“Swapner Din” (2004) opens with dawn breaking over violence. It begins with the sounds of breaking glass and birds flying out of the way. A police jeep lies still. The occupants? Dead. A group of cycle riders passes by. They carry a banner, “সন্ত্রাস নয়, শান্তি চাই” (“We want peace, not terrorism”). This initial sequence by Buddhadeb Dasgupta presents a world in which violence and the ordinary coexist within the same frame. This isn’t a scene so much as the remnants of a dream, already slipping from memory. Yet, it forms the starting point of a journey—one that probes the uneasy suspicion that the world under our feet might not be as steady as it feels.
Who gets to call someplace home? What documents permit you to exist anywhere?
Through the fog of a single day, “Swapner Din” raises these questions. Our guide is Paresh, a government official who projects educational films and also has a dream girl contained in his suitcase. His journey feels like a Bengali twist on a road movie. But one where the road is paved with existential dread and the American Dream is replaced by the elusive promise of Dubai.
The Unstable Identity of Citizenship
In “Swapner Din,” identity is as stable as smoke. Paresh’s makeshift driver, Chapal, possesses a passport bearing his photograph but with another person’s name (Makhan Das). In one of the scenes, Paresh and Chapal go through the area where the police were murdered. The police interrogate Palash, and in a state of irony, Chapal gets his 3rd name — another new identity. Paresh introduces him as Soumindro Biswas (Shamu). Shamu was actually the one whom Chapal was proxying for. Paresh tells Chapal, “What’s in a name!” Yet, the film screams that a name is everything. It is your ticket, your label, your proof of citizenship.
The film illustrates the present-day fears of those living in border villages, where a single spelling mistake in a voter registration list can precipitate a crisis of being. Today, people are panicking and afraid that a misplaced letter might identify them as non-native inhabitants of their own land. Concurrently, Paresh’s identity is bound to a woman who exists in liminality. We get glances at her as Paresh screens his films regarding contraception for the villagers. The village patriarchs heckle him. Paresh’s dream is a silent film; theirs is a loud, brutal reality grounded in traditions that deem women responsible even for conceiving. Meanwhile, Paresh’s lifetime of yearning seems to get compressed into a single meandering day. But the boundaries between Paresh’s fantasies and the world’s violence start to disintegrate.
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They then encounter Ameena. She is pregnant and lost her husband in the Gujarat riots. She is returning to Bangladesh. “I’ll go back to my দে শ (motherland),” she states. Paresh resides in a rented room and lacks roots. He cannot comprehend her affinity for a homeland. Ameena represents a strong, feminine attachment to her homeland. A need for Earth that Paresh has never experienced. The film reveals the cold, architectural design of the borders that Paresh simply observes through Ameena’s experience. Therefore, her desperate silence forces us to inquire, who is the true refugee here?
A Dream That Echoes in Waking Life
“Swapner Din” arrived in 2004, in the long shadow of the Gujarat riots. Seen now, its reverberations feel impossibly current. In the film, Ameena’s desperation—trapped without identity papers that could secure her passage to safety—mirrors a larger, ongoing anxiety about documentation, recognition, and erasure. These concerns find a present-day parallel in India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, an exercise carried out by Booth Level Officers (BLOs). In recent months, multiple news reports have documented deaths among BLOs—some families and colleagues attributing them to acute stress and punishing workloads tied to the revision process.
At least one suicide by a BLO during SIR duties has been specifically reported, though official investigations in several cases continue, and authorities have in some instances disputed a direct causal link. As one widely circulated sentiment—not an official statement—puts it: “If the government wants your name to appear, it will.” The revision process itself, meant to update voter records, has instead reopened deeper questions about who gets counted, who gets seen, and at what cost.
Buddhadeb Dasgupta effectively employs dream sequences to depict this collective anxiety. Paresh’s dream is a peaceful, haunting representation of unfulfilled grief. He envisions his deceased mother, but not in life. And his father apologizes to the man who could love her while stating he never could. This is not only a recollection of Paresh’s past; it is also the unconscious source of Paresh’s inability to relate, demonstrating love as a fleeting presence that can disappear or fail to appear. His entire pursuit of the dream woman is reflective of this primary loss, showcasing his search for a love that will finally remain.
Chapal’s dream is vastly different. It is a whirlwind of frenzied, useless activity. He is chasing the broker over a bridge, his voice screaming into nothingness, “I am not Makhan Das!” This represents the raw fear of losing one’s identity, exhibited in a recurring nightmare. Since Chapal bears another man’s name, his subconscious violently rejects the theft. His dream reveals the terror of becoming a non-person in the eyes of the law. A fear that closely relates to the lived experiences of those who lost their identities in the pursuit of a better future.
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Ameena’s dream is a silent scream of collective trauma. She runs in the midst of a chaotic crowd of people, her body burdened with a pregnancy, until she falls from the crushing weight of memory. This is the specter of the Gujarat riot, which is not discussed in dialogue, yet burned into her mind. Her dream affirms that the violence she escaped has become a part of her, a shadow that transitions from the conscious world to the world of the subconscious. Together, these three dreams create a fabric of national and personal trauma, illustrating how vulnerable and disputed the boundaries between our inner and outer worlds are. Just like the physical barbed-wire fences they travel towards.
The Border Sequence
The climactic border sequence is a heart-wrenching collision with reality. Officials shoot. Ameena is told that she cannot cross because nobody knows the identity of the baby she is carrying. The proposed solution is, “Do you have dollars?” In this moment, “Swapner Din” exposes the idea of citizenship. In “Swapner Din,” identity papers, documentation, and even the assumption of belonging are treated like bargaining chips, unstable and revocable. Chapal’s story delivers this idea without polish or ceremony. The shock of violence reaches him before he ever gets the chance to intellectualize it, much like history reaches people who think they still have time.
“Swapner Din” lingers in uncertainty because uncertainty is its native language. It has the haze of memory, the warped pacing of trauma, the quiet incoherence of lives pushed into impossible corridors. The border crossing feels less like a mapped passage and more like an instinctive interior drift, generated by a mind that keeps moving even when the body might already have stopped, rehearsing hope the way a person rehearses escape when there are no doors left to run through.
“Swapner Din” refuses to tell us. It forces us to become active participants, to choose our own interpretation of the line between dream and death. This ambiguity is the very engine of the film’s power. By denying a neat resolution, “Swapner Din” mirrors the unsettling, unresolved questions of our own world. We are left grappling with the same concepts its characters do: What truly defines a “citizen” if a piece of paper is both everything and nothing? Where is “home” when you are rejected on both sides of a border? The film offers no easy solace, only the cold, beautiful discomfort of not knowing.
“Swapner Din” makes us stare into that uncertain dawn with Paresh. It compels us to sit with the discomfort of not having the answers, reflecting a world where identity is fragile and belonging is conditional. “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” Robert Frost once wrote. “Swapner Din” whispers a painful correction. Not everyone has a place that must take them in.
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