Ritual as Intermedial Interjection in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star

The experience of the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976), one of the most unusual filmmakers from South Asia, raises a significant issue, of how ritual can be considered a potent medium to have an intermedial effect within the complex mediality of cinema. The authors examine his film, The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960), and show that in order to reach the “screaming point” of his “epic melodrama,” Ghatak borrowed form a forgotten ritual a fragment of a ritualistic song to become the experiential core for the experience of the film. The recurrent refrain of the song, at times the abstracted melody from the song creates a space of uncanny in-betweenness, contrasting positions of anthropological distance to a forgotten ritual with an imaginative yet guilt-ridden, painful projection of the secular self, being a part of that ritual itself.