The Ethics of Looking: Poverty, Displacement, and the Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak
Abstract
The article looks at the way Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) and Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) handle the visibility of suffering and maintains that the difference between the two films is not the usual contrast between realism and melodrama but rather a difference in what each one distributes. Ray distributes attention by using long durations, peripheral compositions, and by refusing emotional compensation, so that the poor get a share of the screen time without that time being turned into emotional impact. Ghatak, on the other hand, distributes affect through frontal staging, the use of non-diegetic song, and by having an excess of melodrama, which assigns a family's economic difficulties to a single person and makes her the only figure to whom the viewer feels compassion. When these two films are compared with Abhinavagupta's idea of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa — the process of generalisation which frees the spectator's emotions from the constraints of time, space, and subjectivity — they reveal an unexamined cost in rasa aesthetics. In cases where suffering is systematically produced, as in the rehabilitation system that categorised East Bengali refugees according to official judgments of their "rehabilitability", the erasure of pain which is achieved through aesthetic enjoyment might also lead to the erasure of the spectator's discomfort. The article still does not conclude that Ghatak's excess is the more ethical choice, since the historical particularity that his style preserves is obtained at the expense of relying on archetype and a bhadralok cultural memory. The comparison is thus employed to examine the limits of an ethics of face-centred spectatorship, which assumes the presence of a spectator at a distance — a presumption which the implied Calcutta audience of Meghe Dhaka Tara does not meet.
Keywords: ethical spectatorship; karuṇa rasa; cinematic theatricality; Partition of Bengal; melodrama; vulnerability
Introduction
The argument presented in this paper has two aspects. At the first level it is claimed that the well-known distinction between Ray and Ghatak — that is, the restrained realist who is opposed to the excessive melodramatist — can be most usefully rephrased as a difference between two different economies of distribution. Ray's films assign attention; by means of long takes, a peripheral composition, and by refraining from offering an emotional climax, they grant the poor a kind of duration which is not offset by dramatic effect. The camera stays on Indir Thakrun's old and shrivelled body, on the soiled and tattered saris of Durga and Indir Thakrun, and on the worsening condition of the family home, without turning that gaze into affective value (Chakraborty). In contrast, Ghatak's cinema distributes affect; it achieves this through frontal staging, by using non-representational musical and sound effects to heighten emotion and conflict, and by means of the excess typical of melodrama, it transfers the family's entire economic failure onto Nita and makes her the one point to which the spectator's compassion is directed (Natarajan).
The second level is more sharply defined and open to discussion. This official distinction acts as a controlled examination of the ethical implications of rasa theory. A necessary condition of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa is that the spectator's emotion should be disassociated from its determinants of time, space, and subjectivity; in the classic case, the fear caused by a tiger on stage leads to the physical symptoms of fear but not to the desire to run, "Because the fear which arises in the spectator when watching a play is not bound by the limitations of time, space and subjectivity", and this "disengagement from the constraints of spatio-temporal limitations and the constraints of individuality … directly results in the aesthetic experience" (Wenta). That provides an excellent explanation of why pathos does not disturb the spectator. It is not an explanation of why pathos should make the spectator feel involved — and it says absolutely nothing about the case where the suffering shown on screen is the result of a policy, a border, and a ledger.
The Ethics of Cinematic Representation
When talking about dignity in the context of representation, it is first necessary to establish what dignity means before considering who has it. I do not see vulnerability as an abstract characteristic of human beings or as a synonym for weakness, but rather as the state in which a body is exposed to forces that it has not chosen. Levinas's explanation is useful precisely because it avoids abstraction: it is the embodied subject, "Experienced as vulnerability rather than as a detached exercise of consciousness", that is the point at which the other makes their call, "an inescapable call, before any choice, before the birth of liberty" (Benaroyo). On this view, vulnerability is not a deficiency to be compensated for but is in fact the structure of ethical exposure; the nakedness of the other's face shows that the self, "when encountering the destituteness of the Other, has no other option but to respond" (Lomba and Vermeylen). The model, however, contains an unexamined assumption: the face belongs to a stranger, and the normal situation is that of a relationship which has not yet been formed. If the destitute person shown on screen is one's neighbour or one's sister, then the call cannot be ignored since it has already been accepted or already refused. Kathleen Scott's work on what she calls the "cinema of exposure" is relevant in this case, since she claims that the vivid and affective cinematic depiction of female suffering "plays a vital role in determining the political and ethical relationships of spectators to the images on screen", thereby adding a bio-political dimension to current research into spectators' engagement with cinematic affect (Scott). Her emphasis on embodiment rather than on distance is a correction to the field's present geographical focus, even though her body of work — European New Extremism and body horror — is removed from the two films mentioned here.
