Limits of Representation: Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha

Moinak Biswas

Philosophy East and West, Volume 71, Number 1, January 2021, pp. 151-172
(Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2021.0008

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/777893

[ Access provided at 1 Feb 2021 11:00 GMT from University of California , Santa Barbara ]
Limits of Representation: Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha

Moinak Biswas
Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
moinak.biswas@gmail.com

In his memorable “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” John Berger wrote that
cinema was the twentieth century’s own narrative art because it was a
century of displacement. He saw a profound connection between the
disappearance of people and an art that transports us elsewhere:
Film was invented a hundred years ago. During this time people all over the
world have travelled on a scale that is unprecedented since the establishment of
the first towns, when the nomads became sedentary. . . . [M]ostly, the travelling
has been done under coercion. Displacements of whole populations. Refugees
from famine or war. Wave after wave of emigrants, emigrating for either
political or economic reasons but emigrating for survival. Ours is the century of
enforced travel. I would go further and say that ours is a century of
disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close
to them, disappear over the horizon.1
The most realistic paintings, even when they depict vast landscapes and
oceans like Turner’s paintings do, collect the world and bring it home:
“Turner crosses the Alps and brings back an image of nature’s awesome-
ness.”2 This is the relationship between painting and the place where we
receive it. It comes and meets us ‘here’ in an eternal present. The cinema,
on the other hand, takes us away from where we are to the scene. Theatre,
Berger says, brings the same actors to us to re-enact the same drama in a
season. It is imbued with a sense of ritual return. The cinema, on the other
hand, transports its audience “individually, singly, out of the theatre towards
the unknown. . . . The screen, as soon as the lights go out, is no longer a
surface but a space . . . more like a sky. A sky filled with events and people.”3
In the cinema we travel. Editing in cinema takes us through displacement.
Sound, with its ability to relate to things absent, can also evoke the elsewhere.
Berger reads all cinema phenomenologically in the essay, but, remark-
ably, he also underlines a historical connection: a century of leaving home,
the homeland. In the conclusion he brings back the theme of migration and
goes farther afield looking for the subject of cinema: “Its essential subject—
in our century of disappearances—is the soul to which it offers a global
refuge. This I believe is the key to its longing and its appeal.”4

Philosophy East & West Volume 71, Number 1 January 2021 151–172 151
© 2021 by University of Hawai‘i Press
 I would like to take this as a cue to write on a filmmaker who made the
loss of homeland an abiding theme in his work. What Berger saw as a deep
connection between the twentieth-century experience of the millions and
the cinema became an intuitive source of creativity with this artist. I have in
mind the Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976) and his 1962 film
Subarnarekha (The golden line). Ghatak managed to make only eight feature
films and a few documentaries in a life troubled by box office failures,
alcoholism, and illness. Largely ignored in his lifetime by critics, his
reputation has grown internationally since the 1980s. A major focus of the
literature on Ghatak is the way his cinema responded to the event of the
partition of India/Bengal in 1947. Subarnarekha is considered the third part
of a trilogy on partition, the other two being Megha Dhaka Tara (Cloud-
capped star) (1960) and Komal Gandhar (Gandhar sublime) (1961).
As an artist of the left, emerging out of the Indian radical arts movement
of the 1940s, Ghatak felt compelled to react to the experience of uprooting
and suffering caused by the partition. But he chose to extend the theme of
uprooting to that of the universal predicament of homelessness, and to treat
it as the source of an all-around misery. This did not find favor with critics,
who felt he was obsessing over a single event rather than looking at larger
historical processes or political questions. However, a close look reveals the
obsession to be not so much with the event itself as with the traces in which
it lived on, with lives fatefully altered, individuals laboring under circum-
stances beyond their control, communities fallen into disintegration. Ghatak
was not interested in a sociological investigation of partition but in turning it
into an event that could grow in aesthetic contemplation, take on ‘mythical’
proportions, if we consider myth not as falsehood or fantasy but as a
narrative and iconic configuration that holds a relatively inaccessible truth
by its immediate manifestations. Films that work on such principles while
training their sight on history pose a special challenge to representation.
I would like to make some sense of that challenge in this essay. The
question of representation gets caught in a dyad when we think of films. We
think in terms of reality and image, where the first term, even when it is
something intangible (feelings, ideas), is thought to have a phenomenal
shape and a finished nature. Reality either has a physical form to offer to
representation or has a physical anchor. Feelings and ideas, for instance, are
anchored in characters. There are innumerable films that ‘capture’ historical
experience of the last century: the great wars, or something like the Indian
partition (which has been brought to the screen in many films in the last few
decades). Ghatak’s films avoid representation as capture so far as historical
experience is concerned. They present the traces of an event like the
partition, traces that pass into lives in such a way that one cannot logically
follow them back to the origin. Ghatak seems to be exploring dislocation
itself, which he calls homelessness. How does one portray something like
homelessness as a general symptom of civilization in the twentieth century?

