In The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee gives us the impressions of a mid-nineteenth century Bengali married woman, Kailasbasini Debi, who notes in her diary that “widows are traditionally restricted to a hard life devoid of luxury in order to make them unattractive to men, so they do not become objects of their lust” (146). In Tagore’s novel and in Ghosh’s film, Binodini and Ashalata become each other’s soi soon after the former’s arrival into the household that is Ashalata’s home after marriage.Ĩ. There is a clear and mutual sense of commitment in these friendships, an understanding that the friends will stand by each other, no matter what the circumstances. Soi patano refers to the practice, among Bengali girls or women, of very deliberately forming a friendship, with the friends often bestowing special names of affection, such as Chokher Bali, on each other.
The word soi, a Bengali one, literally translatable as “friend” needs a bit of explanation.
In this reading, Chow, of course, sees cinema itself as a form of translation, an idea that applies to Ghosh’s making of Chokher Bali in a similar but also different way. in the original” (187), so some contemporary Chinese cinema, such as films by Zhang Yimou, by focusing on so-called “primitive” subjects, exhibits/explores the cruelty of certain aspects of Chinese tradition (47, 202). Chow draws on Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” to posit how just as translation releases an “‘intention’ of standing-for-something-else” that is “imprisoned. I am also indebted here to Rey Chow’s line of thought in a section of Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. The new Bengali cinema, of which Chokher Bali is exemplary, has no qualms about representing the subject as sheer exteriority” (176). “tradition of the ‘literary’ film that attempted to reproduce the novel’s interiorized ‘vision’ of the subject. Among other things, Gopal argues that Ghosh moves away from the See Sangita Gopal, Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema, Chapter 5 for another reading of Ghosh’s representation. Chokher Bali was published serially in the Bengali magazine Bangadarshan.ĥ. These reproductions then enter viewers’ homes and are framed by their contexts.
In Ways of Seeing, Berger speaks of cameras and television screens “reproducing” paintings. A more elaborate discussion of this notion may be found in John Berger. A version of this essay, with the same title, was originally presented as a paper at the National Women’s Studies Association Convention in Cincinnati in June, 2008.
0 kommentar(er)
