Ritwik Ghatak Birth Centenary | An Uncompromising Auteur

Like many great artists in history, one of the greatest laments Ritwik Ghatak aficionados have is that he never attained the kind of recognition he deserved during his lifetime. Ghatak passed away in 1976 when he was only 51. Tuberculosis was the primary cause of his death, but his long-standing alcoholism was the main contributing factor not only to his turbulent life, but to his early demise.

On Ghatak’s 100th birth anniversary, his legacy endures as a haunting mirror to a nation still struggling with its regressive tendencies and fragmented identity. A century after his birth, India remains marked by the same ruptures. We remain divided across the fault lines of class, caste, and religion.

Often hailed as one of the greatest filmmakers ever, a people's artist, and a filmmaker’s filmmaker, Ghatak was a non-conformist through and through. With his volatile and staunchly idealistic temperament, it’s little wonder that he turned to alcohol, often trading film rights for bottles of booze, alienating investors, friends, and family alike. His genius was raw—his creations much more intimate than calculated or loaded with artifice.

Across his eight feature films, there were themes of Partition and displacement, fractured identities, and the struggle to rebuild after loss. For Ghatak, Partition was a personal wound that bled into his art. Born in Dhaka in 1925, Ghatak migrated to India after 1947. Ever since, he carried with him the trauma of a divided homeland. His films—Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961), and Subarnarekha (1962)—each explore the human cost of Partition. His stories spoke of the emotional devastation of ordinary people uprooted from their sense of belonging.

Ghatak’s women were complex representations of this sensibility as well. They usually shouldered the emotional and economic burden of their families. They became symbols of a fractured Bengal itself. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Neeta’s self-destruction mirrored the disintegration of a displaced family; in Subarnarekha, Sita became the tragic symbol of innocence crushed by circumstance.

Ghatak: An artist, fragmented

Though cinema became his primary medium, Ghatak was also an actor, writer, and a trained classical singer. His understanding of rhythm infused his films with a lyrical quality. His editing often mirrored musical cadence as well.

He was also a passionate teacher. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he taught at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). He mentored filmmakers like Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, and John Abraham. Eventually, they went onto carry forward his experimental spirit and emotional intensity into the Indian New Wave.

Ghatak made his first film, Nagarik, in 1952 at the age of 26. It was produced on a very limited budget, with actors primarily drawn from the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) —a leftist cultural collective formed in the 1940s. Ghatak had joined the IPTA in his early twenties, where he wrote plays, acted, and directed productions that reflected the social and political upheavals of the time.

Nagarik told the story of a middle-class refugee family from East Bengal that relied on the elder son’s employment prospects for survival. The film never saw the light of the day while Ghatak was alive. A damaged print discovered at Bengal Lab in Tollygunge a year after his death made a brief, two-week commercial release possible.

Overall, commercial success eluded Ghatak for most of his career.

His first commercial release, Ajantrik (1955), was among the earliest films that featured an anthropomorphized inanimate object—a decrepit taxi that its driver treats as a friend and companion. This predated Disney’s uber popular Herbie films by over a decade. His Bari Theke Paliye (1958) told the story of a young boy who runs away from home and wanders through the city, a plot strikingly similar to François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). But, while Truffaut’s film became a global emblem of the French New Wave, Ghatak’s remained in relative obscurity.

In Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973), Ghatak experimented with a hyperlink narrative long before it became fashionable, underscoring yet again how ahead of his time he truly was. He wove multiple interconnected stories around a river and the communities living along its banks.

His work on Bimal Roy’s Madhumati (1958) as a story and screenplay writer gave Indian cinema one of its most enduring reincarnation tales. Madhumati went on to inspire Karz (1980), The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), and even Om Shanti Om (2007). Roy’s daughter Rinki Bhattacharya accused the makers of Om Shanti Om of plagiarism due to the striking similarities in story.

The quiet afterlife of Ghatak’s cinema

Ghatak won several National Film Awards, including Best Story for Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974) and a Certificate of Merit for Ajantrik (1959). In 1970, he was honoured with the Padma Shri for his contributions to cinema—a rare nod from the establishment to an artist who spent his life railing against it.

However, it was only in death that his work began to be truly appreciated and seen. Retrospectives, restorations, and reappraisals in later decades cemented his place in world cinema. For international audiences, Ghatak became a revelation. His raw emotional realism stood apart from Satyajit Ray’s humanism and Mrinal Sen’s political irony.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, restored Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam in 2010. The restored print premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Classics section the same year.

In a world fractured by wars, genocide, displacement, and the slow erosion of empathy, Ghatak’s work feels more urgent than ever. His cinema was both political and profoundly personal as it held grief, memory, and resistance in the same frame. He may not have lived to see his genius acknowledged in his own lifetime, but in the century since his birth, Ghatak’s work has become exactly what he wanted it to be: a bridge between history’s deepest wounds and art’s attempts to heal them.