Ritwik Kumar Ghatak.

In Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen’s account of Ritwik Ghatak’s place in the history of
Indian cinema, they propose Ghatak was truly an original filmmaker with no cinematic predecessors.
Rather, they suggest that “aesthetically his work can be placed alongside that of Bengali novelist
Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908–56) and the teachings of his music forbear Ustad Allauddin Khan” (2).
Given this assessment, it is not surprising that some of the most intriguing comments made by one
of India’s most well respected independent directors are about cinema itself. What is surprising is
that Ghatak’s writings about the cinema regularly denounce a love for the medium. Instead, Ghatak
drew a fine distinction between the opportunities offered up by the cinema and cinema itself, always
insisting: “Film is not a form, it has forms” (3). Accordingly, it was the massive size of the film going
audience, rather than a love for the cinema, that Ghatak claims brought him to the business of films.
The only special skill he perceived in the cinema over any other artistic medium was that “It can
reach millions of people at one go, which no other medium is capable of” (4). Ghatak declared on a
number of occasions that if some other medium came along enabling him to reach more of the
masses, he would happily drop cinema and embrace that other medium.

Equally at home writing fiction or theatre, Ghatak consistently investigated the question of whether
filmmaking was an art form and what attributes made it such, remarking “raw meat is not exactly
‘Moghlai kebab’. A cook comes somewhere in between” (5). What mattered to Ghatak was that a
work was artistically engaged. Ghatak’s work in the cinema itself never settled into any one genre of
style.

My first film was called a picaresque episodic film along the lines of the eighteenth century Spanish
novel Gil Blas De Santillane; the second was called a film of documentary approach; the next was a
melodrama, and the fourth, nothing at all, just no film. (6)

An artist across many mediums, Ghatak wrote, performed in, directed and produced numerous plays
on the stage and in the streets for the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), the theatre
branch attached to the Communist Party of India. His significant influence with IPTA is evidenced by
his play Dalil (Document). It was voted best production of the IPTA All-India conference in Bombay
in 1953. He formed his own theatre group, Group Theatre, following differences with IPTA, staging a
play called Sei Meye in 1969 with the patients in the mental asylum at which he resided for some
time. His film Komal Gandhar (The Gandhar Sublime or E-Flat, 1961) is about this split within the
IPTA in Bengal, during the early years after Partition, and opens with a theatre performance of
Ghatak’s Dalil, featuring many celebrated veteran IPTA actors, forging yet another crossover
between media for Ghatak.

Between Human, Camera and Machine

So what are we to make of this director/writer/producer/actor/author of films/theatre/novels/short
stories – in short, a self-proclaimed artist – who declared no attachment to a medium we, as cinema
enthusiasts from all walks, claim to love? An anecdote about Ghatak’s own viewing habits might go
a little way to explaining. I have been told that Ritwik Ghatak and Kumar Shahani (Ghatak’s prized
pupil) used to watch the Lumières’ L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station,
1896) over and over again, and laugh. They laughed because they found funny the idea of “one
machine looking at the other” (7). Whenever I think about this anecdote, it always connects itself to
the events of Ghatak’s film Ajantrik (Pathetic Fallacy or The Unmechanical, 1958). Set in Bihar
around the activities of a taxi driver who lives at a bus station, it was Ghatak’s first film to be
released commercially.

It’s just a lump of iron. Why this attachment?

This is a question asked of taxi driver Bimal (Kali Banerjee, an IPTA veteran), the central character
of Ajantrik, regarding his dedication to his very old and battered 1920 Chevrolet jalopy, called
Jagaddal. It seems to me that it is the same question Ghatak wants to ask of the presumption of a
filmmaker’s attachment to the apparatuses of the cinema – an attachment Ghatak claims not to
possess. We could draw some interesting conclusions about Ghatak’s investigation of this taxi
driver’s relationship to his car and Ghatak’s own attempts to explain what it is about the cinema that
draws his commitment.

Let us consider further the mingling of the human and the mechanical that traverses Ajantrik.

“The gentlemen at the Bengali Gentlemen’s Club. They put it well.”

Bimal pauses, pensively.
“That I’m a machine. I like the smell of burnt gasoline. It makes me high…”
A light giggle escapes him.
“What they don’t understand is that Jagaddal is also human.”

