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Ritwik Ghatak: Reaching Out to a Lonely Rebel

Sumanta Banerjee

“Troubled times!” That was how Ritwik described the age in which he was born and worked. It was a rolling cascade of distress. In his own words: “…there came the Second World War, the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, the fractured Independence that was obtained by the Congress Party and the Muslim League by cutting the country into two halves and plunging it into utter ruin in 1947. There followed the spate of communal warfare between Hindus and Muslims. The waters of the Ganga and Padma rivers became red with the blood of fratricidal killings. These we saw with our own eyes. Our dreams faded away. We fell crashing down, clutching at a wretched and ragged Bengal. What is this Bengal – where poverty and immorality are our regular companions, where black marketeers and dishonest politicians rule the roost, where humanity is doomed to live in horror and distress?” (Translated from Ritwik’s Bengali article entitled `Amar Chhobi’, or `My Films’, published in a magazine called Sharadiya Film in 1966).

It was this reality of his times that Ritwik portrayed in his films. But his films were not mere documentary records of those `troubled times.’ They were rooted to an ideology. He made a consistent effort to express certain definite ideas through his films – ideas born of the teachings of Marx and Lenin, of the Jungian probe into collective consciousness, his experience in the stage as an activist of the Leftist IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association), of his perception of the Indian religio-cultural tradition, his empathy with the rituals and customs of aboriginal tribal communities, his analysis of India’s political situation, and above all – his examination of the rootlessness of the Bengali refugees who migrated from East Bengal to Calcutta and other parts of the country, following the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947 on a religious basis. Ritwik’s own home was in East Bengal, which overnight became a part of another nation-state called Pakistan. It alienated thousands of Bengali Hindus, who shared the same language, the same culture as their Muslim counterparts in that part of the country, but who were forced to flee their homeland because of the religious hostilities that accompanied the “fractured Independence” – the term used by Ritwik to describe the political transition.

But although he dealt in his films with these socio-political problems and culture-specific concerns of his contemporary Bengali society (from the 1950s till the 1970s), Ritwik could to some extent, surmount the confines of the local contemporaneity, and at times touch a chord of eternal concerns among sections of a wider audience even outside Bengal. In portraying the trauma of the loss of homes among refugees from East Pakistan, which recurs in most of his films for instance, he tried to turn it into a metaphor for the universal sense of rootlessness and alienation suffered by individuals and communities. Still today – more than thirty years after his death – in his own Bengal, his films continue to haunt sensitive sections of the present generation. They hear in them loud echoes of their present plight – as bluntly described by Ritwik in the last sentence of the above quoted article of his. In his films, he mercilessly ripped apart post-Independence Bengali middle class society and its political leadership, exposing their hypocrisy and evils – which still continue to bedevil today’s West Bengal.

Even in films not directly dealing with the aftermath of the 1947 Partition – like Ajantrik and Bari Thekey Paliye – Ritwik evoked sentiments that acquired universal dimensions. He could convey the pangs of loneliness in the mechanical world of the machine that lead a driver to desperately seek an emotional relationship with his car. Watching Ajantrik (without French sub-titles) for the first time at the Venice Film Festival in 1959, the renowned French film critic Georges Sadoul wrote: “Just as the driver fell in love with his car Jagaddal – however reckless, strange and whimsical it might seem – I have also fallen head over heels in love with this film!” (Quoted in the Bengali magazine Chitrabikshan, January-April, 1976). The experiences of the truant boy in the nooks and crannies of a strange metropolis in Bari Thekey Paliye, should sound familiar to people living in modern industrial environs in any part of the world.

Inventing an indigenous film language

But Ritwik’s distinctiveness lay not only in the selection of certain historically important subjects, or contemporary relevant concerns. He tried to innovate a particular style of film making to express his ideas. It bears the unmistakable stamp of his individuality – in the same sense that the silent films made by the German filmmakers in the 1920s could have been made only in the Germany of those days, or in the same way that the films of the modern Japanese film makers indicate a specific Japanese way of expression. Often, by departing radically from the prevalent filmic style and modifying it to adapt it to the Bengali cultural forms (found in traditional commercial theatre and folk-jatra ), or tribal rituals in the Bengal-Bihar border region, Ritwik seems to have evolved an indigenous film language.

In this context, let me point out that the language and grammar of cinematography are still evolving, and going through a phase of multifarious experiments. Some directors have discarded altogether the story element, and sought to create the mood or convey the message through an imaginative arrangement of visuals, music and dialogue. Jean-Luc Godard for instance, in the 1960s often overturned the conventional and familiar norms of dialogue by using on the soundtrack the blaring slogans of commercial ads and Leftist polemics, and choosing characters from comic strips. Modern Japanese film directors like Ozu, Mizoguchi or Kurusowa on the other hand have gone back to their indigenous traditional cultural resources like `Kabuki’, or historical forms like the `chanbara’ sword dances. The Samurai and his rituals become oriental counterparts of the cowboy and his swashbuckling role in the Westerns. In the delivery of the dialogues, or in gestures and movements, the characters often sound loud or even melodramatic (conforming, as they are required to do, to the traditional style of performance). This may grate on the sensibilities of those who derive their fastidious standards from conventional European films. But why should one judge these films by a Euro-centric yardstick? Why should we not learn to accept their film language as a part of their own distinct cultural tradition? Recognizing the need to respect the originality of such a style in the films of Mizoguchi, Satyajit Ray felt that although they were not influenced by the prevalent Western style of film making, they were “original and fundamental enough to necessitate a thorough reassessment of the so-called first principle of cinematography.” (Quoted in `Film Book I`, edited by Robert Hughes, Grove Press, New York, 1959).

