Ritwik Ghatak: An unparalleled auteur of provocation, displacement

In the centenary of his birth, Ritwik Ghatak continues to provoke us with the disquieting narratives in his small oeuvre of films

The Bengali actor Soumitra Chatterjee once attended a meeting with several stalwarts of the film industry in the 1960s, including directors Mrinal Sen and Tapan Sinha. The film director Ritwik Ghatak was also a part of the meeting and sat next to Chatterjee. “He kept on abusing Satyajit Ray,” recalled the actor, later. “I did not get provoked since I did not hold a brief to defend Ray.” At some point, Ghatak uttered an obscenity. “I jumped at him, held him by his collar and planted a huge blow on him,” recalls Chatterjee. “I said I would bury him right there.” This incident is recollected in a recent biography of Chatterjee, written by the journalist Sangamitra Chakraborty.

 

 

Another incident Chakraborty narrates about Chatterjee and Ghatak relates to their planned collaboration on a film. The two of them plan to visit a producer, but the meeting is dissolved when Ghatak turns up inebriated. “I offered to drop him home,” recalled Chatterjee. But Ghatak wanted to go to Rabindra Sarobar, a man-made lake in south Kolkata. “I dropped him by car and he rejoined some lowly creatures and drank dheno [a potent country liquor].”

 

Anyone familiar with post-Independence Bengali cinema and culture will grasp immediately the metaphoric significance of these two anecdotes. While Chatterjee was the epitome of what it meant to be a Bengali bhadralok (loosely translated as a cultivated, middle-class man), Ghatak, whose centenary was on 4 November, was the stark opposite: A provocateur.

 

At the time of his death, on 6 February 1976, at the age of 50, from complications related to alcoholism and tuberculosis, Ghatak had become a somewhat obscure and forgotten figure. While he was mostly unknown in the West, unlike his contemporaries Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, he was also slipping into the shadows in his homeland. Film critic and historian Derek Malcom writes that Ghatak’s second film, ‘Ajantrik’ (1958), was sent to the Venice Film Festival, a year after Ray’s ‘Aparajito’ (1956) won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the same festival. But it was “vetoed at the selection stage, largely because there was no one from India to argue” in its favour. Throughout much of his life — and for many years after his death — Ghatak would find few champions.

 

Born in Dhaka in 1925, Ghatak came to Calcutta (now Kolkata) as a refugee following the Partition in 1947. He soon became involved in leftist theatre, particularly the Indian People’s Theatre Association. (His 1961 film ‘Komal Gandhar’ depicts the struggles of a theatre group in post-Independence Calcutta.) He began his film career as a story and screenwriter, working in the Bombay (now Mumbai)-based Hindi film industry. His most notable project in Bombay was ‘Madhumati’ (1958), directed by Bimal Roy and starring Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala in leading roles. Ghatak wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay with Rajinder Singh Bedi, earning a Filmfare award nomination for Best Story. In recent weeks several journalists have pointed out how the climax of ‘Madhumati’, which includes themes of reincarnation, has influenced later films like ‘Karz’ (1980) and ‘Om Shanti Om’ (2007).

 

Ghatak’s first film as director, ‘Nagorik’ (1953), was never released in his lifetime. However, ‘Ajantrik’ launched him into his most creative phase — 1958 to 1962. During this period, Ghatak made ‘Bari Theke Paliye’ (1959) and the Partition trilogy for which he is best known — ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ (1960), ‘Komal Gandhar’ (1961) and ‘Subarnarekha’ (1962). “‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ was the only popular success that Ghatak ever saw in his life,” writes film scholar Moinak Biswas. “The other films not only were commercial failures but also met with critical censure, often from his comrades in the leftist circle, for obscurity, lack of coherence, and — more damaging — sentimentalism.”

 

In a 1966 essay on ‘Subarnarekha’, Ghatak expresses his intentions for the film: “On the surface, the crisis presented in ‘Subarnarekha’ seems to stem from the refugee problem. But refugee or homeless in this film does not mean only the homeless from East Bengal. …I wanted also to speak of the fact that we have all been rendered homeless in our time, having lost our vital roots. My intention was to raise the expression homeless from a specific geographical level to a generality.” For Ghatak, himself a refugee of Partition, the condition of being homeless is not only the result of a specific historical or geographical event, but the universal condition of humans.

 

Such a condition compels a sensitive human being and an artist like him to be a provocateur. Comparing him to Ray, Jacob Levich wrote in a 1997 article: “Ray’s films are seamless, exquisitely rendered… Ghatak’s are ragged, provisional, intensely personal, yet epic in shape, scope, and aspirations. …Viewing Ghatak is an edgy, intimate experience, an engagement with a brilliantly erratic intelligence in an atmosphere of inquiry, experimentation, and disconcerting honesty. The feeling can be invigorating, but it’s never comfortable.”

 

In his last completed film, ‘Jukti, Takko Aar Gappo’ (1974), Ghatak plays the lead role of a washed-up and alcoholic Marxist intellectual, Nilkantha Bagchi. When the film opens, Nilkantha’s wife Durga (Tripti Mitra) leaves him, with their son. The only material possession she leaves behind is a ceiling fan. Nilkantha promptly sells off the fan to buy a bottle of county liquor. He is evicted by his landlord, literally becoming homeless. He wanders the streets of Calcutta, collecting subaltern and underclass companions, finally ending up in the forest hideout of the far-left Naxalite rebels. In the ending sequence of the film, he is shot dead by the police. His last words are: “I need to do something!” Historian Sumanta Banerjee, in a 2000 essay, writes: “(T)hese words and his role in this film sum up his career as a filmmaker.”

 

The summing up, however, does not provide any closure. The ache of displacement, the violence of history, the contradictions of modernity, the loneliness of the human condition — and the uncompromising desire to love and to create art — that mark his cinema continue to be disquieting even in his centenary. Derek Malcom writes about watching Ghatak’s films at a film festival in Madras (now Chennai) in 1978: “The prints were tattered, the subtitles virtually unreadable… and the projection was below even Indian standards. But the impact was considerable. Here was… a restless iconoclast whose dreams were never likely to be wholly fulfilled but still worth dreaming in the fractured society which he seemed to epitomise.” Even now, Ghatak continues to provoke us, perhaps with one of his most famous dialogues: “Think! Practice thinking!”

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(Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist. The extracts from Ghatak’s essays are from translations by Moinak Biswas)  Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper