Seventy-eight years ago, on 15 August 1947, a cartographer's pen carved Bengal in two – West Bengal and East Bengal (later to be renamed East Pakistan and finally, after the 1971 Liberation War, Bangladesh).
What was once a cultural, historical and geographical landscape was split by the Radcliffe Line. The political events behind the Partition took place swiftly, but its human impacts were slow and everlasting.
It uprooted millions, turned neighbours into strangers, and left behind a deep, unhealed wound.
Since then, Bengali cinema, both in India and Bangladesh, has revisited the Partition time and again.
Sometimes directly, through refugee dramas. Sometimes indirectly, in films about families, villages, and cities still living in the shadow of Partition.
The result is two interconnected cinematic traditions - one rooted in Kolkata's refugee colonies, and the other in Bangladesh's riverbanks and minority homesteads.
West Bengal: Refugee realism and melodrama as historical memory
Nemai Ghosh's Chinnamul (1951) stands as the earliest cinema that depicts the Partition of India. Produced with the help of the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), the film features real refugees from Calcutta camps; it rejects studio-polished documentary-style realism.
Ghosh's camera lingers on faces standing in queues, the bare feet, and the awkwardness of sudden urban settlement.
This was not just a movie; it was testimony. It announced that Partition, for West Bengal, would be remembered as a refugee crisis, not only a political separation.
Ghatak's Partition Trilogy: Turning history into sound and space
If Ghosh gave Partition its first visual archive, Ritwik Ghatak gave it its most terrific cinematic language in his trilogy - Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961), and Subarnarekha (1965).
Ghatak mapped the psychology in the afterlife of displacement.
Meghe Dhaka Tara tells the story of Nita, a young woman who supports her refugee family in a Kolkata colony. The film's whip-crack sound effect at moments of emotional strain transforms everyday sacrifice into a visceral shock for the viewer.
Komal Gandhar deals with the story of a theatre troupe divided by ideology, mirroring Bengal's own fracture.
The troupe's rehearsals become a metaphor for the possibility of collective healing.
Subarnarekha blends Partition with caste hierarchies, showing how one form of social violence intersects with another.
For Ghatak, Partition was not an event of the past; it was a present condition that shaped how people spoke, worked, loved, and remembered.
His blend of melodrama, folk music, and Brechtian distance turned cinema into both mourning and protest.
Rajkahini (2015): The border as brothel
Srijit Mukherji's Rajkahini offered a commercial but symbolically loaded take on Partition, a story of a brothel located directly in the path of the Radcliffe Line. The women in the brothel refuse to evacuate, claiming sovereignty over their space in the face of both political authority and male violence.
While less subtle than Ghatak, the film makes an important point - the drawing of borders is never gender-neutral, and women's bodies often become the sites of power practice.
Bangladesh: Staying, minority precarity, and riverine memory
In East Bengal (now Bangladesh), Partition did not immediately create refugee colonies like those in West Bengal. Many Hindu families decide to stay back, not leaving their ancestral homeland. This opened a different set of questions for Bangladeshi filmmakers. What does it mean to remain in a place where one's community is getting smaller day by day? How does one hold on to land, home, and identity in the face of insecurity?
Chitra Nodir Pare (1999): The choice to remain
Tanvir Mokammel's Chitra Nodir Pare tells the story of a Hindu family in East Bengal, who decide not to migrate after 1947. Unlike the exodus in Chinnamul, this film moves at the pace of the river in its title.
The camera frames courtyards, festivals, and seasons as they pass.
Mokammel's achievement in it is to show that "staying" is not a static act; it is an ongoing battle with fear.
Deshantor (2022): The long hesitation
Based on Nirmalendu Goon's novel, Deshantor focuses on a Bengali Hindu family caught between their homeland and political pressure. Here, Partition is not a moment of departure but a prolonged hesitation.
By centring on indecision, Deshantor frames Partition as a long, slow crisis for many families in post-1947 East Bengal.
Shankhachil (2016): The border in the present tense
In Goutam Ghose's Shankhachil, a family from Satkhira travels to Taki in West Bengal for their daughter's medical treatment. The crossing forces them into a tangle of permits, checkpoints, and interrogations.
The film bridges 1947 to the present, showing that the border remains a daily reality in Bengal's borderlands, long after the headlines of Partition faded.
Two Cinemas, Two Geographies of Memory
West Bengal's screen unfolds in refugee colonies, cramped apartments, and the cultural hubs of Kolkata. It is about adapting to city life, the collapse of bhadralok privilege, and the politics of theatre and art.
On the other hand, Bangladesh's screen memory is rural and ecological. It is set on riverbanks and in villages, where the decision to leave or remain is embedded in land, crops, and ancestral homes.
This difference in setting reflects a deeper difference in focus.
In West Bengal, Partition is remembered as the arrival, the city absorbing waves of newcomers.
In Bangladesh, it is remembered as the loss, the shrinking of communities.
Gendered Borders and Sacrifices
Both cinemas, in West Bengal and East Bengal, agree on one point - Partition's violence is gendered.
In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Nita's body becomes the social safety net for her family. In Rajkahini, the brothel's women fight the border directly.
In Chitra Nodir Pare and Deshantor, women are often framed within domestic spaces, torn between decisions about leaving or staying.
In all cases, women's lives are shaped by choices they did not make, their lives tied to the politics of migration and nationhood.
Why partition still matters on screen
Why do filmmakers keep returning to 1947? Because the questions about belonging, mobility, and identity are not settled yet.
Films like Shankhachil show that the border is not just a historical fact, it is an everyday reality for people in Bengal's border districts.
A shared wound, different stories
When we watch Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara, we hear the scream beneath the song. When we watch Chitra Nodir Pare or Deshantor, you feel the quiet ache of homes that refuse to move.
These are not opposing stories, but the realities of two sides of the border. They tell the truth - Partition was both an abrupt tear and a slow unravelling.
Beyond the Radcliffe Line
The Radcliffe Line was not just a geopolitical decision; it was a cultural shock. Bengali cinema, on both sides, has been its chronicler, mourner, and interrogator.
Seventy-eight years on, these films do more than remember the past. They ask a question about identity, home, belonging and nationhood.
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