It is in this perspective that it is necessary to assess Ritwik Ghatak’s film style. He once stated: “The era of narrating a story in films is over; it is now the time for making a statement through films.” Although he did not totally give up the narrative style, he did indeed break up the traditional linear story line by a variety of stylistic interruptions to make a statement, and thus invented a filmic language of his own. He used techniques, motifs and ideas from the Bengali folk theatre genre called jatra; the Indian cinema of the 1930-40 period; tribal rituals and dances; and Hindu mythology among other things. It is interesting to watch how Ritwik made use of a familiar technique from jatra and traditional Indian filmography. In these forms, for instance, a song is sung in its entirety. In Western filmography, such a device is reserved only for the genre called `musicals’ in Hollywood, while in other films, only snatches of a song or a musical script are used on the soundtrack to explain an emotional moment perhaps. Ritwik in his films, used a song as a whole, to express a certain mood of a character, or at a crucial moment of the narrative. For songs, most of the time Ritwik depended on Rabindranath Tagore’s lyrics, and he knew how best to fit them into the sequences. Listen for instance to the song `Aaj jyotsna rate sabai gechhey boney…” (On this moon-lit night, everyone has gone to the forests…while I’m alone in my room..) in Komal-gandhar during a poignant moment in the life of the heroine Anasuya.

Or, in Jukti-takko-Gappo, where the hero Neelkantha recalls a song by Tagore to show his affection to the mother-figure Bangabala – the girl who arrived in Calcutta, fleeing the war-torn East Pakistan in 1971. The songs on the sound track with the camera panning across the faces of the figures or scenes, accentuate the personal dilemma of the characters, and also lend a historical dimension to the message that Ritwik wants to convey. By using these songs, Ritwik also re-invented Tagore and re-established the relevance of his songs for a new generation.

The other motif that he borrowed from the traditional Bengali jatra and theatre was that of a stereotype – a character marked by an exaggerated style of acting or idiosyncratic delivery of dialogue. The famous actor Bijon Bhattacharya was quite often put in this role in Ritwik’s films – usually as an idealistic school teacher from East Bengal, speaking in the dialect of that area. While in the old Bengali theatre, the highly affected style of delivery of dialogues by such characters became a cliché, in Ritwik’s films the same style, used at decisive moments, ignited a spark in the minds of the audience. Who for instance, can ever forget the sudden appearance of the ghost-like face of Bijon (in the role of Haraprasad) in Subarnarekha peeping through the window with his question (uttered in the typical East Bengali dialect) aimed at the would-be suicide Ishwar – “How long is the night?”. It is a query loaded with memories and fears of an unending nightmare. Or again, Bijon Bhattacharya in Jukti Takko Aar Gappo , living up to the typical role as the teacher of Sanskrit, Jagannath, who indulges in stock quotations from the ancient classical texts.

The use of `coincidences’ as a filmic form

Let me come to the other familiar device used by Ritwik in his films – manipulation of concurrence of events. He arranged coincidences often in defiance of all natural laws. The frequency of too many accidental encounters in his films is again reminiscent of the old Bengali theatres and films.

This had led highbrow critics to accuse Ritwik of contriving situations at the cost of authenticity. Rarely does a brother, they point out, walk accidentally into his sister’s room in a whorehouse (as happens in Subarnarekha). But then, there are a lot of things which never take place in reality, and yet find place in art. Do we see in real life the sky of Van Gogh, or the human figures of Picasso? Yet, the highly extravagant colours and the distorted lines, notwithstanding the objections by stickers for authentic reproduction, touch responsive chords in sensitive souls. The poetry of art can prevail over the grammar of everyday life. The prime point is whether the `unreal’ coincidences, or the exaggerated stereotypes, or the songs, stick out like scarecrows (as they do in most of the current commercial movies), or do they flow effortlessly along the main current of the narrative (as in Ritwik’s films)? Incidentally, Ritwik himself defended his use of coincidences in Subarnarekha : “I have been frequently accused of using coincidences in Subarnarekha. It is true that the number of coincidences in that film is very high. But the main incident in the film – the brother intending to visit a brothel happens to stumble into his sister’s room there – is such a big coincidence that I have tried to use coincidence itself as a form. Right from the beginning, I have tried to alert the audience about the sequence of coincidences. There is a fun in the use of this form. You can describe it as in the tradition of the epic style. At the same time, by investing these coincidences with larger suggestive dimensions, I tried to make them pregnant with meaning. For instance, if one remembers the main point that was to be established – the brother’s entering his sister’s room – one has to understand that this man could have gone into any other girl’s room, but even then that girl would essentially remain his sister. Here, it has only been dragged into, and shown in a mechanical way. Here the purpose was to imbue the particular event with suggestions of the generality.” (`On Subarnarekha’ in the Bengali magazine Chitrabeekshan, January-April, 1976)

This interpretation by Ritwik, takes us beyond the confines of that particular sequence in Subarnarekha, and brings us into the territory of gender discourse. He opens up a can of worms – shaking up the conservative Bengali middle class audience to a whole lot of uncomfortable questions that plague their homes – incestuousness, male predatory instincts, imposition of patriarchal norms on the female members of their families, humiliation of the female which ends up with her bloody suicide – Sita slitting her throat at the sight of her brother invading her sexual space.

