Eating Loss
Hunger and Displacement through Ritwik Ghatak's Lens
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70042/eroth/1002242Keywords:
partition, refugees,, hunger, food,, memory, , displacementAbstract
This paper examines the East Bengali refugee narratives after the 1947 partition through the lens of hunger, everyday survival and pangs of domestic life. Focussing on Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, it argues that food appears less as cultural continuity and more as an absence. Hunger becomes a lived experience of displacement, shaping the lives and identities of refugees through economic precarity and economic exploitation. The paper highlights how everyday survival replaces stability and how the loss of home disrupts family food cultures. A particular attention is also paid to the gendered nature of survival, where women’s bodies and labour absorb the impact of displacement through self-sacrifice and silent endurance. By reading hunger as an effective narrative force, this paper tries to suggest that refugee narratives preserve intimate histories of partition that largely remain unrecorded in official documents.
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References
Ghatak, Ritwik, director. Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star). Chitrakalpa, 1960.
Ghatak, Ritwik, director. Subarnarekha. Chitrakalpa, 1965.
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