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

Locating the Field

In her ‘Introduction’ to The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, Vazira Fazila Yacoobali Zamindar (2007) writes, ‘[t]he mass of ideas of what (Indian) Partition meant do not fold neatly into our paradigm of sovereign nation states’ (2007, p. 4; emphases added). As recent histories from the geo-political space called the Global South reveal, Eurocentric paradigms of nations and their narrations never sat cosily in post-partition South Asia. Seven decades after the cataclysmic event, and five after the subsequent liberation of East Pakistan ¹ as Bangladesh, focus has shifted from monolithic nationalist historiography to micro-histories best captured in cultural representations. As Bangladesh celebrates her 50th year of independence, this article draws on cinema to cast a retrospective view on two intrinsically connected matrices of nation formation – the positioning of gender identities amidst religious denominations. I take Bangladeshi filmmaker Tanvir Mokammel’s film Chitra Nadir Pare (Quiet Flows the Chitra, 1998, henceforth CNP) as a cultural text that offers a complex living history of the continuities and ruptures in social and community relationships that characterised the changing space of the nation.

Bangladesh’s trajectory from its origins in 1947 as East Bengal, a province of Pakistan, through a bloodshot independence from (West) Pakistan in 1971 to present liberalisation-Islamisation debates offers a complex instance of the contending claims of what constituted the ethnic base of the nation. From its original framing as a Muslim homeland, the liberation movement asserted its Bengali Muslim identity, in each instance problematising a more inclusive sense of citizen’s lives and aspirations for a nation. Since the religion-based ‘Two-Nation’ theory of the Partition of India in 1947 proved a faux pas for East Bengal, Bangladeshi nationalist historiography has understandably come to privilege 1971 as the point of arrival. In the process, the significance of 1947 has been undermined. I will argue that such an erasure of chronology is historically fallacious, both for its obfuscation of the ways in which religion and gender operated in East Bengal/Pakistan and because it amounts to a denial of the roots of much of the woes of Bangladesh today. In the 50th year of independence, a reassessment of CNP is relevant because the film addresses precisely these interstices of amnesiac history, the deep and problematic significance of which Bangladesh must reckon with, if the country is to grapple with the persistent devils of a ‘long partition’.

This article pays particular attention to the director’s own understanding of the potential of a cultural text to represent this convoluted history. As with most independent Bangladeshi filmmakers who lived through the Pakistan years – such as Tareque Masud, Morshedul Islam, Manzare Hassin Murad, Shameem Akhter and Yasmine Kabir – Tanvir Mokammel too holds that the partition of the Indian province of Bengal along religious lines was instrumental in rupturing a peoples’ history of syncretic existence. As he said in an interview with Star Weekend:

In my conscious mind, in the socio-political-intellectual plane, I believe that the Partition of 1947 was the root cause for all the anomalies we are suffering from in our present society now. Another reason, I guess, lies in my subconscious. Bengal had been a cultural entity for more than 2000 years. By dividing Bengal, the very existence and emotions of our Bengali identity, our deeply rooted cultural traits have been shattered. It is true that Bengal, in different times in history, remained divided in different states…But never before the 1947 Partition was the division so decisive, so complete. Never was a barbed wire erected between our Bengali population. Hence, the Partition of 1947 haunts me with a great sense of loss, and it keeps figuring in my films and writings repeatedly, like a leitmotif. (The Daily Star, 2017)

CNP undoubtedly captures this outlook, through a deep dive into what this original ‘loss’ has entailed for the nation, how common people of both religious denominations have been rendered into communal fodder by power equations, and how gender experience, crucial to this process, has been systemically marginalised.

Representation of Partition History in CNP: Rationale and Praxis

In CNP, Mokammel’s objective is thus to reclaim a forgotten but urgently relevant history – one writ large right from the setting of the film. His micro-history begins with capturing the brutal effects of the 1947 Partition on a hitherto closely knit community of Muslims and Hindus in Narail – a sub-divisional town in the Khulna division of present-day Bangladesh. Mokammel’s commitment to cinema as an authentic frame to capture the insidious turns of history is observable in his technique of projecting the title and credits on the outer walls of a deserted dwelling that becomes one of the central locales of the film. The dilapidated remnants of plaster and lime resembling a map of a cleft India as it stood in 1947 is not just an indelible marker of time; it also unfalteringly condenses a long-nurtured history of communal harmony as ruin. This is corroborated in the mentioning of 1947 as the starting point of the narrative that unfolds. CNP goes onto focus on the first two decades after the Indian Partition to map the evolving destinies of the subcontinent split into two nation states from a retroactive Bangladeshi perspective. In doing this, Mokammel makes strategic use of children whose growing up parallels the vicissitudes that accompany the rise of new nations.

Partition in the Eastern Theatre: The Subversion of Syncretic Bengali Identity

Contrary to the rhetoric of soft secularism in post-Partition India, Joya Chatterji (2007) notes that by 1947, the Congress had realised the inevitability of Partition and was wary of sharing power with the Muslim League in Delhi. Her research shows that the Congress was in hectic parleys with the departing coloniser to ensure ‘that partition on their terms was the only way forward’ (Chatterji, 2007, p. 15). This essentially meant ‘a limited partition of India’ (Chatterji, 2007, p. 15) by dividing the Muslim majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab. Chatterji’s view is ratified by Willem van Schendel who asserts that the Congress ‘insisted upon the division of Bengal in order to eliminate the Muslim League from India’s post-independence political equation’ (2009, p. 110).