Aboriginal culture and Hindu mythology

Another interesting style that Ritwik devised was the use of tribal cultural performances as well as motifs of Hindu mythology at certain junctures in his film narratives. The adivasis, or the aboriginal tribal people inhabiting the Bihar-West Bengal border region (known as Jangalmahal – literally meaning a forest habitat), quite frequently appear in Ritwik’s films. There are scenes of tribal ritualistic dances in Ajantrik, and Jukti Takko Aar Gappo. They form long sequences that may appear irrelevant to the main narrative. But Ritwik used them as a cinematic form to convey a message. It was to introduce the element of the eternal in the midst of a story that recorded a fragment of a passing life stream. These adivasi dances are part of tribal rituals associated with the rites of passage, during the main stages in the eternal life cycle – birth, marriage and death. Writing about the dance of the Oraon tribals in Chhotanagpur in Bihar, about whom he made a film in the mid-1950s, Ritwik observed: “These dances create the atmosphere which suddenly makes you aware that you are witnessing a scene which is as old as the history of man in India. The tunes, the sound, the spectacle make you realize what vigour and joy of life is. They are precious because they invoke in you the primary emotions.” (`Cinema and I’. Calcutta. 1987).

These tribal dances also establish the primacy of women, who are the main dancers while the males are accompanists, beating on the drums to provide the rhythms. It can be read as a metaphor for the dual sexual roles of the participants. The women who are recognized as the source of creativity for their power and patience to give birth to life, hold their hands and dance in a fairly long gentle unison. The male drummers however beat their drums at a feverish pace. Do their drum beats symbolize the male strokes that make their women give birth to a new life?

In Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, the tribal Chhau dancer Panchanan brings together these male and female principles in an interesting sequence. He shows the mask of Chandi (the goddess of power) to the girl Bangabala. This mask, he tells the girl, is put on by the male Chhau dancer when performing in the role of Chandi in the scene of the killing of the demon in the Hindu mythological tale of Mahishamardini (where the goddess slays the demon who had assumed the form of mahisha or buffalo). When Bangabala wants to dance, Panchanan at first dissuades her saying that according to the traditional norms of Chhau, women are forbidden to dance in the performance. The goddess Chandi, he says, takes on the form of a male to dance in the role of the demon-killer. Is this exchange of gender roles in the Chhau performance prompted by the need to project the warrior image of the mother-goddess – which Panchanan thinks can be better represented by the muscular male performer? But Bangabala, by her assertiveness already commands the obedience of Panchanan (who addresses her by the term ma-thakarun, which literally means `revered mother’ – used by males from the lower orders to address women from a superior caste or class, irrespective of their age, in Bengali society). The Chhau dancer finally concedes: “Yes – you will dance, my mother! Unless you women dance, nothing will happen. Dance…dance…”

Jukti Takko Aar Gappo also presents in one sequence, an encounter between the tribal psyche and the upper caste Brahminical interpretation of Hindu mythology. The argument between the Sanskrit teacher Jagannath and the tribal Chhau dancer Panchanan brings to the fore the chasm between the classical Sanskrit-oriented literary stream of the educated elite, and the aboriginal cultural tradition of the lower orders. As Panchanan explains to Bangabala the various incarnations of the mother goddess in his own home-spun way, Jagannath interrupts him by quoting Sanskrit verses to interpret them according to the Hindu scriptures. Tired of listening to Jagannath’s quotations, at one stage Panchanan explodes: “Stop your ang-bang” (a dig at the Sanskrit word-endings). “These words,” he adds, “are foreign to me…” The Sanskrit teacher asks him in surprise: “But how can Sanskrit be foreign?” Panchanan retorts: “Of course it is. Who speaks Sanskrit in our land?”

But like the performing arts of tribal life, Sanskrit scriptures and literature were also used by Ritwik in his films. He delved into ancient texts like the Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas, or Sanskrit classics like Abigyana Shakuntalam by the famous poet and playwright Kalidasa of fifth century A.D., to borrow motifs and re-interpret them in order to shape the image of the `archetype’ – a term which he himself was fond of using when writing about his films. This `archetype’ again was built around the role of the woman. From Meghe Dhaka Tara to Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, in almost all the films, he evokes mythological associations that hark back to the archetypal mother goddess Durga – in various forms, from the role of the ascetic Uma to that of the destructive Kali. Explaining the recurrence of this image in his films, Ritwik said: “In my films, I have tried to lose myself, totally drunk in these traditions.” He then added: “…our civilization has known this Great Mother intimately since primeval times, both in her benevolent and terrible forms. And through our myths, our epics, our scriptures and our folklore, this archetype has reached out to us at every level of understanding.” (Movie Montage, 1967).

