Female Subjectivity, Patriarchy and Melodrama in Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara

 

Poarkodi Natarajan

Research Scholar, Working in Department of Digital Journalism, Loyola College, Chennai,

*Corresponding Author Email: poarkodi@gmail.com

 

ABSTRACT:

The radical potential of melodrama to critique the dominant culture is pressed to high service in RitwikGhatak’s films, which meditate on the central theme of exile and displacement. With its accent on the point of view of woman protagonist, melodrama privileges female subjectivity and locates the gendered violence of patriarchy. In the backdrop of Partition, Ghatak brings multiple contradictions – political, cultural and personal, to the surface, through melodramatic repertoire. Ghatak employs melodrama’s nostalgic mode to address memory and history, trauma and pathos.Ghatak draws upon a combination of myths, traditions, folklore, history and legends, to develop a narrative imbued with multi-layered meanings and extreme emotions. Ghatak engages in thematic ritualization, offers tribal perspective and assimilates the soul of Indian narratological tradition in his films. Ghatak’s stylistic devices, including the deployment of non-representational registers – music and sound to heighten the emotions and conflicts, evolve into a unique film language. This paper explores the articulation of protest through melodrama and the mise-en-scene of female suffering giving rise to a resistant narrative of partition and patriarchy in Ghatak’sMeghe Dhaka Tara. The trope of woman as nation, the image of Mother Archetype and the devalorization of “women-victims” bodies in the film will be discussed. In addition, the paper will highlight Ghatak’s project of reclaiming melodrama through restoring its elements to its original constituents.

 

KEYWORDS: Melodrama, Patriarchy, Women, RitwikGhatak, Meghe Dhaka Tara.

 

 


INTRODUCTION:

The film Meghe Dhaka Tara, made in 1960, is about a young woman Nita, forced to become the bread winner of her refugee family, who sacrifices all her desires, falls terminally ill, but desperately wanted to live. From the time of Partition to this day, there are several kinds of displacements taking place and several thousands of Nitas toiling around us, which is why this Classic is universal and timeless.On the occasion of Meghe Dhaka Tara’s 50th anniversary, Amrit Gangar observed:

 

Meghe Dhaka Tara induces us to reflect upon the divisions emerging from the inequities and oppressive powers at play. The existential cry of Neeta in Meghe Dhaka Tara where she wants to live, echoes the cry of millions in India even today. Sadly somewhere, we have lost our ability to hear this cry. Perhaps we don’t care Meghe Dhaka Tara remains ever so contemporary as it would keep asking us to question the state of our increasingly self-centered and fragmentary beings. (Gangar, 2010) The filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak himself in an interview said: A girl, a very ordinary girl, tired after her day’s work, waits near my house at the bus or tram stop, a lot of papers and a bag in her hand, her hair forms a halo around her head and face, some clinging to her face because of perspiration. I discover a history from the subtle lines of pain on her face, my imagination reaches out to the most ordinary, yet unforgettable drama in her strong, firm and determined, yet soft, touching and infinitely patient life.(Banerjee, 1982).

 

At the heart of this film is the woman-centric narrative of labour, of poverty, of displacement and it’s accompanied in-sufferable, pain, loss and devastation. Ghatak raises the exploited and consumed protagonist Nita into an emblematic figure of this monumental suffering. As all three men in the family – Shankar, the elder brother, immersed in his passion of music, is completely oblivious of the family conditions, the ailing Father, is unproductive and losing his command over the family affairs, the younger brother Montu, is adding to further immiseration after meeting with an accident - fail to perform their “patriarchal duty” offending for the family, forcing Nita to give up studies and take up a job.Through the character of Nita, Ghatak privileges female subjectivity, with mythical, historical and quotidian resonances, and exposes the very fallacy of reification (as Mother Goddess) through phenomenal sacrifice. Ghatak’s deployment of mythology shouldn’t be read as an attempt to historicise the myth as some scholars have critiqued, rather by combining the mythical, historical and the contemporary, Ghatak draws our attention to the cyclical nature and enormous force of the exploitation and oppression. Through Nita, Ghatak constructs the gendered nature of violence and the crippling of female agency in conflict as well as in everyday situations. Ghatak subverts the patriarchal ideology and articulates protest against all kinds of dismemberment - political, cultural and personal. Further, Ghatak creates a cinema of resistance from within and without melodrama and demythologizes the generic conventions of the genre ultimately restoring its “virtues” by reinventing /subverting it.

 

Melodrama, Excess and Partition:

Melodrama which was originally a form of musical romantic play later came to be used to index works of entertainment that contained emotional intensity, exaggeration, sensationalism, strong action, rhetorical excesses, moral polarities, unappeasable villainy and the triumph of good over evil. (Dissanayake, 2003) Initially used in a pejorative sense, the adjective ‘melodramatic’ names a special type of narrative structure and its regime of verisimilitude and lack of plausibility. As a set of negative connotations, melodramatic therefore signifies a work of fiction riddled with improbabilities in its plot and coincidences in its story turns, has frequent and obvious dramatic ironies, emphasizes moments of pathos and bathos, is sentimental and nostalgic in its emotional register, calculating and even cynical in its effects, uses a deus ex machina, such as a chance encounter, a last minute rescue, or the intervention of an external agent, in order to produce a happy ending or to bring matters to some sort of closure (Elsaesser, 2014).

Historically, melodrama’s attributes have been changing and evolving and has drifted away from its initial coordinates and is marked at present by emotional excesses and sentimentalism. Moreover, melodrama has been identified beyond its generic potentialities, as a mode, a style and a form. The melodramatic repertoire generally consists of women-centric narrative, hyper-dramatisation, moral polarisation, multiple plots/subplots, coincidence/s, closure, exaggerated emotions and spectacle. Ghatak relied on epic melodrama to address displacement, patriarchy and other inequities. In his description of epic melodrama, Gopalan Mullicknotes: In Epic melodramas, individuals are not autonomous individuals; rather they are comprehensively defined by characters and situations around them. In other words, they are pinned down by social relationships that leave little room for their own manoeuvrability. In fact, they are links in a long chain of relationships that makes them more a passive recipient of events than being active agents of their own destiny. In other words, events happen here on an ‘epic’ scale – a scale much larger than what an ordinaryindividual can usually handle (Mullick).

 

Thus, in these films, actions of individuals aren’t determined by their inner states; rather, more often, they are suppressed by the individuals themselves in order to survive. There is thus a kind of ‘in-built determinism’ here - an epic hero acts out of necessity of the system rather than of his or her own choice. The consequent conflict between one’s desires and external social pressures are often internalized. (Mullick). Nita, a liminal refugee figure, relentlessly struggles against raging tides - the socio-political forces of which are too large and insurmountable for an individual, leading to her final destruction. She represses all her desires and feelings as she is left with no choice. Ghatak raises Nita to an emblem of suffering –‘a victimized woman’s body, on which desire has inscribed an impossible history, a story of desire in an impasse.’

 

As Elsaesser observes:

The central characters see themselves (and are seen by the spectator) as victims, who generally do not ‘learn’ from their misfortune, even if they could. They are serial sufferers and paragons of rectitude. As a consequence, melodramatic narratives are generally told from the point of view of the victim, implying a special kind of pathos that arises from the positive valorisation of helplessness or of being wronged (Elsaesser, 2014).

 

While constructing the narrative from the point of view of Nita, Ghatak transcends the morbidity of psycho-centric melodramas, and creates an epic melodrama that transmutes the individual into the collective. Nita is no doubt a ‘serial sufferer and a paragon of rectitude’, but Meghe Dhaka Tara is not about Nita alone, but the many Nitas we fail to see, the many Nitas that are in the making and the many Nitas that existed before our times.

 

Through Shankar’s eyes, Ghatak  highlights this aspect in three scenes – first, Nita’s introduction when she walks past the grocery store and her sandal strap tears; second, when Shankar follows a young woman mistaking her to be Nita and she turns out to be Nita’s friend; third, in the last scenes, when the grocer is enquiring about Nita’s health and Shankar sees a young woman similar to Nita adjusting her torn sandal, dragging her feet embarrassingly and he is overcome by emotion and is unable to bear this sight. The blindness, the misrecognition and the final recognition of the exploitation and our collective guilt stands exposed.As Elsaesser observes, The central characters see themselves (and are seen by the spectator) as victims, who generally do not ‘learn’ from their misfortune, even if they could. They are serial sufferers and paragons of rectitude. As a consequence, melodramatic narratives are generally told from the point of view of the victim, implying a special kind of pathos that arises from the positive valorisation of helplessness or of being wronged. (Elsaesser, 2014)

