consigning the mortal offering to the sacrificial flames) is symbolized the surrender of human desires and aspirations which are carried to the heavens with the smoke. It is believed that Durga was born out of this smoke as a transmutations of human desires, taking the form of Jagadhatri, the universal sustainer. One of the central images associated with Nita is the courtyard wherein are centered the ambitions of the rest of the family … These selfish ambitions pour into the courtyard, the symbolic Yoga Mandapa, from which manifests Nita in the role of provider and creator.”
But Ghatak’s deployment of mythology should not be read as an attempt to historicize the myth as some scholars have critiqued, rather by combining the mythical, historical and the contemporary, Ghatak draws our attention to the cyclical nature and enormous force of the exploitation and the oppression. Through the character of Nita, Ghatak constructs the gendered nature of violence and crippling of female agency in conflict as well as in everyday situations. Ghatak subverts the patriarchal ideology and articulates protests against all kinds of dismemberment-political, cultural, and personal. Further, Ghatak creates a cinema of resistance from within and without melodrama and demythologizes the generic convention of the genre ultimately restoring its ‘virtues’ by reinventing it.
We understand the actions of individuals in this particular film are not determined by their inner states; rather, more often, they are surprised by the individuals themselves in order to survive. There is thus a kind of ‘in-built determinism’ in which the central character acts out of necessity of the system rather than of her own choice. The consequent conflicts between one’s desires and external social pressures are often internalized (Mallick). Nita, a luminal refugee figure, relentlessly struggles against raging tides-the socio-political forces of which are too large and insurmountable for an individual, leading to her final destruction. She represses all her desires and feelings as she is left with no choice. Ghatak raises Nita to an emblem of suffering-‘a victimized woman’s body, on which desires has inscribed an impossible history, a story of desires in an impasse’.
The film uses the visual comparisons of nature and beauty of women to bleak reality of abject poverty, exploitation of women and suffering. There is a tension between the personal and the social,
the individual and the collective. Throughout the film, the main protagonist is helplessly exploited to sustain her extended family. As Shoma Chaudhury, a journalist and a film scholar, said: “The female protagonist (in Meghe Dhaka Tara) is one of the rarest characters in the history of cinema as she works not with the intention of becoming independent or to be liberated from a patriarchal society, but to sustain her extended family.”
the individual and the collective. Throughout the film, the main protagonist is helplessly exploited to sustain her extended family. As Shoma Chaudhury, a journalist and a film scholar, said: “The female protagonist (in Meghe Dhaka Tara) is one of the rarest characters in the history of cinema as she works not with the intention of becoming independent or to be liberated from a patriarchal society, but to sustain her extended family.”
The film is a critique of the family as institution and also of the harsh social and economic conditions arising from Partition- the trauma and the tragedy that defined Ghatak as an artist. By interplaying light and shadows and incorporating evocative and aggressive sounds that underscores the emotional impact, Ghatak creates a unique, sensorial experience that chronicles the systematic demoralization of the human soul. The woman who carried the burden of her family by sacrificing her own dreams and desires, ultimately she herself becomes a burden for her family. How tragic it is when her ‘apoligetic’ father tells her to leave the house even after she is suffering from tuberculosis as it is captured in the scene 92 of the film’s screenplay where Nita after fulfilling her mission succumbs to tuberculosis:
BABA: I have packed your clothes!
[Then he slowly moves towards the door he turns round once and looks
at Nita, who sits up. Baba speaks, waving his hand]
Go away, go away. They are dreaming of a two-storey house. You are successful. You have got them all to Stand on their feet.
[Nita stands up.]
NITA: Ba—ba !
BABA: [His voice is heard but is not seen.]
Don’t stay here anymore. They pity you no.
[Nita stands up, bending her body, the bundle close to her throat.]
You are unable to bear a burden, my dear, let you had to do it. Now you yourself have become a burden. Your breath is poisonous.
[Nita lowers her eyes. Baba says ,raising his head.]
A mother and new born are coming to this room.
[The childhood photo on the table, Nita takes it up. Nita clutches the photo to her bosom. Baba says waving his hands-]
Go away, go away.
