Archives that don’t (let you) sleep: Lost Woman, City, and the Night in Mrinal Sen’s Ek Din Pratidin

Abstract

Being defined mostly by darkness, emptiness, and ghosts, it is generally difficult to ensnare the
night within the claws of an institutional archive. Especially if one speaks of a night in Calcutta in
the 70s—a decade known for its Naxalite movement, police brutality, Emergency, refugee influx—
it becomes further difficult to comprehend the sense of the night, let alone the questions of
recording, cataloguing, or institutionally archiving the histories and memories associated with it.
In Mrinal Sen’s Ek Din Pratidin, a woman does not return home from work on one such night,
making it necessary for the police, her family, and the film in general, to retrace her movements
by relying on existing evidences to look for the lost one. In absence of the body of the woman—
an archive in itself—Sen transforms the cinematic space into a repository of various forms of noninstitutional and multi-disciplinary archives, jarringly interrupting and supplementing one another
in the search of the lost woman as well as the postcolonial home and the city she inhabits, in the
hours of the night. Architectures in ruins, magazine headlines, street sounds, dead bodies, faces,
smoke, etc. are posited as archives that contribute to accentuating the violence and anonymity of
the night in which no one sleeps. Using the night as a metaphor, I will argue how the ‘waywardness’
of many archives becomes critical in recuperating a lost gendered body in a dissenting and fatigued
postcolonial city.