 

At the other level, Nita is born on the day of the benevolent Mother Goddess – the Protector of the World, Jagadatthri’s festival, the hills that she is fond of – the abode of Shiva - she finally reaches, not as a bride, but as a tuberculosis patient in last stages. With such religious and gendered iconography, Ghatak punctuates Nita’s life with the undesirability of the Great Mother archetype, its associated virgin motherhood and desexualisation, the phenomenal suffering and sacrifice, and the final reification.

 

In the climactic scenes, in the hill – the tranquil Shillong hills, she rereads the love letter written by her fiancéSanat, now married to her sister Gita - the letter that declares her as the cloud-capped star, whose aura is dimmed. Shankar arrives and reveals the family’s progress and prosperity, and the pranks of Gita’s child. Listening to this, Nita hysterically bursts out in tears, “Brother, I wanted to live. I too wanted to live. I want to live.” The resounding echoes “I want to live” along with the dizzying 360 degree panorama around the mountains brings a tremendous life force against the injustice. This is the cry of a woman for her desires, for her love, for her self-determination and reconstitution of her lost selfhood. This is the cry of a refugee woman against separation – personal, cultural and political - the final betrayal, the Partition. This cry is the violent assertion of our rights, our identity and our life itself, as Kumar Shahani has commented. Nita becomes a flag bearer of the protest against the patriarchal oppression of women, the violence of the metaphor of woman as nation/homeland, the empty symbolism of the Great Mother archetype, and the displacements within and without family.

 

Mise-en-Scene of Female Suffering:

Ghatak constructs a mise-en-scene of woman’s suffering through multiple visual and aural registers. The recurrent visual motif of tree, the claustrophobic atmosphere of the house, Nita’s tired eyes, the low, high and irregular camera angles, circular pans and wide-angles, alongwith the non-representational registers of music, song and sound effects evolve into a highly formalized and stylistic mise-en-scene. The several scenes in which Nita suffers major blows – when she senses the presence of another woman in Sanat’s apartment and she descends the steps, in the song sequence in Gita’s wedding, later when Sanat discloses to Nita his wish to resume studies and Nita declares all is lost for her, when Nita discovers blood in her cough, the whiplash in the background accentuates the suffering and alongwith the thematic song of Uma, my daughter slowly setsin the ground for the grave tragedy that will follow. The song of Uma, my daughter: Come Uma, let me take you in arms. Putting on your neck a garland of Juin flowers. I know, my daughter, The sadness of your heart, Go my girl, to your husband’s home.played in part at moments when Nita faces setbacks in her marital prospects is replete with the irony of the never to be bride.

 

CONCLUSION:

Meghe Dhaka Tara is an elegy to the quotidian suffering of woman and a protest against gendered violence and oppression. It is a loud cry for female agency and justice.

 

REFERENCES:

1.     Banerjee, S. (1982). Ritwik Ghatak. New Delhi: Directorate of Film Festivals, National Film Development Corporation.

2.     Dissanayake, W. (2003). Melodrama and Sinhalese Cinema. South Asian Popular Culture, 1:2, 175-182.

3.     Elsaesser, T. (1995). Tales of Sound and Fury : Observations on the Family Melodrama. In B. K. Grant, Film Genre Reader (pp. 350-381). Austin: University of Texas Press.

4.     Elsaesser, T. (2014). From Dysfunctional Families to Productive Pathologies : Melodrama Trauma Mind-Games. Journal of the Moving Image, 26-45.

5.     Gangar, A. (n.d.). A Film No Cloud Could Hide, Mumbai Mirror, 2010

6.     Kapur, G. (1990). Contemporary Cultural Practice : Some Polemical Categories. Social Scientist, Vol.18, No.3, March, 49-59.

7.     Mullick, G. (n.d.). Building Conceptual Framework for Understanding Ghatak's Cinema.

 

 

 

 

 

Received on 24.10.2017       Modified on 09.12.2017

Accepted on 25.01.2018      ©A&V Publications All right reserved

Res.  J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2018; 9(1): 183-185.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5828.2018.00032.3