Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara)

Manishita Dass

"Ritwik Ghatak's 1960 film The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara) has been hailed as "a modern masterpiece" and "one of the great classics of world cinema", "an extraordinary, revelatory work" (Adrian Martin), and "one of the five or six greatest melodramas in cinema history" (Serge Daney). It is arguably the best-known of Ghatak's films, and its striking blend of modernist aesthetics and melodramatic force has intrigued audiences for decades. Its focus on a family uprooted by the Partition of India and its powerful exploration of displacement and historical trauma give it a renewed relevance in the midst of a global refugee crisis. Manishita Dass's study of the film situates it within Ghatak's film-making career and in its historical and cultural contexts: the Indian Partition of 1947 and its corrosive effects on everyday life in Bengal; the influence of Calcutta's incipient film...