The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara)
The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara)

Author: Manishita Dass

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 1838719970

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Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) has been hailed as 'one of the great classics of world cinema' (Adrian Martin), and 'one of the five or six greatest melodramas in cinema history' (Serge Daney). A striking blend of modernist aesthetics and melodramatic force, it is arguably the best-known film by Ghatak, widely considered to be one of the most original, politically committed, and formally innovative film-makers from India. The film's focus on a family uprooted by the Partition of India and its powerful exploration of displacement and historical trauma gives it a renewed relevance in the midst of a global refugee crisis. Manishita Dass situates the film in its historical and cultural contexts and within Ghatak's film-making career, and connects it to his theatrical work and his writings on film and theatre. Her close reading of the film locates its emotional and intellectual power in what she describes as its 'cinematic theatricality,' and brings into focus Ghatak's modernist experiments with melodramatic devices, his deliberate departures from cinematic realism, and distinctive use of sound and music. The book draws on extensive archival research, excavates new layers of meaning, and offers fresh insights into the cosmopolitan cinematic sensibility of a director described as 'one of the most neglected major film-makers in the world' (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

Studying Indian Cinema
Studying Indian Cinema

Author: Omar Ahmed

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0993238491

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This book traces the historical evolution of Indian cinema through a number of key decades. The book is made up of 14 chapters with each chapter focusing on one key film, the chosen films analysed in their wider social, political and historical context whilst a concerted engagement with various ideological strands that underpin each film is also evident. In addition to exploring the films in their wider contexts, the author analyses selected sequences through the conceptual framework common to both film and media studies. This includes a consideration of narrative, genre, representation, audience and mise-en-scene. The case studies run chronologically from Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951) to The Elements Trilogy: Water (2005) and include films by such key figures as Satyajit Ray (The Lonely Wife), Ritwick Ghatak (Cloud Capped Star), Yash Chopra (The Wall) and Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!).

The Refugee Woman
The Refugee Woman

Author: Paulomi Chakraborty

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-07-27

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0199095396

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The Refugee Woman examines the Partition of 1947 by engaging with the cultural imagination of the ‘refugee woman’ in West Bengal, particularly in three significant texts of the Partition of Bengal—Ritwik Ghatak’s film Meghe Dhaka Tara; and two novels, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga and Sabitri Roy’s Swaralipi. It shows that the figure of the refugee woman, animated by the history of the political left and refugee movements, and shaped by powerful cultural narratives, can contest and reconstitute the very political imagination of ‘woman’ that emerged through the long history of dominant cultural nationalisms. The reading it offers elucidates some of the complexities of nationalist, communal, and communist gender-politics of a key period in post-independence Bengal.

Revisiting India's Partition
Revisiting India's Partition

Author: Amritjit Singh

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2016-06-15

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1498531059

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Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics brings together scholars from across the globe to provide diverse perspectives on the continuing impact of the 1947 division of India on the eve of independence from the British Empire. The Partition caused a million deaths and displaced well over 10 million people. The trauma of brutal violence and displacement still haunts the survivors as well as their children and grandchildren. Nearly 70 years after this cataclysmic event, Revisiting India’s Partition explores the impact of the “Long Partition,” a concept developed by Vazira Zamindar to underscore the ongoing effects of the 1947 Partition upon all South Asian nations. In our collection, we extend and expand Zamindar’s notion of the Long Partition to examine the cultural, political, economic, and psychological impact the Partition continues to have on communities throughout the South Asian diaspora. The nineteen interdisciplinary essays in this book provide a multi-vocal, multi-focal, transnational commentary on the Partition in relation to motifs, communities, and regions in South Asia that have received scant attention in previous scholarship. In their individual essays, contributors offer new engagements on South Asia in relation to several topics, including decolonization and post-colony, economic development and nation-building, cross-border skirmishes and terrorism, and nationalism. This book is dedicated to covering areas beyond Punjab and Bengal and includes analyses of how Sindh and Kashmir, Hyderabad, and more broadly South India, the Northeast, and Burma call for special attention in coming to terms with memory, culture and politics surrounding the Partition.

The Performance of Nationalism
The Performance of Nationalism

Author: Jisha Menon

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1107000106

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Jisha Menon's book explores the mimetic relationships between history and political performance and between India and Pakistan.

Cinema and I
Cinema and I

Author: Ritwik Ghatak

Publisher: Dhyanbindu & Rmt

Published: 2015-11-22

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9789383200917

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Ritwik Ghatak(1925-76) is the most uncompromising Bengali movie maestro from 20th century India. Cinema & I is the collection of his writings and interviews. In this collection of 20 essays and 17 interviews, dazzling brilliance of a true artist's mind, illuminates the cultural layers of human civilization of east and west, from pre-history up to the modernity. This is a book not meant for those who are interested only in cinema. For anybody, in any way related to any branch of art or humanities, this book is going to be a precious possession.

Global Art Cinema
Global Art Cinema

Author: Rosalind Galt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-04-14

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0199726299

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"Art cinema" has for over fifty years defined how audiences and critics imagine film outside Hollywood, but surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to the concept since the 1970s. And yet in the last thirty years art cinema has flourished worldwide. The emergence of East Asian and Latin American new waves, the reinvigoration of European film, the success of Iranian directors, and the rise of the film festival have transformed the landscape of world cinema. This book brings into focus art cinema's core internationalism, demonstrating its centrality to understanding film as a global phenomenon. The book reassesses the field of art cinema in light of recent scholarship on world film cultures. In addition to analysis of key regions and films, the essays cover topics including theories of the film image; industrial, aesthetic, and political histories; and art film's intersections with debates on genre, sexuality, new media forms, and postcolonial cultures. Global Art Cinema brings together a diverse group of scholars in a timely conversation that reaffirms the category of art cinema as relevant, provocative, and, in fact, fundamental to contemporary film studies.

Island of Blood
Island of Blood

Author: Anita Pratap

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2003-08-26

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1101563370

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In this distillation of frontline experiences and cultural insights, Anita Pratap, one of the finest journalists India has ever produced, faithfully reports on the consequences of war, ethnic conflict, earthquakes, cyclones, prejudices, and the mindless hatred and fear that has hurt so much of the world. Wherever there was a story to be told-from her native India to Afghanistan and Sri Lanka-Pratap braved the odds to send in reports from the front, managing to track down elusive stories and make headlines. With determined diligence she exposed the terrors inside such frightening regimes as the Taliban, returning home each time with a renewed determination to appreciate and celebrate the ordinary.

Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition
Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition

Author: Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-04-07

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1317293886

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Partition occurring simultaneously with British decolonization of the Indian subcontinent led to the formation of independent India and Pakistan. While the political and communal aspects of the Partition have received some attention, its enormous personal and psychological costs have been mostly glossed over, particularly when it comes to the splitting of Bengal. The memory of this historical ordeal has been preserved in literary archives, and these archives are still being excavated. This book examines neglected narratives of the Partition of India in 1947 to study the traces left by this foundational trauma on the national- and regional-cultural imaginaries in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. To arrive at a more complex understanding of how Partition experiences of violence, migration, and displacement shaped postcolonial societies and subjectivities in South Asia, the author analyses, through novels and short stories, multiple cartographies of disorientation and anxiety in the post-Partition period. The book illuminates how contingencies of political geography cut across personal and collective histories, and how these intersections are variously marked and mediated by literature. Examining works composed in Bengali and other South Asian languages, this book seeks to broaden and complicate existing conceptions of what constitutes the Partition literary archive. A valuable addition to the growing field of Partition studies, this book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian history, gender studies, and literature.