{"id":19706,"date":"2021-09-06T09:43:23","date_gmt":"2021-09-06T14:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.deepfocusreview.com\/?p=19706"},"modified":"2022-08-15T09:49:10","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T14:49:10","slug":"chimeras-independence-ritwiks-cloud-capped-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.deepfocusreview.com\/chimeras-independence-ritwiks-cloud-capped-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Chimeras of Independence in Ritwik\u2019s The Cloud-Capped Star"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meghe Dhaka Tara<\/em> (The Cloud-Capped Star<\/em>, 1960), by visionary Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, or just Ritwik for Bengalis, powerfully captures the despair of being in a constant state of transience. It\u2019s a film about the pervasive sense of embitterment over the newly drawn border and the traumatic terms on which independence from British rule had finally been won in India. Undivided Bengal was perceived in British India as a region with sectarian conflicts between Hindu and Muslim segments of the population\u2014incorporated within a Bengali cultural and linguistic identity but carved into two separate territorial entities in 1947. East Bengal (now Bangladesh) formed the eastern wing of Pakistan, and West Bengal became a part of India. Bengalis such as Ritwik\u2014<\/em>who migrated to West Bengal during the 1940s but had deep roots in East Bengal\u2014saw their homeland become a foreign country overnight. Many refugees settled in Calcutta, taking over swampy land in the eastern peripheries of the city to build \u2018refugee colonies\u2019\u2014the crumbling settlements that we see in Meghe Dhaka Tara\u2014<\/em>and struggling to maintain their dignity.<\/p>\n

Meghe Dhaka Tara<\/em> tells the story of Neeta (Supriya Choudhury), the eldest daughter of a downwardly mobile Hindu middle-class family, who barely keeps her family afloat. Her family has been dislocated by the partition of India and trying to survive in refugee settlements in the rural periphery of 1950s Calcutta. Udbastu<\/em> is the word Ritwik used for refugees\u2014meaning someone displaced from their ancestral home (bastu<\/em>). Neeta is portrayed as a provider and a nurturer<\/em> forsaking her dreams as the family becomes more and more reliant on her earnings. Ritwik uses the shattered family as an allegory for the exile and partition, confronting bigotries and social attitudes ingrained within Bengali culture at the time. The visual details show a young working woman with bags on her shoulder and broken slippers, lines on her drained face, and pounded by tempests. She is seemingly ordinary yet astonishingly resilient. These images set the stage for the osmotic interplay of myth and mundanity in Meghe Dhaka Tara<\/em>. As film scholar Manishita Dass powerfully stated, \u201cmetaphors and mythic motifs are not imposed on the everyday but emerge out of it, endowing it with heightened significance and connecting the individual to the collective without transforming the real human being into metaphorical cipher.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Ritwik\u2019s East Bengal, where he spent much of his childhood, is a lost arcadia\u2014<\/em>a dreamy, fertile land of open spaces, magnificent river deltas, engrained communities, and chaotic affairs. He called the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent \u201cthe great betrayal,<\/em>\u201d blaming it on the materialist, immoral, petit-bourgeois Bengali contemporaries that defined Calcutta. It was one of the largest mass displacements of modern history, concerning an estimated 12 to 15 million people, accompanied by the cruelty of the Bengal Famine of 1943, the havoc of World War II, and then communal violence, resulting in the deaths of 500,000 to a million people. The post-independence predicament of the divided and weakening Bengal haunted Ritwik until his death in 1976 at the age of 51. He was concerned with the socio-economic issues and spiritual alienation and cultural deracination from this violent uprooting. He described the magnitudes of rootlessness: \u201cPeople\u2019s ways of thinking have changed, their hearts have changed, their souls have changed\u2026 their cultural consciousness has putrefied, and their umbilical ties with their past completely severed.\u201d Ritwik\u2019s trilogy\u2014Meghe Dhaka Tara<\/em> (The Cloud-Capped Stars<\/em>), Komal Ganghar<\/em> (A Soft Note on a Sharp Scale<\/em>), and Subarnarekha\u2014<\/em>deals with the aftermaths of partition in Bengal, with vigorous motifs on melodrama and realism, with Marxist perspectives, and unsettling moments of Brechtian alienation.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s opening sequence features a striking shot of a symbolic banyan tree against the morning sky, shadowing the fertile land beneath. The camera slowly glides towards the bottom right corner of the frame, where we see Neeta\u2019s brother Shankar (Anil Chatterjee) sitting by the riverbank, reciting the \u201cR\u0101ga Hamsadhwani\u201d (\u201cThe Call of Swans\u201d). We hear fragments of this r\u0101ga<\/em> throughout the course of the film, mostly used during daylight and open spaces. The first glimpse of Neeta associates her with the elements of nature as a nurturer<\/em>, symbolizing the principles of fertility\u2014<\/em>she walks towards the light and closer to the camera, at first just the silhouette of a white saree, which only becomes Neeta when the first close-up reveals her traits. Her unforgettable smile when she stops to look at her brother practicing scales, and the noise of an approaching train, anchors the film\u2019s mise-en-sc\u00e8ne<\/em>, transporting us to the world of a refugee colony. Film scholar Omar Ahmed considered trains an iconographic aspect of Bengali cinema, usually standing for modernity, as in Satyajit Ray\u2019s Apu Trilogy<\/em>. However, Ritwik\u2019s train has morphed into a motif of exodus following the trauma of partition.<\/p>\n

