As the concluding volume of the Partition Quartet Screenplays of Ritwik Ghatak, Subarnarekha is a devastating critique of the fall-out of the Partition in Bengal. It chronicles the fate of Bengali refugee families as they attempt to settle down after having survived the worst fratricide, bloodbath and mass migration in the history of the subcontinent. The news of Gandhi’s death at the very beginning is an ominous portent that the efforts of the people to recover from their trauma is not going to be easy. The rest of the film is an elaboration of the destruction and tragedy faced by the refugee families that had come together to set up Nabajiban Colony. Initially Ishwar, his little sister Sita, and Abhiram, the boy adopted by Ishwar, seem to have built a new life for themselves in Chattimpur, on the banks of the river Subarnarekha; and Sita’s desire for ‘a new home’ seems to have been realized. However, as Sita and Abhiram grow older and realize their love for each other, the discovery of Abhiram’s low-caste identity brings about a crisis; Ishwar, an upper-caste brahmin, will not allow their marriage. By choosing the hypocritical, false ideology of bourgeois and capitalist culture represented by his boss, Ram Bilas – whose squeamishness about caste identity leads to a threat to withdraw the offer of a business partnership from Ishwar – as opposed to his love for Sita, Ishwar puts into motion a series of events that, ironically, destroys the loving family he had himself raised. What is distinctive about Ghatak’s ‘critical melodramatic’ form is that his cinematic narrative acquires tremendous resonance through the use of music, myth, archetypes and allegory to articulate a resounding critique of modern civilization’s destructive potential through his epic vision of civilization. Realism did not provide Ghatak with the modes he needed for his discourse. Paradoxically, he rendered his fidelity to the contemporary through the epical.