Trauma expressed pathologically: Unpacking the use of tuberculosis as a metaphor in Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara

Abstract

In this article, I unravel the use of tuberculosis as a metaphor in Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star), and locate it within the indices of loss Ghatak uses in the film to designate the tragic and brutal partition of the Bengal Presidency in 1947. Nita’s illness – which was both her tragedy and salvation – had to be a careful selection; it had to be semiotically proximate to the other meanings and metaphors imputed to Nita. To establish the salience of the use of tuberculosis, I underscore the link between the perception of tuberculosis and the ‘being’ of the protagonist (Nita) it sublimates. I further demonstrate that tuberculosis is the most apt disease, because the metaphors that the disease has been imbued with assimilate into the larger symbolic register that Ghatak uses in the film. I posit that Nita – ‘also’, and perhaps more acutely – suffers from the imperatives of tuberculosis – the characteristics associated with the disease in the popular imagination – rather than the mere pathological condition caused by the pathogen, mycobacterium tuberculosis.