Reinterpreting Borders in an Intersectional Framework in Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha

Abstract

Ritwik Ghatak is well recognized for his partition trilogy Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-capped Star, 1960), Komal Gandhar (E Flat, 1961), and Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread, 1965). Subarnarekha tells the narrative of three refugees in West Bengal in the aftermath of Bengal's division in 1947: an upper-caste Hindu man, his small sister, and a low-caste boy. It was named after the river Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread), which has a symbolic significance in the movie. It was produced in 1962 but released in 1965. Partition thematics remain as an afterthought in Ritwik Ghatak's cinematic work, rather than being the centrepiece of the storyline, where the sense of migration and loss exceeds the usual inclinations of post-partition stories. Instead, they are generated by the existing borders which define and redefine the lives of the people of contemporary Bengal. This essay seeks to investigate Ghatak's film Subarnarekha and the impact of the multiple power structures like patriarchy, caste politics, and intimacy, which are exercised through various territorial, spatial, and social borders.

Introduction

Subarnarekha starts in a refugee settlement. Iswar, a refugee fighting for survival, adopts Abhiram, a small kid who has been separated from his mother by those attempting to deport them. Abhiram is the same age as Iswar's sister, Sita. Iswar receives a job offer from a wealthy college acquaintance in a hamlet and settles at a mill area near the Subarnarekha River with them. Abhiram and Sita grow up and fall in love with one another. Abhiram also learns that the mother he was taken away from is a 'bagdi,' a member of the lowest caste. Iswar is against their marriage. He tries to marry Sita off to someone else. The two lovers decide to elope and end up in a Calcutta slum. Abhiram obtains a job as a bus driver and is killed in an accident. When Iswar attempts suicide, his friend Haraprasad comes and convinces Iswar to explore the metropolis of Calcutta. After a night of drinking, Iswar finds himself as a client at Sita's door, who has been reduced to prostitution. Sita slits her own throat and dies as a result. Iswar returns to the hamlet, accompanied by Sita's young son Binu. The movie concludes with them on their journey back to their house by the Subarnarekha.

Territorial borders are not the only borders that exist. As much as territorial borders, spatial and multiple social borders also contribute to segregation. Borders are generally perceived as necessary to protect us from 'outsiders'. The term 'outsiders' always has a negative connotation, which becomes stricter in case of social borders. Enforcing borders produces new distinctions and expands old ones, resulting in increased segregation. Social borders are much more rigid and segregated than territorial borders. Bodies that are marginalised as a result of this continual segregation are tied in an oppressive intersectional structure of the various borders defining their lives.

Bengal was partitioned in 1947, dividing it into the Indian state of West Bengal and the Pakistani state of East Bengal. Refugees fled East Bengal following the partition and the vast majority of East Bengali refugees settled in or near Kolkata. Refugees built their informal settlements called colonies by seizing abandoned and unused land, therefore establishing an appearance of refugee authority and agency. Land reclamation and the construction of houses and schools were examples of cooperative operations in the colonies (Menon and Bhasin 69), which is also featured in the film when Iswar and Haraprasad establish a school in the Naba Jiban (New Life) Colony.

In this essay, I attempt to investigate the role of various borders in shaping the lives of East Pakistani refugees, including familial borders, boundaries of caste, gender, and class; the spatial borders in villages, colonies, and cities, and the territorial borders that granted those people the refugee status, as depicted in the film Subarnarekha.

The Cartographical Impact

The territorial borders established as a result of the division caused by the governmental power structure resulted in the formation of borderlands close to them. They are described by Anzaldua as vague and uncertain locations formed by the emotional residue of an artificial border that are in a perpetual state of transition, whose residents are disallowed and forbidden (Anzaldua 3). In Subarnarekha, we find refugees from the Naba Jiban Colony striving to live by forcibly grabbing land from landowners, but survival is especially tough for Dalits. The landowner's henchmen kidnap Dalit women and transfer them to locations distant from the colonies. As a result, we can see that not all bodies are prohibited. The restriction applies to specific bodies that are not in the same social stratum as those in power. Such atrocities are not committed against the colony's upper-caste bodies, as most landowners in Bengal throughout the colonial and post-colonial eras belonged to the upper castes. In the film, young Sita is continuously looking for a new life and a new house, as she is shown often asking, Dadamoni, amader notun bari kothay? ('Brother, where is our new home?'), which appears to demonstrate every refugee's perpetual need for a feeling of belonging and rootedness, yet Dalit bodies are denied the right to experience or express that yearning.

