'In the autumn, once I sailed off on a boat and lost my way among tall grasses where snakes hide. The pollen of grass flowers choked me as I tried to pull the boat away'. Ritwik remembered his days of leaving the confines of the house and developing other preoccupations like acting. Adolescence got more challenging and turbulent with new friendships and relationships getting forged. The scenic shifts in the memories went beyond direct physical confrontations with known lands becoming uncanny at night, and it had a sustained impression on Ghatak which he would extend to his films later in life. 'Against the horizon a village would appear from time to time like an island. In the wet mist we were shivering with cold. Finally, we realized that the spirit of the lake had got us. We spent the whole night to cover the distance of two hours. Desperate and bewildered, we gave up trying and waited for dawn'. The benign moonlit meadows turning into a vast alien land becomes the precursor to the late 30s and 40s, to the historical displacement of Ghatak and the Bengali people.

Education and Early Influences
Ghatak attended Mission School in Mymensingh for primary education. In the early 20th century, no sphere of elite Bengali life in Bengal was outside the cultural influence of the Tagores or Thakurbaari. Abanindranath Tagore's lyrical narrations, Buro Angla (The Old Thumb) or Raj Kahini (Tales of Kings) gave sustenance to young Ghatak's imaginations. The 'gestating child within the artist' as Ghatak calls it, gathered immense joys from fantastical lyrical and painterly traditions that were injecting themselves in the artistic sphere.

Myth and the epic both play an integral role in helping the everyman of the subcontinent to play his role in life. The Mahabharata, Ramayan, Gita and Upanishads, the uptake of colloquial readings of Kalidasa's Abhigyan-Shakuntalam, the frequent performance of jatra, pala-gaan and exercise of folk and Hindustani classical music are part and parcel of Bengali quotidian life; these played an early and obvious influence on Ghatak that leak into his later scripts and slip into dialogues, allegories and episodes in his characters' lives. Abanindranath Tagore's Sita in Captivity, painted in watercolour and wash on paper and Ghatak's conception of the twice displaced Sita in Subarnarekha, have an inter-artistic exchange. ''Aajo ki anando…' sung by Sita in Subarnarekha, in Raag Kalavati when she and Abhiram convey their mutual love for each other is almost evocative of that same love of the Rajput warrior Bappaditya for the Solanki princess.

Ghatak says, "This childhood is a fragile mental state, a folding into oneself like one of those shy delicate creepers that wilt at the slightest touch. It breaks into a hundred fragments, withers and loses its sap at the rude touch of the daily routine. All artists, I am sure, have experienced this. And it is those stabs of surprise that set them flying on journeys of conquest astride Subachani's lame duck in the Aban Thakur's story (Buro Angla/ The Thumb in which the magical goose of the fairy-tale carries human beings on his back to far and unknown countries) The first sensuous thrill that rings along the strides of one's heart!

Ghatak intimates that Ganganendranath Tagore's paintings like Dwarkapuri reminded him of a life 'in a far-off land flowing under layers and layers of roofs…' 'image after image came to my mind jostling against each other, sounds of all tune and timbre invaded my senses. Under those trellised and terraced roofs there flowed the life of another land... and there began a story. Images crowded and surrounded me; strange sounds began swirling inside my mind; in a frenzy I could set myself free from the world of immediate perception.' Seeing the same Gagan babu's 'Death O My Death' Ghatak thought of 'a mother, her indistinct face, obscure and yet so true, rocking forever the child in her lap its resonance touched me. On a rainy day when drops of water flow fast along the telegraph wires, some dropping on the ground, and some coalescing with others to tremble for a while before leaving the enticing refuge of the wires to come down to mother earth, there is rhythm in it, stories, images, and music.'

Rabindranath Tagore, the bard of Bengal and most acclaimed polymath to have ever existed in India, was widely read, discussed and revered by people across all ages. No different from them, Tagore was a significant presence in Ghatak's foray into literature and the arts. He says, 'I cannot speak without him. That man has culled all my feelings long before my birth. He has understood what I am and he has put in all the words I read and I find that all has been said and I have nothing new to say. I think all artists, in Bengal at least, find themselves in the same difficulty. It just cannot be helped. You can be angry with him, you can criticize him, you may dislike him, but ultimately, in the final analysis, you will find that he has the last word.'

Ghatak has adapted several of Tagore's plays for the stage, including Achalayoton, Dakghar, Natir Puja, Poritran, Falguni, Bisarjan, Raja, and Streer Patra.

Ghatak can be quoted from different interviews later in life talking about the consummate humanism of Tagore.

'In spite of the considerable influence Rabindranath Tagore had on you, we find that there is a qualitative difference between the works of Tagore and your films. Don't you think that he was excessively romantic?
'
'Romantic! What do you know about him? Rabindranath is not a romantic, he is a completely variegated affair. He is the performing monkey of Bengali literature. And you call him a romantic. He is a mystic, agnostic, everything. He was also a great rogue and a great one when it came to using vile language. He also wrote in the language used by street urchins. So do not try to avoid or side-track him as a romantic. Read the full range of the man's work. The structure of his writings is extremely tight. He is, as I said before, the performing monkey of Bengali literature. You must have noticed a toy which has a ladder and a small monkey on the top. When you hold this toy upright the monkey rolls down. When inverted, it slides down again. Rabindranath is like this toy monkey. He can get to the top, step by step, and climb upside down as well. So, it is a great blunder to label him a romantic. There are some people who want to sell Rabindranath, and that is why you have this image of him impressed on your minds. You people have not read Rabindranath. You have yet to know of his anger. From the lowest rung of society to the highest he spared none. You may call me a rogue, a rascal, but he was a greater one. Maybe he knew more four-letter words than I do. Do not have a distorted notion about him.'

30s Political Upheavals and the Social and Poltiical Milieu of Ghatak's days as a Fledgling Artist

In the aftermath of World War I, inflation and ensuing poverty led to large families disintegrating, as young men and women moved to Calcutta in search of jobs. The 30s saw both organised movements against the British rule fore fronted by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress with dispersed armed revolts by different factions in the Bengal Province, Punjab and the hill tribes. The reckless spirit of the Chittagong Uprising and martyrdom of Masterda Surya Sen, the bravery of Kalpana Datta and Pritilata Waddedar defined the values of youth at the time. The ideation of Soviet rule and uptake of Marxist-Communist ideologies marked a radical political shift in young Bengalis who were desperately grasping at it when they believed that the existing world order was breathing its last. It is known that Ghatak and his family moved in and between Kolkata and East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in this time but the exact cause of Ghatak permanently moving to Calcutta in 1943 is unverifiable.

Early Exposures to Cinema

Sudhish Ghatak, the second of Ritwik's eldest brothers was a documentary cameraman for six years in England. After his return in 1935, he joined New Theatres and worked as the assistant cameraman in Street Singer (1938) directed by Phani Majumder, starring K L Saigal and Kanan Bala. In his company, Ritwik got introduced to Pramathesh Barua and Bimal Roy, thus paving his way into the world of film appreciation and weaning into the profession of filmmaking. Standing at the precipice of youth, Ritwik stood at the crossroads of embracing the Gorkian lower depths and leaving behind the romance and escapism of his childhood. His films, in a similar fashion, constantly negotiate with childlike wonder and the naked reality of violence.

The Turbulent 40s

The 40s, and most significantly, the Partition saw a rupture in the historical fabric of the subcontinent which incurred major human loss. It tore apart the Bengali psyche and laid the cornerstone for Ghatak's outlook which later became the ruling philosophy of his films. Ghatak extends the metaphor of Partition for everything that is alienating or destructive for the Bengali community, to a point of saturation. His fixation is often criticized, listed as a cause for his overall commercial failure, his caprice and uncompromising nature seen as one of the many reasons for his isolation in the industry, but his thrust cannot be undermined.

