Resisting the resistible: re-writing myths of partition in the works of Ritwik Ghatak

Abstract

For all of the individual, collective and national trauma caused by the Indian Partition, perhaps the most significant legacy has been the way the two new nations of India and Pakistan have written the (hi)stories of Partition to serve contemporary political needs. Both countries have a huge amount of investment in their versions of the past, and public dissemination of knowledge of the past amply demonstrates this. This article will examine the way Partition has featured in the work of Bengali cinema-director, author and playwright Ritwik Ghatak and the way Ghatak resists and rewrites in various ways this state-sanctioned version of his country's and his own past. The Bengal Partition provides the context within which all of Ghatak's work is situated. Interestingly, however, Ghatak never depicts the act of partition itself, choosing instead as his subject the streams of refugees who left what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh, and came to Kolkata in West Bengal. Ghatak's most characteristic story, then, is the story of the educated, middle-to-upper-class East Bengali refugee, who has lost everything by having to move west. This story is the story of Ghatak's own family and the family of the thousands of others, including the present writer, and, as such, it is not surprising that it has become the predominant Bengali narrative of Partition. By focusing on Ghatak's oeuvre, then, this article will examine this narrative of partition, thereby showing how Ghatak uses it to resist the most pernicious, and also most permanent myth of the Indian Partition – that it was an act which led to two different, mutually exclusive, heterogeneous but unified nations.