take her to the hills when she is free. When departing to pursue his music, Shankar reiterates the promise of return to the hills as Nita breaks down. When she finally leaves for the hills - during a storm — her precious photograph falls and breaks. Her desire for life at this point of time, when she is completely spent, is expressed'in her impassioned plea - 'I wanted to live; I want to live!' The camera pans to the hills evoking, ironically, her symbolic realease in destruction. Referring to the fusion of rasa in art, Ghatak once said, 'A man enjoys rasa depending on his capability of imbibing rasa.... for example, films. At the primary level there may be a story of laughter and tears, of joys and sorrows. . . .Deeper, we find political and social implications. . . . (Still] deeper, we find the directions depending on the philosophy and the consciousness of the artist....Even deeper the temporal feeling cannot be expressed in words. At that moment he confronts the unknown. 'All response to art is a personal equation and each one reacts at his own aesthetic level. Truly great art touches all these different levels and this happens to be the fundamental pre-condition of all great art/ The enormity of his exacting yardstick is comm-endably realized mMeghe Dhaka Tara. On the socio-histqric level, Ghatak poignantly captures the refugee ethos in the Bengal after 1947. The trauma of partition weighed heavily on the filmmaker and in a paranoic exorcise he returned to the thehie again in Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha. It is in going beneath these layers that Ghatak confronts and indeed uses the mythic understructure of our civilization. In his words, 'the earliest example of art-work we get belongs to the paleolithic age in the naked Mother Goddess ....This Great Mother is still haunting the consciousness of the people.5 Nita, in Meghe Dhaka Tara is unconsciously creating and perpetuating this archetype. Yet it would be naivt to conceive Nita as the embodiment of the Mother Goddess herself. The female principle of Shakti is a fusion of 'JagatdhhatrT, the benevolent image of the eternal giver, with 'Kali', the malevolent and destructive aspect. This duality is the keystone of Hindu cosmogony and Heinrich Zimmer has succinctly summed it up, The creative principle and the destructive are one and the same. Both are in unison in the divine cosmic energy that becomes manifest in the process of the biography and history of the universe.' Ghatak attempts to function with the totality of this complex archetype. Journal of Ar ts and Ideas 48