On demand: "Subarnarekha"

From its opening moments, Ritwak Ghatak's 1965 film Subarnarekha paints an altogether complicated picture of the India of 1948. A flag is raised optimistically high over a new school at precisely the instant a violent mob descends upon a lower-caste woman, sweeping her away and leaving her child behind; news breaks of Gandhi's assassination, and protagonist Ishwar (Abhi Bhattacharya) severs a friendship bond to make a new life for himself, his young sister Sita (Madhabi Mukherjee) and that now-adopted child Abhi (Satindra Bhattacharya) in a milltown on the banks of the titular golden river. In the foreground, then, the everyday disruption that followed from Partition; in the background, some sense of India in its entirety, its people, politics and stories, its devotional music and unanswered prayers. The narrative itself seems to split. On one side of the screen, the adults, trying to pick up the pieces left behind by the Brits and to make the country function again, this time under their own steam. On the other, the children who would inherit this earth, enjoying their final days of innocence in an Eden that hadn't been entirely childproofed. What Ghatak had locked onto were the haphazard processes of stabilisation and growth in a post-colonial state - again observed at two levels, that of the nation, and that of its citizens.

Thus did Subarnarekha expand upon the Satyajit Ray films of the same time and place. Where the latter mastered the word, Ghatak couples word to masterly image, contextualising his characters within a landscape that is simultaneously natural, industrial and contested, both abandoned and ripe for reclamation: a disused airstrip - the Eastern equivalent of the the airplane graveyard in The Best Years of Our Lives - which serves as a symbol of the country's fractured past while offering a playground for the next generation, a forest where the teenage Sita learns of her adopted brother's affections. They are but babes in the woods, but then so was India; the country's collective innocence could last only so long. Like that river, and the trains Ghatak films from time to time, these characters are caught in transition, passing through, looking out towards engineering courses in Germany and export businesses in Switzerland (one lightly spoken subtext: how the diaspora became a diaspora, and the effects it had on those left behind); the final reel, which broaches the excesses of urban Calcutta, seems to hail from another movie entirely, something Fellini or Wilder might have dreamt up. Here, Subarnarekha circles back to its main characters to suggest a state spiralling out of control. You could find the bare historical facts of these matters in any history book, but Ghatak gives us the poetry - and the tumult - in his country's soul. This director's reputation in the West now rests almost exclusively on 1960's striking The Cloud-Capped Star, the one Ghatak film that made the leap from repertory to VHS and then DVD. Yet Subarnarekha, currently getting by in a battered print with burnt-in English subtitles on YouTube, strikes me as by far the more complete vision: multilayered, sensual, enveloping, mysterious - not least in its use of narrative ellipses to describe life drifting by - this is clearly the work of someone who saw all this playing out with his own eyes as a young man, and could still barely believe it happened.

Subarnarekha is currently streaming on YouTube.