Old Landscape, New Babus: A Study of the Representations of 'Paschim' in Aranyer Din Ratri and Dadar Kirti

Borders both separate and incorporate. As the map of the Bengal region was redrawn by successive governments, through multiple reshufflings, sites which had in the nineteenth century, lay on the western margins of the Bengal Presidency, had come to fall within the post-independence Indian state of Bihar by the time of Indian independence. The borders between these two erstwhile linked regions of Bengal and Bihar had grown increasingly less porous. While the nineteenth century Bengali Bhadralok, had travelled to these regions - known to them as “paschim” - as “changer-babus”, keen to escape the polluted environments of Kolkata, or as members of the professional classes, or with the desire to exploit, in competition and collaboration with the British, the mineral rich earth of the Chotanagpur Plateau; by the second half of the twentieth century the number of Bengali travellers to the region had begun to dwindle considerably. However, late into the twentieth century, cultural texts that retained the “paschim” as setting were consistently produced. In my paper, I will try to show - with particular reference to two films: Aranyer Din Ratri (1970) and Dadar Kirti (1980) – that late twentieth century narratives sought to produce a border that retained these regions as marginal sites of Bengal, rather than as separated spaces, as the new political borders now conveyed them to be. In the nineteenth century, cultural texts had proliferated around the Bengali Bhadralok’s travels to the region, shaping material practices and enabling the development of a colonial centre there. I will argue that these later texts continued to reproduce the region in terms of the discourse developed by their nineteenth century forebears; i.e. not on its own terms, but as an ‘other’ of the threatening metropolis, which jeopardized the well-being of the Bengali Bhadralok as much in the late twentieth century as it had in the nineteenth. Contesting the new political borders that had weakened erstwhile links, these narratives produce competing borderscapes. Utilizing Agamben’s theorizing on “state of exception”, I will attend to the border-thinking of these narratives to explore the implications of continuing investment in the topos of “paschim”, as a linked region on its margins. Finally, I will suggest and try to illuminate the ways in which these films deploy the exploitative borderscapes of “paschim”, to assuage the anxieties of the beleaguered Emergency era Bhadralok