“Melodrama Hochhe Ekta Birthright”: A Long-due Ode To Ritwik Da, With Love

Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments, edited by sports journalist Shamya Dasgupta and published by Westland Books on the occasion of the filmmaker’s birth centenary, is a long-due inquiry into the life and times of Ritwik Ghatak in the English language. Endearingly referred to as Ritwikda by his collaborators and juniors, Ghatak is most known for his films Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), his only commercial success and Subarnarekha (1965). But his oeuvre spans across eight feature-length films, documentaries, plays, short stories, film scripts and abandoned projects. Much has been written about him in Bengali, in both India and Bangladesh, but discourse about him in the English language is few and far in between, limited to serious academics and cinephiles. One hopes for this book to breach that boundary and for Ghatak to reach more people—something that largely eluded him in his lifetime.

Divided into seven parts, it is a meticulously curated collage of people who have loved, lived and/or engaged with their Ritwikda. With an introduction by actor Parambrata Chattopadhyay, also Ghatak’s grandnephew, the following sections chart his life and work through the people who knew him personally—his collaborators, friends, and academics—followed by his own writings and those of his illustrious set of students, ending with a section on his relationship with his wife Surama Ghatak. While some essays have been written specially for this book, others have been collected from various earlier publications. The experience of reading the book is enhanced by the wonderful illustrations by Soumitra Adhikary, often redolent of Ghatak’s haunting frames, along with an extensive archive of photographs capturing him through his professional and personal life—across the decades he remained active.

It would not suffice to call this work a tribute. Aptly called fragments, the essays are a collective bundle of memory, archive, pathos, love and longing. They provide a glimpse not just into Ghatak’s life and work, but by extension, the personal histories of Bengal’s partition and its relentless aftershocks, the rise and fall of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and the conflicts that shaped post-Partition Left politics in Bengal.

Maitreesh Ghatak points out in his essay that the literal English translation ‘The Pathetic Fallacy,’ “does not quite capture the pithiness of the Bengali title” of Ghatak’s film Ajantrik (1958), which literally translates to ‘unmechanical.’ It is a film about a man and his car—a car that is ‘unmechanical.’ Jagaddal (the car, as named by its driver Bimal) has exceeded its function as a machine and transcended to being a friend­­—a living, breathing, honking companion, and perhaps a lover—the only one its driver Bimal (Kali Bannerjee) has known ever since his mother passed away. They refuse to live by the socially accepted codes of human-machine relationships, despite the ridicule faced by them. There perhaps couldn’t have been a better title for the book than a term that’s both an invocation of Ghatak’s incisive commentary on the possibilities of human-machine relationships (something that he critically engaged with in his own writings), as well as his own refusal to follow laid-out norms—in life and in cinema.

The book, however, at no point, exalts this errant nature of his. The stories and musings from friends, collaborators and students feel like a warm embrace—the one that knows all your vulnerabilities, and holds on to you nevertheless. The essays by academics and researchers place his work within larger global art and cinema movements, while seeing him for his rootedness in Indian mythologies and ways of storytelling, as well as his use of melodrama to create epic narratives. Moinak Biswas points out how Ghatak used melodrama to produce kinships that defied the feudal family romance of contemporary melodrama of the 1950s and 60s, prevalent in both Bengali and Hindi cinema.

What truly stands out in this book is the section on personal stories, titled ‘A Bio-sketch in Seven Parts,’ which narrates, among other things, his childhood, the Bengal Partition he never recovered from, his love for theatre and his days in the mental asylum. The book is hardly a page-turner; it does not intend to be, like Ghatak’s films or his writings. But this section carries its heaviest parts, especially the memoirs by his twin sister Pratiti Devi and her daughter Aroma Dutta. The partition of Bengal not just separated Ghatak from home, but also his twin sister Pratiti Devi, or Bhobi (Ghatak and his sister’s nicknames were Bhoba and Bhobi respectively, and that is what they referred to each other as). Devi’s daughter, in her essay, has likened their separation to the cutting of the umbilical cord. They were indeed bound in life as they were bound in birth, as is evident from Devi’s memoirs of their childhood and the pain of separation that came with the Partition. She was his “eternal pair, my companion in life and death” (as quoted in her essay).

Here, we find accounts of a seemingly happy childhood ruptured by the impending and eventual partition of Bengal, leading to Ghatak’s involvement in political and social organising, the making of his first film Nagarik (1977), the pain of it not releasing in his lifetime and the little sparks of joy he experienced with the success of Meghe Dhaka Tara. But what remains is the sorrow of losing his Bengal. In Devi’s words, he neither accepted the Partition nor forgot about it. It’s why he also declined a Padma Shree Award from the Indian government. In Aroma Dutta’s fond remembrance of her chhotomama (younger uncle), whom the latter fondly referred to as his ‘Bangaal Ma’ and ‘Bangabala,’ we find the haunting traces of his painfully autobiographical Jukti, Tokko Aar Goppo (1974). In the film (his last one), he calls his homeless refugee companion Bangabala (literally translated as Bengal’s daughter). In life, he used to call his beloved niece Dutta (who was at one point, along with her mother, an asylum seeker in India from East Pakistan) Bangabala—the spirit of Bengal that he kept holding on to, and that kept appearing in his films through music, trees and the dislocated yet rooted women.

While much of his filmmaking was born out of his scars of the Partition, it was also a product of his deep engagement with theory, form and technology, and an impulse to challenge established norms—as has been detailed in several of the essays. These include the essay by Sanjay Mukhopadhyay, which contends that the unusual composition of his frames introduced a sense of reflexivity in cinema; Paulomi Chakraborty’s analysis of how Ghatak manipulated the properties of the camera to disorient the viewer; and Devdutt Trivedi’s argument about how his cuts deterritorialised the concept of headspace through his framing of actors in relation to their backgrounds. Bhaskar Chandavarkar, in his essay, narrates an incident when, on once being asked by someone if he overdid things with the use of melodrama, Ghatak said, “It is the right and privilege of an artist to take the leap from the ridiculous to the sublime.” It is somewhere between this ridiculous and sublime that he had declared, “Melodrama hochchhe ekta birthright” (Melodrama is a birthright).