We embark into the world of the everyday through a momentary encounter between Neeta and the neighborhood grocer, Banshi, when he brusquely demands that she settle her family\u2019s outstanding dues. The dialect he uses to address her as Didi-thairan<\/em> (elder sister) can be identified as Bangal\u2014<\/em>a word West Bengalis use to denote eastern Bengalis. The exclusive use of colloquial Bangal<\/em> instead of West Bengal standardized Bengali identifies them as refugees from East Bengal. The camera follows her as she walks down an unpaved road and suddenly staggers on her worn-out slippers, picks them up, and continues walking barefoot. In Manishita Dass\u2019 words, this scene, \u201creminiscent of Van Gogh\u2019s painting of a pair of worn-out boots, disclose[s] a history of toil, tenacity and economic hardship.\u201d The scene reemerges at the end of the film in a poignant echo, bringing the collective dimension of this history to the fore. In Ritwik\u2019s depiction of Neeta, the characteristics of the \u2018idealized Bengali woman\u2019 are poise under burden, a quiet dignity, and a paradoxical combination of tenderness and perseverance that evokes the history of pain. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak used the term \u201csubaltern\u201d to describe the often disregarded and marginalized position of \u2018Third world woman\u2019 in the wider context of Eurocentric feminist thought and colonialist ideology. Spivak maintains, \u201cWestern feminism has itself fallen prey to its own work by claiming to speak for all women when it often excludes the experiences of Asian, African and Arab woman.\u201d Ritwik\u2019s work not only reflects the postcolonial resistance identified by Spivak but recognizes that such women have been erased from history.<\/p>\n

\"\"No place evokes women\u2019s forgotten words as much as the courtyard. This center of colonial and post-colonial domestic life was represented in \u201840s and \u201850s Bengali cinema as a sacrificial space, populated by long-suffering girls and women. Ritwik uses the courtyard in the household as a space of enclosure and exploitation. The sociopolitical chaos and moral perplexity within interpersonal entanglements during that time cannot be more apparent than in the characterization of Neeta\u2019s mother (Geeta Dey). Rancorous, cantankerous, acid-tongued, and tense bodied\u2014she embodies the monotony of impoverishment. The shock of dislocation hardens her heart, making her increasingly selfish and harsh in her dealings with Neeta. Many of the crucial scenes that establish Neeta\u2019s role as a nurturer<\/em> of her family and fulfilling her mother\u2019s and younger siblings\u2019 selfish demands are played out in the home’s central courtyard. Later in the film, Neeta exiles herself to a room near the house entrance, suspecting that she might be suffering from tuberculosis. When her mother asks her why she is moving to the barbari\u2014<\/em>meaning outer quarter in colloquial Bengali\u2014Neeta replies with a tormented voice: <\/em>\u201cThis is a friendless house. What is the difference between barbari and andarbari (inner quarter)?\u201d At this point, Ritwik makes it clear that home for Neeta is not a shelter in a heartless world but a site of ensnarement, exploitation, and estrangement.<\/p>\n

