History From Within: Violence and Subjective Experience in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star and Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

This chapter explores how and why subjectivity is a key consideration for a significant subset of post-independence film and literatures that narrate events of mass-scale violence that followed, and were often related to, the circumstances of that independence. The Partition of India and the Nigerian Civil War are the contexts of this violence in, respectively, the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak’s 1960 film The Cloud-Capped Star and the Nigerian Igbo writer Buchi Emecheta’s 1982 novel Destination Biafra. In bringing the two texts into conversation, this chapter seeks to make visible how Ghatak’s film and Emecheta’s novel position the subjective experiences of survivors of post-independence violence as collectively amounting to the definitive histories of the respective conflicts they narrativise. The everyday (re)creation of sustenance, shelter, sanity and community out of constant and systematised scarcity in both stories develops a sustained and complex relationship between subjectivity and collective resistance in the face of violence perpetuated or enabled by the postcolonial nation-state and neocolonial powers. Thus historically situated, individual psychic suffering evidences a collective kind of nation-memory in these two texts that not only allows that suffering to be read as material oppression, but also affirms how subjective experience carries epistemological and political weight.