Book Excerpt | Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak In 50 Fragments Edited By Shamya Dasgupta

Excerpted from ‘Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments’ with permission from Westland Books.

Indian cinema didn't have a language before Ritwik Ghatak

By Safdar Hashmi

In 1955, filmmakers and critics around the world sat up suddenly to take notice of a new phenomenon called Satyajit Ray, whose maiden venture, Pather Panchali, was welcomed all around as the new wind from the east. He was heralded as the creator, pioneer and acknowledged master of a new aesthetic of cinema. Over a quarter century has elapsed since then and Ray is now universally recognised as one of the greatest masters of cinema. His work has inspired scores of young filmmakers in India and abroad, and is regarded by many as having given direction to modern Indian cinema.

Something that went altogether unnoticed, however, thanks to a very efficient commercial-cum-elite mechanism of resisting and suppressing anything of truly revolutionary significance, was the fact that nearly three years before Pather Panchali saw the light of day, one of the greatest treasures of cinema was shot and completed by a most startling genius of Indian cinema: Ritwik Ghatak. The film was Nagarik: for twenty-five long years after its completion, it lay in damp vaults and was condemned, it seemed, to perpetual obscurity. Only in 1977, a year after the death of its creator, was it restored and a print taken out, thanks to the initiative of the Left Front government of West Bengal. When this film was seen in different cities of India, people began realising the enormity of the damage done to the subsequent career of Ritwik Ghatak, not to talk of the course of the development of Indian cinema, by suppressing this film in 1952.

Ritwik Ghatak went on to complete seven more feature films besides several short ones during his turbulent and disturbed life. He was never free from the hounding of the powers that be. One of his most remarkable films—Subarnarekha—lay in cold storage for three years before it could be released. A short film called Amar Lenin has not yet been permitted public release, though it was made in 1970 and given a clear censor certificate in 1971. His last film Jukti, Tokko aar Goppo ran into a lot of trouble with the censors.

The story of the physical suppression of his work is too long and painful to be recited here. Much more alarming and dangerous is the reaction of the cinema columnists, gloriously called reviewers, to present Ritwik Ghatak as a supreme structuralist and as an enigmatic and contradictory personality. Such views are clearly designed to distort Ritwik’s work and its significance. The critics’ effort has been to look at his work merely in terms of its contribution to the grammar of cinema, and from there to proceed to disentangle, so to say, the ‘brilliant flashes of a superb craftsman’ from the more expendable morass of his regimentalised content. An equally sinister school of criticism, which operates via a liberal stance, strives to establish that Ritwik’s sensitivity as a filmmaker lifted his content out of the constricting pale of regimentalised thought, which his intellectual commitment ‘forced’ him to adopt.

The second view was reflected in the long-established tendency to project Ritwik as a rebel in the Communist Party, who constantly fought the stranglehold of ideologists and theorists of the progressive cultural movement in the forties and fifties. The drunken and apparently anarchic personal behaviour of Ritwik is seen as a measure of his protest against the discipline, allegedly sought to be imposed upon creative artists by the leaders of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, and at his refusal to be bound down by unnatural control of the artists’ personality. What such critics fail to understand or refuse to admit is that a lifetime of hounding—and mental torture born out of uncertainties and intense privations at the hands of those who regulate the film market as well as those who man the official bodies ostensibly promoting and patronising new cinema—drove this extremely sensitive individual, poet, scholar and artist to a kind of self-imposed exile from the art world controlled by the commercial monster. An exile that broke him mentally and physically on several occasions.

What these critics also fail to understand or admit is that, in spite of such overbearing torture, Ritwik rose again and again to create films that have become rallying points for those of us who are battling decaying culture in the seventies and the eighties. 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.

When Ritwik shot his first completed film, Nagarik, in 1952, he had very skeletal facilities, a shoestring budget and a cast entirely unused to the film medium. He had the heritage of a medium which had not yet developed in its discipline in India. Yet, propelled by the desire to project the complex nature of his subject, Ritwik brought to bear upon his treatment the accumulated knowledge of the medium from the world over, and produced a work that was as advanced in its technical and grammatical structure as in the conceptual treatment of his story. Gifted as he was with a historical vision, Ritwik made pioneering use of sound as an instrument of structure in his film within a dialectical framework. In his hands, for the first time, sound in Indian cinema graduated from merely amplifying dialogue and ‘effect’ music to becoming a conscious part of the whole design, serving as much to highlight as to comment, analyse and throw into analytical perspective the immediate dialogical and narrative context.