152 Philosophy East & West

The answer, I would suggest, lies in an approach where representation is
‘not in place’ since its object is also not really present. I suggest that this
approach establishes ‘connections’ on many planes so that history is no
longer understood as a line of causality. Thriving on emerging connections
(coincidences being one set), at certain moments Subarnarekha ends up
mirroring consciousness, which is understood here as a space of uncon-
strained connection/recombination. The director made this space partially
independent of characters. I see this as philosophical power of cinema,
which is different from films presenting philosophical thought. It is a
potential. Thinking does not have finished objects, it is suggested only in the
intervals and gaps we talk about.
Let us return to the question of Ghatak’s obsession. Did Ritwik Ghatak
return to the partition in his films because he felt he was not being able to
capture it adequately? One could answer the question in more than one
way. A sense of inadequacy could also arise from a context of silence, not
necessarily from within his own film practice. It has been widely noted that
in the decades following independence, Indian arts remained more or less
silent about the partition. It was around its fiftieth anniversary that a slew of
writings and films on the event emerged, a trend that continues to this day.5
The second answer to the question has already been indicated. Ghatak
returned to it since he saw partition as an ongoing process. The third reason
for the return could be the adoption of return itself as a mode of
approaching the object. How does one approach the sense of loss, absence,
without circling around it?
But did Ghatak make many films ‘about’ partition? Only three of the
eight feature films—Bari Theke Paliye (The runaway) (1959), Komal
Gandhar, and Subarnarekha—make direct reference to the partition. Meghe
Dhaka Tara is set in a refugee neighborhood, a ‘colony’, as they are called,
but does not mention partition. An interesting principle of construction of
the object emerges from this: partition is in the people, it is an event in that
flowing sense, not a happening to be captured. Ghatak’s cinema attended to
the evidence of life lived in the wake of something that divided a people,
barred them from relating to the world the way they had for generations. In
their new homes they could not see the same sky—as a character in his play
Dalil (Document) (1952) says (the same dialogue, incidentally, is repeated in
a play within Komal Gandhar). Ghatak wrote in an essay on Komal Gandhar
that his intention was to point to the “homeless dimension of life.”6 His
contemporaries were puzzled to find him attributing all the decay and crisis
of the post-independence decades to one fundamental misfortune, as he
often did in his essays and interviews. Contemporary social critics looked for
an economic and political explanation of the deepening crises of the
independent nation. Why would an artist choose to have such a vision of
history? If it was an enigma to Ghatak’s critics, it remains one to make sense
of.

Moinak Biswas 153

 We could begin by reminding ourselves that this is an artistic vision of
history. This obvious fact is frequently forgotten when political arguments
are made. It is forgotten that representation in history writing is not the only
representation of history. This is one reason why I bring the word ‘myth’
back into discussion even though it does not have much critical currency
now.7 In the aesthetic understanding of historical experience, which is no
less valid historically or politically, local experiences resonate with age-old
ones, and unless one is inclined to name all the moments in history involved
in the process, and wants rather to capture the resonance itself, myth
becomes a useful device.
The challenge in this case was threefold: building an aesthetic response
to the displacement that Ghatak’s community did not have a language
for talking about; presenting something that could not be captured
through direct portrayal; and presenting homelessness as a universal
symptom, a process expanding geographically, historically, and symboli-
cally. Our task in this essay is to examine the entanglement of the aesthetic
and political aspects of representation that informed Ghatak’s project, and
to bring under scrutiny (one more time) the limits of representation as the
film illuminates them. We suggest that as cinema throws light on such
limits, it enables thinking. The filmmaker was deeply aware of the
contemplative dimensions of his work, even though in the face of
incomprehension and rejection, he was not sure how far he succeeded.
The first reaction to Ghatak’s cinema is always overwhelmingly emotional,
but curiously enough, he remains one of the few philosophically inclined
filmmakers we encounter in Indian cinema. Not only the films but also his
writings bear testimony to that.
We shall look at a few essays he wrote in the mid-1960s, during the
long interregnum when he could not make films. They convey his strong
belief that films are modes of contemplation. The epic form that he was
seeking in cinema, for instance, was interrogative and reflective. Here is a
passage from “Music in Indian Cinema and the Epic Approach”:
[W]e are an epic people. We like to sprawl, we are not much involved in story-
intrigues, we like to be re-told the same myths and legends again and again.
We, as a people, are not much sold on the ‘what’ of the thing, but the ‘why’
and ‘how’ of it. This is the epic attitude.
So the basic folk forms—forms which the latter-day vulgarizations developed,
along with devastating and epoch-making social and political changes, and
which the early filmmaking aped and further bowdlerized, are always kaleido-
scopic, pageant-like, relaxed, discursive, and their contents have been very well
known for thousands of years.8

It could be useful to mention that Ghatak does not find it difficult to reflect
on the Indian epic tradition and talk about the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht
in the same breath. In his films and essays, he shows an abiding interest in

154 Philosophy East & West

Indian philosophical traditions, but he also partook of a global twentieth-
century modernism in the arts.

II

A brief outline of the story is in order. Subarnarekha begins in a refugee

colony. Iswar, a leader of the refugees struggling for survival, adopts
Abhiram, a young boy forcibly separated from his mother by people trying
to evict them. Abhiram is of the same age as Sita, Iswar’s sister. Iswar gets
an offer from a rich college friend of a job in a village outside the border
of Bengal. His departure is seen as a betrayal by the fellow refugees. His
friend Haraprasad calls him a “deserter.” They make their new home in a
mill area by the river Subarnarekha. Abhiram and Sita grow up and fall in
love with each other. Abhiram also discovers that the mother he was taken
away from is a ‘bagdi’, belonging to the lowest rung in caste hierarchy.
Iswar is opposed to their marriage; he tries to marry Sita off to someone
else. The two lovers elope. They end up in a slum in Calcutta. Abhiram
takes up a bus driver’s job and gets killed in an accident. Meanwhile, a
lonely and devastated Iswar tries to commit suicide. His refugee friend
Haraprasad arrives before he can succeed. The cynical and broken
Haraprasad lures Iswar to the city of Calcutta in search of what he calls
“grotesque fun.” After a night of revelry, Iswar ends up at the door of Sita,
by now reduced to prostitution, as a customer. Sita slashes her own throat
and dies a horrible death. Iswar takes the blame for her death, but the
court absolves him of the charge. He returns to the village with Sita’s
young son Binu. The film ends on their trek back to their home by the
Subarnarekha.
That home is no longer Iswar’s since he has lost his job. The theme of
seeking a ‘new home’ is repeated throughout the film. The image of the last
journey of the aging Iswar and the young Binu over the hillocks into the
desolate landscape is paradoxically one of a beckoning elsewhere (Figure 1).
We hear chants from the Aitereya Upanishad on the soundtrack that say,
“Move on, keep moving.” Ghatak’s mythical thinking should be understood

Fig. 1.

