Partition and Cinema
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May 8, 2015 at 8:24am
I will call her as Miss T because I have to conceal her real
identity for purposes of privacy. No, her name does not start with a T, far
from it. But I thought that it would have been rather nice if she were to be
called Tapati, this would have been the right kind of name for her. But modern
girls are not named so poetically. Anyway, the reason why Miss T came to me
this morning is because I am supposed to be her supervisor. Supposed to be
because she had me sign sheaves of paper to the extent and said that she would
revert back to me once her course work got over. She has done so this morning
because tomorrow at forenoon she must submit her research proposal to the
University. And when she rang me up this morning I was somewhat surprised
because she was supposed to meet me on the previous day and not showed up. I,
for my part, actually had quite forgotten her research interest. Her tardiness
irritates me; she said that she did not get in touch with me because she was
very upset with all the politics that happened in her department.
She has not really learnt to work through her way despite
obstacles; she gets distracted when people try to break her concentration. She
is a bright girl but gets easy caught up in social relations. This has
something to do social class; students who emerge from socially dominant
classes do not bother about social relationships and accordingly do not get
caught up in the so-called politics. Such students do not have to depend on
personal gratis, are above favours and attacks, have enough resources of their
own to make their living. Such students are freer to focus on studies. But Miss
T gets caught in politics, she is easy to intimidate, easy to bully and easy to
be smothered under the theories and concepts that are showered on students from
the pulpits of Universities. Miss T is really a victim of her social class,
which is the professional middle class, idealist, upright, principled and yet
conservative and conforming.
Miss T wants to work on the Partition and cinema. Her focus
is on memory and trauma of the Partition. As a Bengali I am a privy to
Partition and its memories. One can safely say that among the middle classes in
Bengal every second family has suffered the Partition. Bengalis are replete
with memories of the Partition but strangely those memories do not have the
trauma. In fact there seems to be a dismemberment of the trauma; except for
writers who speak about the “Other Side of Silence” or the “Bitter Fruit” of
the everyday life in a run up to Partition. The most dominant memory is
nostalgia, of homes left behind with gourds supine across thatched roof and the
lost calf looking for its masters. And of walking, miles and miles into the
sunset. Memories of home, the loss of shelter where one would go to at dusk
fall, and the room with the view of dawn where one would rise with the sun the
following morning.
Such memories are not unique to the Partition but inheres
many other forms of displacements like social harassment as in Dewar,
famines as in Adalat, persecution as in Mahaan, simple disappearance as
in Mother India, or death of spouse or simply rinning way from marriage as
in Aradhana and Kati Patang respectively. These films portray displaced
families in which the structures that offer solace to couples, care to the child,
the old and the sick, support to the weak and draws succour from the
strong are broken leading to enormous suffering to the women and children and longing for the
men. The Bengalis tend to be more attached to the land while the Hindi film
appears to be more wary of the family. Ghatak’s concerns have more to do with
women’s statuses and roles and the loss of land which translates into loss of
livelihood for the men invariably changes the family equations for women. The
pampered eldest daughter of
Meghe Dhaka
Tara, Neeta sets out to become the family’s
only breadwinner while Sita, in Subarnarekha finds her shelter in a
brothel as her brother is unable to protect her from sinking into economic
ruin. Pather Panchali’s tragedy too
is a displacement when Apu and his family are forced out of the village due to
poverty. The changes that Apu faces subsequently can once more be traced to the
loss of precinct.
Despite the differences between the Punjabi and the Hindi
writers and the Bengalis, the former’s concerns with family and the latter’s
with land, Partition is merely seen as displacement. Such displacement from
one’s cultural and social milieu, economic foundations and homeland are
typically the concerns of the property owning male. For a woman, who has no
land, no choice in matters of her social milieu and no right to a homestead
since all of these she loses in a flash as she is married off, these concerns
of the Partition cannot be hers. A woman who is fated to be constantly
displaced and circulated between classes of men with no more dignity than as
chattel, Partition is just another episode. No wonder then when women make
films of post Partition it turns out to be something like the Goynar Baksho, a hilarity of the jealous
and possessive widow who turns, albeit through the grand daughter in law into a
financier of business and then sponsors the Bangladesh nationalism of 1971.
The Partition seems to have given the women of the family
some space to emerge as economic agents and then participate in larger
activities with transcendental political goals. The Partition may have helped
women to fill in spaces vacated by men, now too shocked and too stunned to pick
up the threads of their lives severed from the moorings. Many women hold on to
the more enabling memories of economic independence and an opportunity to enter
the workforce albeit perforce of the economic uprooting that comes along with
geographical displacement. Such memories even today constitute the hidden
support of women for the right wing discourses which are male centred and treat
women as barely tolerated obscenities. The right wing diktats on women’s
clothes, freedom of her movements and other similar comments on her being should
have raised strong feminist forces against these elements. Instead women seem
to be very well inclined towards the right wing especially those whose
predecessors have suffered the Partition. Partition truly cracked through the
family structures, the very same structures which are designed to curtail
feminine agency perhaps across human societies but more so for India. No
thinker seems to have noticed this except perhaps Aparna Sen, the director of
the film Goynar Baksho.
Then what does Miss T do with her thesis, Partition and
Cinema? What is she looking for in these films? How can I say what you are
looking for? I despair. She looks a kind of hurt and blank. Then I slowly try
to delve into her mind, wonder why does she look for such cinema? Why is she
searching through these films on Partition? I have realized through my long
years with research students that topics of their research seem to be connected
to their lives, to the questions which their lives pose for them, the answers
which they seem to be looking for. What could be Miss T’s search? Where could
have been the pilgrimage of her spirit headed to?
I took stock of Miss T’s anxieties and all of these
pertained to her future, a future which she should have been able to command
with her levels of academic attainment but which she may not be able to with
the impending unavoidable doom of marriage that awaits her. She is worried
about her marriage, when, where, with who and how her future will turn over due
to it? She is capable of earning her way through in life, she desperately wants
to help her parents into old age and she is capable of earning for her flat and
a car with the kind of brains that she has. Yet the oppression of the society
may force her into matrimony. Who should she be? Neeta of Meghe Dhaka Tara? Or
Sita of Subarnarekha, the old mother, the wife or the daughter of Garam Hawa?
Shall she meet the fate of Khamosh Pani? Or will she meet the fate of Pinjar?
Her life’s limits are emerging ever clear in her mind, and she regards her
future more with trepidation than with assured hope. She is on the anvil of
being uprooted from the coziness of her caring parental home. Like her thesis,
her life too has the Partition in the background.
What then is her search? Not the cinemas really but to look
into these cinemas deeply and then by some fantasy or escape find a way out of
its frames. Her intention to study the cinema is not to be in the cinema but to
move beyond it, ponder whether through those sad endings, some possibilities of
emancipation were left out? She is not really a cinema person, but a life
person who wishes to travel beyond the cinema. Her thesis uses the cinema as a
starting point but it will not end here, for she is not resigned to fates that
befell the women in the narratives but to create her own story line, create a
new narrative, albeit in the form of the cinema but where the endings of these
films she will draw differently. At least, this is what Miss T’s thoughts are,
to the best of my understanding of her in particular and of young people in
general.
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