Meghe Dhaka Tara depicts the angst of Partition and its impact on women. Ritwik Ghatak politicised melodrama in this film to embody the immensity of loss caused by such seismic events. This only commercially successful film in his oeuvre is now deemed a classic. The repercussions of rupture are depicted through the life of a refugee family and its sole breadwinner, Neeta. Delinking the colonised from exclusive colonial references, Ghatak inscribed the absent subject into history by reclaiming their precolonial past via Indian folk and mythological traditions. Following Jung, he developed the Great Mother archetype as the foundation of the collective unconscious and as a shared spiritual motif among ancient cultures that fell prey to colonialism. The film has three symbolic depictions of the archetype: the nurturer, the terrible, and the seductress. Nita’s birth on Jagaddhatri Puja, a Hindu Bengali celebration of the mother goddess, links her to the nurturing mother figure. The soundtrack incorporates agomani songs sung to express a mother’s longing for her married daughter and anticipation of reunion. A well-crafted symbolism takes the film beyond its spatio-temporal restrictions, adding a tone of universality. Nita’s swansong, therefore, becomes the resounding defiance of all refugees: “I wanted to live. I so love life, I shall live.” Using the three tenses in Nita’s articulation, Ghatak linked the past to the future, hence creating a continuum in the experiences of the colonised. The use of first person restored her from anonymity of victimhood and recovered her agency.

Sanghita Sen