Kallol and Manish Ghatak

The literature of revered authors, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay was "too romantic", too universal and thus could not quell the need for representation of a desperate, impoverished and displaced people at a time of rapid paradigm shifts. A radical literary front by the name Kallol (published in a magazine of the same name), which heralded the Little Magazine Movement, was willing to exhume those 'Gorkian lower depths' where existence was just an unscrupulous struggle, for whetting appetite of food and sex. Ritwik's elder brother Manish Ghatak (penname Yuvanasva), who would become a revolutionary in the Tebhaga Movement, was one of the pioneering poets in Kallol. The likes of Manish Ghatak and Manik Bandopadhyay gave Ritwik a more profound archetypal response to motherland and the fierce desire to restate one's identity in terms of one's past and became the establishment of his larger humanism.

Employment

Ritwik was employed, courtesy his elder brother Manish Ghatak, at a textile mill in Kanpur. Before political organising and foray into the New Theatre Movement, this was his most personal experience of being a working-class man in proximity with other workers. He wrote his short story Raja at this time, published later in Shanibarer Chithi (The Saturday Letter).
"If my father had had his way, I should have been an income-tax officer. I got the job but left it to join the C.P.I. (the Communist Party of India). If I had stuck to it, I might have become a Commissioner of Accountant General by now. But now I am only a street dog! After quitting the job, I tried writing poetry but found myself singularly incapable of it. I shifted my interests to writing short stories and won a bit of fame. More than a hundred of them were published in Desh, Parichay, Shanibarer Chithi and other leading magazines of Bengal. That was when I found that literature delves deep into the soul of man, but it works slowly. It takes a long time to grow roots inside. With typical adolescent impatience I wanted to make an immediate impact, because I felt the people should be roused instantly."

The Bengal Famine

Britain was fighting World War II as part of the Allied Powers and Bengal being central to the British colonial establishment in the subcontinent, suffered major setbacks. Rice which is the staple food source in the East went through a decline in distribution despite the farmer yielding harvest. The reasons being -
I) wartime inflation.
ii) Japan invading Burma, a major cultivator of rice, and ceasing exports to the port cities in Bengal,
iii) for lack of government regulation on the jotedars and zamindars hoarding stocks for sale at higher prices.
The price of rice increased from 5 rupees per maund to 40 rupees a maund. It was at this time that new forms of hoarding — that is, the practice of landlords themselves keeping grains in stock and selling it when market prices rose due to the shortage of supply — came into being. The Bengal famine is the largest socially constructed catastrophe of the 20th century which killed nineteen lakh people and caused unforeseen mass displacement.

The Calcutta and Noakhali Riots

With the precursor of 1937 elections of the Bengal Province won by the All-India Muslim league and the Naval Mutiny, 16th August 1946 observed the call for Direct Action Day as the League went on a general strike and economic shutdown to demand a separate Muslim homeland. Despite the numeric majority of Bengali Muslims, feudal upper caste Hindus constituted the ruling class and withheld cultural and economic capital from low-caste Muslims. As a result, Bengal saw across the board rioting, looting and killing on both sides of the border. Millions of Muslims and Hindus were killed or displaced.

Ritwik passed the Intermediate Examination in Arts, Dhaka University, from Rajshahi in 1946

Partition of India

After a decade of cultural resurgence, peasant rebellions, thousands of strikes, barricades on the street raised by workers, students and ordinary citizens, India gained independence from British rule. An independent Indian government was instituted in Delhi but along with it came the treachery of both nationalist leadership and colonial powers; it resulted in the massacre of India's partition on communal lines.

Ritwik finished his B.A.Honours degree in Krishnath College, Baharampur and joined the M. A. class in Calcutta University. Unlike his adolescent confusion and incomprehension of reality around him, Ghatak now confronted, analysed and participated; " .... a spate of massive changes gave a big jolt to the ideas and ideals of the people... I was already drawn towards Marxism and politics. I was not a card-holder, but an active member, a close sympathizer, a fellow traveller.'' Gone were the days of truancy and delinquent rebellion, instead a committed artist was born, first through a few unsuccessful poems, later through meaningful story writing and then for a few years through the theatre.

The Literary Ghatak

Ritwik's first publication "Akashgangar Srot Dhorey" (Upstream along the Milky Way) appeared in a 1947 periodical, Golpobharati edited by eminent author Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay. In the first year of his graduation class, he along with Nirmal Dutta and Amaresh Lahiri, edited and published a Little Magazine Abhidhara which in an interview later, he describes as 'close to Marxist . . . Printed magazines published from small towns ... It ran for a few months, all on our own financial resources, which we recovered, of course.'
Between 1947 and 1950 about twenty of his stories appeared in leading periodicals.

Entering the Political Theatre Scene

Ritwik wrote his first play Kalo Sayar ('The Dark Lake') in 1948. Bijon Bhattacharya's play, Nabanna (The Harvest) accelerated the popularity of IPTA (Indian People's Theatre Association), the cultural wing of CPI founded in 1943, which had acquired a separate existence from the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) and now had the momentum to usher in the New theatre Movement. Ghatak says, 'I hadn't yet joined IPTA but was hovering around it. I knew a whole lot of people associated with it. Shambhu-da, Bijon-babu, Sudhi-babu, Manik-babu and Tarashankar-da. IPTA was still associated with PWA with Tarashankar-da as the President. My eldest brother was a well-known Kallolite, Manish Ghatak (Yuvanasva). Thus, our family had a regular contact with the then literary circle also. Through them I suddenly confronted Nabanna. I was thoroughly shaken by Nabanna, and I finally got involved with theatre and became an IPTA member.'

Ritwik is known to have acted in a revival of Nabanna by Ashok Majumder O Sampraday (now famous as the experimental theatre company Bohurupee) on 13, 14, and 16 September 1948.

IPTA and Stage Acting

In 1948 Ghatak officially joined the IPTA. Actor Kali Banerjee, who plays the protagonist in Ghatak's Ajantrik, talks about his visits to Metia Buruj with him, to understand the dynamics of dock workers' existence, by being with them in their gate meetings, processions and leisure. Ritwik evolved their stories to plots and plays. IPTA became a melting pot of ideas, an association with the yet to be stalwarts Mrinal Sen, Salil Chowdhury, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Tapas Sen, Nripen Ganguly and Ghatak himself, with revolutionary ideas in mind and lint in their pockets.

Mrinal Sen documents this time in a short prose - Ritwik o Amra (Ritwik and Us). "It was the time of the Telangana and Tebhaga peasant movements. News arrived from Kakdwip, a village in southern Bengal, of the brutal police killing of the pregnant peasant wife, Ahalya. A Red Area was formed in Kakdwip with unrelenting battle fought by the rebellious locals against the police." Mrinal wrote a script, Salil Chowdhury gave it the title “Jamir Ladai (Struggle for Land)”, Ghatak got hold of an old and broken 16 mm camera. The “front” was about to make its debut. " But it was not to happen though. A delegation of scientists who had arrived for the Indian Science Congress smuggled some communist party papers from the European regional office that said, Indian Communist revolution was headed in the wrong direction. By the by, armed struggle was soon abandoned by the communists as a “leftwing deviation”. Jamir Ladai was aborted. Mrinal Sen recalls, "Ritwik took the opportunity to tinker around with that camera and learned quite a bit about handling it, despite the fact that it was an ancient and rundown model"

Assamese folksinger and composer Hemango Biswas recalls Ghatak acting in the role of Raghupati in an adaptation of Tagore's Bisharjan directed by Utpal Dutt; his gaunt structure, voice and gestures superbly suiting the role of a possessed and fanatic idolater. Around the same time, Ghatak adapted Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector for IPTA, even playing the Inspector's part in Utpal Dutt's production of the same; along with it, he was in various other plays like Bijon Bhattacharya's Kalanka, Dinabandhu Mitra's Nildarpan (The Indigo Mirror), Panu Pal's Bhanga Bandar and Voter Bhet, and in selected scenes from Macbeth in Bengali also directed by Dutt, where Ghatak played one of the witches. He participated in a bunch of street plays performed in support of the Communist Party's candidates for the country's first general elections.