Heroines like Nita in Meghe Dhaka Tara, Anasuya in Komal Gandhar, and Sita in Subarnarekha, recall the story of Uma, the daughter of the god of the Himalayas, as described in the ancient myths. It is the story of a young girl, pining for her lover (Shiva) and resorting to austere practices of worshipping to gain him, till she reduces herself almost to a skeleton. Her story had been a part of the collective memory, primarily of the Bengali Hindu society. In these films, Ritwik transposes this mythological image to his contemporary Bengali society, where he projects his heroines as modern Umas, struggling to fulfill their respective dreams. Their objectives differ, but it is the essence – the intensity of their pursuit and the sacrifices that they make – that bring them together to fit into the `archetype’ that Ritwik was trying to formulate. Through snatches of dialogues and songs, incantations on the sound track in certain sequences, he recalls the mythological story and tries to nudge the collective memory.

Nita in Meghe Dhaka Tara, for instance, sacrifices everything to take care of her family, and finally ends up with tuberculosis. Significantly, at the end of the film, Ritwik brings her to the mountains – reminiscent of Uma’s birth from the Himalayan god – where Nita cries: “I want to live”, with the shadow of death in her eyes. Explaining the scene, Ritwik said that he wanted to “convey the entire allegorical connection of Uma – the wife of the Lord of Destruction – who has been the archetype of all daughters and brides of all Bengali households for centuries – with the protagonist.” (Filmfare magazine, 1967 – quoted in `Ritwik Ghatak’, published by the Directorate of Film Festivals, New Delhi. 1982). Anasuya in Komal Gandhar, however fights for her beliefs and lives to attain her wishes, like Uma meeting her lover at the end of her austerities. Spurning her other supplicant – the better off Samar who lives in France – she decides to join her partner Bhrigu in the theatre movement (to whom she is emotionally and intellectually attached), facing all the uncertainties. Commenting on the role of Anasuya, Ritwik said: “The heroine of this film is the Shakuntala of Bengal…” Here he goes back to the story of Shakuntala (as described by Kalidasa in his classic play), to describe the divided mind of Anasuya – torn between her past roots and her uncertain future. “When going to her husband’s place,” Ritwik reminds us, “Shakuntala had to tear herself away from the ashram (where she grew up), her very familiar world, the land where she had lived from the day of her birth.” (Movie Montage magazine, 1967).

In Subarnarekha, the archetype reappears, again revolving around a woman – the heroine Sita. As a child, she wanders along an empty runway (an abandoned airfield left from the days of the Second World War – a reminder of the air raids and bombings). She suddenly encounters a terrifying image of the destructive goddess Kali. It turns out to be a travelling showman who earns his living by entertaining people by assuming various disguises. The frightened Sita runs blindly away – but only to be haunted for the rest of her life by a trail of destructive events. Kali is the “Terrible Mother” – the term used by Ritwik while explaining that particular sequence in the film. Describing it as the “one archetypal image that has been haunting us from a remote past,” he said: “(it) is today confronting us all over the world. You may call it by many names: the Hydrogen Bomb, or Strategic Air Command…It is the power of annihilation, the ability to destroy, and perhaps, like little Sita, we have suddenly found ourselves confronted by it…” (Movie Montage magazine, 1967)

But it is in Ritwik’s last film Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, that the women characters break away from the archetypal roles of suffering and sacrificing females. Durga, the wife of the alchoholic hero Nilkantha, in a move of protest, leaves her husband. Bangabala, the young refugee girl from Bangladesh, is a rebellious creature – outspoken and breaking rules. It is no wonder that Durga and Bangabala get into a brief bond of affection towards the end of the film when the former asks her to stay back. But even then, true to his style, Ritwik invokes several archetypal images. The choice of the name Nilkantha for the hero is significant. It is associated with the old mythological story of the churning of the oceans in search of amrita, the elixir of life, in the course of which along with many other things, poison also came out. In order to save the world from being destroyed by it, the god Shiva took it upon himself to drink the poison. The poison made his throat blue – which gave him the name Nilkantha (the one with the blue throat). In Ritwik’s film, his hero all through his aimless wanderings, seems to be distilling poison from the various bitter experiences – the degeneration of his once politically committed friends, listening to Bangabala’s plight, and engaging in the futile political arguments with the Naxalite revolutionaries in the forest on the eve of his death. Similarly, the unemployed and distressed youth in the film acquires his name Nachiketa from a mythological character who was destined to visit hell because of a curse by his enraged father.

‘Rows of Walls’

But how far did these innovative devices of Ritwik go to create a distinctive film language, impact on his audience?

Although Ritwik derived some of these devices from indigenous sources like tribal rituals and Hindu mythology, they seemed to have gone over the heads of his contemporary Bengali audience. None of his films was a box office hit. The general indifference to his filmic style of presentation disappointed Ritwik, as he watched the audience and critics responding only to certain parts of the contents of his films while rejecting the basic ideas that he was trying to communicate through his form. His films dealing with the uprooted Bengali middle class in the aftermath of the 1947 partition, were being interpreted as melodramatic trips to a nostalgic past and a distressing present. In his numerous writings, Ritwik tried to rescue his films from such misinterpretation.