Moinak Biswas 155

 in relation to the evocation of homeless wandering in the last images. The
ancient chant underlines the timelessness of what the image conveys. One is
reminded of Heidegger’s words: “The real plight of dwelling is indeed older
than the world wars with their destruction. . . . The real dwelling plight lies
in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they
must ever learn to dwell.”9
The standard mode of representing historical events, popularized by
Hollywood, proceeds on the assumption that an event is incidents plus
character, and however profound its dimensions it is measurable and
therefore directly representable. Such films run on the premise that
representation cannot contain absence or failure. The moment of narrative
modernism popularized by the French cinema of the New Wave developed
modes of responding to the traumatic memory of a world that had passed
through the Second World War. The method of ellipsis associated with the
New Wave films should perhaps be seen in this light—as a reconciliation of
the promise of direct capture in cinema and the impossibility of capturing
all. Alain Resnais’s method of displacing the event into faltering memory in
Night and Fog (1956) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) comes to mind. In
the New German Cinema or the New Latin American cinema, ellipsis often
dealt with the collective memory of unbearable historical experiences.
Ritwik Ghatak can be seen engaged in such modernist practice in his own
distinctive way. The dramatic turn of events in Subarnarekha is punctuated
with gaps. They are not exactly like the ellipses in a Resnais or a Godard
film, but neither should they be treated as familiar gaps indicating the
passage of time. They serve as the basis of a narration that is built upon
lives violently interrupted, and they indicate the unrepresentable aspect of
experience that haunts the collective. This is beyond individuals and never
gets rationally assimilated in personal lives. But it haunts, derails, even
destroys those lives.
Available modes of rational explanation must have appeared inadequate
to Ghatak for understanding what he saw as a pervasive crisis of Bengali/
Indian life. The new nation seemed to fail on basic questions of social
justice. For him, something more happened, collectives disintegrated,
individuals lost their sense of belonging, bonds were broken, the world had
become unfamiliar. This dimension of the story called for an epic approach,
he thought, not realist narration. To bring into a single configuration of loss
all that was happening, and to create life-affirmative gestures in the face of
annihilation, the director had to raise the partition to an ‘originary’, mythical
status. This made him abandon the relatively more realist style of Ajantrik
(The unmechanical) (1958), and adopt a form that incorporated operatic
elements, allegorized characters, fateful turns of plot, and dramatic satu-
ration of emotions. Serious filmmaking in India had been developing along a
realist path inspired by Italian neorealism and had only recently earned
international acclaim for it. The best example of this new realism was

156 Philosophy East & West

Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy. Ghatak was part of this new cinema of the
1950s. Therefore, his choice of form after Ajantrik appeared no less puzzling
than his understanding of the contemporary predicament.
He was a great admirer of Pather Panchali (1955), the first film of the
Apu Trilogy. But he wrote that he did not much like the ending of the film,
as he missed the “wanderer’s generous melody” of the original novel.10
Pather Panchali, a film praised by John Berger in his essay, ends with the
boy protagonist leaving his ancestral village with his parents. They will make
a new home in the holy city of Benaras, as we discover in the sequel.
Curiously, Ghatak did not find an adequate image of displacement in that
finale. Is it because the film suggests changing places, movement between
real locations, while he was looking for a pure, open-ended journey, a true
elsewhere that cannot be named? If we cannot name the place that beckons
us, how do we represent it in the cinema? Places are the most real things in
film, more than time or action. We are not faced with the fantastic here, but
the fact that imagination exists. How does cinema engage with imagination
‘taking place’?
Ghatak was an even greater admirer of Ray’s second film in the trilogy,
Aparajito (Unvanquished) (1956). He discussed one of the last scenes of
that film in a review of Siegfried Kracauer’s book Theory of Film:
Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), a landmark of realist film theory.11
The protagonist Apu, after he loses his mother, his last connection to his
family and the village, sees the reflection of the constellation Orion in a
pond. Ghatak found in this a refutation of Kracauer’s thesis that the camera
primarily registers surface reality. He talked about the same scene in an
interview where he explained that Orion (’Kalpurush’ in Bengali), with its
Upanishadic association, is a call to leave, to embark upon an unknown
journey.12 The place of such things is in the recesses of what he called the
“cultural complex.” Ghatak often makes a case in his essays for a cinema
that delves into the processes of consciousness. For such a filmmaker,
representation of what comes into being, what lies as a possibility, was a
task to be taken on. It is curious that someone who mourned the loss of
home so profoundly also admired the dimension of wandering. The
narrated content, the diegesis of the film, holds on to one impulse while
the movement embodies another. All his partition films have this double
pull.13
The melodramatic elements employed in his films between 1959 and
1962 confused his critics because they seemed to trivialize matters. It is
usually argued on Ghatak’s behalf that he used melodrama to critically
overturn it, to do something else.14 But this seems to be only a partial
understanding of his method. He did not really adopt the melodramatic form
of popular cinema, but only worked with elements of narration and
performance shared by that cinema. For him, the source was the living
traditions of epic narration where discursive passages mix with performance