Ritwik creates an association between brewing sounds and Neeta\u2019s mother to suggest a life fuming with displeasures in which her greater sentiments are crushed. The archetypal disguise of the atrocious mother is reflected on her tense face and distorted by her everyday struggles. Ritwik uses a similar combination in the film\u2019s symbology of the goddess Uma to emphasize the sorrows and the ironies of Neeta\u2019s dilemma. The symbology of Uma renders a rich vein of Bengali folklore: The tale follows the uniquely tender and affectionate daughter Uma, the only child of her parents, Giriraj (Lord of the Mountains) and Meneka, who regretfully give their daughter away in marriage to Lord Siva. Siva features in this myth as an old and reckless husband to Uma. The autumn festival in Bengal, known as Durga Puja, celebrates Uma\u2019s return to her parental home. Bengalis worship idols of Durga for four days, during which \u0101g\u014dm\u014dni songs rejoice her return and b\u012bj\u014dy\u0101 songs mourn her departure. Many scholars have argued that \u0101g\u014dm\u014dni and b\u012bj\u014dy\u0101 songs echo the practice of child marriage in early medieval Bengal known as gaurid\u0101n<\/em>. Ritwik himself said that he reimagined Neeta as an agent of the young Bengali girls given away in gaurid\u0101n<\/em> over hundreds of years.<\/p>\n

The withering of Neeta\u2019s personal worth and distinct identity echoes in the eponymous expression that her would-be lover Shanat uses to describe her. In a letter, he writes: \u201cI didn\u2019t appreciate your worth at first. I thought you were like others. But now I see you in the clouds, perhaps a cloud-capped star veiled by circumstances, your aura dimmed.\u201d The romantic metaphor attains a distressing irony in a series of events that include Shanat\u2019s betrayal. When Neeta\u2019s youngest brother Montu and their father suffer debilitating accidents, she sacrifices her postgraduate studies to become the sole breadwinner for the family. Reluctant to wait for Neeta, Shanat marries her sister Geeta (Gita Ghatak) with support from Neeta\u2019s mother, who believed this a seamless solution to her predicament. Neeta\u2019s father (Bijon Bhattacharya), a decaying schoolteacher, associates her with gaurid\u0101n. <\/em>At the same time,\u00a0he watches Geeta\u2019s wedding preparation and expresses with a sense of vulnerability: \u201cIn the past, people would marry their daughters off to dying men. They were barbarians. Today, we are educated and civilized, so we educate our daughters and then wiring them dry, put them to the grind, and wipe out their futures: That is the only difference.\u201d Even today, his comment opposes the linear narrative of social progress and women’s rights in Bengal. Despite Neeta\u2019s education and employment, and everything that differentiates her from gaurid\u0101n<\/em>, she is still subject to exploitation of new forms of patriarchal ethos and the network of familial relationships.<\/p>\n