The companionship Bimal feels towards his taxi in Ajantrik (which generates the accusation that
Bimal “must be a machine”) in fact announces a profoundly ”human” attachment and dedication
motivating him. Bimal holds onto his car, Jagaddal, for fifteen years, against the prevailing trend
amongst his peers for ditching old cars and upgrading regularly to new “fashionable whores”. The
sense of companionship between Bimal and his taxi is evident from the dialogue Bimal establishes
with Jagaddal and his loving actions towards the car. Jagaddal is also invested with ”human”
gestures and locomotion. These are implied in Ajantrik by emphasis on Jagaddal’s bodily functions
and independent agency, epitomised by the camera’s attention to frequent autonomous movements
of Jagaddal’s headlights. Sounds of drinking and exhalations of satisfaction exude from the car
among descriptions of Jagaddal’s health and durability. According to Bimal, in comparison with other
cars, Jagaddal never “catches colds” or “gets tummy aches”. That Bimal believes in Jagaddal’s
independent agency is summarised in the final test of the car’s strength, after it has received new
parts.

“I’ve pampered you enough,” Bimal warns, dropping several large boulders that he can barely carry
into the back of Jagaddal.
“Today you must decide whether you want to stay or not!”
When Jagaddal struggles with the load and collapses (effectively dies), Bimal smashes the
windscreen and bursts into tears, his head resting on the steering wheel.

Ghatak’s own comments about this relationship surprised me when I came across them as an
already dedicated fan of the film. He is rather disdainful:

Only silly people can identify themselves with a man who believes that that God-forsaken car has
life. Silly people like children, simple folk like peasants, animists like tribals. To us city folks, it is a
story of a crazy man. […] We could imagine ourselves in love with a river or a stone. But a machine
– there we draw the line. (8)

At first I was taken aback by such a seemingly superior attitude towards the central character
of Ajantrik, for whom I hold much affection and for whom I believed the film held a similar affection.
However, while the condescending tone is evident in these comments, Ghatak maintains a
significant sense of curiosity about this phenomenon. He begins to make some very interesting
connections between some of the cultural traditions of India in relation to this machine. He
continues:

But these people do not have that difficulty. They are constantly in the process of assimilating
anything new that comes their way. In all our folk art the signs of such assimilation are manifest. (9)
At the same time as Ghatak discusses this capacity for assimilation common to “children, simple folk
like peasants, animists like tribals”, he acknowledges the trends of the modern era: “The order of the
day is an emotional integration with this machine age” (10). Here we discover a curious confluence
between the practices of folk art and the attitudes resulting from industrialisation. Bimal is certainly
not the first man to fall in love with his car. We can all think of “city folks” of similar persuasion.
Ghatak, it seems, is in fact well aware of this: “I have seen such men (I have had the doubtful
pleasure of meeting Bimal himself in real life) and have been able to believe in their emotions” (11).

Surely we must acknowledge that the cinema and its apparatuses such as the camera are deeply
engaged in this process of “emotional integration with this machine age.” Yet Ghatak is skeptical of
this kind of emotional integration. This is why the director laughed when he saw L’Arrivée d’un train à
la Ciotat, describing it as “one machine looking at the other” and why he finds Bimal such a curiosity.
In Bimal, we can envisage a loose metaphor for the quintessential filmmaker, defined entirely by his
or her relationship to a machine that is his or her livelihood. Yet Ghatak resists offering Bimal as a
portrait of himself because he refuses to accept any attachment to the cinematic medium, indeed to
any medium in particular. He finds such attachment laughable, like many of Bimal’s detractors. He
remains inquisitive about this phenomenon, however, drawing out the tension in Ajantrik between,
on the one hand, a climate that encourages emotional attachment to machinery that constitutes
livelihood, resulting in companionship, and on the other, a climate of constant upgrade that
encourages discarding on a regular basis. Is Bimal an exemplary figure of the machine age or an
anachronism? The unresolved tension between these possibilities feeds much of my own curiosity
about this film.

