Caste Away

Film: Subarnarekha (Golden River/The Golden Thread)
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

Subarnarekha (commonly called The Golden Thread but called Golden River in the Tome of Knowledge) is a film that I badly misjudged going in. This is the second time I have done this with a film in the last few weeks, and it both cases, I misjudged the films the exact same way. As with Black God White Devil, I immediately assumed that Subarnarekha was going to be another “bad things happen to poor people” film. It’s not—the financial status of the people in the film never plays into anything. Instead, this is a film about the Indian equivalent of racism, although it’s probably more aptly caste-ism.

So what we have is, essentially Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but in black-and-white and taking place in India. Ishwar Chakraborty (Abhi Bhattacharya) is a Brahmin-caste refugee forced into India by the partition that created the state of Pakistan. He ends up in a refugee camp with his sister, Sita (Indrani Chakraboorty as a girl, Madhabi Mukhopadhyay as an adult). The two do their best to survive, which is made more difficult when they see a woman driven off and separated from her son, Abhiram (Mater Tarun, then Satindra Bhattacharya as an adult). Ishwar takes the boy in, essentially adopting him as a younger brother.