Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara: Immortalizing the Refugee Woman in Bengal

27 October 2009
14.00 - 17.00 hrs

IIAS, Conference Room, Rapenburg 59, 2311 GJ Leiden
Speaker: Dr. Rituparna Roy, IIAS affiliated fellow

One of the most powerful artistic articulations of the trauma of displacement consequent upon the Partition of India is to be found in the works of the Bengali filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak. The cultural unity of the two Bengals was an article of faith with Ghatak. He never accepted the Partition of 1947 (which divided Punjab and Bengal on the basis of religion) and it became an obsessive theme with him.

Meghe Dhaka Tara (based on Shaktipada Rajguru's novel of the same name) is one of his most well-known films on this theme. It tells the story of Nita, a refugee girl in a colony in Kolkata, who struggles to maintain her impoverished family – at first, giving private tuitions to school children; and then, as the financial situation worsens in the house, by working full-time in an office, giving up on her own post-graduate studies.

She is the exploited daughter, taken-for-granted sister, and betrayed lover in the film - and ends up being just a source of income for the family. She is the victim not just of Partition, but of familial pressures, and her life ends tragically fighting TB – though not before she cries out her desire to live to her brother in a hill sanatorium and admitting that she had wronged in accepting injustice, that she should have protested for her rights.

The film struck a chord with the audience at the time it was released because of its utterly honest depiction of the personal dynamics of a contemporary socio-economic upheaval (refugee families trying to survive) as also its vivid portrayal of a new reality – refugee women joining the work-force and changing the very profile of Calcutta.

But it is a gendered narrative and I am interested in exploring this aspect of the film in order to show what partition did to women – whether it simply victimized women or accorded them a new agency as well; and whether such agency turned out to be yet another form of exploitation by a patriarchal society that now masqueraded as being ‘modern’. In doing so, I would also address the question of whether Nita was representative of her generation.