Limits of representation: Kitwik Chatak's Subarnarekha

Abstract

Film was invented a hundred years ago. During this time people all over the world have travelled on a scale that is unprecedented since the establishment of the first towns, when the nomads became sedentary. . . . [M]ostly, the travelling has been done under coercion. Displacements of whole populations. Refugees from famine or war. Wave after wave of emigrants, emigrating for either political or economic reasons but emigrating for survival. Ours is the century of enforced travel. I would go further and say that ours is a century of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.¹