What I have done here is cull chronologically the 300-word entries for Ritwik Ghatak films included in my 100 Greatest Asian Films list and elsewhere on this site, which you will find elsewhere on this site.
1952
14. THE CITIZEN. Although films from “Bollywood” are quite the fashion, nearly all outstanding films from India have been Bengali, not Hindi. Writer-director Ritwik Ghatak is the first great postwar Indian filmmaker. Nagarik is his first feature. Made when he was in his twenties, it was released in 1977, the year after his death. Satyajit Ray regarded Ghatak as “more Bengali” than himself.
The tragedy that is the foundation of Nagarik is the 1947 partition of Bengal (following the independence of India) that created countless refugees who flooded Calcutta, including Ghatak. The film opens with stunning irony: a freely roaming camera that captures trees and river, goes underneath a spectacularly intricate bridge, and finds rows of tall buildings: an encapsulation of the endless possibilities that the city offers. An overhead shot of a nicely dressed young man in the street, in conjunction with this sense of possibility, marks him for success. But we discover that Ramu has made another attempt at getting a job in borrowed clothes. Jobs are scarce, and his slum-dwelling family withers in poverty in cramped quarters, their lives at the mercy of the money they need and talk about. For now, Ramu is certain he will be successful. In time, the family’s hopes evaporate.
Ghatak, a Marxist, has made a strong, evocative film that focuses on closeups of the faces of the family members and haunting long shots, often with a single soul at least troubled, even defeated, in the frame. In a magnificent shot, a woman sits in front of a mirror. We see her and her reflection. Her eyes are closed. When financial stress consumes existence, there is scant existence; and, additionally, if you are separated from your homeland, there is scarce identity. It is like looking into a mirror with your eyes closed.
1958
28. AJAANTRIK. A dilapidated Chevrolet jalopy obsesses Bimal. The taxi driver has named it Raggadal. This work vehicle barely works, continually breaks down, requiring Bimal’s constant mechanical attention and the reordering of expensive parts when Bimal’s boss would prefer that the nearly forty-year-old car be put out to pasture. Because of Raggadal, Bimal is the village laughingstock. When a passenger complains that Raggadal “croaks,” he and his companion get tossed out.
Raggadal does croak—and groan, and make all sorts of metallic sounds that are first comically and later pitifully exaggerated on the soundtrack. Bimal is continually talking to it, as though Raggadal were a cherished pet. Raggadal may be a symbol of technology that the times have passed by, a symbol therefore of the transience of successive technologies, but it is Bimal’s lonely means of accessing some point in the lives of his fleeting passengers and an anxious attempt at a bulwark against his own transience.
Ritwik Ghatak’s Bengal film Ajaantrik (a.k.a. The Unmechanical and Pathetic Fallacy), in black and white both stark and fluent, begins as a raucous comedy and slides into tragedy as we become increasingly aware of Bimal’s unhinging soul. Comical obstinacy yields to the delusion that the past can be held onto.
Ghatak employs an artillery of visual techniques to accompany his stream of sound effects. Raggadal’s headlights seem droopy eyes. In one shot the interior of the cab goes rapidly in and out of focus to suggest Raggadal’s labored breath! In a winding shot giving Raggadal and Bimal’s point of view on mountainous road, the same shot slides into objectivity when Raggadal itself, with Bimal, ends up coming toward the camera—a shattering glimpse of Bimal’s dissociation.
Raggadal ends up scrap, with Bimal ambiguously smiling; on the ground, a toddler—the future—toots Raggadal’s horn.
1960
34. THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR. The first shot is of an enormous tree, the leafy crown of which is asymmetrical. The shot is held and held. A male voice is heard singing. A girl pops into the foreground of the frame. Across the river, a train chugs. The girl smiles, disappears. The camera moves, placing the singer into the frame’s foreground. In a number of ways, this bravura opening suggests separation and out-of-jointness. Thus begins Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ritwik Ghatak’s turbulent, melancholy film about the misfortunes of a Bengal family from East Pakistan in a refugee village outside Calcutta. Ghatak himself fled to Calcutta as a result of the 1947 partition of Bengal. His film studies the effects of such an event on uprooted lives. It is a tragic anthem for all the world’s displaced, dispossessed.