It is harder to define dignity in practice and one must not be tempted to regard it simply as a feeling. I have outlined three conditions which apply to both films and which do not imply a preference for presenting the character in a sympathetic way. The first of these is interiority: does the character have a mental and emotional life that extends beyond their state of deprivation, or are they left mentally and emotionally drained by it? The second is duration: does the length of time that the camera focuses on the character allow them to become a symbol, or does it keep them as an individual person? The third is the ending: does the film return the viewer to a state of comfort, or does it leave the viewer in the position of someone who has seen something which they can no longer forget? These conditions are not criteria by which a film can be said to succeed or fail; instead, they are the conditions within which the two films turn out to be different, and in an asymmetric way.
Classical Indian aesthetics emerges at a particular stage, and it is essential to understand exactly what is being said. Rasa is not emotion; it is the aesthetic transformation of emotion, a point which the tradition emphasizes. Karuṇa rasa is therefore not the pathos of a particular situation but 'aestheticized pathos', a 'tragic relish' (Budhathoki). In the classical sense, rasa means taste or essence and, ultimately, bliss; according to the Nāṭyaśāstra, it stands for the 'essence of emotion' and the final state of relish which the spectator attains (Roy). A comparison with Aristotle is useful but by no means conclusive: while Aristotelian katharsis is understood as a psychological cleansing of pity and fear, the rasa tradition describes an experience which involves both emotional purification and spiritual elevation, so that the artistic experience becomes a means of achieving self-awareness rather than merely serving as a form of release (Goyal). The most philosophically thorough recent approach to the question of painful beauty makes this structure clear. For K. C. Bhattacharyya, a spectator's sorrow can only become rasa if it meets an intentional content requirement — that is, the sorrow must express the character's sorrow and must have the appropriate expressive essence for sorrow, not merely be sorrow that is felt as applying to oneself — and a claim about phenomenal immersion: since one has no personal interest in the characters, one is not involved in the phenomenon of grief; instead, one's feeling is immersed in the expressive essence of sorrow (Lawson and Lopes).
On the other hand, there is another view within the tradition, and a major part of the argument in this article is devoted to upholding it. According to one recent comparative interpretation, Abhinavagupta's solution to the problem of tragic pleasure lies in "the magic of heart-sharing which occurs through emotions that have been transformed in an aesthetic manner", whereby the audience of a tragedy "no longer has to act as passive and disinterested witnesses who ignore the alterity of others"; the experience of theatre thus offers "resources for moral transformation" (Ashton and Tanner). In this interpretation, rasa does not bring about comfort for the spectator by dissolving the other's particularity; rather it involves the spectator as a result of a mutual emotional structure. The same kind of reasoning is used in modern applications of rasa in the context of transnational cinema, the claim being that the experience of rasa requires the spectator to be sympathetic and that rasa can function as a set of mutual emotional structures—similar to Raymond Williams's "structures of feeling"—so that "isomorphic structures of oppression and identification trigger affective bonds and connect similar movements across borders" (España and Oliete-Aldea). Rasa theory therefore contains both a separating and an implicating element. The question that this article poses is not which of the two is generally correct, but which one of the two films brings into play and what difference that makes.