The problem is rooted to the dissociation between the stylistic devices that Ritwik chose, and those that his audience were familiar with in the commercial film media. We should remember that the bulk of the audience of his films in Bengal were the urban and suburban middle class people. To them, tribal culture always remained alien. Even the appeal of Bengali folk rituals or songs like Panchali, Agamani-Bijoya, or wedding songs (strains of which Ritwik often used on the sound track in certain sequences in his films) was lost upon the urban Bengali audience. These cultural forms, with which Ritwik grew up during his childhood in the past East Bengal, had disappeared by the 1960s from the middle class society of Calcutta. The only aspects of Ritwik’s style which had had some appeal for the Bengali middle class viewers were the devices borrowed from the old theatres and films – the use of songs, the frequency of accidents and coincidences, a tendency towards the melodramatic in certain situations. Having been fond of these well-established conventions over generations, the Bengali urban and semi-urban audience found it easy to accept them. It is for this reason that the highly melodramatic sequences in Subarnarekha of all of Ritwik’s films, still remain popular with the Bengali viewers.

As for the motifs derived from aboriginal rituals and popular myths, may be the tribals and the Bengali rural populace who are still attuned to these traditional cultural forms, could have responded to this part of Ritwik’s cinematography more spontaneously – if however they could ever get a chance to watch his films (living as they were in the remotest corners of the country, cut off from all media facilities)! But, then there was another problem. These motifs are used by Ritwik to express ideas which are rooted exclusively to the problems of estranged middle class individuals in a hostile metropolis – ideas which are far removed from the existential concerns of the rural poor. (The only film of his which was totally based on rural reality was Titash Ekti Nodir Naam, filmed in 1973 in Bangladesh – his birthplace which he had a chance to revisit after decades only a few years before his death to shoot the film).

The characters in Ritwik’s films are lost and alienated souls from the urban petty bourgeois milieu. Even when Ritwik takes them away to a rural locale (as in Komal Gandhar, or Jukti Takko Aar Gappo), their thinking is bound by their urban existence. Most of them are displaced from their homes by the 1947 Partition, or some socio-economic distress, trying to survive in Calcutta and its suburbs. Some are young dreamers in this alien city, denied the chance to build their future, as Ramu, the hero of his first film (which was significantly entitled Nagarik, meaning citizen). In this film, a poverty-stricken middle class family ends up in a slum, trying to build a new future out of the ruins of their existence. In the films that followed, we come across the lonely taxi-driver Bimal in Ajantrik, who establishes a human relationship with a car. Another is a truant child Kanchan in Bari Thekey Paliye, who runs away from his village home to Calcutta and suddenly becomes an adult after having been exposed to the world of the metropolis. The others are uprooted refugees from East Bengal, seeking shelter in Calcutta or elsewhere, and trying to cope with the conflict between nostalgia for the past and compulsion to adjust to the present.

These subjects and ideas, primarily rooted to urban middle class experiences, were as alien to the tribals and villagers of Bengal, as were the traditional folk motifs that he used in his films, to his urban Bengali audience. There thus seems to be a disjunction between Ritwik’s themes and the cinematic style that he adopted, however innovative and exciting the latter might have been. Ritwik himself realized the limitations of his style, of his efforts to interlace tribal and folk rituals with modern narratives. Commenting on the long sequence of tribal dances in Ajantrik, he admitted: “..these symbols, in their sporadic presentation, could not become universal. Had I been a bit more conscious, these symbols could have perhaps broken out from the four walls of their familiar surroundings, and found a new meaning.” (`A few thoughts on Ajantrik in `Chalacchitra, Manush ebong Aaro Kichhu’. Calcutta. 1975.) In another important essay in the same above-mentioned collection, he spoke of the “rows of walls” that separated the film maker from the audience. One such wall was the `pulse of the audience.’ On behalf of the film makers, he said: “…our continuous and ardent effort is to feel their (the audience’s) pulse and count the beats. But our capacity to perceive the movements of the pulse is very limited…” He then turned to the audience, and said: “You are also a great wall. Perhaps, the biggest wall.”

Complaining that the audience were not prepared to accept films made in a new style, he reminded them of both the mythology of the past and the rural cultural heritage (the sources which Ritwik used for the new style that he tried to innovate): “Our country is the land of Ramayana and Mahabharata. You would not hear in many countries the philosophy that our peasants talk about.” Among the other `walls’ that separated the new film makers and the audience, were the commercial interests against whom Ritwik raised his fingers in that essay – producers, distributors, and exhibitors in the film industry – who were driven by the profit motive to sponsor certain types of films, and keep other films dumped in the can.

Many arguments, debates – and a little chit-chat

These contradictions at the various levels of relationship between cinema as an art form on the one hand, and the people as an audience on the other, remained a cause of intellectual introspection with Ritwik till the end. In his last film made in 1974 – Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (which when translated, literally means `Arguments, debates and chit-chat’), he tried to capture the different facets of this multi-dimensional complex relationship on a wider socio-political scale.