Paradise Café

In his short piece Paradise Cafe, Mrinal Sen writes about his early days with Ritwik, as young outcasts. "We had our little group, then. I write of a time twenty-seven years ago. Except for one of us, we were all unemployed. Relatively unencumbered, each of us busy avoiding the responsibilities we were supposed to shoulder back home. First thing in the morning, we would get away. Crowd into a small café near the crossing at Hazra. It was a tiny room, about eight feet by twelve. A tea shop crammed with bare tables and broken chairs. Called Paradise Café. In our group, Ritwik was the tallest, the thinnest, and obviously the most daring."

When it seemed impossible for the front to enter filmmaking, they actively took part in unionizing film technicians and studio workers. "We would visit the studios and the homes of the workers. Speak to them, explain to them. Try to infuse them with a sense of pride and confidence in their own strength and powers. And all this came together, one day, when on the floors of the studio, we raised our voices collectively. And none other than the tall and thin Ritwik led that noisy procession."

Hem Ghosh's Paradise Cafe features in a sequence in Ritwik's first film, Nagarik.

Ghatak's Foray into Film Acting

Tathapi directed by Manoj Bhattacharya under the supervision of Bimal Roy is remembered for introducing several Bengali IPTA figures to the silver screen, including Ghatak. Bimal Roy adapted leftist writer Swarnakamal Bhattacharya's story. The film stands at a tangent from the radical realist initiative launched by Roy's Udayer Pathey (1944) which culminated in Nemai Ghosh's Chinnamul (1950). The plot features a mute heroine and a love triangle.

Tagore's Bisharjan at Jadavpur University

Ghatak says "Then came another bit of heart searching. It was after my greatest success on stage, a prestige performance staged in the Jadavpur University campus in 1950. I produced Tagore's Bisharjan (The Sacrifice), in which I also played the leading role. More than eight thousand persons attended the show. It was fantastic! But this also showed me that I could only reach a maximum of ten thousand people through a show. And so much collective labour had to be expended just for that! Then I decided to make films."

Ghatak featured in Nemai Ghosh's radical and realist narrative film Chinnamul .

Ghatak wrote and directed his first major play Jvala (The Burning Pain) based on a communist party report titled "Suicide Wave in Calcutta".

Ghatak's debut direction- Bedeni (Aborted)

Ghatak was appointed to assist Nirmal Dey and when the latter abandoned the project, Ghatak was appointed as the director. He rewrote the screenplay of the originally titled film Bedeni based on Tara Shankar Bandopadhyay's novel Nagaini Kanyar Kahini and renamed the film as Arupkatha. The unit shot for 20-days in Bolpur and Ghatshila but because of faulty cameras, it did not expose.

Ritwik wrote and directed the play Dalil (Document) for the IPTA, staged for the first time at a teacher's Conference in Hazra Park in South Calcutta with a cast including Kali Banerjee and Ghatak himself as Khetu Ghosh. Dalil was staged at the national conference of the IPTA at Bombay where it was voted the best production of the festival.

Ghatak meets Soviet auteur Cherkasov and Pudovkin

The first International Film Festival took place in Calcutta and a Soviet film delegation had arrived with it. "The delegation spent most of their time with us", Hemango Biswas recalls. "Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak and Utpal Dutt were already involved in very serious thinking about cinema though they hadn't yet been able to make one. But I noticed Ritwik carrying on long discussions with them (Pudovkin and Cherkasov) on cinema based on his sound knowledge and deep understanding of the ideas of Eisenstein and Pudovkin... I realised that Ritwik's perception about cinema had acquired an exceptional edge, perhaps much more than anybody else". Ghatak and his comrades were bent upon reducing the gap that existed in cinema and reality, more succinctly put, they looked forward to the possibility of cinema working on the documentation of lived history, of the refugee encampments, of hunger marches, mill workers' strikes, unemployed youth crowding the streets and young guerrilla fighters being hunted down by cops, of the impoverished dying like flies in Calcutta streets.

Ghatak elaborates himself, 'What was of prime importance was to develop a serious attitude towards cinema. So, what we did was read a lot, whatever we could lay hands upon, because from 1944 to 1950 none of us had either any money to make a film or any opportunities to expose ourselves to foreign films. We could avail ourselves of such a chance only after 1950 onwards. Till then what did we do? We doggedly hunted for books like Eisenstein's Film Form and Film Sense; Pudovkin's Film Technique and Film Acting; Siegfried Kracauer; Paul Rotha and Roger Manville and tried to consume them as much as possible in preparation for the future. This entire effort on our part was executed outside the film industry, though all of us belonged to it in some way or other... they (the industry) all laughed at us just as they do even now'.

Amongst the screenings at the festival that had the most bearing on the IPTA frontrunners, Rome, the Open City and Bicycle Thieves provided them with final verdict on the way in which these young generation of film makers wanted to go.

"Can you recall any particular influence that inspired you to be a filmmaker? "

"Well, there were films like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, Pudovkin's Mother, Krakatit, the Czechoslovakian film Nemá barikáda by Otakar Vavra and books like Eisenstein's Film Form, and The Film Sense, Pudovkin's Film Technique and Film Acting, Ivor Montagu's collection of film articles in the Penguin series (in Film World), and Bela Balaz's Theory of the Film, all of which threw up a completely new world before my eyes. Most of the films which I have mentioned were banned in India at that time. We could only see them clandestinely. That also gave a romantic aura to the whole experience. And then came the first Film Festival in India (in 1952) which introduced us to the Italian neo-realists. This was yet another completely new and fascinating world. All these films and books helped to develop my tastes, but they did not influence me directly. I did not become a part of any school."

Ghatak says, "I am absolutely convinced of the tremendous impact the International Film Festival had on all of us ...countless films number of people, and a rare occasion for exchange of ideas! We could see a few excellent films which immediately provoked a deferred seriousness towards cinema. I presume that the prompt response to such films was the making of seven or eight films, very unusual and unconventional in nature. The courage and strength which I derived from the festival, was forthright translated into my unreleased film Nagarik. The transition got wonderfully articulated in Pather Panchali."

Soviet Contribution to Ghatak's Conception of cinema

"These persons you have mentioned, are they the greatest cineastes in your opinion?

They are not cineastes and they are not dilettantes. They are more or less pioneers in exploring this exciting medium. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and in a way, Dovshenko discovered a new artistic language in films. The first two were not only filmmakers but were also among the first film theorists of the world. Filmmakers anywhere owe a debt especially to Eisenstein. He gave us a whole new medium of expression.

From Stage to Screen

Along with theatre, what gradually emerged as Ghatak's main pre-occupation was cinema. IPTA brought together like-minded artists frenzied by the idea of a New Cinema Movement. Since the very inception of the Indian People's Theatre Association, the importance of the film as a powerful medium to enlighten the masses has been recognized. And from the very beginning it has been the ideal of the People's Theatre to coordinate its stage movement with that of the film either by arranging shadow theatres, film shows of progressive films depicting the life of the people, like The Grapes of Wrath or by producing films in consonance with the ideals of the People's Theatre. A tireless effort thus resulted in the making of an unconventional and realistic film on the Bengal famine. Dharti Ke Lal (Children of the Earth) was made in 1949, scripted by K.A. Abbas. 'Comrade Abbas was also asked to prepare the synopsis of the story which was to be based on People's Theatre's two Bengali plays, Nabanna (The New Harvest) and Jaban Bandi (The Witness), and Krishen Chander's novelette "Anna Data".