Poverty and Everyday Vulnerability in Pather Panchali
The claim is supported by two sequences. The first of these is the arrival of the monsoon. This sequence extends from about 01:37:49 to 01:40:10; Ray characterized its atmosphere as a 'grey humid stillness' and it is accompanied by Ravi Shankar's sitar in the background music—most importantly, 'without any dialogue or movement on the part of the characters, Ray managed to create in his audience the right mood for appreciating the playfulness of Apu and Durga as they are soaked in the first monsoon rain' (India and Ain). Think about what is being achieved here. The film's most sensuous moment is not a moment involving the development of the plot; it is a moment involving the weather. The children's bodies are subjected to the rain and the viewer is given time to observe those bodies, but this time is not turned into narrative progress—nothing is achieved, no one is saved and no deprivation is alleviated. That is what I mean by the distribution of attention. The film allows a sense of duration without requiring that this duration should have any meaning, and by doing so it rejects the emotional approach in which poverty can only be understood as a crisis.
The next sequence is that involving the train. Chakraborty describes it as "one of the key sequences" precisely because of the way the two scenes are placed next to each other: "Ray puts the home of Apu, which is collapsing, alongside the bright, open countryside that the train goes through" (Chakraborty). The official structure in this case is based on counterpoint and not on contrast; the film does not present deprivation and modern life as thesis and antithesis, but rather lets the bright openness of the plain pass by a house that is breaking down, so that both scenes occupy the same visual space and have the same duration. It follows that the ethical implications of looking are significant. In this film rural poverty is not a moral condition, nor an aesthetic type resembling the picturesque, nor a separate and isolated world; it is a situation which is being overtaken by a history whose tracks do not pass through it. The only thing in Pather Panchali to arrive on time is the train.
The suggestion that this restraint reflects tenderness should not be accepted at face value, since Ray himself offers a suitable point of contradiction. In a 1981 interview with Cineaste, when asked whether he romanticised poverty — whether "the poverty and misery in your films never becomes ugly" — he replied: "I think that Pather Panchali is fairly ruthless in its depiction of poverty. The behaviour of the characters, the way the mother treats the old woman, is absolutely cruel" (India and Ain). This is no exaggeration; it highlights the film's most uncomfortable feature, which is the family's cruelty towards Indir Thakrun. In this case, the withered body and the tattered sari (Chakraborty) are not intended to elicit sympathy but instead form part of a domestic economy in which an old woman is a cost. The film also does not counterbalance that cruelty by revealing a secret act of kindness; the mother's harshness is not explained and Indir's death is not followed by a reconciliation. As for my first criterion, the film does address interiority — Indir is given appetite, a grievance, and a remembered past — and it also satisfies the criterion of duration, since the camera does not turn her into a stereotype. It is with regard to the third criterion that the film becomes more complex, and I will come back to this in the comparative section.
The fact that the film has been received makes this point more evident. In the 1950s, Ray's films, which depicted scarcity, came under sharp criticism from reviewers who wanted to show an energetic India to the rest of the world, yet Ray carried on with his work; fifty years later, the international admiration of "the vulnerability of the poor in India" had become a marketing asset (Kullu). The period between these two events does not show an increase in ethical awareness; it is a story about who is permitted to see what and under what conditions. Moreover, Ray's Marxist critics accused him of being a "bourgeois humanist, a politically weak person without a definite ideology" and of being out of touch with important social and political issues (Roy and Dutta) — a charge which confuses restraint with evasion, but which does highlight a real consequence of the observational approach: a film that does not plead cannot be blamed for pleading and cannot be blamed for refusing to do so as well.
Displacement, Melodrama, and Sacrifice in Meghe Dhaka Tara
The historical situation connected with Ghatak's film is not merely background; it in fact forms the very means by which the film shows suffering, and it is therefore essential to treat it with care. When the Partition occurred in 1947, some 18 million people were displaced (Kudaisya). All over the subcontinent between 11 and 18 million refugees migrated from India to Pakistan, and West Bengal alone took in over 3.9 million; in Bengal the migration went on longer than in the Punjab, with East Bengali minorities, mainly Hindus, fleeing in successive waves, and although there was less bloodshed in Bengal than in the Punjab, the process carried on for many decades (Banerjee). The migration of Hindus from East to West Bengal was on a massive scale, whereas "the number of Muslims who left West Bengal for eastern Pakistan after the Partition was relatively small," and most of them stayed in the province—this population imbalance changed the social structure of the area (Chatterji).