The events in this film take place in 1971, when the Bengali ethos was going through a drastic change. In West Bengal, the armed rebellion of the Naxalite youth against a corrupt and degenerate administrative and political system, had churned up the stagnant pool of the socio-economic status quo. In the countryside, conflicts between landlords and the landless were taking a violent form. Across the border, in the then East Pakistan, the Bengalis had launched a liberation struggle. The Pakistani military crackdown against it had led to the migration of thousands from there into West Bengal. In his personal life also, Ritwik was facing a crisis. Caught up in the toils of dejection, caused primarily by the poor reception of his films and financial problems, Ritwik had been increasingly seeking refuge in alcohol. “Somehow I feel,” he said, “alcohol is the final salvation.” (Quoted in the magazine Chitrapat, No. 10). Financial difficulties forced his wife to take up a job in a town far away from Calcutta. His home in Calcutta lay desolate. This becomes the peg on which he hangs the narrative of the film.

Ritwik himself acts in the role of the hero Nilkantha – a disillusioned Leftist intellectual who becomes an alcoholic. Abandoned by his wife, he winds up his home and lands up in the streets of Calcutta. The concept of displacement which recurs in his earlier films (where most of the characters are exiles from the post-Partition East Bengal) reappears here in the form of a variety of rootless figures – an unemployed youth called Nachiketa, a fugitive girl Bangabala fleeing her home from civil-war torn East Pakistan, Jagannath who is a penniless teacher of Sanskrit. Collecting these fellow-sufferers as his companions, Nilkantha starts his quixotic journey. The odyssey – without any specific destination – becomes a metaphor for the rewarding experiences that a traveller can gain. More important than reaching the uncertain goal, is the knowledge and friendships that the traveller (i.e. the audience) acquires during the odyssey.

In the course of the journey, Ritwik arranges a series of encounters between different – often opposite – segments of the people of our society. There is a meeting between the failed Nilkantha and his old friend from his political past, a writer called Shatrujit who is now a successful writer; a debate between the Sanskrit teacher Jagannath and the tribal Chhau dancer Panchanan; a scene where helpless silence and aggressive verbosity meet each other when Nachiketa looking for a job in a factory has to listen to a political leader haranguing the striking workers; a fight between the tribal poor and the landlord over possession of land which leads to the accidental killing of Jagannath; the love and hate relationship between Nachiketa and Bangabala which ends up in their coming close to each other under a tree in a forest. And finally, we are brought to the forest where the last encounter takes place between Nilkantha and the band of young Naxalite revolutionaries.

It is in this final encounter that Ritwik makes his political statement, under the alias of Nilkantha. Nilkantha becomes yet another `archetype’ – the representative of the Bengali middle class intellectual, who frustrated with his past experiences, makes a last bid to cling to a hope for change. His soul is lacerated by failures and disappointments, and stung with disgust at the surrounding reality. Yet, in this tortured soul of his, he still nurses a niche of affection for the young revolutionaries who are trying to change the world. In the forest, where he meets them, Nilkantha greets them with words that try to link up with his own political past : “You are the only ones who remain from my Bengal – there’s nothing else left.” Then he voices his old hope: “You will snatch the future, whatever happens,” and adds: “That’s why I want to understand you – what are you thinking?” During his arguments with them, he expresses his own disappointment with the way in which the Indian political leadership obtained Independence: “..this great betrayal in 1947…the bourgeoisie stabbing the national liberation movement behind the back…on August 15 of that year…the great betrayal…Independence…my foot!” But the dialogue between Nilkantha and the Naxalites leads nowhere. He does not understand the language of these young people, and he ends up by saying: “I’m confused, fully confused. I’m at a loss, groping in the darkness. May be all of us are confused.” Yet, Nilkantha chooses to stay back with these revolutionaries, and at the end dies facing bullets from the police force that attacks the Naxalite den. It reminds us of Rudin, the hero of Turgenev’s novel, who became a martyr joining the rebels at the barricades. Explaining his choice, Nilkantha (who is the alias of Ritwik) tells his wife when she comes to see her during his dying moments: “I had to do something…do something…”

After uttering those words, Ritwik (as Nilkantha) in his typical style, ends the film with an allusion loaded with political symbolism which he borrowed from a story by the famous Bengali author Manik Bandyopadhyay. Nilkantha reminds his wife of the handloom weaver Madan in that story (entitled Shilpi, or The Artist). Madan leads the rest of the weavers of his village in a strike – refusing to operate their looms in protest against the middleman’s usury. But one night, the weavers are surprised to hear the sounds of the loom coming from Madan’s house. Fearing that their leader has let them down, they gather around Madan’s hut. Madan asks them in and shows them the bare loom – which carries no thread! But then, why was he operating the loom? Smiling sheepishly, Madan tells them that he was about to get gout in his joints from the long spell of idleness. “I had to do something,” he adds.

It was this urge to `do something’ that kept Ritwik going. It is to his credit that notwithstanding the ups and downs in the political environment and in his personal life, he kept the loom of his intellect in operation till the last. A film maker is both an artist and an artisan. It was not a coincidence therefore that Ritwik chose the words of the artisan Madan as his last testament on screen. Refusing to succumb to the `distressing times’ and go under, he desperately clung to a hope – hope for a new life. The archetypes from the mythological narratives, aboriginal rituals and performances, Bengali folklore, and the eternal rhythms of nature which symbolized the continuity of life, provided Ritwik with this hope. In his last but one film Titash Ekti Nodir Naam (1973), the river Titash which was the mother of the fishing folk, dries up and dies, driving out her children from their homes. But a paddy field is born on the dry river bed, and a new civilization begins. The last vision of the dying heroine Basanti is of a child running through the paddy fields playing on a leaf whistle.

[Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016). Courtesy: Countercurrents.org, an India-based news, views and analysis website, that describes itself as non-partisan and taking “the Side of the People!” It is edited by Binu Mathew.]

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Ritwik Ghatak: Shunned in His Lifetime, Proven Right at the End of it All

Shamya Dasgupta

[A rebel. An idealist. A non-conformist genius who refused to compromise. One hundred years after the legend was born, he has been rediscovered and recognized as a giant of Indian and world cinema. A tribute.]

The World Cinema Project has restored, among other films, Titas Ekti Nodir Naam by Ritwik Ghatak. Martin Scorsese, the revered Hollywood film-maker who is also the founder of the project, didn’t know much about Ritwik Ghatak, who made the film in 1972-73, until recently. He quite candidly admits that he knew little about Indian cinema outside of Satyajit Ray and Bollywood. When he finally came across Ghatak, though, Scorsese saw “an extremely refined vision of cinema” and films that were “thematically dense and layered”.

Many film-watchers in India are no more likely to have encountered Ghatak—although that is only partly their fault. Ray had famously said, in 1989, to a French journalist in a broadcast interview, “We have a fairly backward audience here, I must say, in spite of the film society movement and all that. If you consider the larger audience, it is a backward audience, an unsophisticated audience.”

Ray was lashing out at the audience’s, and critics’, response to Devi, his film with a very young Sharmila Tagore as the lead actress. One of his true masterpieces, the film is about a young woman who is interpreted (perhaps not the right word for it) as an avatar of goddess Kali by her father-in-law, and the unsavoury reverberations of it. Ray said, “It [the film] dealt with religious dogmatism, it didn’t attack religion as such; it attacked dogmatism, the extreme form of religion… But people [are] writing in the papers that ‘Oh, because Mr Ray is not a Hindu, he is a Brahmo, he is making such films against Hinduism’ and all that. But they are stupid people, you can’t take them into account.”

And this is Ray, the man globally synonymous with great cinema in India.

What, then, of the socially, politically, morally, and much-elsely conscious cinema of Ghatak?

Yet, in this, his centenary year, I have discovered to my great joy over the past many months of working on Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments as its editor, an anthology of essays just published by Westland Books, that his work has its audience and is finding new viewers—and its place in Indian and world cinema.

Ghatak was usually less polished in his demeanour than Ray was, just rawer; perhaps that could be said about their cinema too. If he embarked on a diatribe against Bengali cinema-watchers, Ghatak would probably have dealt in the language of the streets. I say probably, but by all accounts, that’s exactly what he used to do.

Drunk much of time in the last fifteen years of his fifty-year-long life and out of work for large swathes in that period—he didn’t make a full-length film between 1962 and 1972-73, though he did make some short films and documentaries. He was vice-principal at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Poona (now Pune) — Ghatak was disillusioned with what we often refer to with the all-encompassing word — ‘system’, and wasn’t shy of giving vent to his frustration.

His films attacked the very class of Bengalis he belonged to, the middle-class bhadralok, which was—and remains—the chief patron of the arts.

An unusually creative and sensitive young person, it appears that Ghatak could have had his pick of careers, coming as he did from a well-off family. But the times made the man: as a teenager, he lived through World War II, the struggle for independence, the Great Bengal Famine, the many communal riots, and, finally, the freedom and Partition of India, followed by more riots and killings and the refugee crisis.

From the writings of his twin, Pratiti, we find that even in his early teens, he was spending a lot of time with labourers and workers of various hues, and around the time of independence, taking active part in civil society initiatives that brought him closer and closer to the marginalised, and causing him to be disillusioned with the world of the urban elite. His ideas first burst through in writing—poetry and short stories—and then theatre, and finally cinema, as is well documented, in order to converse and communicate with more and more people.

That was the primary impulse, to speak to people, but, of course, he had the artist’s quest for recognition too. Letters to his wife Surama, when he was working at Filmistan Studios in Bombay, briefly, in the mid-1950s, speak of the fame he had hoped to find along the way.

And therein lies the unravelling of Ghatak.

His first film, Nagarik, made in 1952, went unreleased till after his death in 1976. Why? Because he had had his differences with the Communist Party of India (and the Indian People’s Theatre Association) he belonged to, and was expelled. And, from what I have picked up from various people I have spoken to, members of that party prevented the film from getting a release.

A similar fate befell Subarnarekha, made in 1962 but only released in 1965, because of issues with the censors. Apparently they objected to the film’s climax in which the drunk protagonist walks into the quarters of his sister, who has turned to prostitution, in the dead of night, prompting the sister to kill herself. It’s a gut punch of a scene in a magnificent film.

Komal Gandhar, made just before Subarnarekha in 1961, did get released on schedule, but only in limited theatres. It was scuppered by forces—it’s impossible for me to say who was chiefly responsible, though I have heard it said it was the Communist Party again—that played the pettiest of tricks: planting people in the audience in theatres that would laugh at gritty or emotional scenes and howl at the lighter moments.

By all accounts, Ghatak didn’t start out being the man he became—bitter, an alcoholic—when still only in his thirties. He was an idealist, a man full of ideas.