Moinak Biswas 157

 and high drama, where characters are etched in bold outlines, and choric
supplements follow individual destiny. Moreover, he had a lifelong
association with the theatre, from which he often drew inspiration. Given
his admiration for Sergei Eisenstein and Brecht, this should not come as a
surprise. To combine an emotionally saturated dramatic narration with
philosophical reflection—one could summarize Ghatak’s method. I would
like to see this as a modernist moment in Indian cinema, if we are prepared
to take modernism as something with multiple beginnings and as internally
heterogeneous.
Melodrama is thought to make room for excess. Rather than explaining
away excess as a disguise for something else, one should acknowledge its
presence in relation to an unassimilated, unutterable content in Ghatak’s films.
Melodrama is inadequate for the truly tragic dimensions of the plots of Meghe
Dhaka Tara or Subarnarekha. These films work on a substance that finally cuts
through the surface of sentiment, exploding like a primal scream. One
remembers Nita’s last cry for life in Meghe Dhaka Tara as she says to her
brother “I want to live”; or the howling Iswar breaking down in the courtyard
after his sister kills herself in Subarnarekha; or the piercing noise over rapid
camera movement in the same film as Abhiram’s mother dies on a railway
platform. The way they are treated as auditory and visual events signals a
withdrawal from the unfolding story of ordinary lives, indicating a passage
through social existence into the primordial affects that envelop it. So far as
such scenes are concerned, there is a connection between the tragic content
and kinship in Ghatak. I have discussed this in some detail elsewhere.15
For our present purpose, let us consider the idea that rather than
appearing as climaxes to the line of emotional development these are
ruptures in Ghatak’s cinema. They signify the point where realization dawns
that the suffering is too great to be contained within the tonal scale of the
story. These are the truly challenging dimensions of excess, not the
sentimental parts. The apparatus of cinema—sound, camera movement (the
long pan over Nita’s cry, the crane shot over Iswar’s howl, the frenetic
camera movement as Abhiram’s mother dies), editing, acting—performs the
task of representation, thereby pointing to the latter’s limits. I use the word
‘perform’ here to draw a distinction from visual or aural capture, from the
idea of representation where we place the film eye in relation to an object
out there. On the other hand, performance here is not confined to character
or actor. In these scenes, the filmic body folds in and throws up something
it had been storing. Commercial melodrama would not dare enter this
territory for the experience of pain it produces. One is not surprised to learn
that Subarnarekha, like most of Ghatak’s films, was a failure at the box
office. One also understands why there was so little talk of partition in art
and literature in the decades that followed.
One must add that this ‘performance’ is not akin to what film theorists
used to call the hysteric dimension of melodrama, as it is not an instance of

158 Philosophy East & West

repressed individual emotions bursting forth in hyperbolic expression or
spectacular mise-en-scène.16 It comes to stand for the untold collective
story. Ghatak’s one representational task was to speak of the difficulty of
speaking. One way of doing so was to recast the story in mythical
dimensions. He felt that the experience of interruption of life that his
community went through resonated with the deepest symbolic reserve of the
collective. His reading of Jung-inspired comparative mythology, which had
considerable influence in those days, made him believe that this symbolic
reserve is found in archetypal stories and images. Subarnarekha has a scene
where Sita as a little girl suddenly confronts a Kali figure in an abandoned
airstrip, a relic from the Second World War. Ghatak writes:
All of a sudden, this fearsome figure of Kali appears before her. The shuddering
girl seeks refuge in the embrace of a passer-by. And then she learns that the
Kali figure is an impersonating “Bohurupi,” who puts on disguises in order to
earn his daily meal. He did not want to scare the “little sister,” just happened to
come upon her. . . . I somehow feel that our whole civilization has stumbled
upon that archetypal image of the Terrible Mother.17
As one records common lives in its aftermath, the event becomes a shadow.
Unlike films on partition made later (mostly from the 1990s on), Ghatak
never chose to show the migration, riots, and bloodshed. He almost never
reenacted historical moments in that form. The refugee colony as a setting,
or characters referring to 1947, act as simple representation. But when the
story moves away from the refugee environment, as happens in Subarnar-
ekha, as people find a way to escape that reality and find a life of relative
peace—how, then, does the theme of uprooting and splintering appear? It
could be instructive to proceed with this question.
Komal Gandhar (Gandhar sublime) (1961), the preceding film, also has an
underlying theme of escape from the crushing lower-middle-class existence.
Anasuya, the female protagonist, has a fiancé in Europe. Toward the end, she
almost leaves the city for this man: we see car shots of the road leading to the
airport. But in a magical reverse movement, not staged for our eyes, she arrives
at the suburban town where her comrades in radical theatre have come to
perform. Komal Gandhar is a film about union, marriage, about theatre
pitched against forces of separation. The startling ellipsis where her turning
back takes place without explanation, without even a visual clue, becomes
more intelligible when we remember the aesthetic and political meaning of
her movement. On one level, the film carries on a conversation with
Rabindranath Tagore’s essay on Kalidasa’s Sakuntala and Shakespeare’s
Miranda in The Tempest. Anasuya is a name taken from Abhijnansakuntalam.
On a more visible level, Anasuya’s devotion to theatre is inseparable from her
commitment to the daily struggle of the people that she witnesses. Hence, she
must return to her own. It is difficult, as Tagore says in his essay, to separate
Sakuntala from the nature that nurtured her.18