The situation the refugees found themselves in was not the result of an emergency response but rather an administrative decision. As Sudipta Mondal has described the rehabilitation system in West Bengal in the late 1940s and 1950s, there existed "a layered administrative structure which linked access to relief and settlement with official judgments about economic productivity and 'rehabilitability'"; through the use of transit camps, worksite camps and Permanent Liability camps, the government was able to differentiate between the self-reliant and the potentially productive part of the labouring population and those who were regarded as permanently dependent on state assistance. Class and caste had a decisive influence on the outcomes: many middle-class bhadralok refugees looked after themselves by taking up jobs in the cities and by establishing squatters' colonies, while poorer agricultural workers and those belonging to lower castes depended more on the camps and on state-sponsored resettlement schemes "frequently situated in marginal or frontier areas" (Mondal). The Dandakaranya scheme, which was carried out after 1958 in order to resettle the refugees by allocating them land in the forests, placed them in a peninsula consisting of plateaus and hill ranges that people from the riverine and delta regions of Bengal found hard to accept; they demanded to be resettled in their "natural habitat" of Indian Bengal, met with resistance from the state and many of them returned to take up land without any government help or planning, or else became squatters in the slums around Calcutta (Kudaisya). Meghe Dhaka Tara is set among both the beneficiaries and the victims of this system: it tells the story of a Bengali refugee family which migrated from East Bengal and is now living in a Government Refugee colony in the suburb of the Calcutta metropolis, where "economic hardship, insecurity and rootlessness" affect the family until it finally degenerates into "selfishness, self-centredness, meanness and an inhuman attitude towards life and the world" (Chakraborti).
In the family, distributive logic operates. Since Nita is the oldest daughter, she "gives up all her own happiness in order to provide for her parents, her brothers and her younger sister; she stops attending college and takes up private tutoring as a means of supporting her parents" (Chakraborti). The situation is not one of the dramatic type in which a daughter makes a sacrifice and is later rewarded. It is instead a case of a transfer in which one person's life is used so that others may continue, and the film's cruelty lies in the fact that the people who benefit from this transfer do not see it as wrong. A similar pattern is evident in the case of the scholarship. Nita, being the first daughter of a poor family in post-Partition India, has "an identity shaped by her role as a caregiver", and the film examines "how the burden of communal expectations and family obligations forces the protagonist to abandon her own goals" (D). Feminist interpretations of Ghatak's Partition trilogy highlight "recurring patterns of moral objectification and sacrificial narrative arcs", and note that his women "are not simply victims of Partition but instead become symbolic repositories of collective trauma, cultural endurance and metaphysical longing" (Das and -).
It is the particular methods employed to achieve this which form the basis of my argument since it is exactly through these methods that distribution according to affect can be told apart from distribution according to attention. As Natarajan points out, the main technique involves Ghatak's use of 'stylistic devices, including the employment of non-representational registers—music and sound—to intensify the emotions and conflicts and to develop a distinct film language', and it is by means of this language that melodrama gives primacy to female subjectivity and reveals the gendered violence of patriarchy (Natarajan). The most thorough analysis currently available of the film's musical structure shows just how far this goes. A ritualistic song becomes 'the experiential core of the film' and is positioned within 'a chiaroscuro of familiarity plus unfamiliarity', unlike the usual practice in cinema of keeping music separate from dialogue in order to maintain clarity; Shankar teaches Nita a song by Tagore — 'the night when my doors were shattered by the storm' — and the authors regard this moment as a 'screaming point' in the sense as defined by Michel Chion, that is, a section in which the song 'has the same power' as a scream even though no scream is visible (Chattopadhyay and Ganguly). The song reappears, and its last appearance is after Nita's brother returns from visiting her in the sanatorium in the Shillong hills; when a shopkeeper asks about her, he does not answer, and 'that silence itself shows that Neeta is lost forever' (Chattopadhyay and Ganguly). Earlier on she 'literally runs off into the tempestuous night with nothing but the photograph of her and Shankar from their childhood, her most valued possession', and the song ends suddenly with the shot of her leaving — the fact that the immediate violence of the action is omitted meaning that 'the audience is deprived of an easy association' (Chattopadhyay and Ganguly).