\"\"However, Neeta\u2019s situation is not unchangeable. Ritwik uses visual and aural symbols to demonstrate that she still has a chance to grow and evolve. Consider the house\u2019s layout: clay, hay, bamboo, and cane mirroring impermanence. And consider the distinctive sound of refugee colonies: school children singing the national anthem of newly-formed India and reciting their multiplication tables, the chirping of crickets, and the howling of an owl at night. These factors contribute to the symbolic nuance of how the socio-historical forces reshape the internal space. One cannot forget the scene of enigmatic reawakening of the chorus of crickets, when Neeta\u2019s father recites the well-known poem by John Keats, \u201cOn the Grasshopper and Cricket,\u201d to celebrate her birthday by the lake proclaiming the first lines, \u201cthe poetry of earth is never dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a lone winter evening, when the frost
\n<\/em>Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
\n<\/em>The Cricket\u2019s song, in warmth increasing ever\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

While the nocturnal noise of the crickets plays a central role in creating a sense of imminent misfortunes, Ritwik uses non-diegetic sound to connect Neeta\u2019s agony to a larger historical trauma\u2014<\/em>the overwhelming sound of whiplash used at the film\u2019s three dramatic high points. The idea of the whiplash was inspired by a 1943 Bengali poem \u201cMadhu Banshi-r Goli\u201d by Sombhu Mitra. The poem reflects the socio-economic mayhem of wartime Calcutta, when Congress and the Muslim league tore the region into two independent fragments, and it pays homage to revolutionary dreams of a better world. Bengali film historian Chidananda Dasgupta wrote that the dramatized sound of whiplash is \u201cone of the very few alienated, intellectualized moments in Ghatak\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a different aural flourish, one of the most prominent musical moments of the film is a haunting Bengali folk song, or eternal river song, that brings back memories of a lost homeland. It\u2019s sung by Ranen Roychowdhury, a gifted folk musician from Bengal who also plays the singer in this sequence. The music starts in the background, during a rough encounter between the neighborhood grocer Banshi and Shankar, leading to a series of tense exchanges within the family. Then, we gradually see a group of four folk musicians appear in the backdrop, singing a song that brings back the memories of a lost homeland into the refugee colony. Roychowdhury\u2019s desire for freedom is only heightened by the certainty that it will not come. A cry from the heart, his eyebrows rise, but his eyes remain closed to the world of corrupted promises.<\/p>\n

I wasted all my good days
\n<\/em>Now, in bad times,
\n<\/em>I\u2019ve come to the banks of the river of life
\n<\/em>Boatman, I don\u2019t know your name
\n<\/em>I cry helpless tears on the banks of the river of life
\nWho will take you across, my heart?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"Roychowdhury was known for the authenticity of his singing style and a voice that evokes the riverine space of his native Sylhet (now a district of Bangladesh). Like Ritwik, he grew up in East Bengal and moved to Calcutta during the Partition. The song is in bh\u0101tiyali\u2014<\/em>a traditional form of folk music that consists of metaphorical and emotional verses usually sung by boatmen during the journey across rivers during flood season. It is as if the wandering folk musician remembers the waters of his native region, which are now artificially separated from their original inhabitants. The memory of this free and borderless nature appears for a moment to bring together divided Bengal.<\/p>\n

The unfiltered authenticity of folk music is juxtaposed against a more theatrical melodramatic style that Ritwik employs to emphasize significant sequences in the film. During his tenure at the Indian People\u2019s Theater Association (IPTA), he fused several models ranging from Brecht\u2019s epic form<\/em> to Bengali traditional folk form known as j\u0101tra. <\/em>In numerous interviews and essays, Ritwik discussed how Brecht\u2019s epic approach influenced his work. He believed that genuine audience engagement could only be achieved by alienating the spectator and emphasizing narrative non-linearity, anti-realist staging, expressionistic performance styles, fluid yet disorienting movement between contiguity and detachment, and the diegetic and non-diegetic use of aural motifs. Ritwik\u2019s frequent use of wide-angle lenses, placement of the camera in irregular angles, rack focus, dramatic close-ups\u2014<\/em>all these techniques emerge out of the blend of Brechtian theatrical and cinematic forms.<\/p>\n