Moinak Biswas 159

 In Subarnarekha, the escape from the refugee colony spells disaster. The
three central characters, Iswar, Sita, and Abhiram, leave the city to find their
new home, as they call it. But they are forced to return and face the horror
lying at the core of the city. There are gaps in this movement when things
seem to happen but are not shown. Instead, we have signals of an
impending encounter with the terrible that the director speaks of.
As he turned to what he considered an epic form, Ghatak started weaving
strands of discourse around the narrative line. Unlike the familiar reflexive
cinema of modernism, these overlaying threads are not playful or ironic. They
are made of allusions and citations that create a horizon of echoes so that
words and action can reverberate with myth, poetry, and historical memory. I
would like to call this the first level of ‘thinking with cinema’ that Ghatak
attempted. It would take time to disentangle all the discursive threads present
in Subarnarekha. Let me point out only a few. The film begins with a title-card
saying the date is January 26, 1948. A refugee gathering is commemorating
the ‘Jalianwala Bagh’ massacre of 1919 by the British army. This unusual
announcement sets in motion a series of connections. The 26th of January two
years later will be Republic Day, the inauguration of the new constitution in
India. And on January 30, 1948, Gandhi will be assassinated. In one of the
early scenes, we see the news of Gandhi’s death arriving at a newspaper
office. As we cut back to the refugee colony, Haraprasad and Iswar are shown
reading the news. On the shot transition a voice on the soundtrack says, “Hey
Ram!”—the last words Gandhi uttered as he fell to the assassin’s bullets.
Toward the end, just after Sita kills herself, the same “Hey Ram” can be heard
on the soundtrack. Tagore’s allegorical poem “Sishutritha” is used in the
dialogue and the written scrolls that punctuate the film. Tagore wrote the
original English version of this long poem, “The Child,” in 1930 in Germany
for a screenplay at the request of the UFA studios. It was never filmed. He
adapted it to the Bengali “Sishutirtha” two years later. It should be noted here
that Tagore’s inspiration was a Passion play he saw in Germany, and the Child
in question is a Christ-like figure.
Toward the end of the film, we find Iswar and Haraprasad drinking in a
Bar. We hear ‘Patricia’, the theme music of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita
(1960) playing in the background as the two men talk about the
Upanishad. This is followed by a taxi ride through the night. Drunken
voices say how the present has forgotten the recent past even as sacred
texts in Sanskrit (the Kathopanishad and Ishopanishad) are mixed with
nonsense modern verse:
HARAPRASAD: Haven’t seen the Atom bomb.
ISWAR: Haven’t, haven’t they?
HARAPRASAD: Never. Haven’t seen the War, haven’t seen the Famine, haven’t seen
the riots, haven’t seen the Partition. . . Useless, that old hymn to the glory of
the Sun.

160 Philosophy East & West

 Fig. 2. Fig. 3.

It is useful to get a sense of this textual overlay because it presents history in

a different way than we are used to witnessing in films. And, more
importantly, as it constructs the object of representation through displace-
ment it makes room for consciousness to emerge as an object. Most of the
dialogue in the scene of the taxi ride is heard over passing blurred
streetlights (Figures 2 and 3). Blurring is a commonly used subjective shot
effect. Here, in this drunken haze, the perceiving subject is split. Not one
but two people are watching from inside the car. And there seems to be
more. The words spoken about erasure of memory of devastation, of events
only a little more than a decade old, issue forth from the consciousness of
the film itself, not only from the characters. They are commentaries on the
situation in this sense. The familiar technique of voice-over or subtitles exists
for authorial statements. The film does use the latter, but the voice here is
not voice-over in that sense. It is loosely tied to characters present on the
screen. The looseness creates a space where the film passes from story to
discourse—makes its thoughts known, as it were.
If pointing to an order of existing texts, cultural recall, inaugurates the
first level of thinking (we have to leave the unfolding narration to follow the
echoes coming from another time and place); the technique of partially
separating the voice from the body lays out the second plane of reflection in
the film. The director develops a method of construction that makes
processes of consciousness relatively independent of the individual. Un-
anchoring the voice from the individual is part of that method. A remarkable
instance occurs earlier in the film. Abhiram and Sita go to the Sal forest
where they express their love for each other for the first time. Such scenes
especially demand facial expression and a full rapport between the voice
and the body. But we keep watching the two from the back, or from an
angle where their mouths cannot be seen uttering the words (Figures 4
and 5). As their words turn into whisper, becoming one with the murmur of
the wind blowing through the Sal leaves. The surroundings seem to take
over the task of utterance. The sweeping pan away from the figure of Sita
toward the end of the scene makes for a final freeing of affect from the
person, releasing an ownerless emotion, as it has been called by Indian

Moinak Biswas 161

 Fig. 4. Fig. 5.

philosophers.19 It is also possible to see this as distribution of consciousness

over space, a principle the director followed from his second film, Ajantrik.
The pan makes a purely subjective connection between spaces, but a
moment’s reflection reveals that this subjectivity is not confined to Sita as an
individual. It seems to have an autonomy as a process, which I am trying to
see as a premise of thought to emerge in cinema. Space itself becomes a
contemplating instance.
In the same year, 1962, Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa Vie opened with
Anna Karina and Andre Labarthe speaking with their backs to the camera.
Ghatak could not have seen the film at the time, and he uses the technique
differently. But there are more than superficial affinities at work. It is usually
said that Godard’s work took a Brechtian turn from that film. Among other
things, the idea of the tableaux division in Vivre sa Vie was borrowed from
Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928). In a remarkable short essay “On
Subarnarekha,” written to defend the film against attacks, Ghatak mentioned
Brecht and his Threepenny Opera as an instance of representation without
recourse to realist fidelity.20 There are indeed several references to Brecht in
his writings as we have indicated earlier. In another essay, he wrote about
the coincidences in Subarnarekha as something akin to Brecht’s plays.21
The scrolls of text that appear on the screen at intervals come as narrator’s
intervention in Subarnarekha. They divide the plot into episodes, which
Ghatak likens to the English tradition of the Chronicle play. If making space for
consciousness is an aim of this orchestration of elements, one could ask, what
is a possible object for the consciousness to engage with? Subarnarekha invites
us to contemplate connections: connections between individual lives, between
individuals and historical movements, between nature and human agents. This
becomes legible on the third level of contemplation, one enabled mostly by
the structure of coincidences and temporal intervals in the film.
Coincidences, associated with the debased form of melodrama, were a
major reason for the adverse criticism that greeted the film. There are indeed
many of them: Abhiram discovering his estranged mother on the local
railway platform just before her death (thereby also discovering his low-caste
origin); Haraprasad arriving at Iswar’s quarters right when the latter was

162 Philosophy East & West

about to hang himself; Abhiram’s accidental death; Iswar turning up at Sita’s
door as a customer the day she is forced into prostitution; and so on. The
film seeks to build a form out of coincidences:
[T]he central event, the brother ending up at the doorstep of his sister in his
search for paid sex, is such a great coincidence that I thought of using
coincidence itself as a form in this film. I have tried to leave clues for the
audience about coincidences occurring in the film from the very outset. I have
injected connotations in the formal order of coincidences in order to make them
pregnant with meanings. . . .

