Reading Bhadralok Cultural Memory, Kitsch And Culture Industry In Ritwik Ghatak’s Films

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2023.422

Keywords:

Ritwik Ghatak, bhadralok, memory, kitsch, culture industry, film

Abstract

The paper problematizes Ghatak’s Marxist treatment of the Bengali as well as the Brahmanical repertoire of cultural knowledge, for the purpose of carving out a Communist significance of the period. Rather than a recontextualization of traditional myths, the paper reads in this attitude a nostalgic particularistic abstraction of a rich array of aesthetic ideas, which are best appreciated in their diverse cultural context. The paper argues that Ghatak utilizes creative opuses of vast potential to serve political goals, with an aim of strengthening the East Bengali immigrant population in post-Partition West Bengal. The paper criticizes how Ghatak breaks down the traditions from different spatial and temporal coordinates for serving the representation of the plights of the Bengali Refugee – making a powerful integrated identity of the traumatized subject at the expense of erasing class, caste, communal and gender distinctions. In this, there is an effort to fashion an imaginary unified East Bengali sub-national entity, which is politically evened out for realization of unique identity and clout.

Author Biography

Sarbani Banerjee, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee

Assistant Professor at HSS, IIT Roorkee

References

Adorno, T.W. (1991). Culture Industry Reconsidered. In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J.M. Bernstein, 98-106. New York: Routledge.

Adorno, T.W. (1991). Transparencies on Film. In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J.M. Bernstein, 178-186. New York: Routledge.

Adorno, T.W. (1980). “Commitment.” 1980. Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism, 177-195. London: Verso.

A Soft Note on a Sharp Scale (Komal Gandhar). 1961. Dir. Ritwik Ghatak. Chitrakalpa.

Balibar, E. (1991). “The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism.” Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx. Translated by James Swenson, 87-124. New York: Routledge.

Banerjee, T.N. (2010). “Journeys of No Return: Exile and Travel in the Films of Ritwik Ghatak.” Pratilipi 13: n.pag. Web. 22 May 2015.

Biswas, M. (2004). “Her Mother’s Son: Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak.” Rouge 3: n. pag. Web. 31 March 2014.

Carrigy, M. (2003). “Senses of Cinema: Ritwik Ghatak.” Great Directors 29: n.pag. Web. 29 July 2014.

Collins, J. (1991). “Theorizing Cultural Memory: Totalizing Recall?” American Literary History 3(4): 829-40. Web. 18 Feb. 2015.

Ghatak, R.K. (1987). “My Coming into Films.” Cinema and I, 19-20. Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial Trust.

Ghatak, R.K. (1987). “Cinema and the Subjective Factor.” 1987. Cinema and I, 60-64. Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial Trust.

Ghatak, R.K. (2000). “On the Cultural Front: A Thesis Submitted by Ritwik Ghatak to the Communist Party of India in 1954.” Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial Trust.

Greenberg, C. (1973). “Avant Garde and Kitsch.” In Art and Culture, 3 21. Thames and Hudson.

Harrington, L. (2011). “‘Fragmentary Evidence’: The Struggle to Narrate Partition.” South Asian Review 31(1): 1-21. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2010.11932740

Kabir, A. J. (2003). “The Necessity of Anti-Sentimentalism.” Countercurrents.org: n.pag. Web. 23 July.

Kapur, G M. (1990). “Contemporary Cultural Practice: Some Polemical Categories” Third Text 4(11): 109-118. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528829008576267

Khan, A., Bose, G., & Chakrabarti, D. (1978). Left Cultural Movement in West Bengal: An Analysis. Social Scientist, 6(6/7), 114–119. https://doi.org/10.2307/3516548

Kundera, M. (1969). The Joke. Translated by David Hamblyn and Oliver Stallybrass. New York: McCann.

Kundera, M. (1984). The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper Perennial.

LaCapra, D. (2001). “Holocaust Testimonies: Attending to the Victim’s Voice.” In Writing History, Writing Trauma, 86-113. Baltimore: John Hopkins.

Latif, A.I. (2013). “The Bengal Partition and Identity Politics: A Ghoti View.” Peace and Security Review 5(10): 25-45. Web.

Mandal, M. (2011). Settling the Unsettled: A Study of Partition Refugees in West Bengal. New Delhi: Manohar.

Naficy, H. (2001). “Chronotopes of Imagined Homeland.” In An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, 152-180. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.

O’Donnell, Erin Elizabeth. 2009. “The Assemblage of “Woman” in the Affective Melodramatic Mode of Meghe Dhaka Tara (“A Cloud-Capped Star”, 1960) and Subarnarekha (“The Golden Line”, 1962).” History, Trauma and Remembering: The Construction of a Postcolonial Bengali Cultural identity in Ritwik Ghatak’s Films. Ph.D thesis. The University of Chicago, 166-217. Web. 19 July 2014.

Parker Follett, M. (1998). “The Crowd Fallacy.” New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government. PA: Penn. State UP. pp. 85-92. Print.

Reason, Debate and a Story (Jukti Takko Aar Goppo). 1974. Dir. Ritwik Ghatak. Rita.

Rothberg, M. (1997). After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe. New German Critique, 72, 45–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/488568

Said, E.W. (2000). “Reflections on Exile.” In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 173-186. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

Sarkar, B. (1999). “An Auteur in/of Displacement.” Allegories of Dispersal: Nation and Participation on Indian Cinema, 1947-77. Ph.D thesis. The University of Southern California, 305-336. Web. 4 Oct. 2014.

Shah, P. (2014). Of roots and rootlessness: music, partition and Ghatak. The South Asianist Journal, 3(1). Retrieved from http://www.southasianist.ed.ac.uk/article/view/705

Shahani, K. (1990). Film as a Contemporary Art. Social Scientist, 18(3), 33–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/3517424

“Subarnarekha – A Review.” Oct. 2008. Rev. of Subarnarekha, dir. Ritwik Ghatak. Bangalnama 25: n. pag. Web. 24 Oct. 2014.

The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara). 1960. Dir. Ritwik Ghatak. Chitrakalpa.

The Golden Thread (Subarnarekha). 1965. Dir. Ritwik Ghatak. J J Films.

The Unmechanical (Ajantrik). 1958. Dir.Ritwik Ghatak. L.B. Films International.

Downloads

Published

2023-12-20

How to Cite

Banerjee, S. (2023). Reading Bhadralok Cultural Memory, Kitsch And Culture Industry In Ritwik Ghatak’s Films. CINEJ Cinema Journal, 11(2), 21–49. https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2023.422

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2023): Winter

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Sarbani Banerjee

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
  2. Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
  3. The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
    1. Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
    with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
  4. The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  5. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
  6. Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
  7. The Author represents and warrants that:
    1. the Work is the Author’s original work;
    2. the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
    3. the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
    4. the Work has not previously been published;
    5. the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
    6. the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
  8. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.

Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link.