Ghatak responded to this influence initially by confining himself to the reading of literature on cinema. Though it was hopelessly inadequate, yet he could get hold of the works of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Simultaneously, with his IPTA colleagues. Along with theatre, these people dreamt of the New Cinema Movement which had been initiated by Dharti Ke Lal. In the absence of opportunities available to translate their dreams into reality, this generation kept their spirits undaunted, and fully utilised their time and energy in discussing, debating and arguing about cinema while living utterly unknown and penniless.

Nagarik: The First Full-Length, Bengali Neo-Realist Art Film

Ghatak on Ghatak:

"The screenplay of Nagarik was written in 1950-51. In those days there were no realistic films at all. This was the first genuinely realistic work in Bengali film on the post-War agonies of middle- class Bengalis. Its technical side is not perhaps impressive, such as the soundtrack. Yet it is still valid for me so far as its theme is concerned. I picturised the fragile picture of the lower-middle class inhabitants of Bengal."
Nagarik is the first neo-realist film to be made in India, though it would release a good twenty-five years after its making. Faced by the war, famine and the travesty of partition, Ramu the eldest son of a lower-middle class, North-Calcutta family, aspires for a job but whiles his time away, wistfully spending his days gazing at trees and dreaming of settling with his beloved Uma in a house resembling that of a calendar painting. The old patriarch is an idealist who clings to fantasies of the plenitude in his heydays while his mother mourns her old home; his sister Seeta dismayed by the family's poverty, tries to escape the situation with their lodger, Sagar. Eventually they move into a slum and abandon their individual aspirations as they become progressively politicised. The film came in the wake of the IPTA derived political cinema in Bengal and remains Ghatak's most direct call to political action, including his only explicit propaganda scene: the insertion of the Internationale - the communist anthem, on the soundtrack ; as the family leaves the house while another group like them comes in presumably to live through similar experiences.

Nagarik was completed in 1952 fulfilling the IPTA ideal of collective action. "… none had asked for any remuneration, neither the laboratory nor the studio. Even the raw stock was given to me free of cost". But for inscrutable commercial reasons, the film did not get a release. Ritwik has gone on record to say, "Nagarik has not yet been released. I will commit suicide." The film was never released and believed lost, but a restored print, showing the extensive decay of the recovered positive, was posthumously released after 25 years, in 1977.

The IPTA was being threatened by divisiveness and dissolution. Ritwik was constantly questioning the prevalent leftist attitude in confronting art and culture and facing stiff opposition. He was branded a Trotskyite. A general antagonism towards him grew in ranks.

Ghatak writes and submits his thesis On the Cultural 'Front' to the Communist Party of India, co-signed by Surama Bhattacharya and Mumtaz Ahmad Khan. The thesis proposes to show that the Communist Party's lack of a pertinent or inspired cultural line, is not the result of an ideological failure but largely, an organisational defect.

An Excerpt from the Thesis

"To be or not to be that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing. end them?
He thinks better of it when he considers life after death. "That undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller ever returns"- this gives him the pause. Otherwise, who would bear "the pangs of despised love," "the insolence of office." "the Law's delay," "the proud man's contumely," "and a thousand such pricks", "when one can finish off everything with a bare bodkin ?"
Thus, he reasoned. Thus, his native hue of resolution was sicklied over by the pale cast of thought.
Now, what happens here? And how does Hamlet's procrastination throw light upon the artiste's function?
Who is Hamlet? A prince of Jutland in the fifth century, probably not a historical figure. Why does he think of committing suicide? Because the question arises in his mind "whether it is nobler to suffer slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune," or "is it better to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?"
One must then ask what are those slings and arrows of said fortune and what is that sea of troubles? Hamlet enumerates them. They are the pangs of despised love, insolence of office, Law's delay, proud man's contumely, etc. We must now enter his life and personality to understand them. But a search into his personality will draw a blank each and every time. If we accept his word, we must admit that his reasons for such fatal thoughts are impersonal. Hamlet has observed these outrages from afar, from his high office. Watched them, noted them and hated them."

Purged from IPTA, Ghatak forms his Group Theatre (1954) which worked on the principles of Stanislavskian method of acting. He wrote and directed the film 'Sanko' (The Bridge), and dramatized Sukumar Ray's Hajabarala.

In the end of October 1955, Ghatak received a letter informing him that he was no longer a member of the Communist Party of India.

Ghatak's early documentaries: The Life of Adivasis and Places of Historic Interest in Bihar

Ghatak says, "In order to shoot documentaries you need a much stronger love for people... I do not consider documentary films to be a separate art form... they are documents of human life... I do not know a whole lot about documentary films even though I have made quite a few as I made those to make a living". Ritwik deeply admired the techniques of Robert Flaherty's documentary Nanook of the North (1922) and John Greisens' Drifters (1929), two people who he considered made the documentary-form so impactful.

In his letters to his wife Surama during his time in Jharkhand and later Bihar while filming Places of historical interest for Aurora Film corporation under the Government of Bihar, Ritwik writes: 'Rajgeer! I shall never forget Rajgeer. Gautama Buddha traversed its streets. Mahavir lived here! And today I wandered around the streets built by King Vimbisara in 500 B.C.E.! The gallows created by Ajatasatru are still standing firm and solid... Each step here, as if contains a kaleidoscopic memory. Time, as if stopped in veneration. The breeze here carries an exotic fragrance. I visited every nook and corner. I shall come back here again. The glory and greatness of the political history is equally matched by the sensuous, earthy vigour and simplicity of the tribal ethnicity. Days were spent in sheer ecstasy and creativity while Ritwik was making a documentary on the Oraons for the Bihar government. 'I worked in a frenzy for the last few days in Ranchi. But what an experience of happiness and fulfilment! I am spending my days amidst the Oraons and the Mundas. I am glad to be back on terra firma, the loamy earth all around tickling my palate! The enchanting tunes of their songs; the mesmeric rhythm of their dance; their zest for life amidst misery and deprivation; I am enthralled by all this!'

Marriage to Surama

In May 1955, Ritwik and Surama Bhattacharjee were married in Shillong. An activist, teacher, writer and political prisoner, Surama had joined the IPTA and gotten together with Ritwik.
Ritwik writes to Surama or Lakshmi (her nickname) on the eve of their marriage, 'Both of us should have let ourselves loose with abandon for the sake of the revolution! Have you realized that two patriots, a man and a woman, are setting out for great adventures! But inexperienced and thoroughly crazy! Through perpetual ebb and tide these two will give form and shape to the image of an ideal humanity. I had plenty but had lost all, now I shall regain my lost being through you, the bliss and beatitude arising out of it will be the beacon light of our journey. We are companions for ever, there lies life and well-being...'

Their marriage was however dysfunctional for the most part, with Ritwik being bankrupt and indulging his self-destructive tendencies of heavy alcoholism, an erratic lifestyle coupled with haphazard schedules for work that was infrequent and often unpaid. They lived separately, she with their three children in Shillong sustaining on a school-teacher's salary and Ritwik hopping between his friends' houses between Calcutta and Bombay.