If you remember the main point of the story you would agree that whoever the
brother might have visited would have been his sister after all. What has been
shown here is only a literal expression of that. The purpose here as well is to
signify the general in the specific.22

We do not associate coincidences with the historical, which is commonly

understood as a rational, causal unfolding. Ghatak seems to put another idea
of history in view whose workings look similar to fate because connections are
made in more than one direction, on more than one plane. Connections go
back and forth. Things do not evolve causally but seem to jump over space
and time. Let us go back to the question of aesthetics and politics of
representation. To avoid enacting history as events is an aesthetic choice; to
present history as the web of actualized or possible destinies in people’s lives
is also an aesthetic strategy. A political perception of the historical emerges
within the artistic process, as the moment of ‘dislocation’ is extended
metaphorically and universalized. The mythical resonance serves representa-
tional politics. The misfortune of one country stands for global homelessness.
The partition scattered people in such a way that accidental separations,
death, and chance meetings became the stuff of life. There is now a substantial
body of testimonies about the aftermath. Valuable new material is being added
as Dalit refugees are writing their part of the story. People did go through
unpredictable separations and chance unions as well as death and madness.
Abhiram’s mother is called Kaushalya.23 Ghatak’s familiar practice of
using allegorical names for characters takes on bold dimensions here. The
Rama of the epic is an ‘untouchable’ Dalit in the film. But as coincidences
function like a structure in the film, real-life stories are raised to the level of
abstraction—“Whoever the brother might have visited. . . .” They are caught
in a play of forces that has the power to name. A disavowal of this essential
encounter comes from those who “Haven’t seen the War, haven’t seen the
Famine, haven’t seen the riots, haven’t seen the Partition.” “They” are not
named. The subject is missing in these utterances. The film attempts
representation of a denial for which there is no visible agent.
It was indeed difficult to accept Subarnarekha. Apart from other things, it
was one of the most violent films anyone had seen until then. Sita’s death

Moinak Biswas 163

 Fig. 6. Fig. 7.

and Iswar’s devastation constitute a moment of eruption that Ghatak puts

together with consummate mastery of craft, forcing us to face the ultimate
horror (Figures 6 and 7).
If the relative silence on the experience of partition was on account of
horror, shame, and guilt (many survived violation, many turned into
perpetrators), this scene, coming right after the taxi ride under the blurred
lights of oblivion, seems to aim at shattering all silence. Shame, guilt, and
horror are its stuff. It is another form of generalization, displacing the large
collective experience into an episode of kinship tragedy. The exceptional
craft of the scene does acknowledge limits—one cannot show everything, as
it would benumb perception. But at the same time, it gives us something
unbearable to witness. One is reminded of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s
observation on the prohibition/impossibility of cinematic representation of
the Nazi death camps. He does not believe prohibition has any validity, or
that the impossibility is real. If one looks for aesthetic strategy to avoid
reducing the enormity of the horror one must first remember, he thinks, that
representation in the sense in which the West has understood it at least
since the Renaissance is not a reproduction of something out there, but the
presentation of an absence in what appears to be present.24

III

As we try to make sense of this nightmare, we realize there has been a

parallel story, a story not told. One must think of the episodic punctuation
(“Chronicle play” mode) at this point. It is common to leap over space and
time in narrative or use an episodic structure. In fact, our popular cinema
uses the latter quite compulsively so that each scene becomes something to
be enjoyed for its own attractions. This is sometimes seen as linearization
problem of the popular film form. But by using time gaps Subarnarekha does
not present a problem of either suggested occurrence (things must have
happened in the intervening period even though we do not see them) or of
ellipsis (nothing or something unknown happened which cannot be
grasped). It uses the gaps themselves as hints of a monumental movement.

