The Spokesman and The Destitute at the Land of Resurrection
Single-channel video/Duration – 11.30 mins 

Sekhar is the national bourgeoise, playing the spokesman of national reconstruction in Satyen Bose’s 1954 film Jagriti. Iswar Chakraborty is the uprooted bhadralok, portraying the face of post-partition destitution in Ritwik Ghatak’s 1962 film Subarnarekha. A parallel interaction takes place between the displaced Ishwar and delegated Sekhar as they settle on power through the republic of resurrection. In both films, these antithetical roles are played by Abhi Bhattacharya, who was a lead actor in 1940s Bengali melodrama. Bhattacharya introduced the western liberal urban protagonist in Bombay cinema. He acted interchangeably  in mythologies and devotional films. Both the films revolve around the Brahmin male protagonist by default and his initiations for an upcoming generation. Within the kinship between the constructed nation and the confronted one, the children are shaped as the conformist inheritors of the nation from their diametric subject positions. The overtones of Ghatak’s epical-historical iconography and Bose’s nationalist reformist melodrama meet in the figure of Bhattacharya, the actor at the heart of savarna-cinematic discourse. Their contexts juxtapose, cross-dissolve, morph into one as they manufacture and circumambulate the nation. This outrageous assimilation of screen lives is reconciled within the project of text and music of the nation. Borrowing from Ghatak’s complex montage, its multiple visual-situational intersections activate deeper points of social-historical connections, complicating the notions of power and powerlessness. The screen acts a varied, complex semiological contact zone where a crucial interplay between ideas of modernity and structures of caste takes place. Superimpositions, overlays, dissolves, multiple exposures activate the conceptual and technical remnants of modernity and its anomalous, multi-layered, sociological-historical paradoxes. The speech computer generates Marxist ideologue Bishnu Dey’s Notes on Progressive Writing in Bengal from the 1940s while the two archetypes of the national subject in Bhattacharya identifies with Caspar David Friedrich’s enlightened wanderer, simultaneously uttering Manu’s mandates. The hyperbolic time of modernity is framed in repetition and critical reference to the counter-hegemonic conversation from the seminal Gulamgiri, between Jotiba and Dhondiba. The radical contradiction in mirror stage moments of avant-garde cinema and sovereign national bourgeoise language supposes an anchorage in the knotting of the golden aka sacred threads.