Amidst these whirlwinds of high politics, it becomes necessary to understand the cultural and socio-economic implications of the Pakistan plan, for both concern the common man’s perspective that remains outside the pale of nationalist historiography. For instance, in keeping with the seamless Bengali identity based on common language and shared culture, the East Pakistan Renaissance Society espoused an understanding of freedom concerning ‘the creation of a total cultural programme’ (Bose, 2014, p. 9) instead of the binary exclusive state(s) proposed by the political leadership. As a unifying factor, language, and thereby the syncretic culture of Bengal, was too strong an influence to let the fact of Islamic religious identity serve as a common denominator that could bring together Muslims of Bengal and Punjab under the yoke of Pakistan.

In the context of Partition that forms the overarching backdrop of CNP, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ are to be understood as ‘constructed categor(y)ies of community and political mobilization that emerged under colonial conditions’ (Zamindar, 2007, p. 3). So when Mokammel begins CNP in 1947, he places the story of Narail as a prototype of peoples’ history against a more recent and cataclysmic statist history that saw a communal pogrom in undivided Bengal, a continuing saga of mass displacement devoid of any bureaucratic-juridical assistance and the resigned acceptance of ‘a fundamentally nonterritorial vision of nationality’ (Gilmartin, 1998, p. 1081).

This is not to say that CNP is only about wistfully looking back at a lost history; rather, it is part of Mokammel’s larger oeuvre, which rests on the truth that ‘nations are not given from seed, but are constituted in self-contradictory struggles, and in struggles that are prolonged and in some senses endless’ (Pandey, 2000, p. 290).

In an interview with the author on the relevance of the film in the present time, Mokammel said as follows:

The Hindus have been migrating from East Bengal since 1947. There were different phases and causal connections behind this. In fact, Hindus are still migrating from contemporary Bangladesh. A researcher from Bangladesh has mentioned that on an average, 632 Hindus migrate from Bangladesh each day. (T. Mokammel, personal communication, 20 April 2020)

Such post-partition realities do not allow a closure to the issue of migrancy/displacement, which is the central concern of CNP. The Western theatre had somewhat of a physical closure to its undeniably gory history of 1947, with both state(s) sanctifying ‘movements(s) with the intention of permanent relocation (and) voluntary exodus’ (Zamindar, 2007, p. 7), and Karachi/Lahore as initial centres of power in (West) Pakistan. However, in the two Bengals, where there was not much organised transfer of population, the trauma of displacement for Bengalis, Hindu and Muslim alike, whose roots were on the ‘wrong’ side of the Radcliffe Line, ² has been a continuing one. On a conservative estimate, Joya Chatterji says that ‘[b]etween 1947 and 1967’, the period covered in CNP, ‘at least 6 million Hindu refugees from East Bengal crossed into West Bengal’ (2007, p. 2), and Mokammel’s film represents one such micro-history.

Alongside this prolonged process of disentitlement and displacement experienced by minorities, the Bengali Muslim community in East Pakistan experienced otherness in their own land under West Pakistani domination; the pure homeland ideal was rapidly abandoned to reveal a situation of politico-economic subordination and a brute cultural imposition of provincialism. And it is a known fact that the imposition of Urdu as the only state language by the West Pakistan administration made it one of the cornerstones of alterity within Bengali nationalism. ³ As a film that traces the history of nearly two decades since 1947, much of CNP is set against the background of political agitations and police/army brutalities in East Bengal/Pakistan on the one hand and the continuous exodus of Hindus on the other. For Mokammel, gendered experience is pivotal to the unsettling of the idea of shared Muslim identity and the dramatisation of the simultaneous oppression of the Hindu minority. It is an irony of history that his apocalyptic vision of the past extends into the present, for the contradictions it captures continue to saddle Bangladesh as a nation state. ⁴

Tanvir Mokammel, CNP and the Importance of the 1947 Partition

It becomes clear from the foregoing account that the seeds of the emergence of Bangladesh as a nation, and the necessity of defining who constituted the national subject, were inherent in the Partition of 1947. As with her South Asian siblings born of the same partition, there were shared patterns such as the counterpoint of a secular fabric to ethno-religious majoritarianism, the persistence of marked social inequality and the late arrival of globalisation. However, Bangladesh was driven by the imperative of constructing a Bengali Muslim identity, and it tended to be resistant to any effort to represent the social, ethnic and religious in their contradictions.

Key to this unravelling of such a dominant ethno-nationalist focus for Mokammel is an engagement with the Bengal partition both in his films and his novels. He mentions the following in an interview:

The significance of 1947 Partition can hardly be overemphasized. It has so many ramifications. Most of our present day social, political and cultural problems are rooted in the Bengal Partition …. The deeper I look into our history, the more I find the ever-widening significance of 1947 Partition in our socio-cultural and political history …. Notwithstanding the eerie silence among the ruling class of Bangladesh about the Partition of 1947, common people from both sides of the border have kept those memories afresh in their minds … I believe as a film-maker my job is to give voice to the voiceless. (Huq, 2019)

