Synopsis
Iswar
(Abhi Bhattacharya) and his younger kid sister Sita, victims
of the partition of Bengal stay in Nabajeeban Colony in Calcutta.
While fighting for their individual survival, Iswar and his
friend Haraprasad also look into the problems of the suffering
refugees. A little boy Abhiram is left alone when his mother
is abducted. Iswar takes him under his wing. A college friend
of Ishwar offers him a job as cashier for his iron foundry
in Chhatimpur on the Subarnarekha. Iswar accepts and goes
there with Abhiram and Sita. Haraprasad calls Ishwar a deserter.
At Chhatimpur across their house, the children discover an
abandoned airstrip and find it a most attractive playground.
When the manager of the foundry becomes insane since his daughter
deserted him, Iswar is promoted to the post. Abhiram (Satindra
Bhattacharya) comes home after his B.A. exams and Sita, a
young woman now (Madhabi Mukherjee) and he fall in love. Iswar
gets the news that Haraprasad's wife has committed suicide
due to the suffering of their children. She implores Iswar
to take care of them but Haraprasad refuses to hand them over
to a deserter. Iswar wants Abhiram to go to Germany but he
wants to settle down in Calcutta and write. Sita convinces
Abhiram to stick to his convictions. Iswar's friend wants
to make him a partner but he is not happy with Abhiram's presence
and his unknown caste origins. That same day Abhiram discovers
his mother, a dying low-caste woman. He now has to bear the
burden of his caste identity. Iswar snubs him and looks for
a match for Sita. Sita and Abhiram elope to Calcutta. They
struggle to make ends meet there and have a five year old
son, Binu. Abhiram unable to get a publisher for his writings,
gets a bus driver's job. Haraprasad meets Iswar and in their
defeat and despair the two decide to go to Calcutta and lose
themselves in pleasure. Abhiram is beaten up and killed following
an accident. In search for further pleasures Iswar comes to
Sita's house who is waiting for her first customer. Without
glasses he doesn't recognize her but on seeing him, she kills
herself. Iswar recognizes her as her blood splashes on him.
Two years later Iswar is released as it is proved that it
was suicide rather than murder as he claimed. Haraprasad brings
Binu to him but leaves without meeting Iswar. Binu and Iswar
get down at Chhatimpur. Iswar is told he is fired and has
lost the house as well. Binu calls him uncle and Iswar picks
him up, overcome by emotion. The two trudge together on the
sandy, rocky track...
The film
Subarnarekha,
made in 1962 but released in 1965 is the
last in a trilogy examining the socio-economic
implications of partition, the other two
being Meghe Dhaka
Tara (1960) and Komal Ghandhar (1961).
It is also perhaps Ritwik Ghatak's
most complex film.
 In the film Ghatak depicts the great economic and socio-political
crisis eating up the very entrails of the
existence of Bengal from 1948 - 1962; How
the crisis has first and foremost left one
bereft of one's conscience, one's moral
sense. In the film, the problem of homelessness
or rootlessness no more remains confined
to the refugees from the partition. Ghatak
extends it further as an important concept
for the modern man, uprooted from his traditional
moorings. The geographical sphere is thus
merged into a wider generality.
The
basic texture of the film is highly melodramatic.
Episodes after episodes have been joined
together in a dense story of fateful coincidences.
To quote Ghatak himself...
"I
agree that coincidences virtually overflow
in Subarnarekha. And yet the logic of the
biggest coincidence , the brother arriving
at his sister's house provoked me to orchestrate
coincidence per se in the very structuring
of the film. It is a tricky but fascinating
form verging on the epic. This coincidence
is forceful in its logic as the brother
going to any woman amounts to his going
to somebody else's sister."
Ghatak
endows virtually every sequence with a wealth
of historical overtones through an iconography
of violation, destruction, industrialism
and the disasters of famine and partition.
Most of the dialogues and the visuals are
a patchwork of literary and cinematic quotations
enhanced by Ghatak's characteristic redemptive
use of music. A famous example is the sequence
set on an abandoned airstrip with the wreck
of a WW2 airplane where the children playfully
reconstruct its violence until they come
up against the frightening image of the
goddess Kali (who turns out to be a rather
pathetic traveling performer). Later, in
dappled light, the older Sita sings a dawn
raga on the airstrip. In a classic dissolve,
the old Iswar throws a newspaper showing
Yuri Gagarin's Space Exploration into the
foundry where it bursts into flames, which
then dissolve into the rainwater outside
Sita's hovel. Haraprasad, who had earlier
rescued Iswar from committing suicide by
quoting from Tagore's Shishu Tirtha,
later in the nightclub parodies an episode
from the Upanishads using an East
Bengal dialect. Other quotes from this extraordinary
sequence includes Eliot's The Waste Land
(1922) and, through the music, Fellini's
La Dolce Vita (1960). Fellini had
used the 'Patricia' music in La Dolce
Vita to lash out at a degenerate, decadent
western civilization. Ghatak passes a similar
judgement on Bengal by using the same music
for the orgy in the bar. A torn and tattered
Bengal enhances the grimness of Sita and
her prostitution as it is a powerful metaphor
of its inner degradation.
The film is aided with fine performances
from Madhabi
Mukherjee and Abhi Bhattacharya and
special mention must be made of Bahadur
Khan's evocatively haunting musical score.
Sadly, like most of Ghatak's films, Subarnarekha
was totally rejected by the public. Ironically,
today the film is hailed as a classic and
as an important landmark in the history
of Indian Cinema.
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