Mapping the Spatial Borders

Subarnarekha depicts regions within specific territories that are inaccessible to certain bodies. The spaces depicted in the film are subject to strict regulations and are categorised based on who has access to them. In a city like Calcutta, the pubs and racetracks are generally frequented by people of the upper class and caste, such as Iswar. Bodies that do not adhere to these criteria or deviate from the acceptable and normative are driven to the margins and end up in slums and ghettos. Due to Abhiram and Sita's inter-caste marriage, the couple was forced to live in a Calcutta slum with their child, and had a tough time surviving with what Abhiram brought home as a bus driver. The boundaries become denser in small towns. Despite being well educated and not staunchly believing in caste, Iswar urges Abhiram to leave after his caste is revealed since it jeopardises his career and social position in the small-town society.

The Interplay of Various Social Borders in Subarnarekha

Social borders are enforced through power structures like patriarchy, caste, and gender, and these borders are deeply ingrained in our cultural beliefs. Dominant paradigms, or established beliefs that exist as absolute and unchallengeable, are passed down to us through culture. Culture is made by those in power (Anzaldua 16), and it caters to these power structures. Throughout the film, we observe bodies from the upper caste and upper class establishing the normative and determining the course of life of bodies outside this border by enforcing stereotypes disguised as cultural beliefs. Individuals in a stereotyped category who have the greatest interaction with bodies that carry the stereotype have a higher sense of affiliation with others in the category than those who are more isolated (Ross et al. 55). Iswar's attitudes regarding Dalits shift as a result of his conversation with Ram Vilas, who cannot accept bodies belonging to the lower caste. Iswar didn't care about Abhiram's caste at the refugee camp since his collective identity was based on being a refugee. Caste functions as a unit in which an individual is a member. However, it is worth noting that the individual has no unique existence aside from the caste to which he or she belongs (Power Structure in India 152). Abhiram's whole identity is reduced to that of a Dalit when his caste is revealed, and all previous identities linked with him are suddenly erased. When Ram Vilas and Iswar discuss Abhiram, Ram Vilas emphasises that while Abhiram may be a well-natured individual, he may not be from a respectable caste. For Ram Vilas, caste is a person's defining identity. Casteism is often justified as a religious responsibility by the upper caste characters in the film. "What are we left with if we don't take care of our castes' virtues and mix it with them (lower castes) instead?" says Ram Vilas towards the beginning of the film. The notion of purity and contamination has dominated the caste system. To ensure purity in marriage, the trade of food, and the pursuit of jobs, every Hindu is required to keep his or her relationship and interaction inside the restricted circle known as a 'jati' (caste) (Power Structure in India 154). In Subarnarekha, we find an example of this in Ram Vilas's iron foundry, which has well-defined spatial boundaries and is off-limits to Dalit bodies. Only individuals like Mukherjee and Chakraborty seem to be in command of everything. Ram Vilas is averse to the presence of, and even repulsed by the prospect of meeting, someone from a lower caste.

Abhiram's mother's life exemplifies the multidimensional discrimination that Dalit women face. Abhiram's mother was abducted from the colony on the fringes of Calcutta and dumped in a remote region outside of Bengal. She gets off a train going to Dandakaranya and dies on the Chhatimpur station platform, where Iswar, Sita, and Abhiram dwell. Because of her caste, no one attempts to rescue or reach out to her. It is notable how casteism asserts its existential rights even among the poorest in the most severe circumstances. The train headed towards Dandakaranya has dual symbols. Dandakaranya is also the place in the Ramayana which is a turning point in the life of Sita in the epic, and the train headed towards Dandakaranya brings about the turning point in the life of Sita in the film. It is also a symbol of the plight of the Namasudras (Sanyal 211). It should also be noted that Abhiram's mother has very little screen time in the film, with only two scenes dedicated to her, further muting her voice. Hers is not a character with a proper backstory or a voice. We only see two events from her life, one being her death. As Spivak points out, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak in the framework of colonial production, and the subaltern as a woman is much more marginalised. This is also true for the depiction of the subaltern in the media (Spivak et al. 287).

