Table Of ContentTHE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR vii
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Daniela Berghahn and John Hill for
encouraging me to write this book; Rebecca Barden at the BFI, for
commissioning it and attentively steering it to publication; Sophia
Contento for preparing the visual material for it; and Maitreesh
Ghatak for going beyond the call of family duty in helping me
weather the emotional cloudbursts that – not surprisingly, given the
personal resonances of the book’s subject – accompanied the process
of writing it.
The book draws on archival research supported by a British
Academy Research Grant, and on material from two of my essays:
‘Unsettling Images: Cinematic Theatricality in Ritwik Ghatak’s
Films’ (Screen 58:1, Spring 2017) and ‘The Cloud-Capped Star:
Ritwik Ghatak on the Horizon of Global Art Cinema’ (in Global Art
Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl
Schoonover, Oxford University Press, 2010).
viii BFI FILM CLASSICS
Prefatory Note/Synopsis
Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, Ritwik Ghatak, 1960,
Bengali) has been hailed as ‘a modern masterpiece’ and ‘one of the
great classics of world cinema’ (BFI), ‘an extraordinary, revelatory
work’ (Adrian Martin) and ‘one of the five or six greatest melodramas
in cinema history’ (Serge Daney).1 It is arguably the best-known
film by the visionary Bengali film-maker Ritwik Ghatak (1925–76),
whose ‘seismographic renderings of trauma’2 have come to haunt
world cinema and whose shadow looms large over India’s alternative
film culture. The BFI’s decision to release a DVD version in 2002
Neeta in Meghe Dhaka Tara/The Cloud-Capped Star (1960)
THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR ix
and the recent digital restoration of the film undertaken by Criterion
in collaboration with the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project
indicate the film’s exalted position in the canon of world cinema.
Meghe Dhaka Tara tells the story of Neeta (Supriya Chaudhuri),
the eldest daughter of a downwardly mobile middle-class Hindu
family from East Bengal, displaced by the Partition of India and
struggling to survive in a refugee settlement on the outskirts of
Calcutta in the 1950s. Even as a postgraduate student, Neeta largely
bears the burden of keeping the family financially afloat. Her older
brother Shankar (Anil Chattopadhyaya), who would normally have
assumed the responsibility of supporting the family, spends his days
practising Indian classical music and dreaming of becoming a great
singer, with the encouragement of Neeta, who believes him to be a
genius. Their mother (Geeta Dey) is apprehensive about what would
happen to the family if and when Neeta leaves home to marry her
long-time suitor, Sanat (Niranjan Ray), an ex-student of her father’s
and a research scientist. Sanat describes Neeta as ‘a cloud-capped
star’ (‘meghe dhaka tara’) in a billet-doux: ‘I didn’t 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.’ This romantic metaphor acquires a poignant irony as
a chain of events not only reveals the shallowness of Sanat’s love for
Neeta but also invests this seemingly ordinary young woman with a
tragically mythic aura.
Through various twists and turns of the plot, Neeta finds
herself trapped within her dual role as a provider and a nurturer
as her family becomes even more dependent on her earnings. Her
father (Bijon Bhattacharya), an eccentric schoolmaster emblematic
of a waning Bengali liberal humanism, and her younger brother,
Montu (Dwiju Bhawal), a millworker representative of the newly-
déclassé Bengali petit bourgeoisie, have debilitating accidents and lose
their jobs. Now the family’s sole breadwinner, Neeta abandons her
postgraduate studies in order to take up full-time employment and
postpones her marriage to Sanat. Unwilling to wait for Neeta, who
x BFI FILM CLASSICS
cannot bring herself to forsake her family, Sanat ends up marrying
her younger sister, Geeta (Geeta Ghatak), with the tacit support and
connivance of Neeta’s mother, who sees this as a perfect solution
to her dilemma. An indignant Shankar leaves home in protest and
Neeta’s doting father watches helplessly while Neeta continues to
shoulder her burden in stoic silence. The strains of her life eventually
take their toll. When Shankar returns from Bombay after establishing
his reputation as a classical singer, he finds Neeta wasting away with
tuberculosis, a condition that she has managed to conceal from the
rest of the family. He whisks her away to a sanatorium in the hills but
it is too late to save her.