Born in Khulna (East Bengal) in 1955, Mokammel’s early childhood memories of a nation in turmoil were vivid, particularly his recollections of the infamous East Pakistan riots of 1964. ⁵ In CNP, a news broadcast from Radio Pakistan reports of communal clashes across India and both Pakistans in the wake of the Hazratbal incident. This is testimony to the perilous situation of minorities left over on the ‘wrong’ sides of the Partition. In CNP, the direct bearings of these incidents are manifest in the protagonist, the Hindu lawyer Shashikanta Sengupta’s decision under duress to shut shop. However, he remains firm in his resolve not to leave ancestral roots by the Chitra. It is historically known that Pakistan as an Islamic state covertly sponsored hatred against Hindus in a spree of ethnic cleansing, and it hounded Bengali Muslims who sought to reach out to Hindu brethren afflicted with massacre and displacement. While public memory is both selective and short-lived, histories in general, and cultural history in particular, have the onus of preserving vital continuities in assembling the chronology of events that affected the evolution of a nation and its people. This necessitates delving into history of the period 1947–1971, without which the arrival of Bangladesh as a nation in 1971 cannot be fathomed. Mokammel’s films are an exploration of this continuum and seek to understand present-day Bangladesh as the homeland for Bengalis and other ethnic groups, irrespective of religious denominations and gender identities.

This urge of returning to roots has shaped Tanvir Mokammel’s work in two interconnected ways. As a leftist activist, he foregrounds the perspective of subaltern history; second, he seeks to give priority to a connected historiography that challenges an insular and partisan focus on Bangladeshi history. In his own words, Mokammel sees himself as ‘an Auteur filmmaker’ ((Khan, 2020), whose films carry a central message of cultivating a secular Bengali culture. Beginning with Hooliya (Wanted, 1984), an experimental short feature film, Mokammel has until now made seven feature films and over 14 documentaries. This article’s premise is that his work provides an insight into the complicated nature of gender and religious indices in the existing discourses on partition and displacement.

CNP is a film in which Mokammel relives his childhood memories of pre-Partition Khulna, a Hindu majority district with 51% Hindus. In his interviews, Mokammel spoke of the loss of his childhood friends who had to leave for India. He also has vivid memories of his mother’s efforts at bringing persecuted Hindus to the relative safety of Mokammel Manzil, where they stayed on until the riots of 1964 had subsided. This personal background places in perspective the film’s depiction of the life and times of a group of children, Hindu and Muslim, in the town of Narail by the placid Chitra. The film goes on to show them growing up as citizens of a ‘nation’ in turmoil. Mokammel takes up the make-believe world of the games that Minoti (Minu), Salma, Najma, Badal, Bidyut (Bolu) and many other young boys and girls play by the Chitra River, the lifeblood of Narail. He uses these to subtly map the slithering paranoia of religious binaries that begin to weigh heavy upon children. It is largely through their maturing as young men and women imbibing or opposing the worldviews of the times that the film represents the evolving contrarieties of a nation that subvert the bonds of childhood. This crystallising of the personal in the artwork is evident in Mokammel’s comment on CNP:

Their anxious faces perhaps left a strong impression on my young, tender mind. You will be surprised to know that when I was just a student of class six – I mean around the age of 11 – I decided to make a film on the miseries of the Hindus in East Bengal and decided to title the film Chitra Nadir Pare. (The Daily Star, 2017)

The mofussil town of Narail is replete with Mokammel’s own boyhood memories, which provide material for the story of CNP. Cumulatively, these experiences unfold as an aesthetic documentation of the hopes and challenges of the Bangladeshi nation, and the predicament of citizens whose religious identities have been systemically pitted against a more inclusive ethno-linguistic selfhood. Today, Bangladeshi national life again stands at a critical crossroads over the recurrent challenges of sectarian formulations of identity and gender injustice. This article seeks to develop a critique of this situation by analysing CNP as a moving micro-narrative that brings visibility to the lives and struggles of common people, something largely lacking in most political studies of South Asian partition.

Weaving the Tale: Micro-history on Film

The opening scenes of CNP carry an eponymous significance, set as they are in different locales by the Chitra River. Prime among these is the deserted residence of Nagen Babu, once a rich Hindu householder. His family have left behind their home and hearth, fleeing the jeopardies of life in a homeland that virtually disowned them. Only heard of and never seen, Nagen Babu’s family becomes a prototype of the migrant Hindu in CNP. Such displacements, whether planned, reported or shown to the accompaniment of loud wails, banging of heads on walls and of people turning insane, form a leitmotif of the film.

So, this house in shambles becomes a haven for the children of Narail, where they play their make-believe games and organise picnics. And when they grow, it is the space they come back to in search of a lost time. The cleft map of India on the outer walls of this building is not just a visual with geo-political connotations. The opening scene also conveys the ramifications of Partition through the apparently innocent hullabaloo of the children playing on the banks of the Chitra. The sighting of a flock of migratory birds triggers the children’s imagination and an utterance that captures the beleaguered times:

Minu: Wild ducks have no home. In different winters they live in different fens.

Salma: How happy they are!