Sita and her neighbour in Calcutta, as well as Abhiram's mother, were the only female characters in the film, with an overabundance of male characters. This obvious discrepancy illustrates the status of women in the post-colonial age when they have little social visibility. From the outset of the film, the suggested presence of patriarchy can be sensed. Iswar is almost like a father figure to Sita, compassionate yet overprotective and expecting only cooperation from Sita's side. Sita is unable to articulate herself and therefore relies on songs to do so. The songs sung by Sita reflect her emotions, as seen in the sorrowful songs when Abhiram is gone and when Iswar tries to marry her off to an upper caste man, and the joyous song when Abhiram and Sita proclaim their love for each other. It is worth noting that while Abhiram's schooling was planned, Sita's education was not even addressed. Surprisingly, Iswar had no such fantasies about Sita (Mukherjee 141). Despite being an extremely talented vocalist, Sita is limited to the domestic boundaries throughout the film. In this perspective, Himani Bannerji's observations are worth noting:

"The female body is invented in different ways in private and public spaces and in terms of the onlooker. Her clothes and presence thus possess a set of architectural and social correlates coded as 'andarmahal' (inner quarters) and 'griha' (home), and as 'home' and the 'world'. This spatial organization is imbued with moral-cultural imperatives which are embedded in a specific social reproduction entailing its own sexual division of labour… 'Whereas education for males was directly related to the pursuit of employment, female education had no economic function'" (Bannerji 111–112).

Even Abhiram's education is only encouraged since it may lead to a job. Iswar opposes Abhiram's desire to be a writer and pushes him to study engineering in Germany, which will provide him with a career. Because Iswar is the family's sole breadwinner, he urges Abhiram to find his job and relieve him of his burden.

For many refugees, migration resulted in an upheaval of daily life, upsetting occupational systems and family relations, forcing a re-evaluation of societal roles (Moore 2). Much of what society criticises is centred on familial bonds. One notices the dynamic nature of family as an institution in the film through the changing members. Iswar presents Abhiram as his brother and looks after him in the same way as he looks after Sita till his caste is determined. After that, he is embarrassed to be associated with Abhiram and begs him to leave in order to protect his social status and his job as manager and shareholder of the foundry. The welfare of the community takes precedence above the wellbeing of the individual (Anzaldua 18). This is evident in both Abhiram and Sita, as they do not want to take any action that may harm Iswar. Instead of prioritising Sita's wants, Iswar arranges her marriage with someone from the same caste in order to serve the interests of the upper caste community. Sita's protest is ignored and is interpreted as exceedingly rude, resulting in Iswar slapping her. Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex:

"When a boy revolts against his father, against the world, his violence is effective… he imposes himself upon a world, and he transcends it. But it is not for the adolescent girl to affirm or impose herself… She may hope neither to change the world nor to transcend it" (Beauvoir 377).

In the film, there is an exceedingly difficult brother-sister relationship that is intoxicated with patriarchy. Iswar regards Sita as more of his property than a person with feelings and desires. Iswar does not anticipate Sita to violate any of the restrictions put on her as a result of her upbringing in this patriarchal environment. He suffers a double blow when Sita asserts herself against his patronisingly dictating will while also jeopardising his patriarchal caste-conscious hegemony (Roy 101) by eloping with Abhiram. However, eloping with Abhiram also does not provide her any autonomy. When Sita suggests that she wants to sing for others and make money for the family, Abhiram dismisses her harshly, demonstrating how Abhiram controlled her life now that she was his wife. It also reveals the ignorance Sita, who comes from an upper-caste family, had been living in. A culture reeling from the devastation of division linked a woman's capacity to sing or dance with sex enslavement. Sita's naiveté reveals the spatial boundaries that had been concealing her.

Finally, to conclude, self-regulating communities, as Menon and Bhasin explain in Borders & Boundaries: Women in India's Partition, have very regressive consequences; the importance of having the choice to leave the community cannot be overstated, nor can the desirability of equality as citizens of a secular state be seriously challenged in that case. The alternative, as proved most forcefully and soberingly by Partition, is the perpetual subjugation of all other identities — gender, class, caste, region — to an exclusive and restricting religious or ethnic group (Menon and Bhasin 256), with multiple examples seen throughout Subarnarekha. Sita battles her way through the confluence of all these borders imposed on her and emerges as a powerful woman, as seen in the film's poster as well. Sita is the film's protagonist, and the plot revolves around her journey and misery. Because her continually shifted identity as a refugee intersects with her gender and the function she plays in society, Sita's character examines identities and crosses borders. It is worth noting that the character is named Sita in order to evoke this precise sentiment in the film. The two characters with the same name have one thing in common: they never enjoy a happy existence. Despite marrying men they admire, they spend time in exile, suffer in loneliness, and are looked down upon by society. Ghatak has himself steered away from the normative and crossed borders by naming the character Sita, as the name has mythical roots.

In the film, the enormity of an event known as a country's partition is weakened by the universality of the existential crises arising from the complex narrative web of gender, caste, and class (Roy 101). In the film, we witness a broader spectrum of refugee awareness, in terms of how boundaries, both territorial and others, impact individual bodies, as well as commitment, hegemony, and defiance along those borders.

Works Cited

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