The talk traces the ways in which established ways of viewing and inhabiting public texts,genre conventions, mythologies, and audio-visual relations in cinema produced a lacuna in the representation of the Partition in cinema of the 1940, 50s, 60s and the 70s. It is proposed that Ritwik Ghatak’s film style subverts these established practices. His films are an exercise in aesthetic-political praxis in that they stage a confrontation between the