The film connects Neeta’s individual predicament to the
traumatic aftermath of the Partition of India (1947) and a gendered
critique of the family through an aesthetic that combines the
emotional jolts of melodrama with a neo-realist concern for the
everyday and modernist strategies of fragmentation.
Note: While the city of Calcutta was officially renamed Kolkata in
2001, I have used ‘Calcutta’ when referring to the city in the pre-2001
period.
THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR 1
1 Introduction: Echoes of a Cry
Towards the end of Meghe Dhaka Tara, we see the protagonist,
Neeta, on the grounds of a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in
the hill station of Shillong, far away from the grimness of her family
home in a refugee colony near Calcutta. She sits quietly on a rock
as her brother, Shankar, who has come to visit her, tries to distract
her with cheerful chit-chat about the family, especially about the
mischievous antics of their young nephew, Geeta and Sanat’s son.
Suddenly, the usually stoic and reserved Neeta cries out, ‘But I did
want to live!’ and breaks down, clinging to her brother, imploring
Neeta’s outburst: ‘I want to live!’
2 BFI FILM CLASSICS
him to assure her that she will live: ‘Please tell me that I’ll live, just tell
me once that I’ll live! I want to live! I want to live!’ Her desperate yet
defiant cry echoes through the landscape, as the camera pans across
the surrounding mountains in a dizzying 360-degree turn. Even after
her visual image disappears from the screen, Neeta’s disembodied
voice reverberates in an empty space – and continues to do so in the
Bengali cultural imaginary. A recent Bengali newspaper article claims,
in appropriately melodramatic terms, that Neeta’s piercing cry ‘has
not only echoed through the hearts of Bengalis as a lament but over
the last fifty years, continued to inspire cornered men and women
whose hopes have been extinguished’.3
For many viewers familiar with the film’s historical and cultural
milieu, including myself, Neeta’s final, uncharacteristic outburst
of anguish evokes the thwarted desires and shattered dreams of a
generation of displaced Bengalis caught in the crossfire of history. This
generation was not a historical
abstraction to me as my parents
and some of our closest family
friends belonged to it. On seeing
Meghe Dhaka Tara for the first
time in my teens, I was struck by
the haunting parallels between
Neeta’s story and the lives of two
of my favourite aunts: one of my
mother’s dearest friends and her
older sister. Brilliant, articulate
and imaginative students who
were encouraged by their liberal
middle-class family to pursue
higher education, they had to give
up on their dreams of becoming
a historian and an economist,
respectively, in their late teens to
Original poster (Artwork: Khaled
shoulder family responsibilities
Choudhury)
THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR 3
in the wake of the Partition and their father’s death. They worked as
schoolteachers as they put themselves through college and raised their
younger siblings, and then until retirement; never married; and spent
their twilight years in a rented apartment, not having managed – despite
their frugal lifestyle – to save enough to afford the security of a home of
their own. Of course, they did not die young, like Neeta, nor were they
crushed by their circumstances. They lived long lives, translating their
left-liberal and proto-feminist principles into everyday practice; had a
formative impact on the generations of high school students they taught
and their surrogate nieces (my sister and I); and never spoke of their
disappointments or displayed any hint of bitterness. Nonetheless, their
faces get transposed onto Neeta’s every time I watch Meghe Dhaka
Tara, and her final scream always reminds me of the broken dreams and
lost horizons of hope that my aunts – and countless other women and
men – had accepted in silence, with a quiet courage and heart-rending
grace akin to Neeta’s habitual response to adversity.
