The Cloud-Capped Star: A Cry for Life

In The Cloud-Capped Star’s refugee colony, Hindu exiles from what used to be East Bengal and became East Pakistan have made thatched shelters for themselves and are attempting to rebuild their lives. At the center of this narrative—which Ghatak adapted from a short story, “Chenamukh” (The commoner), by Shaktipada Rajguru—is Neeta (Supriya Choudhury), who initially helps to support her family by giving lessons to children, even while attending university classes herself, but eventually becomes the sole provider for her parents and three siblings after a series of adversities beset them. While the bare bones of the film’s narrative could be the story of any refugee family struggling to resettle under harsh circumstances, it is Ghatak’s cinematic vision that makes this film unique. After the credit sequence, which introduces various leitmotifs, both visual and aural—shimmering stars amid rippling water; stringed, percussive, and vocal rhythms and notes—the film opens on the wide-angle image of a huge tree, from below which a figure emerges, walking slowly to the sound of a male singing voice, practicing scales. Seconds before that shot gives way to a close-up of Neeta in profile, smiling indulgently at her older brother, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee), the sound of a train is introduced; when we finally do see her face, we also see a train rushing past along the horizon in the distant background, while Shankar is seated by a pond in the middle distance. In these opening shots, Ghatak introduces two dominant images associated with Neeta throughout the film—the tree and water, both signifiers of fertility and creation in Hindu symbology. Furthermore, the close-up of Neeta introduces the force of history in the form of the train, an evocative image of the Partition in the literature and cinema of the time.

The first third of the film traces the family’s daily struggles with various indignities and difficulties, including an accident that disables the father (Bijon Bhattacharya); the barbs aimed at Shankar for not taking on the responsibilities of the family as the eldest son; the insecurities of the mother (Gita Dey) about Neeta’s relationship with her beau, Sanat (Niranjan Ray); and, most poignantly, Neeta’s attempts to support everyone. The section culminates in a Baul (wandering minstrel) song that comments on the situation by expressing in the tradition of mystical poetry the desire to transcend the sufferings of life. The sequence begins as the song fades in during a conversation between Shankar and the local grocer, who accuses the family of living off Neeta. A cut finds the camera tracking in lyrically toward a group of Bauls, seated and performing on their traditional stringed instruments. The central singer seems lost in an interior world as he sings, “I don’t know your name, O boatman / Who should I call for? / Who will row me across?” The song continues over the scenes that follow, including one in which Neeta informs her parents that her younger brother, Montu (Dwiju Bhawal), has taken up a job in a factory. This disturbs the father, who also does not seem to know who is going to row him across to the other side and free him from his suffering.

The mother’s predicament is similar. The greatest threat she sees to her family seems to be Neeta’s relationship with Sanat; when Sanat visits Neeta, the sound of rice boiling on the stove and the sight of steam rising upward and enveloping the mother’s face powerfully evoke her anxieties about her family’s basic survival. A similar expressionistic use of sound occurs later: spices loudly splutter as they’re thrown into boiling oil during the scene in which the mother tacitly approves of the attempts of her younger daughter, Geeta (Gita Ghatak), to attract Sanat. Neeta, her mother, and her sister can be seen as representing preservation, destruction, and sensuality, respectively—what filmmaker Kumar Shahani has identified as the three “traditional aspects of feminine power” and fertility in the Indian tradition, as depicted by the Tantric symbol of the inverted triangle.

In this second section, it is Shankar’s and Neeta’s humiliations that drive the narrative. Shankar’s response to the insults for not earning his keep is to withdraw further into his music. Neeta, meanwhile, hears of Sanat giving up his research and taking a job, and, when she visits his new apartment, realizes that there is a woman in his inner room. She leaves without a word, and Ghatak shoots her from a low angle as she descends the stairs, while the soundtrack explodes with the sound of a whiplash, evoking the psychological laceration that this discovery causes. Her descent continues into a close-up, with her eyes brimming and gaze turned upward, a hand clutching her throat in a gesture of claustrophobia. She closes her eyes and turns her head to her right while Ghatak dissolves from her grieving face to a shot of the center of her family’s courtyard, invoking the central archetype of this film: Durga, the Mother Goddess.

One of the main images associated with Neeta is that of the courtyard, the place where all the members of her family make their demands on her. In the film, the courtyard is like a havan kund, the traditional ritualistic receptacle into which human desires and aspirations are consigned as offerings to the gods. A popular story about Durga is that she was born from the sacrificial fire in the form of Jagadhatri, the goddess who sustains the universe, the provider and benefactress of the world. Neeta shares her birthday with the Goddess, provides for the family, gives everything up for them, and is finally given up by them. After the marriage of Geeta and Sanat and the discovery of Neeta’s tuberculosis, Neeta, who earlier was frequently framed in the middle of the courtyard, is seen only on its peripheries, marginalized, having removed herself from the center of the household.

Neeta’s defeat and sacrifice at the hands of her family are articulated in another stunning sequence in which she requests that Shankar teach her a song by Tagore. As the siblings sing together, the camera glides toward them, away, and then back, following the rhythms of the music and the significance of the lyrics: “The night the storm blew open my doors / Little did I know that you would come into my home . . . / Could I have known that the storm was the pennant of your triumph?” As the song seems to have concluded, Neeta suddenly sings the first line again, in a tight, low-angle close-up that echoes that earlier shot on Sanat’s staircase, big, teary eyes turned upward, gazing off-screen as the sound of the whiplash explodes once again on the soundtrack, followed by silence. Once more her hand moves to clutch her throat, before she breaks down, sobbing inconsolably.