[End of the background music. Exit Baba. Nita stands up, carrying the bundle and the picture. She advances towards the door and opens it. It is raining heavily outside.] (The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, sec:20)
Thus the family system and the social system are like a vicious trap that slowly closes in on the main character Nita, the dutiful daughter who sacrifices everything, every dream and every possibility in order to pay the needs of all the other family members. No one who profits from Nita’s sacrifice except Shankar is particularly willing to help her- and indeed, when it comes to her rather demonic-looking mother, this matriarchal figure is actually willfully trying to compound the oppression, by directing the romantic attentions of Nita’s impatient suitor over to her rather less self-sacrificing sister. As Kumar Sahani, Ghatak student and a celebrated Indian film-director observed: “The breaking up of society is visualized a three way division of womanhood. The three principle female characters embody the traditional aspects of feminine power .The heroine, Nita, has the preserving and nurturing quality: her sister Geeta, is the sensual woman ; their mother represents the cruel aspect”.(Sahani,166)
Geeta is typical-centered woman concerned only with attaining personal happiness and comfort. Her character is conceived in the image of those refugee women who easily did away with values, driven by the imperative to live against adverse financial circumstances, for they realized it was not possible to survive in the face of disintegration by clinging to moral values. Geeta, driven by this, seduces her elder sister’s feeble-minded suitor Sanat with her feminine charms. In the film , she pays scant respect to her sister’s sacrifice of self-interest in her pursuit of achieving her selfish ends. On the other hand, Nita’s mother is a typical refugee housewife coming from East Bengal who, torn apart by day-to-day bitter struggle for mere survival, is led to measure all relationships in utilitarian terms of profits and loss. Thus, she approaches her eldest son Shankar and provokes him to leave the house. She is alarmed by Nita’s relationship with Sanat. She is afraid that if Nita marries Sanat the family will lose their only source of income. Unwittingly, she lets Nita to become a machine for earning money. When Nita’s father raises the issue of her marriage, she reprimands her ailing husband by saying, “If she gets married, what will we be left with? Sucking your thumbs?” (My Translation) .
Through the characterization of Nita’s mother, Ghatak problematises the notion of femininity. We have to understand that Ghatak did not intend to portray her either as a symbol of selfishness or a stereotypical selfish woman but rather Gahtak has revealed the helplessness of a woman who had to prioritize her role of a housewife over that of a mother for the sake of her family. In the mainstream Indian cinema, the character of mother was constructed in the image of a biological mother who has some pre-determined role to play, but Ghatak debunked this conventional construction of motherhood as he portrayed the character of Nita’s mother against the backdrop of an uncertain world where bare survival was at stake.
Nita challenges the patriarchal hegemony and gender discrimination and transcends the gender inequality by taking upon herself the entire burden of her family and helping every member to attain success in life. She gives up studies and takes up the job of a clerk. The whims and fancies of her self-centered sister, Geeta and brothe , Montu result in further demands being made on her. The elder brother, Shankar, who doggedly pursues his dream of becoming a classical vocalist, remains her only true sympathizer till the end. Yet, being unemployed and in need of sympathy and encouragement himself, he is more dependent on her than the rest of the family. Sanat, with whom she is in love, betrays her idealism and faith by discontinuing his research and marrying her sister Geeta. Suffocated by the oppressive claims made on her, Nita’s isolation is tragically complete when the people in her life establish themselves one by one, and go their own ways. Significantly, Nita’s self-sacrifice is totally ignored by the patriarchal authority of the Bengali middle-class. Male hegemony manifests its ugly form in terms of deception, betrayal and pursuit of self-aggrandizement and Nita learns the basic lesson- it is futile to go beyond gender discrimination as enforced by patriarchy, and one is condemned if one tries to do so. Nita’s brilliant endeavor gets lost in complex mosaic of relationships driven by self-interests in a patriarchal society.
In the climatic scenes where Nita makes her impassionate plea for leaving further while being fatally ill with tuberculosis. This part of the film has consistently ranked as one of the finest scenes not just in Indian cinema but cinemas from all across the world;
NITA: Dada, ami kintu banchte cheyechilam! (Brother, but I really
wanted to live.
SHANKAR: Khuki...! Idiot.
SHANKAR: Khuki...! Idiot.
NITA: Dada, ami- (Brother, I-)
Ami sottie banchte cheyechilam (Brother, I really wanted to live)
Dada ami banchte bhalobasi.(Brother, I love living)…
Dada, ami banchbo, Dada, ami banchbo!(Brother I will live, I
will live ) (My Translation).