164 Philosophy East & West

 The intervals also seem to present absence, what Indian philosophy calls
‘abhava’, as real. Another philosophically inclined filmmaker, Ghatak’s
student Mani Kaul, attempted a systematic application of the interval as a
creative principle of negation in his films. He worked on the interval
between the shots to begin with, something that we can find in the sequence
in the Sal forest in Subarnarekha. The Nyaya-Vaisheshika ideas of abhava
played an important part in Kaul’s reflections on this method.25 A proper
assessment of this dimension of the interval, the interval between images, in
Ghatak’s work is beyond the scope of this essay, but the narrative interval is
not unconnected to this method of progression. In the intervals of narration
what is absent holds out the promise of a substance that is real but
something that regular instruments of knowledge cannot grasp. To address
the non-existent in the gap of narration one needs to underline the limits of
such knowledge.26
After Sita’s encounter with the Kali figure on the abandoned airstrip, the
first inscription scroll appears. It reads: “Years pass by after this. . . .” As we
return to the story, the comic foreman of the factory informs Iswar that the
manager has gone mad and has been taken to the city for treatment. We see
the manager in question earlier as a quiet, elderly man, with the world’s
suffering etched on his face. The foreman first introduces him to Iswar as
someone touched in the head, who has withdrawn from the world since his
daughter eloped with a man. We also see him in the scene preceding the
scroll: he is the passer-by in whose embrace the terrified little Sita seeks
refuge. He holds her hand and walks down the airstrip toward the horizon
telling her the story of the Ramayana.
Iswar becomes the new manager. Sita and Abhiram have grown up. The
next scroll appears after Sita elopes with Abhiram: “A few more years pass
by,” it reads. As we return to the story, we see Iswar crossing paths with two
villagers. He casts a strange look at them, takes time to come to his senses
and return their greeting. As he leaves, one villager says he looks mad. The
other says he has the eyes of a murderer. The next scene is in the factory.
We find the foreman reading aloud the news of Yuri Gagarin’s space travel
from the newspaper. He comes and says to Iswar: “Look, look, the Russians
have sent someone called ‘Gogarin’ to the great void!” The newspaper
blocks half the face of this jester, with one bulging eye visible (Figure 8).
Iswar snatches the paper from his hands and throws it into the burning
furnace. This form of punctuation indicates an alternative set of connections,
not just the passage of time in the lives of the dramatis personae. Madness—
cosmic travel—the jester as herald. . . . There is provocation to rethink the
function of intervals here.
The scroll after Sita’s death reads: “Even this night has an end. Days roll
into months, months into years. . . .” Soon after this, Haraprasad will give a
half-philosophical, half-absurd explanation to a journalist trying to find out
why Iswar has been saying to the courts he was responsible for his sister’s

Moinak Biswas 165

 Fig. 8.

death. That Haraprasad is also a jester becomes clearer than ever at this
point. The curious thing is that he uses a line from Tagore’s “Sishutirtha”—“-
Mother, open the door”—to explain what Iswar is trying to tell the world
through his mea culpa. He cites the poem earlier at the time of Iswar’s
attempted suicide: “What of the night? No answer comes.” The last scroll
coming after this will quote the last lines of the poem, wishing victory to
“the newborn, the ever-living.” It sounds too didactic if we overlook the
conversation going on with the poem.
Iswar goes back to the “new home” with the orphaned son of Sita.
Orphans will be healed, Ghatak seems to have believed, and they will carry
the historical burden without the scars of oblivion. I am trying to understand
how, in aesthetic terms, one could harbor such hope. The intervals of time
in the film are not akin to the ellipses in European modernist cinema, just as
the weave of textual references is not reflexive in the sense in which we use
the word for that cinema. In the interval not only do the lives we see in the
film move on, but as the jesters appear to point out, madness visits, the void
beckons.
We have tried to suggest that films can think, or rather make us think with
them. This is the more profound aspect of the relationship between cinema
and philosophy, not the fact that some films put philosophical ideas into
action.27 Subarnarekha invites us to think the connectedness of things with it,
the structure of coincidences being a good example. Processes of thought
cannot be turned into objects to be seen, but they can be figured as space
created for contemplation. That the film was tracing out a space of reflection
becomes clear when these intervals work as a shortcut to madness and a leap
into the void. The deep recesses of consciousness materialize at the two
symmetrical moments of time transition discussed above. Imagination is also
figured by the same token. The imagination that harks back and conjures up
the Kali in the aerodrome, a relic of the Second World War, also produces the
fantasy of going into the great void, Gagarin’s journey.
The scene in the Sal forest where the voices of the lovers hang loose
and merge with the rustle of the wind provides us a good example of the
emergence of space of consciousness in cinematic terms. The latter is

166 Philosophy East & West

distinct from representation of what is already formed and finished. It does
not have an object, so to speak; it is better seen as a potential. It occupies
the gap between the body and the voice, between the human and the
surroundings that whisper, or the swiftly traveled path of the camera when
Sita stands up and sings out. At certain moments in Ghatak’s cinema,
emotions are no longer anchored to individual characters. And in a parallel
movement, consciousness emerges as space beyond the person. I would like
to go along with the deep allegorical charge of Subarnarekha and take the
liberty of suggesting that space can become a site of infinite recombination
in the intervals of expression.28

Notes

1 – John Berger, “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” (1982), in Selected Essays,

ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Vintage International, 2003), p. 474. Berger
was paying tribute to a passing century of cinema and speaking of it as
it is experienced in theatres. But I think it is possible to argue that even
the new modes of viewing have not erased the fundamental differences
between films and television shows, web series, or game videos, and
certainly not between films and painting or theatre. As we receive
films, especially those made within the cinematic ‘institution’, we turn
somewhat into cinematic spectators.
2 – Ibid., p. 475.
3 – Ibid.; italics in the original.
4 – Ibid., p. 482.
5 – Among books and articles, see Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of
Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: Hurst and Co.,
2000); Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, National-
ism and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, eds., The Trauma and the
Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, vols. 1 and 2 (Calcutta:
Stree, 2003 and 2009); and Mushirul Hasan, “Memories of a Fragmented
Nation: Rewriting the Histories of a Fragmented Nation,” in Edinburgh
Papers in South Asian Studies, no. 8 (1998). Many of these writers have
commented on the general silence about the partition maintained
socially. Ashis Nandy has attempted a psychological investigation of the
phenomenon; see Nandy, “Too Painful for Words?” The Sunday Times
Review, July 20, 1997. Nandy mentions Ghatak as an exception. Among
the films, one can name Train to Pakistan, directed by Pamela Rooks
(1998); Earth, directed by Deepa Mehta (1999); Gadar: Ek Prem Katha,
directed by Anil Sharma (2001); and Pinjar, directed by Chandraprakash
Dwivedi (2003).