Yes, he wanted recognition, not necessarily a lot of money. Yet, from the early 1950s all the way to the time of his death in the mid-1970s, he also deliberately kicked every chance at success out of his path. To put it simply, he sought glory, but not by compromising. He wanted to do his work, his way, and only his way, and wanted the world to accept him for it.

Does that suggest entitlement?

Or, naïveté?

Who knows?

Q: But what if the audience doesn’t accept the artist, or the artist’s worldview? What should the artist do—stay firm in his/her convictions or think about their worldview based on what the audience tells them? Where does the independence of the artist end?

A: An artist must always remain firm in their convictions.

The Q&A above is translated from an interview published posthumously in Ritwik: Nijer Kothay, Nijer Lekhay.

“I had a chance and made the film. It was fun all the way through—it is still fun while it is grossing exactly nothing at the box office.”

This is about Ajantrik (1958). Another colossal failure at the box office, but now regarded as an all-time global classic. But, then, as Safdar Hashmi said of him:

“Far from being a rebel protesting against ‘constraints’ within the cultural movement, Ritwik, unlike many erstwhile luminaries of the progressive cultural movement, never wavered in his pursuit of a medium and a message that is true to the people and carries on their struggles in the artistic sphere, he never placed his art at the disposal of commercial cinema or fell prey to the attractions of glamour and riches. In his films, he used no populist elements, the shortcuts to popularity resorted to by so many of our so-called ‘radical’ film-makers these days.”

Or consider what versatile Bengali actor Anil Chatterjee said about Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960): “The distributor, Mahendra Gupta, had suggested a different ending to the film: the sister should survive, and she would return home with her brother. Ritwikda shot that ending. But he told me, ‘This ending will not be used, I will shoot an alternate ending. This film must end in tragedy. The sister must die. She can’t survive.’ He didn’t compromise.”

He really didn’t. What happened instead, though, was steady deterioration, of his health, his relationships, even perhaps his work. Jukti, Tokko aar Goppo, his final film, can be thought of as a classic, a film so different from anything ever made, at least in India; it is autobiographical, raw and abrasive, a comment and a statement more than anything else. Of the film, Safdar Hashmi writes:

“In 1974, in a state of ill-health and near nervous breakdown, he completed his last film, Jukti, Tokko aar Goppo, a film so daring in its complete disregard of the very language and grammar of cinema he had mastered and developed that it is difficult to understand how it achieves its intense intimacy with the audience. It is as if the characters step out of the screen to talk to you and you are forced to respond to them, to react very sharply for or against them. The central character, played by Ritwik himself, parodies his real life in such a way that it compels the audience to reflect and criticise him. Perhaps that is just what Ritwik had been struggling to do through cinema all his life. Ironically, perhaps he wanted to see whether it could be achieved only through a conscious rejection of much of what has come to be accepted as the language of cinema.”

I get what he’s saying of the film, but I don’t agree.

The writer and poet Nabarun Bhattacharya says about Jukti, Tokko aar Goppo:

“When the film was made, and we watched it, I couldn’t understand it at all. In fact, I had a raging row with Ritwik about it. I remember telling him, ‘Enough is enough! You think you can do whatever you want and everyone has to sit and watch it? I can’t accept that you will walk to the camera lens and pour alcohol on it as a defence of your alcoholism.’ He conceded defeat at the time. He said so. He finished by quoting Shakespeare: ‘Then mum’s the word.’

“But I have been astounded each time I have watched the film since, the modernity of it is incredible. Just watch it. See the heights he has reached, see where each image has travelled. And that film talked about every political issue in Bengal, and even in the rest of the world, at the time. This epic quality of Ritwik’s framing motivates me every day. Every day some new prostitutes are born, and every other day, their elder brothers reach them at night, drunk. But only Ritwik could have captured this in such a bold sequence.”

My view is of a piece with Nabarun’s first impression. It was self-indulgent. It was entitled. It was roguish.

Knowing he wasn’t going to get better, knowing that he was going to die sooner rather than later—as his conversations with niece Aroma Dutta tell us—did Ritwik plan his swansong thus?

“I will do what I want, with the National Film Development Corporation’s money at that, and you have to watch it.”

Who can say?

What we can say with some certainty and conviction, though, is that this was a man who truly believed in the sanctity and relevance of his art and of his thoughts and theories. He did nothing he didn’t believe in.

He was willing to shun work, suffer deeply and waste away till he got a chance to do what he did. Lesser mortals would have compromised, taken the path more travelled. But here we stand today: this man, fifty years after his death, is more relevant than ever.

A giant of world cinema.

Shunned in his lifetime, proven right at the end of it all.

[Shamya Dasgupta is a sports journalist by profession, currently working as Deputy Editor with ESPNcricinfo, and a cinema enthusiast. He’s the author of Don’t Disturb the Dead: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers (2017), and two books on sports. He translated Mahasweta Devi‘s Laayl-e Aasmaner Aayna into the English (Mirror of the Darkest Night, 2019). He has recently edited a volume of writings on Ritwik Ghatak by eminent writers, filmmakers, academics, novelists, poets, among others: Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments, published by Westend. He lives and works in Bengaluru. Courtesy: Independent Ink, a portal for insightful articles and features on culture, society, news and entertainment.]