Ritwik Ghatak, rebel auteur who drew upon his life and times for his art

“No one else can shake the people’s middle-class mindset, wealth, and contentment. You have departed, pride has dissipated, and humility has surfaced.” This is my translation of a few lines from Ritwik, for You, a poem written by Bengali poet Shakti Chattopadhyay in 1976, shortly after the death of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak.

 

November 4 marked the centenary of Ghatak, Indian cinema’s rebel auteur. Along with Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, he is often hailed as one of Bengali cinema’s three maestros. However, in a 1997 article, Jacob Levich referred to Ghatak as the “problem child” and Ray as the “suitable boy” of Indian art cinema. Ghatak’s films are “ragged, provisional, intensely personal, yet epic in shape, scope, and aspirations,” according to Mr Levich.

 

His films continue to be among the most potent artistic representations of the trauma of displacement associated with Partition. Drawing from his own experience of Partition as a young immigrant, his Partition trilogy, Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961), and  Subarnarekha   (1965), illustrates the consequences of this colonial geopolitical exercise. Depicting a startlingly honest indictment of the family as an institution, The Meghe Dhaka Tara  may be one of the most tragic films ever produced.

 

A committed Marxist, a lay Jungian, and occasionally a novelist, Ghatak was a key figure in the Indian People’s Theatre Association, the Communist Party of India’s cultural wing.

 

Ghatak confined his filmmaking to Bengal, even though he wrote the script for Madhumati (1958), the Hindi blockbuster directed by Bimal Roy. Despite his talent, financial difficulties limited him to making only eight films. His first film, Nagarik (1952), is a blatantly Communist picture that criticises the Horatio Alger-like aspirations of a naive young man in the Calcutta slums. It’s arguably the first Bengali art film. But it was released in 1977, after his passing.

 

Long before the Herbie films, his first commercial release, the bittersweet comedy Ajantrik (1958), was one of the first Indian films to feature an inanimate object — a rundown 1920s Chevrolet Jalopy taxicab — as a character. Its stunning depiction of the intricate interaction between man and machine is still relevant today. With a scenario akin to François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), Ghatak’s Bari Theke Paliye ( 1958) appears to be the most playful of his films. It tells the story of an imaginative village boy who flees to the big city. Preceding Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973) is among the early works in a hyperlink structure, with several characters in a collection of connected storylines. But under Ghatak’s direction, the narrative transforms into a visionary, alluring political movie.

 

Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1977), Ghatak’s swan song, is arguably the most harsh and purposefully indecorous self-portrait ever recorded on celluloid. Here, in the role of his alter ego, the director alternates between being irritable, hectoring, resentful, and pitiful.

 

“As a creator of powerful images in an epic style, he was virtually unsurpassed in Indian cinema,” Satyajit Ray stated in the “foreword” to Cinema and I, a compilation of Ghatak’s cinematic essays.

 

Ghatak’s brilliance influenced a generation of filmmakers, and he was often hailed as a filmmakers’ filmmaker.  Euripides, a legendary Greek tragedian from the 5th century BC, is renowned for his theatrical innovations, having a significant impact on drama even now. Was the non-conformist Ritwik Ghatak the Euripides of Indian cinema? In reference to Euripides, Ghatak remarked, “We must orientate our entire creative endeavour along... the channel of epic mentality.” And that may have transformed his filmmaking art into a way to convey and end people’s misery.

The author is professor of statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata