The talk traces the ways in which established ways of viewing and inhabiting public texts,genre conventions, mythologies, and audio-visual relations in cinema produced a lacuna in the representation of the Partition in cinema of the 1940, 50s, 60s and the 70s. It is proposed that Ritwik Ghatak芒鈧劉s film style subverts these established practices. His films are an exercise in aesthetic-political praxis in that they stage a confrontation between the