Mangled Homes, Tangled Homeland: Religion and Gender in Tanvir Mokammel’s Chitra Nadir Pare

Abstract

The oeuvre of Tanvir Mokammel majorly centres on his conviction that the Indian Partition of 1947 has long-standing ramifications for Bangladesh. While nationalist historiography understandably privileges the Liberation War of 1971 as the arrival of nationhood in Bangladesh, Mokammel persistently argues for the relevance of historical continuities in understanding both the aspirations and ruptures underlying the nation project over the last 50 years. This article analyses his film Chitra Nadir Pare (Quiet Flows the Chitra, 1998) for Mokammel’s representation of the complex ways in which the matrices of religion and gender have subversively operated in the intervening decades between 1947 and 1971 to rupture a hitherto syncretic Bengali identity, leading to displacements and statelessness. This re-historicising of the mid-twentieth-century cataclysm and its analysis in the second decade of the twenty-first century prioritise film as an authentic medium of cultural history that bears deep implications in the present time.