The emotion shown by the music is not one that is already evident in the image, rather it is the emotion which the image does not manage to express; as a result the audience's emotional response becomes an essential element of the story rather than just a secondary effect of it. Although Ray left his sitar outdoors so that the rain would remain no more than rain, Ghatak's song acts as a narrative intervention within the story world: the music takes over from the world and tells the viewer something that the world itself will not (Heldt). In fact, the music in Ghatak's Partition cinema has been called "the metaphorical protagonist" of the films, a term which clearly illustrates the way in which the emotional impact has shifted from the characters to the form (Ganapathy‐Doré et al.).
This brings us to the strongest criticism of my argument, a point which cannot be simply referred to but must be directly dealt with. Although Ghatak's approach prevents the loss of historical particularity, it does so by introducing a different kind of generality. As Sarbani Banerjee explains in her interpretation of Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ghatak's method is analogous to the one Adorno described in the idea of Jugendstil: "By choosing objects which are presumably free from subjective meaning, these films end up bestowing upon the object exactly that meaning which they are trying to avoid" (1991, 182) (Banerjee). Since the film collects "elements that touch the heart of the collective bhadralok cultural memory", such as Tagore's songs, Baul music and Fellini, its montages and sound effects "establish a dialogue between the individual and nature", the motifs "strike upon the valuable intellectual assets of the Bengalis", and when viewed against the background of the Partition, evoke a strong and highly compelling emotional reaction; his technique "is also based on the principle of shock and comes close to Adorno's definition of pseudo-revolutionary films" (Banerjee). To conclude, the charge is that the film's emotional effect comes from a cultural repertoire which has a clear class character, and that the emotional intensity which refusess to accept the spectator's innocence at the same time meets the spectator's taste.
Rasa, Spectatorship, and the Limits of Aesthetic Sympathy
The conventional account of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa deals with a problem which no film can avoid, even while at the same time bringing about another difficulty which no film is capable of surmounting. The problem it solves is why it is possible to endure the depiction of suffering. This is because the spectator's emotions are not bound by the restrictions of time, space, and subjectivity, so that the fear or grief caused by art does not result in action and has no personal relevance; it "directly leads to the aesthetic experience" (Wenta). The new difficulty it creates is that the mechanism which allows endurance also acts as a mechanism of immunity. If the spectator's sorrow is absorbed into "the expressive essence of sorrow" rather than into the character's real grief (Lawson and Lopes), then the spectator's relationship with the suffering other has become one with an aesthetic essence—this shift a critic analysing the iconography of pain would identify as the point at which the performance of pain turns into its consumption, and it is at this moment that aestheticised suffering "risk[s] transforming female pain as a consumable spectacle" (Siyue).
In the two films the two aspects are presented and the point that calls for analytical consideration is the way in which they differ. Pather Panchali follows the usual pattern of the traditional version in that the suffering it shows is the result of the seasons, the weather and recurring events, and it leads the viewer to establish a reflective relationship with an expressive essence—namely, hunger as a condition of the world rather than as a plea addressed to a person. Yet the film gives no form of compensation. Since karuṇa rasa is 'aestheticized pathos' and 'tragic relish' (as Budhathoki states), Ray's film is notable for the small amount of such relish that it provides. The monsoon sequence, with its 'grey humid stillness' and the absence both of dialogue and of any character movement (as India and Ain have noted), produces an aesthetic experience of poverty which remains unpleasant. It is a matter of judgement whether this reflects a limitation of the film or an ethical achievement, since it depends on whether one regards aesthetic relish as part of the ethical response or as something that is in opposition to it. I consider it to be the latter, at least in this case, and therefore see Ray's failure to offer relish as a deliberate underpayment of the classical agreement.