Minu: Not at all. My father says those who do not have a home of their own are the most miserable ones in this world. (Mokammel, 1998) ⁶

These lines are fraught with an irony of which the children are perhaps unaware – how their unconscious subject positions as Hindus or Muslims already shape their responses to the migratory birds. In an interview, Mokammel makes a categorical distinction between ‘state’, which he calls a temporal identity, and ‘nation’, which is constituted of human parameters and is therefore permanent (Huq, 2019). The relationship between Hindus and Muslims affects not only the state but also the nation, given the porousness of borders and the constant to and fro of migration between East Pakistan and India. This is brought out in CNP through the choric role assigned the lunatic beggar. He will suddenly leap out to utter an oracular refrain: ‘Are you going? Or coming? It’s all the same. Going and coming are the same anyways’ (Mokammel, 1998). Mokammel called this lunatic as follows:

[T]he only sane person in that post-Partition imbroglio…kind of a Toba Tek Singh ⁷ of East Bengal …. You can say that the presence of the madman in the film Chitra Nadir Pare is more a symbol created by the film-maker for a purpose or a comment by him rather than a human character per se. (T. Mokammel, personal communication, 17 February 2021)

While the imminent loss of home and homeland is already an incipient paranoia in Hindu children like Minu, her father, the lawyer Shashikanta Sengupta, insists on remaining rooted despite the general drift of Hindus to migration. We first meet him on the banks of the Chitra as he returns from a visit to his ailing brother Nidhukanta. Despite his birthplace becoming a Muslim ‘homeland’, Shashikanta, a widower with two children, Minu and Bolu, and his widowed sister Anuprava, holds dear his rights in the land of his forefathers and the ecology of life by the Chitra. He defiantly says ‘Advocate Shashikanta will not go anywhere. He will continue to walk steadfast in the land of his forefathers’ (Mokammel, 1998). Mokammel and his music director Syed Shabab Ali Arzoo acknowledge that they are ‘very meticulous in creating the musical scores for (their) films’ (T. Mokammel, personal communication, 17 February 2021). Music reinforces in paradoxical ways the binary between the idea and reality of the ancestral land that Shashikanta talks of. It is evening when he sails back to Narail on a boat from Ramanandakathi, and the background score plays the Magrib azaan; when he reaches home, Anuprava is lighting the lamp by the basil, and she plays the conch in a traditional Hindu ritual of sunset. On the one hand, Narail is still a piece of syncretic Bengal, but on the other, the passage of the day also suggests an evanescent picture of social cohesiveness, something that will be borne out by the unfolding of events in CNP.

Shashikanta’s defiance will soon prove difficult to keep up, despite the presence of well-meaning Muslim friends like his fellow lawyer Shamsuddin. The latter offers the safety of his own tenements when the Hazratbal incident of 1964 snowballs into widespread riots and arson across West and East Pakistan, affecting India too. Muslim members of the legal fraternity, part of the communal bandwagon seeking the takeover of Hindu property, brand Shamsuddin pro-Hindu for espousing an inclusive Bengali identity. In an increasingly polarised East Pakistan, the likes of Shamsuddin are indeed rare. More common are neighbours who unleash psychological violence to compel Hindu flight. Shashikanta mentions the covert pressures exercised by his neighbour Hamid Mia, a contractor, who is maternal uncle of Salma, Najma and Badal. Given the close ties between the children of the two families, this is unfortunate indeed. However, towards the end of the film, when Minu and her aunt are compelled to leave for India, Hamid Mia extends a helping hand and appears to be sad–Mokammel investing the situation with an emotional complexity. In contrast to Hamid Mia’s ‘inconsistency’, his sister consistently retains her affection towards Minu and allows her unhindered access to their house. Mokammel suggests that the conduct of people, and specifically women, in domestic settings operates differently from the conduct and calculations of men in a public context involving property and identity:

I think that was not abnormal among average Bengali Muslim families of that time, when someone was non-communal and sympathetic towards their Hindu neighbours, and someone else was communal and greedily eyeing their property. The gender factor or the binary between domestic (ghar) and outside (bahir) relationships between the two communities can also be factors here. Though being religious and a homebound woman, Salma’s mother, also being Badal’s mother, had sympathies for Minoti. That may not be the case for Hamid Mia, the man of the world maternal uncle who, during those unsettling days, was eyeing an opportunity to grab the house of Shashikanta’s family. In the era of post-Partition East Bengal, the existence of this binary among Muslim families, far from being unusual, was rather common. (T. Mokammel, personal communication, 16 February 2021)

Shashikanta’s elder brother Nidhukanta, a benevolent doctor who lives in the village of Ramanandakathi across the Chitra, complains of Muslims creating terror among Hindus by pelting stones at their houses or threatening their womenfolk. Similarly, in Narail, a Muslim caretaker singles out Bidyut among other boys for the petty offence of urinating in the graveyard, and subjects him to intense physical and psychological torture. Mokammel uses children to capture the enormity of Partition. The deep scars of the graveyard incident on Bidyut’s psyche finally compel Shashikanta, much against his wishes, to send his son to Kolkata. Young Bidyut’s shift from Narail to Kolkata constitutes a displacement from the serene environs of the Chitra to the claustrophobia of his uncle Biren’s house, capturing the loss of a whole way of life.

For the major part of the film, until he falls to his death on the banks of the Chitra, Shashikanta encounters queries from neighbours and relatives regarding his plans to migrate. There are suggestions that he must do this for the sake of the motherless girl Minu, now a grown-up woman. However, in the face of news of the increasing numbers of Hindus leaving Narail for West Bengal, father and daughter become even more resolute about staying. Shashikanta is popularly perceived as eccentric, and Narail is abuzz with derisive limericks ridiculing him: ‘Shashikanta Sengupta the lawyer has a secret desire/He’ll not leave his homeland, will rather stay on by the Chitra/If not in his human form, then as an airy ghost’ (Mokammel, 1998). When Shashikanta utters these lines, it makes for humour, but it is also a grim commentary on ways in which corrosive political rhetoric had pervaded mass culture to undermine the hitherto syncretic Bengali psycho-social mindscape.