Moinak Biswas 167

 6 – Ritwik Ghatak, “Komal Gandhar prasange” (Cinema, man, and more
[my translation]) in Chalacchitra manush ebang aro kichhu (Kolkata:
Dey’s Publishing, 2005), p. 143.
7 – Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in one of the first monographs on the director,
used the twin concepts of myth and epic to read his films. See
Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (Bombay: Screen
Unit, 1982).
8 – Ritwik Ghatak, “Music in Indian Cinema and the Epic Approach”
(1963), in Rows and Rows of Fences: Ritwik Ghatak on Cinema
(Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000), pp. 21–22.
9 – Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 161.
10 – Ritwik Ghatak, “Ekamatra Satyajit Ray” (Only Satyajit Ray [my trans-
lation]), in Chalacchitra manush ebang aro kichhu, p. 209.
11 – Ritwik Ghatak, “An Attitude to Life and an Attitude to Art,” in Rows
and Rows of Fences, p. 14.
12 – “Ritwik Ghatak-er sathe sakkhatkar” (An interview with Ritwik Ghatak),
Movie Montage (1967), collected in Chalacchitra manush ebang aro
kichhu, p. 240.
13 – In Bari theke paliye, the runaway boy rediscovers his home in the
village after experiencing exile in the city. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Nita
nurtures a deep desire for the mountains, which she finally gets to see
as her life runs out of her. Anasuya in Komal Gandhar struggles with
the pull toward a foreign land where her fiancé is waiting. Subarnar-
ekha draws out the central characters from the refugee shelter to a
desolate rural landscape.
14 – A recent example is the article on Ghatak by Ratik Asokan, “A New
Look at Ritwik Ghatak’s Bengal,” in New York Review of Books, online
edition, January 25, 2020.
15 – See Moinak Biswas, “Her Mother’s Son: Kinship and History in Ritwik
Ghatak” (2003), http://www.rouge.com.au/3/ghatak.html.
16 – See, e.g., Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minelli and Melodrama,” Screen
18, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 117–118.
17 – Ritwik Ghatak, “Human Society, Our Tradition, Film-Making, and My
Efforts” (1963), trans. Moinak Biswas, Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (Spring
2015): 17.
18 – Rabindranath Tagore, “Shakuntala,” in Prachin sahitya (1907). The
film’s title echoes the Tagore poem “Komal gandhar” from the book of
verse Punascha (1932/1961). Both are available at www.tagoreweb.in.

168 Philosophy East & West

19 – For an elaboration, see Arindam Chakrabarti, “Play, Pleasure, Pain:
Ownerless Emotions in Rasa-Aesthetics,” in History of Science,
Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, vol. 15, part 3, Science,
Literature and Aesthetics, ed. Amiya Dev (New Delhi: Centre for
Studies in Civilizations, 2009), pp. 189–202.
20 – Ritwik Ghatak, “On Subarnarekha” (1966), trans. Moinak Biswas,
Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 19.
21 – See Ritwik Ghatak, “Experimental Cinema and I” (1967), in Rows and
Rows of Fences, p. 34. He also found similar structures in Tagore’s novels;
see Ghatak, “My Films” (1967), in Rows and Rows of Fences, p. 51.
22 – “On Subarnarekha,” p. 19.
23 – Rama’s mother in the epic Ramanaya.
24 – Jean-Luc Nancy, “Forbidden Representation,” in The Ground of the
Image, trans. Jerry Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005),
pp. 28–40. Another contemporary philosopher, Jacques Rancière, has
also refuted the notion that there are unrepresentable subjects.
According to him, it is a matter of what he calls “regimes” of art,
which decide what is representable. See Rancière, “Are Some Things
Unrepresentable?” in The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliot
(New Delhi: Navayana, 2010), pp. 109–138.
25 – See Mani Kaul, “Seen from Nowhere,” in Kapila Vatsyana, ed.,
Concepts of Space, Ancient and Modern (New Delhi: Abhinav
Publicatons, 1991), pp. 415–428.
26 – For a recent treatment of the reality of negation and absence see
Arindam Chakrabarti, “Absence, Non-Existence, and Other Negative
Things,” in Realisms Interlinked: Objects, Subjects, and Other Subjects
(London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 285-292. Also See Birgitt Kellner,
“Negation in Indian Philosophy” (2005), available at www.encyclope
dia.com.
27 – Several philosophers have inspired this new line of inquiry and
contributed to the flourishing field of film philosophy. See, e.g., Gilles
Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989);
Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg,
2006); Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, The Time After, trans. Erik Beranek
(Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013); Jacques Rancière, The Future of the
Image (New Delhi: Navayana, 2010); Jacques Rancière, Intervals of
Cinema, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2019); Alain Badiou,

Moinak Biswas 169

 Cinema, trans. Susan Spitzer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); and Jean-
Luc Nancy and Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kiarostami: The Evidence of
Film (Paris: Klinksieck, 2007).
28 – For a discussion of space as ‘akasa’, as a space of unconstrained
recombination, see Arindam Chakrabarti, “Where am I? Three Spaces
in the Metaphysics of the Mokṣopāya,” in Engaged Emancipation:
Mind, Morals, and Make-Believe in the Mokṣopāya (Yogavāsiṣt. ha), ed.
Christopher Key Chapple and Arindam Chakrabarti (New York: SUNY
Press, 2015).

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Press.
Bagchi, Jasodhara, and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, eds. 2003/2009. The Trauma
and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India. Vols. 1 and 2.
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Amiya Dev, pp. 189–202. New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations.
———. 2015. “Where am I? Three Spaces in the Metaphysics of the
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———. 2020. “Absence, Non-Existence, and Other Negative Things.” In
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170 Philosophy East & West

———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson
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Moinak Biswas 171

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———. 2010a. “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” In The Future of the
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———. 2019. Intervals of Cinema. Translated by John Howe. London:
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———. 1932/1961. “Komal gandhar.” In Punascha. www.tagoreweb.in.

172 Philosophy East & West