With regard to its structure, Meghe Dhaka Tara is different in that the suffering it shows arises at a specific time, is due to administrative causes and has a familial character, and for this reason the content of it cannot be generalised; the family's poverty is not the outcome of just one season but is instead the result of policy, and the film points out the specific mechanisms involved — the refugee colony, the foreclosed college, and the private tuition classes. However, in terms of form, the film makes full use of the aesthetic and emotional effect of that suffering. The song functions as a 'screaming point' (Chattopadhyay and Ganguly); the non-representational elements of music and sound intensify the emotions and conflicts (Natarajan); the way in which the address is given has a theatrical effect that serves to remind the audience that what they are seeing is a representation of reality and not reality itself (Dass). The result is a film which avoids generalising its content while at the same time achieving a generalisation of form — the viewer's emotional reaction is linked to a particular historical catastrophe and is nevertheless raised to an archetypal level at which Nita becomes the Mother Archetype, the woman as nation, and the site of the devaluation of women's bodies (Natarajan). When Rasa theory is applied to this film, it finds it easy to account for the feeling of relish; it has more difficulty explaining why relish is not the appropriate response, and it is exactly in this area that the theory's ethical dimension needs to be modified.
The exact conditions under which the qualification can be granted are when suffering is the outcome of a policy—namely, the stratified administrative system which linked relief to the officials' judgments as to a person's "rehabilitability" (Mondal)—in this case, the relief of pain attained through aesthetic enjoyment is not merely an aesthetic act; it is an operation which has a political counterpart in that the same kind of process which frees the spectator's emotions from the constraints of a particular person and a particular place is also the one by which an administrative system turns a person into a case. Although Meghe Dhaka Tara opposes this at the level of the narrative content, it accepts it at the level of aesthetic form. This tension is not a flaw; it is the subject of the film and therefore the reason why the film cannot be seen as an instance of a humanist idea of compassion.
Comparative Discussion
What then do the differences between the films enable us to learn about the relationship between aesthetic form, historical suffering, and the dignity of the people who are depicted?
The first thing to notice is that the way in which a film form corresponds to a cause involves an ethical decision. When it comes to cyclical, environmental deprivation — for instance, a household experiencing the seasons, illness, and pressure from a moneylender — the most suitable form is one that can deal with recurrence; such a form should have a long duration, a peripheral composition, an environment that actively takes part in the action, and a camera that omits the reaction shot. Conversely, in the case of a sudden, officially recorded and legal break — such as a border being drawn, a colony being allocated, or a household being downgraded because of an assessment of its productivity — a form capable of expressing shock is more appropriate: one that employs archetypal address, has a frontal composition, and features a song used in place of dialogue. This does not imply that Ray's choice of form would have been unsuitable in the context of the Partition or that Ghatak's form would have failed when portraying rural poverty; rather, it shows that the selection of narrative form is determined by the structure of the suffering being shown, and that both filmmakers made their choices with that in mind. As a result, neither form is more ethical by nature. The realist-observational approach is not inherently respectful, and the melodramatic approach is not inherently exploitative; each achieves its ethical effect at a cost that the other does not have to bear.
The third point brings us back to the three criteria on which I based my discussion, and it is in this connection that the humanist interpretation of both films becomes awkward. Concerning interiority, both films are successful in this respect: Indir Thakrun is shown to have an appetite, a grievance, and a memory, and Nita is given desires—specifically, a college, a love, and a photograph which she carries with her into the storm. As for duration, both films satisfy this criterion, though in different ways: Ray's camera ensures that Indir remains a person by refusing to turn her into a figure, while Ghatak's camera achieves the same result by making her a figure so consistently that the transformation becomes apparent. It is with regard to the third criterion—the ending—that the two films differ, and the manner in which they differ is contrary to what one might anticipate. Pather Panchali ends in loss with no compensation, and the viewer is left with an unchanged image of a world in which the child who was at its centre is no longer there; the film does not restore the viewer to a state of comfort nor does it give the viewer a sense of responsibility. The only observation the film provides is what Ray's Marxist critics pointed out, namely that observation is a form which leaves the observer unchanged (Roy and Dutta). Meghe Dhaka Tara ends with the brother's silence, together with the final appearance of the song and the shopkeeper's unanswered question: "that silence itself shows that Neeta is lost for ever" (Chattopadhyay and Ganguly). The viewer is not consoled and is not permitted the consolation of having been moved; the film's excess has already made the viewer complicit in the aesthetic transformation of a life into a figure.