The protagonist is Neeta (Supriya Choudhury, wonderful), whose family, once middle-class, now struggles in poverty. A student, she sacrifices her education and postpones marriage in order to support parents and siblings after injury forces her father out of work. Rather than appreciating her efforts on their behalf, her family exhausts her emotionally and financially, and when her health fails—she is tubercular—her father tosses her out into a raging storm. Ghatak’s film is indeed full of echoes of Shakespeare’s Lear.
Perhaps The Cloud-Capped Sky could use a little more discipline; it is oversized, overripe. There may be a few too many trenchant closeups. But there are also beautifully layered compositions, to which foreground, background and the space in between contribute intricately and evocatively; and the film’s main arguments, that being wrenched from one’s homeland may loosen one’s grip on one’s humanity and that the family, as institution, may be insufficiently strong to shore up the weakening of these ties, compel. The film is half-baked, half-brilliant.
1961
KOMAL GANDHAR. History as tragic illusion: writer-director Ritwik Ghatak, cinema’s Bengali poet of the Partition of India, begins Komal Gandhar, a.k.a. E-Flat, set in Calcutta, near the end of the second act of a nighttime performance addressing the 1947 event. (The play is Ghatak’s own 1952 Dalil.) A character in the play-within-the-film asks, “Why should I move from my beautiful home by the river Padma?” The rhetorical question is unanswerable, especially when the additional point is made that to leave home is to leave his mother, who is buried there (mother/Motherland). But an answer comes nevertheless; why must he uproot himself and become a refugee? “For food”: hope of survival. The camera pans from platform stage to seated audience. Intermission; flickers of faint light across a woman’s darkened face tease theatrical illusion into the deeper illusions of historical and political reality. As the film proceeds, the “stage” on which the action unfolds is primarily off-stage. Cries of the heart—aching songs and choral music deepen these—can scarcely be theatrically “contained.”
Ghatak himself moved from East Bengal (today, Bangladesh) to Calcutta following the Partition. There, he joined the Indian People’s Theater Association. Bhrigu in the film is largely based on Ghatak. The two theatrical troupes belong to a train of divisions that suggest the extent to which post-Partition India, haunted by it, everywhere reflects the Partition or is consciously or unconsciously perceived as such. The ultimate “division” is self-division because “food” and material things are not all that encapsulate survival. After losing homeland, separation, resettlement, one must also reformulate one’s outlook and cultural identity in order to survive—but one still longs to identify with what has been lost.
Romantically, Bhrigu and Anasuya are separated, we learn, by more than their different troupes—a tad schematic nonetheless.
1965
38. GOLDEN RIVER. With Subarnarekha, Ritwik Ghatak completed the trilogy he had begun with Meghe Dhaka Tara (see above) and Komal Ghandhar (1961) about the human upheavals, strife and all-out war, famine and dire poverty created as a result of the 1947 Partition of India, the arbitrary line that the British drew on a map as its farewell colonialist act, dividing India into a secular state and Islamic Pakistan. Ghatak’s saga over many years focuses on a family of Bengali refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) trying to establish new roots.
It is a work structured by coincidences; but its melodramatic material everywhere gains resonance by references to Partition. The film opens, for instance, with a lower-caste mother pleading for her little son’s admission into school, only to be told that the line dividing school districts cannot be crossed. Suddenly regional conflict ignites and the woman is snatched away, leaving Abhiram orphaned; the child is adopted by Ishwar Chakraborty, whose little daughter, Seeta, Abhiram grows up to love. (Seeta commits suicide when her brother solicits her as a prostitute.) Meanwhile, the Subarnarekha River flows near the refugee colony on the outskirts of Calcutta—the beautiful illusion that division can be peaceably adapted to. (“Subarnarekha” literally means “golden line.”) The surrounding dull, daunting rocks taunt the illusion.