In Shashikanta’s refusal to accept the Partition as fact and the option of migration, Mokammel offers an interesting counterpoint to the patterns of Hindu migration noted by Joya Chatterji. She observes that Hindus, like Muslims, were never a homogeneous community, and that their reasons for migration were not uniform but based on caste-class dynamics. Unlike Punjab, ‘in East Bengal the violence was more contained’ (Chatterji, 2007, p. 111) apart from specific riots in Noakhali and Tippera in 1946, in Khulna in 1950 and the pogrom following the Hazratbal incident in 1964 mentioned earlier. While one cannot deny the psychological pressures on Hindus who stayed on in East Bengal, Chatterji observes that ‘people left East Bengal when they did for a variety of reasons, not always because of an immediate threat of violence’ (2007, p. 111). She notes that of the early waves of refugees that ‘the overwhelming majority were drawn from the ranks of the very well-to-do and the educated middle classes, with assets and skills which they could take with them across the border and, in many cases with kith and kin on the other side’ (Chatterji, 2007, p. 115). Here, Shashikanta did not follow the more common path of his class. Despite qualifying on most counts as the proverbial Bengali Hindu upper-caste bhadralok (gentry) wary of losing clout in an increasingly changing homeland, Shashikanta’s indefatigable nature makes him a character of recalcitrant micro-historic potential who assumes tragic dimensions.

It is interesting how the Hindu social institution of caste became a key factor in determining migrations. While most early migrants were upper-caste gentry, lower castes who had minimal material possessions and generally formed the bulk of the trade and service sector seemed to have marginally better chances of acceptance in a Muslim society developing a growing utilitarian outlook. The remaining figure of the Hindu Zamindari, the Babu, an unnamed gentleman residing in the big house, observes that while the upper castes would have to depart, the lower caste Hindus would stay behind because of the relative absence of Muslim subjects in certain sectors, with the bulk of poorer Muslims being mostly agricultural labourers. In the early part of CNP, the barber Bijoy’s plans of staying on and further consolidating the trade for his son is testimony to caste-identity-based migration patterns. Lower caste migrations thus began incrementally in a later phase when they could no longer sustain themselves. Even today, one comes across Hindus in ancestral professions such as sweetmeat sellers and barbers largely in Khulna and other parts of Southern Bangladesh. Shashikanta’s clerk Nimai’s dilemma whether to move to India or stay on, now that he is practically jobless, shows the precarity of the middle classes. Contrasted with the male Hindu workforce, the Hindu sex worker Shikharani whom Nimai visits on the fringes of Narail, presents a different picture of migrancy:

Shikharani: The brothel is almost vacated. Belly, Jyotsna, Krishna have all left. Madam also plans to leave.

Nimai: Are you leaving too?

Shikharani: Now in Calcutta there is no dearth of prostitutes. Flocks of refugee girls are now joining this profession and many of them from respectable families too.

Nimai: So are you migrating as well?

Shikharani: I’m already an outcast, no one will marry me. I survive by selling my body here, and it will be no different there. A customer has no religion as such. (Mokammel, 1998)

Shikharani’s pragmatic decision, howsoever existential its implication, brings a new trajectory to the class-gender angle of migrancy. As gendered subjects whose bodies become sites of violence/contestation, the woman question will be taken up at greater length in a subsequent section. For now, Mokammel’s commitment to a faithful representation of the myriad alleys of this complex history must be commended. The genre of a feature film where even minor characters come to life makes the human crises so very palpable.

CNP opens in 1947 and continues until the middle of the 1960s. It culminates with the East Pakistan riots of 1964, when the unleashing of a spree of ethnic cleansing of Hindus resulted in a fresh wave of migrations to India. A key feature of this time frame is the Language Movement of 1952, though Mokammel does not make any overt reference to it. However, it exercises visible presence in the Language Martyrs’ Memorial ⁸ at Narail Government Victoria College where Minu and Salma are students, unmistakably pointing to momentous events that have taken place in the narrative backdrop. The problematisation of the nation project even for Muslim subjects thus relates to a neo-colonial subordination of East Pakistan on the basis of linguistic and cultural domination. This must be understood as being different from the voluntary acceptance of Urdu alongside Bangla as the language of cinematic entertainment that Hoek (2014) unravels, as such acceptance was restricted to certain sections of Bengali elites.

Mokammel shows the larger context impacting the intimate world through the death of Badal, brother of Salma and Najma and the beloved of Minoti. Badal leaves Narail for Dhaka to pursue higher studies, and like most youth of the time, he joins the volatile political resistance against anti-democratic moves by the West Pakistani military regime and is shot to death. It is the only scene of overt violence by West Pakistan and resistance by Bengali nationalists. Through it, Mokammel condenses the agitations of East Pakistani students against Ayub Khan’s military regime, especially by those from the University of Dhaka that later became the epicentre of a bloodbath in 1971. For Mokammel, Badal represents ‘the sane side of East Bengal Muslim populace who were non-communal and forward looking’ (T. Mokammel, personal communication, 14 February 2021). They brought about the secular Language Movement of 1952 and were inevitably attacked by the West Pakistani military junta. It is thus possible to trace through Badal and his likes a continuum from the Language Movement to the Liberation War of 1971, connecting the story of CNP with the larger historical and political canvas of the young man’s killing.

