Dream of a diasporic: Trauma of partition in films of Ritwick Ghatak

Abstract:
Ritwik Ghatak is a preeminent figure in Indian Cinema, a cult filmmaker and an auteur.
As a director and visionary, his films like Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komol Gandhar and
subarnarekha articulates the trauma, obsession and agony of the post-partition refugee
scenario in Bengal. Using melodrama as a dominant device to project the diasporic
mourning, his auteur never fails to struck the cord of melancholia - his canon is chiefly
symbolized by the nostalgia of a past El Dorado, a promised land which was lost forever
in the process of migrating to a new place following the Bengal partition. Ghatak looks in
retrospection from his artistic position in post-partition apocalyptic world, and in the
process, revisiting a traumatic past often results in loss or fabrication of memory which
ultimately evolves into a dreamscape where memories are fragmented and partial, and
images are blurred. Ghatak also explores various genres of music to revisit the diasporic
sensibilities and paradoxically points out towards the ironic though obvious cultural
similarities of both the countries while yearning for a universal civilization. This paper,
by establishing an overarching paradigm, will try to trace a diasporic identity through the
lens of the bengali auteur.