Is it that Ghatak is uncomfortable with the kind of integration Bimal embraces and that the cinema
potentially manifests because he perceives himself as a kind of universal artist hero, a Renaissance
man in the shadow of his much admired hero Tagore? It seems it could be Ghatak who is
anachronistic rather than his simple peasant folk and tribals. It is another interesting confluence:
Ghatak, an innovative filmmaker, breaking and creating all kinds of cinematic rules and regulations,
like Bimal, resisted the fashions of his day to respond in a certain way to his means of livelihood.
The parallel between Ghatak and Bimal, then, lies not in their relationship to the machine age but
rather to a sense of being isolated by a personal vision that goes against the grain. Further, both
refugees of Partition, their sense of being out of place is magnified as individuals whose vision of the
world differs strongly to many of those surrounding them.

Partitioning Realities
Ghatak was born on 4 November, 1925, at Jindabazar, Dhaka, the cultural centre of East Bengal
(now Bangladesh), which had become, by the beginning of his filmmaking career, East Pakistan. At
that time, Pakistan had a general ban on all Indian films. As a consequence, for the majority of
Ghatak’s filmmaking career, his films could not screen in his birth city. Ghatak migrated to Calcutta
in early youth, attending the M.A. class at Calcutta University in 1948. His films are heavily
influenced by his personal experience of Partition.

In our boyhood we have seen a Bengal, whole and glorious. […] Our dreams faded away. We
crashed on our faces, clinging to the crumbling Bengal, divested of all its glory. (12)

Before I encountered Ghatak’s work, I knew plenty about Partition at the moment of its birth on
the other side of the country – the trains full of corpses coming in and out of Lahore, the attacks
made on old friends and neighbours. With Ghatak, however, for the first time, I experienced
the mindset of the refugees of Partition, without statistics, and also the particular experience of
Bengal, about which I had heard little. For the first time, I was brought most relentlessly into time and
space of those left homeless, crumbling on the faded outskirts of a nation, living out a divided
Bengal.
Ghatak’s pupil, Kumar Shahani, explains the importance of Ghatak’s approach to Partition as a
radical political expression:

The heroes and heroines of Ritwik’s films, while their energies are sapped by a society which can
sustain no growth, have inner resources that seem to assert themselves. […] He was extremely
disenchanted with those of his colleagues who wanted to maintain a false unity and were not,
implicitly, pained enough by the splintering of every form of social and cultural values and
movement. It is these factors that make Ritwik’s films a vitally generative force for the young. He
does not hide behind a medieval or a dead past or a decorative Indianess…Very few of his
contemporaries have avoided these pitfalls whether they work in the cinema and the other arts, or in
the theoretical and cultural sphere. It is as if they were ashamed of being themselves, today, with
their true history. (13)

This potent attitude to Partition distinguishes Ghatak’s work acutely from the films of those such as
Satyajit Ray. The difference between the two can be described in this way: “Instead of painstakingly
trying to build up a realistic space-time, he would try to develop a story simultaneously on various
levels, relying heavily on songs, melodrama and coincidences” (14). Kaleidoscopic, relaxed,
discursive, Ghatak’s uneven style manifests the deep tensions weighing from various directions
upon his characters and the trajectories of their lives. Meghey Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star,
1960), Kormal Gandhar (The Gandhar Sublime, 1961) and Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, 1962)
form a trilogy around the socio-economic implications of Partition. Ghatak’s own description of a
moment in his film Subarnarekha (which, like Komal Gandhar, was an absolute box officer failure)
set in a refugee colony, called Nabajeeban on the outskirts of Calcutta in the 1950s, illustrates
beautifully his cinematic manifestation of Partition:

When the camera suddenly comes to a halt at the dead end of a railway track, where the old road to
East Bengal has been snapped off, it raises (towards the close of the film) a searing scream in
Anasuya’s heart. (15)

A Place in the Canon: Ghatak versus Ray

Motivation for writing this profile arises partly from a desire to overturn, realign and respond to
Satyajit Ray’s predominant position within the discourse of Indian cinema. I am aghast when I come
across seemingly contradictory statements such as this one: “It all goes to prove once again that
Satyajit Ray is the exception who proves the rule of Indian filmmaking” (16). Yet this statement
captures perfectly a common general attitude about Ray’s place in Indian filmmaking history. The
tendency, both in and outside India, to valourise the cinema of Ray as representative of everyday life
in India or as representative of Indian cinema in general, is problematic. As a consequence of this
tendency, other cinemas outside of the commercial mainstream that do not follow Ray’s distinctive
model have had great difficulty registering their authenticity or authority to the viewing public, both
indigenous and foreign. Ghatak is largely unknown outside India and outside certain Indian
filmmaking circles, despite being regarded by Satyajit Ray as one of the best Indian directors of the
twentieth century. This appears to be changing with increasing accessibility to his work and a
successful retrospective of his work held in New York in 1997.

Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak were in fact clearly admirers of each other’s work. Praise from both
sides can be found in print on a number of occasions. Indeed Ray, a member of the Ritwik Memorial
Trust, provided the foreword to the published volume of Ghatak’s writings on cinema in
English, Cinema and I, reprinted in Rows and Rows of Fences. He is full of approval for Ghatak’s
work:

Ritwik was one of the few truly original talents in the cinema this country has produced. […] As a
creator of powerful images in an epic style he was virtually unsurpassed in Indian cinema. (17)
Likewise, in his Row and Rows of Fences, Ghatak’s praise for Ray is high: “Satyajit Ray, and only
Satyajit Ray in India, in his more inspired moments, can make us breathtakingly aware of truth, the
individual, private truth” (18). Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) is lauded in Ghatak’s essay on literary
influence in Bengali cinema:

It is true that this film was also based on a famous novel. But for the first time, the story was narrated
in the filmic idiom. The language was sound. Artistic truth was upheld. The fundamental difference
between the two art forms was delineated. (19)

In the essay “Recollections of Bengal and a Single Vision”, Shampa Banerjee offers an interesting
anecdote from Dopati Chakrabarty about the relationship between the cinemas of Ray and Ghatak:

Satyajit Ray once said: Had Nagarik been released before his Pather Panchali, Nagarik would have
been accepted as the first film of the alternative form of Bengali cinema. (20)

Nagarik (The Citizen), the first film Ghatak ever made, was completed in 1953 but in fact released
posthumously in 1977. Pather Panchali was released in 1955. The central character of Nagarik,
Ramu, opens the film looking for a job in Calcutta, while his family struggles to make ends meet.
Incredibly, in a memorial lecture on Ghatak, given after his death, Satyajit Ray had this to say:

Ritwik was a Bengali director in heart and soul, a Bengali artist much more of a Bengali than myself.
For me that is the last word about him, and that is his most valuable and distinctive
characteristic. (21)

Given the incredible praise heaped upon Ghatak by Ray at such times, it is a wonder his work was
not more widely received with open arms. Jacob Levich goes a little way to explaining in part the
difference in the reception of these two filmmakers during their lifetime.

Satyajit Ray is the suitable boy of Indian film, presentable, career-oriented, and reliably tasteful.
Ghatak, by contrast, is an undesirable guest: he lacks respect, has “views”, makes a mess, disdains
decorum. (22)

Indeed, Siddharth Tripathy puts it well: “if cinema were a religion…Ritwik Ghatak was a rare catholic
from out country.” (23) But what’s not to like about a rebel? Edgy, uncouth, insulting, an alcoholic,
Ghatak’s films are always challenging. They never make one feel comfortable. But why should they?
My own response to this issue of Ghatak’s status within Indian cinema is merely to frame the
competing views on his worth that exist within the discourse of this cinema and its history. In order to
account for Ghatak’s unpopularity with audiences during his lifetime, we must balance Ray’s praise
for Ghatak’s work with the attitudes of those who sought to bring Ghatak into disrepute:

The knowledge that Komal Gandhar‘s box-office potential was sabotaged by people who were once
his friends, deeply hurt Ghatak. It is to this day widely believed in Calcutta that the Communists and
Congress joined hands to finish him off. A large number of tickets were bought by goons of both the
parties who then disturbed the viewing of the legitimate viewer by sobbing loudly during funny
scenes and breaking into uproarious laughter at the serious ones. The audience was alienated and
the viewer-ship fell dramatically after a promising run in the first week. The film had to be withdrawn.
He, being the co-producer, had to share the burden of the financial loss. It broke him. His descent
into alcohol began soon after. (24)