Within the tragic genre to which CNP belongs, Badal’s passing ‘enhances the sense of loss which was the dominant theme of the film – a lost time, a lost generation, a lost country’ (T. Mokammel, personal communication, 14 February 2021). For Minu, the deaths of her lover Badal and then her father Shashikanta overpower her with double misfortune, making migration her only tenable option. The evocation of the bonds that evolved between Badal and Minu, from their time as childhood playmates to their love in young adulthood, are an elegiac representation of the failed hopes and destinies of Hindu and Muslim communities of East Pakistan. The film captures the different levels of oppressive power, from the state machinery that vanquishes Badal and many of his generation to the subversive power of the petty bourgeois Muslim subject who compelled Badal’s childhood friend, Bidyut (Minu’s brother), to forsake his roots in Narail years ago.

Religious/Communal Identities: Continuities and Ruptures

CNP, representing a nation at the crossroads, traces the processes of (sub)conscious communal identity formation. Here, Mokammel makes strategic use of children’s games, which, as the last conversation Minu has with Salma before she leaves Narail reveals, were never wholly innocent:

Salma: You know, in our childhood days, Najma and I would tease you and Bidyut on the sly over something.

Minu: About what? …

Salma: You won’t laugh, right? We’d think that black ants are better than red ants because they don’t bite. So we were sure that the black ones must be Muslims, and the red ones, Hindus. How childish we were!

Minu: (With a sigh). Perhaps we still are … (Mokammel, 1998)

A deconstructionist analysis of an otherwise idyllic representation of childhood in the early part of the film would register how games, riddles and dreams, all become loaded with meaning, and return to haunt at the end. The earlier conversation, for example, hinges upon the ambivalence deliberately woven into the idea of childishness. For Salma, these words are a kind of expiation; for Minu, they anticipate the impending loss of a way of life. The Muslim woman will not undergo the trauma of losing home/homeland and can still luxuriate in the memory of childhood innocence, while the Hindu woman who faces an uncertain future cannot perceive this memory as comforting any longer. As Minu and her aunt leave on the bus for Kolkata, Mokammel takes the poignancy of the moment to a crescendo by playing as background score a refrain from the children’s playtime by the Chitra. Minu’s final journey is both physical and metaphorical. There is pathos underlying this shift of Kolkata from an exotic locale in the children’s imagination to a place of exile offering the refugee woman only a bedevilling turn of circumstances. The auditory impact is enhanced manifold by the visual image of the famed trees dotting Jessore Road, an iconic geo-spatial reference point that had incessantly witnessed displacements since 1947. In CNP, the overarching trees form a cave-like image through which the bus meanders until it fades from view, symbolically sucking up in its vortex a habitat, a culture and a hope; a sense of loss as excruciating as physical death itself.

CNP repeatedly evokes visual representations of such bonds to constitute an old-world charm. In most such scenes, the Chitra River forms a significant backdrop–a mute ecological presence amidst changing times. The scene where the children, irrespective of religious background, participate in making the idol of the Hindu goddess Durga on the riverbank is a delight to the eyes; so too is the scene with grown-up sisters Salma and Najma partaking of ritual food at the community Durga Puja later in the film. While Anuprava, Minu’s widowed aunt, observing caste-ordained notions of purity and pollution, gets irritated when Muslim children swarm over her as she bathes in the river, she has no dearth of affection for Badal, Salma and Najma whenever they come to her house. Minu, in fact, notes that her aunt must have a real soft spot for Badal to offer him sweet drops that she otherwise hoards zealously. Similarly, we observe that Minu has unrestricted access to Badal’s house, which she frequents both to meet her friends and to have a glimpse of her lover. When Badal is leaving for Dhaka the first time, Salma very casually calls him from behind. This is something considered ominous in the Hindu creed, and their mother frets over it. Salma’s uncle Hamid Mia rubbishes it as a piece of ‘Hinduani’ superstition, in Muslim practice, it is enough to utter ‘Bismillah’ and set forth. While cultural beliefs accompanying religious faith persist, they do not stand in the way of individual relationships. CNP offers us hope that even amidst the pervasive rupture of human bonds as a result of communal conflict, a section of Bengali society holds onto the grace of personal relationships undiluted by religious polarisation or gendered othering.

Gendered Subjects: Representing the Female Body

Gender violence has been a significant part of the narrative of Partition, as scholars such as Urvashi Butalia, Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon, Suranjan Das, Dina Siddiqui, Nayanika Mookherjee, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and others have shown. The entire canon of Partition Literature and its cultural representation across media are replete with horrendous accounts of the violation of women as targets of communal violence and patriarchy, that which Chowdhury calls ‘narratives of abject victimhood’ (2015, p. 760). Coming as it does almost five decades after the cataclysmic events; CNP casts a retrospective glance at the layered complexity that this narrative of victimhood had assumed, and thereby the ramifications of the gender question.