A remarkable example of Ritwik\u2019s continual collision between theatrical and cinematic forms can be seen in one of the most poignant sequences in the film, which relies on a specific kind of cultural knowledge and cinematic staging that carries the soulful and distinctive rendition of Rabindrasangeet<\/em>, known as Tagore songs. Neeta\u2019s brother Shankar proclaims to leave the household as a protest for the wrongdoings done to her. Neeta, in despair, then asks Shankar to teach her a Tagore song instead of responding directly to his proclamation.<\/p>\n

The night when the storm tore down my doors
\n<\/em>You came to my home, unbeknownst to me
\n<\/em>The lamp went out, and it became dark,
\n<\/em>I stretched out skywards, though I did not know for whom.
\n<\/em>I lay in the unbridled dark, wanting this to be a dream,
\n<\/em>I knew not that storm was your pennant for your triumph,
\n<\/em>As dawn broke, I saw you standing there,
\n<\/em>At the heart of desolation engulfing my home. <\/em><\/p>\n

The cinematography in this scene is astonishing and evokes a sense of distress, but also emotional communion between Neeta and Shankar, and solace in art. Both are seated next to each other when the camera floats along in a dimly lit room, creating a willowy movement through its fluid use of lenses. It is perhaps the most poignant moment in the film, which no dialogue could have better articulated. The mechanisms of musical allusiveness, glimmers of moonlight through the bamboo walls, use of theatrical flourishes in the camerawork are heightened by the performances, lighting, editing, and the soundtrack in a glorious convergence. At the closing lines of the song, Neeta repeats the last lines with a broken voice. Suddenly, the violent whiplash sound cracks, and the camera cuts to her upturned face, and the scene almost mimics the promise of redemption offered by the last lines in the Tagore song. This is the first time in the film Neeta bursts into tears. The audience is left in a state of heightened emotion, connecting Neeta\u2019s pain not only with the family\u2019s oppressive structure but also with the post-independence predicament of a \u201cdivided, debilitated Bengal.\u201d The r\u0101gas, folk music, and Tagore songs intertwine with choric chants, ambient noises, and sound effects\u2014<\/em>thus creating an intense musical dialogue in the film. This dialogue gives voice to the unspoken thoughts and emotions of the characters situating heartbreaks in a wider social and cultural context.<\/p>\n

\"\"The use of aural and musical motifs in the film alters the imagery into an almost transcendent allegorical significance while connecting it to performances of Hindustani classical music. The entire visual, musical, and aural compositions thus collide, interact, and evolve, creating symbolic associations that cannot be reduced to linear reasoning. R\u0101ga verses, a unique feature of the classical Indian music tradition, are used throughout the film, and its performance is ornamental. The start is slow and then moves into a more expansive and rhythmic mode, gradually increasing in tempo to reach a fervent climax before collapsing into silence. In Indian tradition, r\u0101gas are contemplated to have the power to color the mind<\/em>. Ritwik uses fragments of the \u201cR\u0101ga Hamsadhwani\u201d (\u201cThe Call of Swans\u201d) during the film to evoke certain feelings and ideas within the spectators, as well as establish a symbolic association with season and time. The development of the r\u0101ga through fragments establishes Shankar\u2019s progress as an artist. In the beginning of the film, when we see him practicing his scales by the lake, he sounds unsure and stops midway to pick up the melody again. At the end of the film, the melody reaches its complete expression and confidence when Shankar returns to the refugee colony after establishing himself as a successful singer in Bombay\u2014<\/em>in sharp contrast to his sister\u2019s plunging trajectory.<\/p>\n