As with Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ghatak has fashioned a piece of powerful yearning—the desire of people to lead settled lives. An upwardly tilted shot suggests that sparsely adorned branches of a tree are reaching hopefully with all their fragile might into the heavens: a piercing image. “All year I’ve been yearning to come home,” Abhiram, who has been away at school, tells Seeta at the edge of a forest. Without realizing it, the boy is giving voice to the hearts of a shattered people.
1973
45. A RIVER CALLED TITASH. “As the poet Lalan says, ‘When the water turns to air,/ The fish will dissolve in the wind.’”
From India and Bangladesh comes Ritwik Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam.
Causality in this instance generating a stunning symbolical equivalence, the drying river accounts for the fate of the fishermen and their families in a 1930s East Bengal village. Moreover, the barren landscape and dissolving community resonate with prophetic symbolism: the elimination of a whole culture as a result of the 1947 Partition.
Ghatak’s River opens with Nature’s lament—rain dropping into the river—and images of barrenness and uselessness: boats, for instance, empty, abandoned. A father consoles his little daughter over this desertion of “the spark of life”—no small matter, since, otherwise, the area’s relative productivity would have been part of his legacy to her. Environmental devastation strikes at the heart of human life.
Some overwrought melodrama (including kidnapping, escape, madness, murder, suicide, beatings, outbursts of temper) drives Ghatak’s narrative, based on Advaita Malo Barman’s novel. The story, which covers many years, is complicated. A rare joyous moment occurs when a man bursts from the frame after his father gives permission for him to send his son to school, creating the possibility that the boy will have a better life than both father and grandfather.
But the powerful black-and-white poetry that Ghatak and cinematographer Baby Islam achieve becomes the soul of a film whose detailed study of tribal customs lends additional interest. Indeed, this eclectic work combines documentary realism, evocative imagery, and experimental flights of fancy.
The film culminates in the river’s drying and the eruption of violence. Ghatak quotes Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930)—only here, in place of a radiant sunflower, barren branches accompany the girl. Voluminous parched land. A lone child plays.
1974
REASON, DEBATE AND A STORY. Two years before his death at fifty, Ritwak Ghatak’s final fictional film, the autobiographical and poetically black-and-white Jukti, Takko Aar Gappo, has Ghatak appearing as Neelkantha, a version of himself, on a symbolical foot-journey through past and present. (His film thus reminds us of Jean Cocteau’s last one, Le testament d’Orphée, 1960.) Its springboard in Calcutta is Neel’s abandonment by wife Durga and young son Satya (played by a Ghatak—I presume the writer-director’s son or grandson) because the man drinks too much. Once Durga is gone, the sale of the roof over her husband’s head among her parting accomplishments, two young persons, a woman and a man, wander in. Routed refugees from newly independent Bangladesh, these two also are among the dispossessed; the new trio takes to the road. The film will culminate in Neel’s end; emerging from a forest, he is shot to death by the police—like the refugees, only more absurdly in his case, a political victim.
On his journey Neel’s mind enters a private past—that of youth, full of hope and faith; the memory of young love now is “fragrance blowing in the wind.” But as he travels through Bengal, Neel also enters the memory of a people’s past. This includes, in 1943, India’s devastating man-made famine to keep its wartime soldiers fed, outfitted and armed (see Satyajit Ray’s amazing 1973 Distant Thunder), and the postwar 1947 partition of Bengal between India and Pakistan that routed and devastated countless lives, and which is symbolized here, poignantly, by the fate of a child.
Along the way, Ghatak brands as a sell-out the one Indian filmmaker, another Bengal, greater than himself, Satyajit Ray, who “appears” as the character Shatrujit.
Ghatak, who also edited, composed the film’s aching score.
Dennis Grunes 