Beyond sporadic incidents of gender violence shown in CNP, Mokammel picks upon the autumnal ritual of Durga Puja, the greatest festivity in the annual calendar of the Bengali Hindu, to represent gender subversion. On the one hand, the female goddess in her clay iconography with 10 arms, wielding weapons to destroy evil and musical instruments like a conch to signal peace, is invoked through the sacred chants of Mahalaya ⁹ and worshipped both as destroyer and preserver according to Hindu mythology. On the other, and behind the scene of the festivities, Mokammel juxtaposes the brutal violation of Nidhukanta’s widowed daughter Basanti. While returning after offering prayers, she is waylaid and assaulted in the bushes by the Chitra, her assailants a group of young Muslim men in lungis. ¹⁰ The gender politics that emerges within the larger fold of the religious-turned communal will return to haunt us. What really matters is the retrogressive journey of the state that has lost out on the dream of the nation. Here, the targeting of Basanti as a vulnerable subject is part of a planned violence and defiling of womanhood to consolidate the ethnic parameters of the state. Urvashi Butalia observes the following in The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India:

Mass scale migration, death, destruction, loss – no matter how inevitable Partition seemed, no one could have foreseen the scale and ferocity of bloodshed and enmity it unleashed. […] Still less could anyone have foreseen that women would become so significant, so central, and indeed so problematic. (Butalia, 2017, p. 188)

As in most other South Asian countries, incidents of violence against women still remain a problem in neo-colonial Bangladesh. All measures at gender sensitisation pale into fatuity in the face of regressive strains of Islamisation and patriarchy. This is subtly represented in the futures of young women in CNP – Najma is safely married off and Salma becomes homebound, while for Minu, the only option is to move to Kolkata. It must be remembered that both Salma and Minu are shown as college students in Narail, yet circumstances are such that one cannot think of self-dependent career options in the land of their birth for any of these women characters. Viewed parallel to their destinies, Shikharani’s resolve to migrate stands at the other end of the spectrum of gender and representation of the female body. Cumulatively, Mokammel takes up ‘conflicts that are ostensibly over purdah and poverty or tradition and modernity (to) contain other larger struggles for power in many arenas’ (Siddiqi, 1998, p. 206)

Mokammel’s art is at its most suggestive when he shows Basanti’s white saree being ripped off between the branches of the trees, and then her suicide by drowning in the Chitra even as the idol of the goddess is being immersed amidst much fanfare. Tragically, this appears to her to be the only means available to avoid capitulation to social stigma. This collage of successive frames of two female faces – of Basanti and Durga – their bodies floating on the water, creates a climactic moment of recognition of the female as doubly marginalised subaltern. In this montage, there is a sense of the entire paradox of riverine Bengal – a bounteous motherland that once clamoured to liberate herself from the coloniser, now the medium that channels a staggering sense of the loss of hope and of the ideal in the quagmire of communal politics.

The other axis of this defeat is represented in the anomie that suffuses Minu’s plight. Hers is a situation perhaps more difficult than death, in that it entails carrying on the battle to stay afloat amidst the loss of both the ideal of life and its emotional succour. In these two destinies, of suicide and bare existence, lies the crux of Mokammel’s treatment of the gender issue in CNP. By tracing the displacement of two destitute women from home and homeland, the film captures the critically gendered dimensions of partition. As Shashikanta’s pyre burns by the river, Minu’s empty gaze into the distance says all there is to be said about the impending maelstrom that will engulf their lives. The difference in the way Bidyut and Minu, both Hindus, view Kolkata can be read as an ecocritical trope within the matrix of gender. For the young boy, it is a place consciously sought out for refuge, while for the adult woman, it is marked by her estrangement from roots; as destination, it is a blind alley. As Minu and two other old Hindu women come to be abandoned in the course of the film, Mokammel raises the subtle question of whether women are more deeply rooted in their ecology than men.

In CNP, this ecocritical perspective is relayed in the visual power of the Chitra River and the sense that the female characters are deeply attached to its habitus. The riverine topography of Bangladesh, and Mokammel’s avowed fascination with rivers in almost all his films, is inflected by the understanding that rivers in Bengal are traditionally considered feminine, even akin to a mother figure. The very title of CNP also implicitly points to a discourse on gender. We may observe equivalence between the river’s constant presence as mute witness to the changing patterns of social and community existence and the lives of women. This is pronounced in the Chitra’s pervasive presence in Anuprava’s recollections of her marriage and widowhood. When Shashikanta and Minu speak in tandem about staying back in Narail, Minu’s attitude rests on her feelings of claustrophobia in a Kolkata where there is no river like the Chitra. While at one level CNP is a film about partition, its deeper resources come from this nuanced treatment of the life of women in a complex ecology of being.