Not surprisingly, given its social and emotional resonances and
unsettling power, Neeta’s climactic lament is routinely invoked in
tributes to the film’s director Ritwik Ghatak and in conversations
about his films. It is perhaps fitting that this cry of pain and defiance
has become emblematic of the oeuvre of a film-maker who repeatedly
described cinema as a means for ‘expressing my anger at the sorrows
and sufferings of my people’4 and as a medium that let him ‘shout
out’5 and give voice to ‘the screams of protest’6 that had ‘accumulated’
in his psyche as a result of observing the iniquities around him.
Ghatak, who came of age in Calcutta in the 1940s, tended to
blame the social, political and economic woes of contemporary Bengali
society on what he called ‘the great betrayal’: the Partition of the Indian
subcontinent in August 1947, which led to the creation of the new
sovereign nation-states of India and Pakistan and was accompanied by
widespread communal violence, resulting in the deaths of approximately
500,000–1 million people, and one of the largest mass displacements
in modern history, involving an estimated 12–15 million people.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Urdu poem ‘Subah-e-Azadi’ (‘Dawn of Freedom:
4 BFI FILM CLASSICS
Ritwik Ghatak (1925–76)
August 1947’) captures the widespread sense of disenchantment, on
both sides of the newly drawn border, over the traumatic terms on
which independence from British rule had finally been won:
These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light –
This is not the Dawn for which, ravished with freedom,
We had set out in sheer longing…
Night weighs us down, it still weighs us down.
Friends, come away from this false light. Come, we must search for
that promised Dawn.7
The horrors and the tragedy of the Partition – the loss of lives,
livelihoods and ancestral homes, and the abrupt sundering of families,
communities and emotional bonds – darkened the long-awaited
‘dawn of freedom’ on the Indian subcontinent. Like Faiz and many
others of his generation (including my left-liberal parents and their
THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR 5
extended family of friends), Ghatak was deeply disturbed by the way
in which the Partition seemed to negate or vitiate the promise of the
nationalist movement for independence. Until his untimely death in
1976, he continued to agonize over its far-reaching social, cultural
and political consequences, especially for the people of Bengal, his
home province and one of the regions hardest hit by the Partition.
Undivided Bengal, which occupied a total area of 78,389 sq. miles
and was perceived in British India as a region where religious differences
between the Hindu and Muslim segments of the population were
subsumed within a Bengali cultural and linguistic identity, was carved
into two separate territorial entities in 1947: Muslim-majority East
Bengal, which formed the eastern wing of Pakistan, and West Bengal,
which became a state of the federal republic of India. Bengal’s much-
vaunted cultural unity lay in tatters, unravelled by sectarian sentiments
and Hindu-Muslim riots, and overnight, Bengalis such as Ghatak, who
lived in or migrated to West Bengal but had deep roots in East Bengal (or
vice versa), saw part of their homeland become a foreign country. While
nearly 42 per cent of undivided Bengal’s Hindu population remained
in East Pakistan at first, continuing communal tensions led to a steady
influx of Hindu refugees, including a large number of middle-class
migrants, into West Bengal from 1948 onwards, creating staggering
problems of resettlement by the 1950s and exacerbating the socio-
economic troubles of an already overcrowded, resource-strapped state.
This process continued throughout the 1960s; in 1981, the number of
East Bengal refugees in the state was estimated to be 8 million or one-
sixth of the population.8 A large number of these refugees settled in or
around Calcutta, taking over marshy land in the eastern fringes of the
city to build ‘refugee colonies’ – ramshackle settlements similar to the one
we see in Meghe Dhaka Tara – and struggled to rebuild their lives from
scratch with little or no assistance from the state.9 The government’s
failure to create an effective refugee rehabilitation programme not only
impinged on the everyday lives of millions of displaced Bengalis but also
significantly contributed to West Bengal’s economic decline, political
turmoil and social anomie in the post-1947 period.
