Space and Psyche: The Bengal Partition in Chitra Nodir Pare and Swapnabhumi

Abstract

The Partition of 1947 brought changes to the subcontinent’s demography by dividing India, Pakistan, and later Bangladesh (which gained independence in 1971). Millions of inhabitants were compelled to leave their ancestral homes, switch jobs, and endure separation from loved ones. Those who remained behind witnessed the departure and felt the absence of neighbours and friends. The mass displacement and communal violence gave lasting psychological trauma to the partition victims and witnesses. Born in 1955, Bangladeshi filmmaker Tanvir Mokammel, one of the few in his country to produce films about Partition, was profoundly affected by the migration of his schoolmates and neighbours during post-Partition unrest. In his full-length feature film Chitra Nodir Pare (1999) and mega documentary Swapnabhumi (2007), he portrays the ongoing suffering of the masses, their anxiety over separation and the emotional scars left on them by the historical division. In Chitra Nodir Pare, Mokammel has depicted the lasting effects of the Bengal Partition through the story of Shashikanta Bhushan, a Hindu lawyer from Narail, reluctant to migrate from his homeland and in the documentary film Swapnabhumi, he brings the long-term consequences of stranding Pakistanis living in East Bengal and their repartition crisis to attention. This paper, with an emphasis on addressing the existing amnesia surrounding the Partition in Bangladesh, analyses these two films by Tanvir Mokammel to explore the consequences of the Bengal Partition, as depicted on screen, in the memory of different generations. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, Freud’s ‘uncanny’ (1955), and Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of ‘unhomeliness,’ this article argues that Chitra Nodir Pare hammers the traumatic remembrance so forcefully that it resists the balance between memory and forgetting required by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s theory of ‘ethical memory.’ In contrast, Swapnabhumi partially fulfills this ethical imperative by foregrounding displacement and statelessness as ongoing struggles of survival and belonging.