When Shankar arrives to her at Shillong Hills and reveals family’s progress and prosperity and the pranks of Geeta’s child, Nita hysterically bursts out in tears. The resounding echoes “I want to live”, along with the 360 degree panorama around the mountains brings a tremendous life force against injustice . This is the cry of a woman for her desires, for her love, for her determination and reconstitution of her lost selfhood. This is also the cry of a refugee woman against separation- personal, cultural, political- and the final betrayal partition. Nita’s violent cry, her unrelenting affirmation of life, counterpoints the claustrophobic confinement in which she will spend her final days. In juxtaposition to Ghatak’s expansive and fluid camerawork, Nita’s entrapment in this natural space conveys stasis and rigidity. The immense landscape appears to collapse around her as she gasps and struggles to find her voice on the soundtrack- for her visual image is now absent and we are left with sound of her disembodied uttuerances. Yet Nita, as diseased ‘woman’, fallen ‘Goddess’ and dystopian Bengal (i.e.‘Motherland’) is determined to live on even as she is dying. Perhaps Nita’s biggest tragedy is that even her grief is not solely her own, as a world is populated by many Nitas, all equally ignored , all suffering, all apparently without hope. Nita becomes a flag bearer of the protest against the patriarchal oppression of women, the violence metaphor of woman as nation, the empty symbolism of the Great Mother Archetype and the displacements within and without family.
If we look at the backdrop of the film, we find Partition and post-Partition. An allegory for the traumatic of the Partition of Bengal, Meghe Dhaka Tara captures the disintegration of a Bengali middle class family as a result of dislocation, poverty, self-interest and petty, internal division. The repeated imagery of a passing train bisecting the horizon alludes to the physical division of the family’s ancestral homeland. Inevitably, as Nita attempts to recuperate from the ravages of self-denial, want and exploitation, her cry of anguish becomes an indistinguishable resonant echo from the lost and irredeemable soul of a displaced and uprooted people. At that historical time, in the strict gender division of spaces, women are given charge of the quotidian reproduction of life. The caring and nurturing role of women hounds them in these moments of rapture. Nita’s famous cry that resounds on the hills at the end of the film is the most living indictment of this aspect of the Bengal Partition. Nita, the breadwinner of the family, denied its gendered privileges and became the victim at the sacrificial altar of the displaced family. Her tragedy was an integral part of her diurnal survival and struggle.
It is true that Ghatak is less worried about the frames and technicalities of his films, unlike Ray or Kurosawa who have sometimes being criticized for looking at life through a Western point of view. In order to express the inexpressible, Ghatak decides to use outdoor locations, unrealistic lights and shadows and a peculiar form of editing with violent jump cuts and clashing compositions. While the film is often called bleak and angry, there is a sitar playing in the background trying to sooth the fraying nerves and this is one of the many contradictions that Ghatak keeps putting forth in a precise and deliberate manner. Therefore, almost like a magician, he controls the emotions of the audience, as if they were strings attached to his hands.
It is true that Ghatak is less worried about the frames and technicalities of his films, unlike Ray or Kurosawa who have sometimes being criticized for looking at life through a Western point of view. In order to express the inexpressible, Ghatak decides to use outdoor locations, unrealistic lights and shadows and a peculiar form of editing with violent jump cuts and clashing compositions. While the film is often called bleak and angry, there is a sitar playing in the background trying to sooth the fraying nerves and this is one of the many contradictions that Ghatak keeps putting forth in a precise and deliberate manner. Therefore, almost like a magician, he controls the emotions of the audience, as if they were strings attached to his hands.
It cannot be denied that Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara is based on the Partition and its aftermath, as this film is a part of his most celebrated trilogy. Apart from the theme of Partition and its aftermath, what we get after briefly analyzing the film is that the representations of unprivileged woman, society, patriarchy and melodrama that are inextricably intertwined in setting, music and song. It is an elegy to the quotidian suffering of woman and a protest against the gendered violence and oppression. There is no doubt that Ghatak transcends the morbidity of psycho-centric melodrama and creates an epic melodrama that transmutes the individual into collective. The film is not about Nita, but the Nitas we fail to see, the many Nitas that are in the making and the many Nitas that are existed before our time. For Ghatak , cinema was always a form of protest. Thus, we see the articulations of protest through melodrama and the mise-en-scene of female suffering giving rise to a resistant narrative of Partition and patriarchy in the film Meghe Dhaka Tara. And it is Ritwik Ghatak’s credit that he could bring to us the sufferings and exploitations of woman, patriarchy and a questionable society from a historical time through his epic melodramatic style.
Works Cited
Bagchi, Josodhara, ed. The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India.
Kolkata: Stree, 2003. Print.
Bellour, Raymond. “The Films We Accompany”. Rouge.Com. Rouge, 2004. Web. 2 May. 2018
Bellour, Raymond. “The Films We Accompany”. Rouge.Com. Rouge, 2004. Web. 2 May. 2018
Bhattacharya, Sandipan and Sibaditya Dasgupta,eds. Ritwik Ghatak, Face to Face: Conversations
with the Master,1962-1977. Kolkata:Cinecentral,2003.Google Book Search. Web. 5Aug. 2018
Bhaskar, Ira. “Myths and Rituals: Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara”. Journals of Arts and Ideas.
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