This year marks Ritwik Ghatak's birth centenary.
Among India's greatest filmmakers, Ghatak is the pre-eminent chronicler of Partition's wounds.
His noted trilogy includes Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha, Komal Gandhar.
Born in 1925 in Dhaka, Ritwik Ghatak came from among millions forced to leave Bangladesh because of the 1943 famine as well as the Partition. Psychic trauma and dilemmas wrought by displacement percolate through his work–eight features, ten documentaries, essays and fiction. These sutures reflect in the very texture he creates—whip cracks, jump cuts, severe renting of images. A plea for cultural unity of the two Bengals echoes throughout his oeuvre, merging myth, realism and melodrama.
Ghatak only left India once in his lifetime. In 1971, he returned to East Bengal to make Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, a film commissioned by the government of Bangladesh as part of an effort to reconstruct its national identity following its break from Pakistan.
Subarnarekha (1965) was shot around the same time as Ray’s Mahanagar (1963), but it found a release later. Madhabi Mukherjee, who led both films, recalled how it irked Ghatak a little. “At the premier of Mahanagar he told Ray — ‘Wait and watch; she has performed much better in my movie.’”
His first film, Nagarik, made in 1952, went unreleased till after his death in 1976. Many strongly believe it has to do with his differences with the Communist Party of India (and the Indian People’s Theatre Association) he belonged to, from which he was expelled.
In his foreword to the Ghatak book that compiled his writings on cinema, ‘Cinema and I’, Satyajit Ray wrote, “Ritwik was one of the few truly original talents in the cinema this country has produced. Nearly all his films are marked by an intensity of feeling coupled with an imaginative grasp of the technique of filmmaking. As a creator of powerful images in an epic style, he was virtually unsurpassed in Indian cinema”.
During his brief Vice-Principal stint at FTII in the mid-60s, his apostles included Mani Kaul, John Abraham, Kumar Shahani.
Three unfinished films–Kato Ajanare, Bagalar Bangadarshan, Ranger Ghulam–were acquired by Pune’s National Film Archive (NFAI) in 2016. These were made between 1959 and 1968.
Komal Gandhar (1961) was one of Ghatak’s own favourites because of the dilemma of operating at different levels. He drew simultaneously on the divided heart of Anasuya (torn between Bhrigu and Samar, the man she was betrothed to years ago, now living in France), the fractured leadership of the theatre movement, and the tumult of divided Bengal.
Internationally known as 'The Unmechanical', 'The Mechanical Man' or 'The Pathetic Fallacy', Ajantrik (1958) is often counted as India's first sci-fi. The film had received a special entry for screening at the Venice Film Festival in 1959. Its influences can be felt in Ray’s Abhijan (1962) four years later, and in the general outline of Ray-devotee Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) quite a bit later then. Film critic Georges Sadoul shared his experience of watching the film in this way. He said, “What does ‘Ajantrik’ mean? I don’t know and I believe no one in Venice Film Festival knew…I can’t tell the whole story of the film…there was no subtitle for the film. But I saw the film spellbound till the very end”.
Global legibility eluded Ghatak's work for decades. A 1982 column by the British critic Derek Malcolm in Sight & Sound recalls the enthusiastic reception accorded Ghatak’s work by Western critics at a film festival in Madras. But by 1996, when the New York Film Festival presented the first retrospective of Ghatak’s work in the United States, Western cultural institutions had not yet reckoned with him. The American critic J. Hoberman referred to the filmmaker as “scandalously obscure.”
In July 1975, Ghatak began shooting a documentary called Ramkinkar Baij - A Personality Study, circling the legendary tribal painter-sculptor of Shantiniketan. It remained incomplete for Ghatak passed soon after.