The Significance of Music in CNP

As Minu descends the flight of stairs of their house Panthanirh at dusk for the last time, she breaks into a Tagore song, Pather shesh kothay, ki achey sheshe (Where lies the end of the road, what awaits at that end; Trans. mine), which perfectly sums up the mood of the moment and the uncertainty of life hereafter. In fact, all through the film, Mokammel’s adroit use of Tagore’s lyrics has a subtle significance, given that the cult of Tagore was perceived by the administration as putting ‘Islam in danger’ (Ranjan, 2016, p. 134) in East Pakistan. Given that CNP re-historicises the period, this may be a form of protest in itself. As Payami (2002) notes, during the period under consideration, the West Pakistani government went to the extent of banning Tagore on Radio Pakistan in order to curb the rise of popular Bengali nationalism. For Mokammel, the Bengali Hindu middle-class milieu of the film provides the right socio-cultural ambience for the liberal use of Tagore songs ‘because the wordings of these songs suited perfectly well for (sic.) the thematic schema of [our] soundtrack’ (T. Mokammel, personal communication, 14 February 2021). Music gains prominence in CNP also because of the eclectic mix of folk songs of the soil that blend with Tagorean lyrics. This interweaving of high and folk culture is best exemplified in a couple of scenes that follow in quick succession, all involving Shashikanta. In the first, one hears a boatman’s song on the Chitra, Porer jayga porer jomi ghar banaiya ami roi, ami toh shei gharer malik noi (I build my tenements on other’s land; none of it is mine, Trans. mine) wafting into Shashikanta’s bedroom where he sits as a pensive figure at dusk. A little later, the lonely widower is seen listening to Tagore’s Tumi ki keboli chobi … (Are you all but a portrait, Trans. mine) on the gramophone as he casts a fond look at the portrait of his wife hanging on the wall. Cumulatively, these scenes offer a moving commentary on the unfolding of his tragic life, both as a family man and as a citizen faced with the impending peril of statelessness. In effect, both positions become the overarching themes of the film. The boatman’s song, a composition by the folk lyricist Abdul Latif, is a leitmotif that recurs at significant moments, culminating in Shashikanta’s funeral, when it functions as a sad comment on the ephemerality of life.

Similarly, Mokammel rounds off the moment of Badal’s death with a gloomy variant of an otherwise spirited song, Aalo amar aalo ogo aalo bhuban bhora, which is an exhortation to the rays of light and hope to pervade our lives. When asked about the use of this song, he noted:

Badal, a meritorious student of Dhaka University, represented the enlightened self of East Bengal that was opposed to the oppressive and philistine regimes of Pakistan and also challenged the very ideological quintessence of the idea of Pakistan, that is, communalism. With his death, it is as if the last ray of hope was lost, and darkness descended on the land. So…we deliberately used a variation of sad tune of that Tagore song on the sound track in that particular scene, referring to the symbol of aalo (light). (T. Mokammel, personal communication, 14 February 2021)

The choice of music defines the nostalgic mood of CNP right from the beginning, and Mokammel credits his music director for an ‘exceptionally sensitive piece as the opening title or theme’ of the film (T. Mokammel, personal communication, 14 February 2021). This theme music is played out in different variations in the course of the film, inviting the audience to share the sustained mood of pensiveness that suffuses CNP.

The Closing of CNP

The final movement that commences with Anuprava’s last evening prayers the day before their departure deserves special mention. Even though her lighting the lamp by the basil in the courtyard is an intrinsically Hindu ritual, yet the picturisation transcends all barriers of religion to become a living elegy of the passing of a hitherto peaceful life for a people intrinsically bound by faith in the rootedness to the soil of their birth. The spiritual and the material coalesce. The next morning, when the old woman locks the doors of their house for the last time, by force of habit, she ties the bunch of keys to the ends of her saree, as she had always done. In the resigned fatigue with which she safekeeps what are now the keys to nowhere, Mokammel subtly explores the liminality of her consciousness, unable to come to terms with loss of home and the fact of migrancy, which in reality is displacement. Panthanirh, Shashikanta’s house, is a symbolically charged site in the film–its very name capturing a contradictory destiny: it is a compound of Pantha (traveller) and Nirh (haven of peace/rest). Overcoming the limitations of a hired 16-mm celluloid camera lacking a depth of focus, Mokammel zooms into the plaque indicating the name and the year of the building (1327 by the Bengali calendar, 1921 according to the Gregorian). This comes at the poignant moment when Minu and her aunt are leaving their house for the last time, staggering under the weight of their loss. Panthanirh stands on the banks of the Chitra River carrying the timeless significations of mangled homes in a homeland tangled in a web of uncertainty. As the house is emptied of its residents, the audience have nothing but empathetic sadness to sink into because they anticipate that there will be no return. The narrative of CNP comes full circle as Mokammel uses the background score of the children’s limericks about Kolkata as a land of utopia ironically, as it is clearly a dystopia for Minu. She embodies a marginality made up of the dual lack of being a Hindu and a woman. These deficits contribute to an irremediable marginalisation that pitches the subject beyond the territorial space of the nation into a void of statelessness. Mokammel’s final suggestion is perhaps that Minu is a nation unto herself, a quintessential human identity she encompasses, even while being denied her rights and access to the space of the motherland.

Conclusion

CNP stands as a representation of Tanvir Mokammel’s rooted belief in the historic wrongdoing of Bengal’s partition in 1947. Within the genre of tragedy, the film brings together the apparently contestable relationship of history and fiction. ‘What is history at the end of the day? Some stories. Happiness and sufferings of human beings, their dreams and struggles– all these finally turn into stories. The more dramatic the story, the more attractive it is’ (Mokammel 2019, p. 212. Trans. mine). As a storyteller, he is both vivid and incisive in the way he retraces history in CNP over a span of seven decades. Mokammel digs into the micro-history of a lawyer’s family to illustrate the macro history of Partition, constructing archetypes of mangled homes unravelling in the uncertainties of a tangled homeland, much to the consternation of the Bengali, challenging the idea of the nation they wanted to become.