Eventually, Neeta contracts tuberculosis. Upon learning of her illness, her father acts with rage and mournfully suggests that she leave home. The heartless act is a contradiction: it\u2019s driven by love for his daughter and grief over his inability to protect her. The English-language subtitles cannot perfectly capture the moment when he intends Neeta to leave and says: \u201cA child will be born in this house,\u201d meaning he is actually questioning his family\u2019s rightness to nurture a newborn in this house. Neeta picks up her most treasured belonging\u2014<\/em>a photograph with her brother in the mountains taken during a trip to a hill station. She shares her fondness for the mountains with Shanat at the beginning of the film, and she cherishes the memory of watching a picturesque sunrise from a mountain peak after a long hike. Later, in another scene, she tells Shankar about her dream to revisit the mountains when he becomes successful. Neeta\u2019s childlike plea to her brother to take her to the mountains might remind a Bengali viewer of Bibhutibushan Bandopadhyay\u2019s Panther Panchali<\/em> (The Song of the Roads<\/em>), the classic novel that inspired Satyajit Ray\u2019s first film. In the novel, ill teenager Durga, who lives in a rural village, tells her brother Apu about her dream to see a train when she recovers. Ultimately, Durga dies without seeing a train (unlike in the film). In Ritwik\u2019s film, Neeta finally sees the hills from a sanatorium, the place of her death.<\/p>\n

Towards the end of Meghe Dhaka Tara<\/em>, we see Neeta sitting on a rock as her brother Shankar visits her at the sanatorium in the hill station of Shillong (the northeast part of India and the capital of Meghalaya). Shankar tries to distract her with chitchat and share amusing details about their mischievous nephew, Geeta\u2019s son, a toddler. Neeta smiles at first, but then she suddenly cries out and breaks down to her brother, \u201cBut I did want to live! Please tell me that I will live, just tell me once that I will live!\u201d<\/p>\n

Her desperate cry echoes through the landscape as if the mountains endure the pain with her. The camera scans the surroundings in a 360-degree turn. Manishita Dass beautifully wrote in her book about the film that the echoes reminded her of lines from a well-known Bengali poem, \u201cJanani Jantrona\u201d (\u201cMother Misery\u201d): \u201cI asked for life but only got the keening of the wind.\u201d Dass writes, \u201cThrough this hyper-melodramatic articulation of Neeta\u2019s desire to live, Ghatak not only expresses his personal anguish over the Partition but also registers his protest against what he deemed to be a mockery of independence and the ongoing destruction of a collective way of life.\u201d Neeta\u2019s disembodied voice evokes the shattered dreams of a generation of displaced Bengalis caught in the conflicts of history. Brilliant, curious, and creative students gave up their dreams of becoming historians or mathematicians to take on familial responsibilities in the wake of their newly formulated country. They have suffered and accepted their fate in silence with discreet courage and distressing grace, similar to Neeta\u2019s reaction to adversity. Meghe Dhaka Tara<\/em> leaves us in the theater of history with a timeless appeal, denouncing the injustices and betrayals of every day, endured by women like Neeta not only in Ritwik\u2019s time but also in our own.<\/p>\n

\n

Bibliography:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ahmed, Omar. Studying Indian Cinema<\/em>. Columbia University Press, 2015.<\/p>\n

Dasgupta, Chidananda. “Cinema, Marxism, and the Mother Goddess.” India International Centre Quarterly<\/em>, 12.3 (1985): 249-264.<\/p>\n

Dass, Manishita. The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara)<\/em>. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.<\/p>\n

Mukherjee, Victor. “The Muted Voice of a Refugee Woman: Looking at Ritwik Ghatak\u2019s Meghe Dhaka Tara through the Feminist Lens.\u201d The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 8 (2017): 976-8165<\/em><\/p>\n

Raychaudhuri, Anindya. “Resisting the resistible: re-writing myths of partition in the works of Ritwik Ghatak.” Social Semiotics, <\/em>19.4 (2009): 469-481.<\/p>\n