Filming Oraon (unavailable)

Ritwik shot a reparatory test film for a documentary on the life of the Oraon tribe of Rani Khatanga village, Jharkhand. It was shot in 1955 at the Chhota Nagpur plateau region. Some footage from Oraon was used in Ajantrik. Ritwik's views on the totemic, , Austro-Asiatic tribe are as such: "The Oraons are probably the only tribe remaining in central India who have still retained their power to express their mental ecstasy through the primal medium of dancing. Thousands of years of oppression, involving waves of migration, swindling and torture by the higher and more cultured brethren of the land and other lands, poverty, lack of health and the easy way of living, nothing could completely wipe out a trace of that irrepressible joy which bursts forth in rhythm. They have been told again and again, and that flow of advice is by no means absent even today, that it is just not proper to break into dance at the slightest excuse. It is not cultured. It is aboriginal, it reminds one of one's own sins in another narrow and criminal society."

Ritwik left for Bombay to work at Filmistan, Shashadhar Mukherjee's studio, primarily for financial stability and paying off debts.
He worked as screenwriter and co-wrote the script of Musafir, with Hrishikesh Mukherjee for Mukherjee's own directional debut. Musafir was released in 1957 starring Dilip Kumar, Kishore Kumar, Suchitra Sen, Keshto Mukherjee and Nirupa Roy in titular roles; it was Ritwik's first co-written Hindi-language film script to go under production, a domestic drama featuring the lives of three families living in the same house. Ghatak was unimpressed by the quality of work in Bombay. He didn't see eye to eye with the creatives of the Hindi commercial films. However, he used the time to direct a fresh stage version of Bisharjan, and Musafiron ke Liye, Govind Mali's adaptation of Gorky's Lower Depths for IPTA, Bombay, which premiered on 18-19 December 1956, with A. K. Hangal and Balraj Sahni in the cast.

Ghatak writes the script of Madhumati, Bimal Roy's biggest commercial hit. Released in 1958, Madhumati starring Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala becomes the highest grossing film of the year, with 4 crores as its nation-wide collection. Madhumati introduced Indian cinema to the now overused trope of reincarnation.

Sci-fi and the Bengali Maverick's Misfortune

In a letter to Surama Ghatak, Ritwik writes, ''I have planned a story for Filmistan. I like it very much. An atomic research scientist falls asleep while doing his research, dreaming about a future world where an universal scientific community has taken shape. Of course, I have to keep space for a lot of song and dance and romance, and melodrama; I have to put in all the ingredients of a Bombay film. But, despite that, I think I can focus on scientific development and social structure and psychological evolution, and still make it an entertaining story. I will ask Dr Meghnad Saha [the astrophysicist] for help when I come back home during [Durga] Pujo. We can ask the Nuclear Physics Laboratory here for help too. Sashadhar Mukherjee wants to hear the story the day after tomorrow. If he likes it, I can start thinking about doing some good work." The script was shelved because Sasadhar Mukherjee demanded drastic changes that Ritwik hadn't agreed with.
Ritwik's contemporary Satyajit Ray had also produced a sci-fi script titled Alien, much later in 60s, inspired from his short story Bonkubabur Bondhu, but reported about it being robbed by his publicist in Hollywood in the mid-60s.

Ajantrik

After three failed attempts at making films: Amritakumber Sandhane, Notun Phasal and Arajan Sardar, and four years of stagnation, Pramod Lahiri (producer of Ray's Parash Pathar) agreed to produce Ajantrik. The film is based on a story by Subodh Ghosh and chronicles the adventures of Jagaddal, the ramshackle 1920 Chevrolet and her driver Bimal, interspersed by documentary footage of the Oraon tribe of Chota Nagpur. The car is animated with human emotion, from the twin perspective of the audience and the protagonist. She expresses the grudge of an old virtuoso who lets off steam and irritable sounds when derided by her partner/driver Bimal, or scoffs at a passenger who complains; when a newlywed bride steals glances of Bimal, she huffs smoke like a jealous lover and conspires to run her over. To contradict the animation of the car through Bimal's perception is to reconcile the symbol of modern culture to a more ancient one.

Ghatak on Ghatak: "The protagonist of my film... you can call him a lunatic, but also a child. Or tribal. In one respect all three are the same - they will try and infuse life into the inanimate object. And this is an archetypal reaction. When a child imagines a monster, when the lunatic loses himself at the sight of a cloud, or when a tribal imagines a railway train as God they react in the same way... The tribal dances and songs in Ajantrik showed the whole cycle of life birth, hunting, marriage, death, worship of ancestors, rebirth. This was the main theme in Ajantrik - the law of life. The child fantasising about the bogeyman, the aborigine imagining god, the tribal seeing the train for the first time—all these come from what we may describe as a law of life. "

The organising principle of Ajantrik is the romantic pathetic fallacy—the belief of life in the inanimate. The romantic extension of human emotion into nature, and the inanimate car and man's one-dimensional relationship to it is broken down in the film into various elements. The specific tradition of the narrative in Ajantrik comes from the Soviets. Sergei Eisenstein's description of narrative —not unrolling in the naturalist principle but a 'colliding of attractions' and its relation to pathos. The motor car in Ajantrik literally and metaphorically collides with the camera to substantiate this.
The extension of the Pathetic Fallacy to the machine through Bimal is an attempt to reconcile the main symbol of modern culture with a more ancient one; Bimal's failure, and the receding, indifferent nature of the car in the end, raises contradictory forms of perception to the mythic system by showing us the disjointed relationship between perception and the actual material forces at work. The unity of the car, the children, the tribals and townspeople is a falsity of bourgeois characterisation and the unity is repeatedly shattered—when the old jalopy almost runs over the bride, and when the runaway bride comes back forlorn, or when the car almost crashes into the camera, to speak of only two instances. The looming symbol of the cross, suggests a sort of crucifixion, when Bimal gives his all to revive Jagaddal from the state of disrepair, the tribal woman kneeling at the cross and crying are portents of the immediate death of the fallacy.

Ajantrik is a visual allegory that establishes new images of the archetypal relationship between man and nature as well as man and the machine. Bimal who, like the poet and child, cannot distinguish between the object and subject, adapts the unknown to his own subjective fantasies and expectations. However, the animation of the car as a part of nature's ecstatic flow is broken down with the inevitable breaking down of the car and the discreet identity of the human itself.
The more complex association in the film is Bimal's indirect encounters with the Oraons. The presence of the tribals at the periphery of the film is indicated musically. The sounds that Jagaddal makes are sounds of the Oraon horns. Visual associations like the high-flying 'bairakhis', processions and markets form a complex montage of sound, movements and tonality. Bimal is situated within the culture of the "ancient", and his operative mode of thinking is animistic.

Ghatak on Ghatak

"In India, there has not been much experiment in film. Whatever few have been made, have mostly been made in Bengali. There have been some stray attempts in other provinces, like the latest one by Hussain about an artist's approach to the world. But all these falls into that ambiguous territory called Documentary. It is only in Bengal that some feature films have been attempted which may go under the name of 'experiment'. I'm not qualified to speak about other people's work, so I refrain from commenting on them. I can only speak from my own little experience.

My first film, AJANTRIK, is normally called an experimental film. I don't know to what extent that's true. But I've been asked from different quarters: for whom did I make that film. I always answer that I am made it for myself and for nobody else. I say to sympathetic people: this doesn't mean that I have a narcissistic approach to art. And film seems to be an art. You must be engaged in society. You must commit yourself to good in man's destiny, against evil. By that, I don't mean, like Roger Vadim, being interested in Napoleon's life because he wants to show the contour of Napoleon's couch where he used to enjoy the company of women and not his historical role...in my book, the same goes for people like Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet - they represent the decadent forces in Western civilisation. I consider them completely invalid as experimentalists. For instance, I have had the doubtful pleasure of seeing Hiroshima Mon Amour and L'annee Derniere A Marienbad. These films seem to me completely hollow, and gimmicky, and a pose. I refuse to take these things to be real experiments in the true sense of the term. This brings up the moot question, what is experiment? Here he's the crux. As we all know, everything in this universe is relative. Experiment in films, in relation to what?

