• “Those who suffer for others, suffer forever.”

• 

“[T]he female protagonist [in Cloud-Capped Star] is one of the rarest characters in cinema history as she works not with the intention of becoming independent or to be liberated from a patriarchal society, but to sustain her extended family.”

– Shoma Chaudhury, Journalist and film scholar in The Hindustan Times [New Delhi] 03 Sep 2010.

Ritwik Ghatak, the director of the film, brings up the Partition and its effects in many of his films. He breaks a taboo about bringing up the partiton in his films, and in particular, focuses on the effects it has had on everyday life. This film uses the visual comparisons of nature and the beauty of the women (the long scenes of detailed women’s faced) to the bleak reality of abject poverty, exploitation of women and suffering after partition in India. There is a tension between the personal and the social, the individual and the collective.

[Ghatak’s] cinema was intellectual in the sense that there was a conscious attempt to make cinema itself a tool in the search of what, rephrasing Bertolt Brecht’s words, one can call a ‘fighting conception of the modern.’ It was a matter of inventing a modernity which would seek to resolve the trauma of the continuing encounter with the modern. To choose cinema as the site and the tool for such experimentation was to assume the avant-garde position without the signals of the avant-garde cinema familiar to us. (“Historical Realism” 190)

Meghe Dhaka Tara traces the exploitation of women through the life story of Nita, the refugee main character who is trying to take care of her family.  The film locates Nita’s exploitation as part of the social, gendered class-structure to which Nita belongs. This powerful and melodramatic film depicts the mundane, everyday world for women, not only in a post-partition refugee camp, but also in a patriarchal society in ordinary everyday life. The theme of exploitation in this film is significant. “Those who suffer for others, suffer forever”. Nita is exploited by her family, but she does not fight back and throughout the movie no matter how bad it gets for her she continues to allow others to exploit her. The film is a commentary on how the British colonized and exploited India, and how the continuation of exploitation of the weak follows in post-Independence, Partition, and port-Partition. Nita says, “I have never protested against [any] injustice. That [indeed] is my sin.” Nita’s eventual death could be seen as a punishment, for her unquestioning fulfillment to her family’s exploitation and abuse of her. I don’t think the film presents Nita as a heroine, or her death as martyrdom. Instead, the film is critiquing all the places women have in Indian patriarchal society. Neither of the women are a way out, as under patriarchy there are no options for women to be free. The film critiques the way the family has treated Nita, but also the ways in which Nita has allowed herself to be treated.

The film is also a commentary and critique of the class (caste) and gender dynamics that existed pre and post Partition. There are many parts of the film where gender violence, exploitation, and mentality of the bourgeois class are apparent. This is clear in the many ways that Nita is treated by her family members and Sanat throughout the film. Her father, the school master, is the most obvious example of bourgeois mentality. There are many scenes where he quotes Yeates, valuing the intellectual class as higher than the working class. This is evident in many scenes, particularly at 49:05, when he finds out his son is working in a factory. He is furious and disgusted by the embarrassment that his son is now a “labourer”, which is below their “civilized intellectual bourgeois class”. This is juxtaposed in the scene at the end of the film where he kicks out Nita when she is sick and dying, something that most people would call inhumane and un-civilized.

(Section: Kristina Johansson)