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Graham Riach. Can the subaltern speak?<\/em> Macat International Limited, 2016.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\"\"<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maaisha Osman is a health care journalist based in Boston. She has written for Boston Globe Media\u2019s STAT News, Scope, and Point of View Magazine. A lifelong cin\u00e9phile, she dreams of writing book of essays on films by her favorite directors like Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Satyajit Ray, Rwitik Ghatak, Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, Wong Kar-wai, and others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), by visionary Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, or just Ritwik for Bengalis, powerfully captures the despair of being in a constant state of transience. It\u2019s a film about the pervasive sense of embitterment over the newly drawn border and the traumatic terms on which independence from British rule had finally been won in India. Undivided Bengal was perceived in British India as a region with sectarian conflicts between Hindu and Muslim segments of the population\u2014incorporated within a Bengali cultural and linguistic identity but carved into two separate territorial entities in 1947. East Bengal (now Bangladesh) formed the eastern wing of Pakistan, and West Bengal became a part of India. Bengalis such as Ritwik\u2014who migrated to West Bengal during the 1940s but had deep roots in East Bengal\u2014saw their homeland become a foreign country overnight. Many refugees settled in Calcutta, taking over swampy land in the eastern peripheries of the city to build \u2018refugee colonies\u2019\u2014the crumbling settlements that we see in Meghe Dhaka Tara\u2014and struggling to maintain their dignity. Meghe Dhaka Tara tells the story of Neeta (Supriya Choudhury), the eldest daughter of a downwardly mobile Hindu middle-class family, who barely keeps her family […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","topic-film-editorials"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nChimeras of Independence in Ritwik\u2019s The Cloud-Capped Star | Deep Focus Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.deepfocusreview.com\/chimeras-independence-ritwiks-cloud-capped-star\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Chimeras of Independence in Ritwik\u2019s The Cloud-Capped Star\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), by visionary Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, or just Ritwik for Bengalis, powerfully captures the despair of being in a constant state of transience. It\u2019s a film about the pervasive sense of embitterment over the newly drawn border and the traumatic terms on which independence from British rule had finally been won in India. Undivided Bengal was perceived in British India as a region with sectarian conflicts between Hindu and Muslim segments of the population\u2014incorporated within a Bengali cultural and linguistic identity but carved into two separate territorial entities in 1947. East Bengal (now Bangladesh) formed the eastern wing of Pakistan, and West Bengal became a part of India. Bengalis such as Ritwik\u2014who migrated to West Bengal during the 1940s but had deep roots in East Bengal\u2014saw their homeland become a foreign country overnight. Many refugees settled in Calcutta, taking over swampy land in the eastern peripheries of the city to build \u2018refugee colonies\u2019\u2014the crumbling settlements that we see in Meghe Dhaka Tara\u2014and struggling to maintain their dignity. Meghe Dhaka Tara tells the story of Neeta (Supriya Choudhury), the eldest daughter of a downwardly mobile Hindu middle-class family, who barely keeps her family […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.deepfocusreview.com\/chimeras-independence-ritwiks-cloud-capped-star\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Deep Focus Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2021-09-06T14:43:23+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-08-15T14:49:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.deepfocusreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/cloud-capped-star-2.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Maaisha Osman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Maaisha Osman\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta 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It\u2019s a film about the pervasive sense of embitterment over the newly drawn border and the traumatic terms on which independence from British rule had finally been won in India. Undivided Bengal was perceived in British India as a region with sectarian conflicts between Hindu and Muslim segments of the population\u2014incorporated within a Bengali cultural and linguistic identity but carved into two separate territorial entities in 1947. East Bengal (now Bangladesh) formed the eastern wing of Pakistan, and West Bengal became a part of India. Bengalis such as Ritwik\u2014who migrated to West Bengal during the 1940s but had deep roots in East Bengal\u2014saw their homeland become a foreign country overnight. Many refugees settled in Calcutta, taking over swampy land in the eastern peripheries of the city to build \u2018refugee colonies\u2019\u2014the crumbling settlements that we see in Meghe Dhaka Tara\u2014and struggling to maintain their dignity. 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