In relation to man and his society. Experiment cannot dangle on in a void. It must belong. Belong to man.

I have seen some films by western filmmakers like Fellini, whom Gerasimov condemned in Cannes as working out a drain inspector's report in his film La Dolce Vita, but Fellini portrayed the life around him, as he saw it, boldly and with great sincerity. It is the death certificate of Western civilisation. In my films, I have tried to portray my country and the sorrows and sufferings of my people to the best of my ability. Whatever I might have achieved, there was no dearth of sincerity. But sincerity alone cannot take you very far."

Baari Theke Paaliye

"To me, it is precisely contemporary reality with its innumerable and unwieldy patterns and crosscurrents of forces that needs abstraction, if I set myself the task of propounding certain fundamental traits of that reality. I think that much in the modern art of literature and painting would have to be thrown out if we do not accept this position."

Kanchan, a wistful young boy pines for the fantastic world of El Dorado. The prosaic reality and drudgery of routine bores him. He wants to set sail on the Orinoco river and see the Red Indians. He becomes a renegade and finds a different El Dorado- Calcutta. Ghatak uses a subjective lens in the film to show the audience the perspective of a child looking at the huge metropolis. Overwhelmed by its skyscrapers and the frenzied movement of the masses, Kanchan is finally rescued by the poor, old teacher Haridas. Kanchan lives through a series of fascinating yet scary episodes of a street magician tricking the death of a child, of the little boy Abhi who draws wonderfully but gets snatched by street urchins; Kanchan is harassed, feels humiliated, and sees the death of his friend Mini's mother. He is reminded of home where waits the plenitude of life and kindness of his own mother. The renegade returns home.

Baari Theke Paaliye is an unique picaresque episodic film. Incidentally, François Truffaut- one of the most notable filmmakers of The French New Wave, released his debut film, a similar a coming-of-age drama, The 400 Blows about a day in life of a 14-year-old boy, the picaro, Antoine Doinel. While Kanchan gives in to fantasy and escape, Antoine chooses to lie and commit petty crimes to rebel against his aloof parents and oppressive teachers. “Oh, I lie now and then, I suppose. Sometimes I'd tell them the truth and they still wouldn't believe me, so I prefer to lie.” His love of cinema becomes his escape.

Kato Ajanare (All the Unknown), Ritwik's next project was based on Shankar's first novel of the same name, in remembrance of Calcutta High Court's much acclaimed barrister Mr Barwell. It is an unfinished Bengali drama-film, shot on a 20-day schedule. The shooting was complete, except the court scene but it was stalled till it got abandoned for lack of financers. The film starred Anil Chatterjee as Shankar, Chabi Biswas as Rempini, Kali Banerjee as Noel Barwell and Utpal Dutta in the role of the Dutch sailor.

Ghatak starts his partition trilogy with Meghe Dhaka Tara.

"The 'Great Mother' image, with both the benevolent and terrible aspects has been in our civilisation since antiquity, intermingled with our myths, our epics, our folklores and our scriptures... in Meghe Dhaka Tara I was working on a universal theme."
Ghatak turned an essentially provincial experience into an expression of universal validity. He considers it his greatest film and happens to be the only critically and commercially well received film in his career, in his lifetime. Published as Chenamukh, the original story reminded him of Shakespeare's 'the cloud-capped stars'. Along with it, Ritwik confesses to have emerged with the most crucial pre-occupation of his life: Indian Mythology. At every level, the Romantic idea of the narrative is under attack in Meghe Dhaka Tara. Ghatak drains out the aspect of returning to tradition, of fullness, and totality, from the melodramatic form. The exploitative form of the melodrama itself becomes the parasitical system. Meghe Dhaka Tara is testament to the fact that conflict is inevitable but the inevitable is totally inconsequential.

Ghatak makes formal use of elliptical narration, deep focus shots, wide angle elongation and very low angles to present his figures. Essentially what he explores is the exploitative archetype of the mother-goddess—the rules that set into concrete forms and how the vital full-blooded human flesh seeks freedom from it. More than any other work of his, Meghe Dhaka Tara depends upon purely sensuous portrayal in its evoking of the conflict of traditions. He fights the relationship between the sensuous and the abstract. The conflict is his content, and the formal structure is its mode of exploitation. We see the portrayal of this Great Mother image in Mehboob's Mother India—but in Meghe Dhaka Tara we see an unforeseen inversion of the archetypal form. The femininity principle embodied by Kali and Durga, was a strong cultural manifestation of the materialist vision of the lower classes against the Brahmanical metaphysical credo of repression.

Tantric Abstractions

The woman, represented in the form of the tragic-protagonist Nita, is characterised by primordial images of womanhood who acts as the cornerstone for social functioning. Three aspects of womanhood are distributed amongst the three women— the nourishing force of the nurturing heroine, the cruel pragmatism of the tenacious mother and the sensuousness of the other sister. In 'Myth and Ritual— Ghatak's 'Meghe Dhaka Tara', Ira Bhaskar outlines the mythic dimension of the relationship thus—Durga was born out of this [havan kund or sacrificial pyre] as a transmutation of human desires, taking the form of Jagadhatri, the universal sustainer. The overlaying of the images of Nita and the yagna mandapa, suggests the symbol of her being the archetypal goddess who provides and preserves by burning her own desires at the sacrificial altar. The return of the mythical figure to her elemental state happens through a process of deconsecrating— immersion in water with holy chants. Nita's immersion is foreshadowed with the Baul song that recurs with Sanat-her suitor's rejection, Geeta's marriage to him, the discovery of Nita's tuberculosis and finally when she leaves the house—her rain drenched face is the epitome of this motif. In its totality, Ghatak acts out the ritual of consecrating and deconsecrating the mother-goddess to raise it to the tragic.

Meghe Dhaka Tara: The Dying Girl's Final Cry— "Dada, ami bajbo" (Brother, I want to live)

Nita's forceful affirmation of the right to live. The cry "... echoes through her entire past, through those pitiful expressions of protest, but also reverberates beyond herself, touching upon the suffering of a whole people like her, bound down to the rituals that have come down from her predecessors and designed to keep future humanity in bondage. This is the only point of expression of the conflict between the archetype and the individual, but the violence with which the release comes shows the nature of the bondage. If in Potemkin revolutionary spirit leaps like wildfire, here the cry resonates across individual differences and expresses the anguish of the struggling class.

But then there is an immediate receding - the hills that have echoed her cry are passive, the nature that wept for her stares mutely back. It jerks us once more to the present, causing a reversal very similar to the inert nature at the end of Ajantrik if the antagonistic forces have won, something more significant than that has also occurred, which could not have occurred had Ghatak accepted the life-affirmative as the conclusion - the emphatic denial of romantic false-consciousness."

As much related to the archetypal forms as the rituals is the romanticism strongly etched into the middle-class. The link is obvious-the acceptance of the archetype in its particular form, and the hope of release coming through its transmutation of human desires, is the romantic dream that took birth when these desires snapped their relation to the material level of their existence. In the film, there is a constant attempt to bring out the romantic through various conventions and violently negate them, reverse them into an indictment of the romantic sensibility itself.

At its largest this reversal comes through the archetype itself. The nostalgia of the Durga Puja has the ancient tradition of gauri-daan or the giving away of the girl, often a little child, in marriage to a stranger. "This created, along with fear, a deep nostalgia," writes Ghatak, "Our folk-lores are full of this... this is why Durga is a daughter to us; that is why autumn is a season of nostalgia for us."

