WOMEN’S HISTORIES BEYOND REFORM: LITERATURE, CINEMA AND NARRATIVE SURVIVAL IN SHYAM SINGHA ROY (2021)

Abstract

Shyam Singha Roy (2021), directed by Rahul Sankrityan, explores the endurance of women's histories in temporalities against the historical delicacy and temporary interventions of reformism. Structurally constructed around two remarkable periods of time, the film sets out a past marked by ethical writing and social critique where women's suffering is made visible in the context of religious authority and ritualised patriarchy in which the tributes of devotion and artistic performance serve as mechanisms of constraint. Literature formulates this vulnerability and lists the injustice. However, Literature is vulnerable to erasure through violence and discontinuity not only on the written text but also to the creator in history. In the contemporary time, the cinema does not begin reform again but resumes unfinished histories, through visual remembering, replicating repetition and embodied performance. Through layered telling, embedded short films, song lyrics and mirrored identities, the film builds a Mise-en-abyme treatment along with meaning created retrospectively. By interpreting reincarnation as logic, not fantasy, but retro-narrative logic, this paper argues that Shyam Singha Roy displaces women's agency from institutional change to narrative persistence by placing Literature and cinema as narrative custodians and a continuum of cultural memory, as one vessel of cultural continuity after another.