The way in which attention is distributed preserves dignity and does not disturb the spectator; on the other hand, the distribution of affect involves the spectator and carries the risk of turning the person who is presented as a symbol into something different from what they actually are. Neither of these outcomes is a satisfactory one, and one must resist the urge to say that one film is the ethically better one. What the comparison reveals is that the ethical question raised by the representation of suffering is not whether the subject is shown in a sympathetic way, but rather who has to bear the cost of the representation—either the subject, who in this case becomes an aesthetic object, or the spectator, who has to give up the comfort of a secure position.
The strongest counter-argument is based on class. If art cinema in India had been an elite form of cinema which maintained class distinctions by supposing that a refined taste was necessary (as Virdi proposes), then the comparison I have drawn could itself have come about as a result of that kind of cinema — a tendency to favour the restrained over the excessive one which mirrors the hierarchy found within the canon while at the same time asserting that it is challenging that hierarchy. Banerjee's way of interpreting Ghatak in terms of Adorno's criticism of Jugendstil makes this point correctly: a form that chooses objects 'presumably freed from subjective meaning' ends up giving them 'exactly that meaning which it is trying to avoid' (Banerjee). If this is right, then the emotional intensity which engages the viewer originates in a bhadralok tradition whose universality is assumed rather than demonstrated, and the film's critique of the refugee's situation is expressed in the language of the class which was in charge of the refugee's rehabilitation. I do not think that this interpretation excludes the film, but it does mean that the kind of argument I can put forward in its favour is limited: Meghe Dhaka Tara does not offer a model of ethical spectatorship that could be applied without exception. What it does is to show the cost that cinema has to pay when it refuses the spectator's innocence, and that cost is in part borne by the figure upon whom the refusal is being carried out.
Conclusion
This article seeks to provide a fresh account of a well-known contrast and at the same time examine the traditional theory in the light of that account. The difference between Ray's realism and Ghatak's melodrama is usually attributed to differences in temperament or in aesthetic commitment; I have instead argued that it lies in the way in which each film distributes attention, and that this difference has ethical implications which can be clearly stated. Ray distributes attention so that the poor are given a length of time which is not offset by a dramatic function, and in this way maintains their dignity, even if it leaves the position of the spectator unchanged. Ghatak, by contrast, directs emotion so as to turn a family's economic failure into a heavy emotional burden for one person, and in doing so rejects the spectator's innocence by making the subject available as a symbol. Both films are critical of the conditions that they depict; neither of them is critical in a way that leaves the spectator free.
The rasa theory does not result in rejection but only in a qualification. Sādhāraṇīkaraṇa remains the most economical explanation of why it is possible to endure the depiction of suffering, and its description of aesthetic pleasure is not outweighed by any similar theory in the Western literature on spectatorship. Yet the theory's ethical neutrality should not be taken for granted; in instances where suffering is deliberately inflicted—for example, when a state sorts refugees according to its judgement of their "rehabilitability" (Mondal)—the aesthetic disappearance of pain occurs together with an administrative erasure of the people involved, and a criticism which holds that pleasure is the natural goal of the aesthetic experience will be unable to explain why the excess in Meghe Dhaka Tara, whichrefuses the spectator the comfort of a detached bliss, is not merely a sign of bad taste. The part of the tradition that emphasizes heart-sharing and moral transformation (Ashton and Tanner) is better able to carry out this type of criticism, but this has to be argued for rather than assumed, since the tradition contains both of these elements and the films trigger different ones.
The conclusion of rasa-based film criticism is therefore a demand for greater specificity. Even though rasa theory has been proposed by Roy as a solution to a type of criticism that favours realism, this proposal is valid; still, if the theory is to serve an ethical rather than an aesthetic function, it must be able to distinguish between the kind of generalisation that makes suffering visible and the kind that makes suffering comfortable. This distinction cannot be derived from the theory itself and has therefore to be established, film by film, by means of an analysis of the way the film is structured, the use of framing, the sound, and the ending—that is, through the formal description which the theory's universalism is sometimes intended to avoid. The two films examined here show that the ethical difference does not lie so much in whether suffering is aestheticised as in what the aestheticisation is required to achieve and for whom.
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