Ghatak on The Epic

"There is an epic tradition which dominates the Indian mentality. It had seeped into the Indian subconscious. It is no surprise, therefore, that Indians are attracted to mythologicals, I am a part of it. I cannot think of myself without the epic tradition. I am all for it. It is in our civilisation since time immemorial. In my films I rely mainly on the folk form. The Great Mother image in its duality exists in every aspect of our being. I have incorporated this in Meghe Dhaka Tara and also in Jukti Takko aar Goppo"

"I have continued to experiment in my films. These were the thoughts behind them. To me, all my films are just completed exercises, I cannot have any opinion about them. But when I hear, for instance, that the non-realistic cry of a consumptive girl - "I want to live" - just when she is at the point of death, is horribly forced in the context (of Meghe Dhaka Tara), I truly wonder. I feel I haven't been able to convey the entire allegorical connection between the protagonist and Uma - the wife of the Lord of Destruction, who has been the archetype of all daughters and brides of all Bengali households for centuries. Or, for instance, when I hear that I am guilty of expressionism in my latest film and that expressionism and symbolism do not go hand in hand with reality, I try to think out: what are the go has on which expressionism thrives to me, it is precisely con temporary reality, with its innumerable and unwieldy patterns and crosscurrents of forces, that needs abstraction, if I set myself the task of propounding certain fundamental traits of that reality. I think much in modern art and literature and painting have to be thrown out if we do not accept this position. Picasso and Jamini Roy, for instance, will cease to exist. This sort of theorising exasperated people like Marcel Proust, who declared that film cannot be an art. He is the antithesis of Dr. Kracauer.

One can understand this line of thinking, of course, under the shadow of the bomb. Western civilization is in the pangs of death. These are but expressions, in films, of that crisis. When learned men start abusing any abstraction, and blaming science, which is born of such abstractions, for contaminating the minds of men, one is reminded of the 18th and 19th century yearning for the 'Noble Savage'. This pathetic clinging to the superficial can make one feel merciful, but not partisan. Attempts at trying to crawl back to the origins of cinema and exalting the Still Camera plus Motion formula are ludicrous. As ludicrous, say, as trying to bring back Dionysian orgies and the satiric mimes and masks of Thespis would be in today's theatre. The same can be attempted with a sense of the contemporary, of course, but in a synthesis on a higher level, such as Strange Interlude of O'Neil or Strindberg's Dream Play, or more aptly in Brecht's experimentation. Organon remains the most brilliant a tempt at such a synthesis."

Abuse of the Melodrama

"And that is precisely what is happening in the hands of all the masters of cinema, from Flaherty down to Fellini and Antonioni. My first film was called a Picaresque episodic film along the lines of the 18th century Spanish novel Gil Blas De Santillana, the second was called a film of documentary approach; the next was a melodrama, and the fourth, nothing at all, just no film. To my mind, I am only groping. Groping to find the most proper expression for the theme at hand. Sometimes I may experiment with story forms and treatment, styles of shooting, images etc. Each one of my films is quite different from the others, though I fear that my personality and inclinations are in all of them. From the compositional point of view, all the films have divergent balancing principles thought to be inherent in the theme. I have tried to weave different patterns into the soundtracks, into the music. It's the nuances that I'm after, the exclusive, fleeting nuances. They contain the life-spark. Any story is good material if it leaves room for those nuances, even songs and dances don't have to be millstones around your neck. They are creative elements with tremendous potentials, if the theme and approach call for them. There are so many genres. One accepts melodrama as one. I do not believe in the film's privileges being turned into dogma (a la Dr. Kracauer). I do not abhor abstraction, scientific or otherwise. I believe in organising my filmic elements, even if one wants to catch and portray the very flow of life itself.

I do feel a quickening of the heart when the camera shows the instantaneous, the casual, the proverbial ripples in the water, the everyday glory of a sunset, or the involuntary twitching of a pain-stricken face. But the passions of an Othello or a drunken clown's tirade about life to a ballerina who is sick at heart are not second nature to me. I think a truly national cinema will emerge from the much-abused form of melodrama when truly serious and eminent artists bring the pressure of their entire intellect to bear upon it. After all, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa and Kinugasa took the Noh and Kabuki into their hands and squeezed supremely personal statements out of them.

The prospect is exciting, is it not?"

Komal Gandhar (Partition Trilogy)

"Contemporary Bengal; the wounds of Partition and doubts of an uncertain Independence; the depression that comes from an indiscriminate use of national idealisms; the emotional bankruptcy of a leadership nurtured on Western ideals the pain and failure resulting from these national and international crises. This film deals with these pains, painting a picture of that valueless, hopeless descent... The heroine of the film is an image of Shakuntala; the hero represents the turmoil in the minds of modern youth: not really healthy, or sane, a little obsessed, downhearted."

The Stage and the Rhythm of Bengal

Despite Ghatak's resistance to romanticise the violent past of Partition, Komal Gandhar is essentially an exercise in nostalgic romanticism, of the loss of united Bengal and Ghatak's days at IPTA. Komal Gandhar unfolds around the rivalry of Bhrigu and Shanta, and their theatre troupe, around which Anusuya has to navigate her romantic attraction to Bhrigu. Together, they stage the play Shankuntalam, which ultimately falls apart. The backstage politics within theatre troupes, the details of costume, make-up, actors, their qualms, needs, even theatre's economic history, sound equipment, backdrops, the machinery for light and wind, is explored to a depth that wasn't shown before in moving pictures. The camera is placed on the stage itself to divulge the awkward directions and plaster whiteness of masks for Shakuntala's characters. The stark contrast of the subject of commercial theatre, Shakuntala, in the disruptive backdrop of Kolkata riddled by riots, protests, sounds of gunfire and lathi-charge, in a way asserts a dialectical relationship between images of the past and a larger contemporary. Komal Gandhar establishes the present in the shadow of the Noakhali Riots and Anusuya's dead mother.

The fragmented remains of history separate the protagonists, Bhrigu and Anusuya—like it separates Resnais's French Actress and Japanese Architect in Hiroshima, Mon Amour. To come together, they have to come to terms with their own past that is occupied by the memory of violence, of partition, poverty and death. The film mimics the period when IPTA lost its unified front to separate factions forming in their own folds. On one level for Ghatak whose perceptivity is almost entirely informed by the violence of partition, the difference between the two rival groups of Shanta and Bhrigu, and Bhrigu and Anusuya in the film is essentially the difference among the lower classes who either aligned with or opposed the bourgeois sentiments of art and entertainment.

As said earlier, Ghatak took the rupture of history and extended it to everything that was degenerative or partisanal in Bengali life. To make sense of Komal Gandhar, must resort to that forgotten historical memory. The film borrows the form of community theatre, epic, drama and allegory, to re-order that memory. Anusuya's kinship to the mother she lost in Noakhali riots, and her considering Bhrigu. her mother's own son takes on an acute dimension. The logic of the bourgeois romance is beaten. Yet, Komal Gandhar is probably the only film by Ghatak which ends in romantic couple formation.

The stories of Ghatak's films usually deal with a group of impassioned youth committed to resolve the contradictions of independent India through art. But they soon lose that fervour, like the CPI's cultural wings lost its, gets broken up on petty squabbles and the narrow individualist notions of its cadre. Thematically, the story reveals Ghatak's preoccupation with the shattering of dreams to forge a unity where all the objective conditions are tearing up a social fabric. The resolution in Komal Gandhar is in terms of personal hope and compassion, overcoming social contradictions.

The Crumbling Appearance of A Divided Bengal

"We were born into a critical age. In our boyhood days, we saw Bengal, whole and glorious. Rabindranath, with his towering genius, was at the height of his literary creativity, while Bengali literature was experiencing a fresh blossoming with the works of the Kallol group, and the national movement had spread wide and deep into the schools and colleges, among the youth. Rural Bengal, still revelling in its fairy tales, panchalis, with its thirteen festivals in twelve months, throbbed with the hope of a new spurt of life. This was the world that was shattered by the War, the Famine, and when the Congress and the Muslim League brought disaster to the country and tore it into two to snatch a fragmented independence for it. Communal riots engulfed the country. The waters of the Ganga and the Padma flowed crimson with the blood of warring brothers. All this was part of our experience, of what happened around us. Our dreams faded away. We crashed onto our faces, clinging to a crumbling Bengal, divested of all its glory. What a Bengal it was that remained, with poverty and immorality as our daily companions, with blackmarketeers and dishonest politicians ruling the roost and people doomed to horror and misery!

I have not been able to break loose from this theme in all the films that I have done recently. What I have found most urgent is to present to the public eye the crumbling appearance of a divided Bengal to awaken the Bengalis to an awareness of their state and a concern for their past and the future. As an artist I have tried to remain honest, and it is for the future to decide in how far I have succeeded."

Komal Gandhar was a commercial failure.

"I am most surprised at audiences' failure to accept Komal Gandhar, which I consider to be my most intellectual film. I have a hunch that the film will come into its own maybe after twenty or twenty-five years. It deals with a problem that may not yet have become in- tense enough to endanger the Bengalis' very existence.

Anyway, in both the active and inactive phases of my life as an artist, I have realized that it is imperative for the artist to live in a state of daily struggle, struggling against a wide range of inhibitions. Once in a while a crisis may overpower an artist temporarily, but that should not be allowed to drive him to compromise. In other words, we should never surrender to a crisis, and abdicate our conscience, our freedom, our being."

Ghatak started filming his sixth film, Subarnarekha but lack of financers caused long breaks in the shoot, compelling him to raise funds by making advertisement films and writing scripts for sale. Scissors, an Ad film for Imperial Tobacco Company, for instance, was made to raise funds for the completion of Subarnarekha

Ustad Alauddin Khan

The documentary on Ustad Alauddin Khan was sponsored by Sangeet Natak Akademi and talks about the role of the legend as a guru of several renowned musicians. Alauddin Khan's vocation is a complete departure from the traditional Hindustani classical gharanas, being associated with Bengali rural stage theatre or jatra, where he was exposed to jari, sari, baul, bhatiyali, kirtan, and panchali verses. He was trained to play a mix of various instruments both foreign and indigenous, by Swami Vivekananda's brother Amritalal Datta. He laid foundation to the Maihar Gharana. Khan also toured across Europe with Uday Shankar's ballet troupe. Ritwik's family was very close to Baba Alauddin Khan. Besides Khan, the documentary features archival footage of Pt Ravi Shankar, Annapurna Devi and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. However, Ritwik's role as the director doesn't feature in the credits.

Ritwik calls himself a disciple of Khan.

Bagalar Bongo Darshan (Unfinished)

Starring Sunil, Indrani Mukherjee and Padma Devi, the film was abandoned after a week's shooting. In his own testament it, was an adaptation of a story by the Italian neo-realist filmmaker Alessandro Blasetti. If completed, this would have been Ghatak's unabashed comedy.

Ghatak had a short stint as teacher and vice-president at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. Around the end of 1964, Ghatak received invites to lecture at FTII, Poona but his alcoholism had taken a toll on his health, and he became more erratic. Nevertheless, he took the position of Vice President at Poona to get better. Surama recollects from his letters that till then, he still wanted to get better and showed concern for the family and the children. Around this period, Ritwik made the first recorded Bengali translation of Bertolt Brecht's 'The Caucasian Chalk Circle' and 'The Life of Galileo'.
Irreverent of textbooks or theory, what he brought to the classroom was 'passion, the possibilities of cinema, a childlike enthusiasm for the medium-and storytelling'. Saaed Akhtar Mirza remembers that Kundan Shah had asked him what one needed to be a good director, and he replied, 'A bottle in one pocket of your kurta, your childhood in the other'. "He used to talk about cinema in a manner that was more dreamlike, more than text and theory", Mirza says. "He gave us a sense that it's an active creation, not just business. That gave us a sense of responsibility, when you attach your name to a piece of work, be careful, be sure."

In early 1965, Ghatak wrote home: "I am being looked after extremely well here, it might be the only place left where everyone is excited to have me."

During his short stint at FTII, Pune, Ritwik Ghatak was involved in the making of two student films: Fear and Rendezvous.
Fear is pivoted on the paranoia of the atomic bomb which was a recurring fear of ultimate and complete decimation of civilization in the Cold War era. It features Subhash Ghai, Asrani and others from the batch of 1964-65.

"People often ask what we, his students, have inherited from Ritwik Ghatak. The problem, here, is that they have not realised what it meant to work in a continuous line of tradition. Our elders prefer imitation to development. They would prefer that learning still be restricted to the feudal mode. The hereditary principle may be removed but the young must copy what they have picked up from the master craftsman. It is the most certain method of retaining the status quo; of endorsing the work of opportunistic mediocrity. In an atmosphere where our cultural attitudes and artefacts have been identified with the objectification of effete feudal Brahminism and European humanism inflicted on us by the colonials, Ritwikda's work is the violent assertion of our identity. It is the cry of the dying girl in Meghe Dhaka Tara which echoes through the hills, our right to live. The division of Bengal which was responsible for her tragedy was only the immediate symptom of a broader division. The impetus, not only to the obvious narrative content to his films, but to their very language, was given by the tremendous splintering of the social system, of its values, while the facade of a hoary culture was still being maintained. The contradictions of a society that could have modernized itself after attaining formal independence are the prime cause of a deeper division. The middle class is seen at the unsteady apex of the inverted triangle, brought about by the three-way division central to the structure of Meghe Dhaka Tara. The feminine principle, borrowed from our earlier lower level of materialist culture, also suffers the split into the three principal women characters - the cruel mother, the sensual daughter and the preserving and nurturing heroine.

The triangular compositions and the multiple allusions to Durga on the rich sound-track reinforce the pattern. To those critics who are indifferent to this method of structuring.

Subarnarekha (partition trilogy)

"One archetypal image that has been haunting us from a remote past is today confronting us all over the world. You may call it by many names: the Hydrogen Bomb, or Strategic Air Command or De Gaulle or Adeneur, or some other name you would not like to mention. It is the power of annihilation, the ability to destroy and, perhaps like little Sita, we have suddenly found ourselves confronted by it. When I was making the film, none of this had occur- red to me. My only thought was that there was some- thing unseemly in the child's joy as she roamed among the mute witnesses of a great upheaval. It is not good to have so much innocence."

Ghatak's lifelong project is the project of remembrance, essentially remembering the genocidal victory of history. He perceives the tragedy of the 40s, of suffering, death, displacement, and violation of the Bengali people, not as the failure of revolution but as oblivion of his people. He talks about what's lost in terms of a vague memory of belonging and plenitude. But the exhumation of memory in his films does not allow a wholesome return to the past, as Ray's does; it brings back the moment of rupture to consciousness—a moment that he reminds us not to forget. He refuses to agree with the logic of violence, and with the historical displacement of his people as the only outcome that could come out of it. The personal tragedy in the lives of his characters always recall the tragedy of the partition, and the loss of Home.

Ghatak alludes to the imagery of The Wasteland by T S Eliot. He also uses the tune of Patricia from the soundtrack of La Dolce Vita in the pub scene for a devastating comment on decadence in the world's poorest city. He does not hesitate to use a cliché against itself - by making it brutal and violent, an unusual quality in Indian cinema.

The film spans itself from the childhood of Sita— and the nationalist struggle, Jallianwala Bagh and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi—to her maturity and eventual death, as the squalor of the refugee camp becomes the squalor of Calcutta. It spans across her elder brother Ishwar—a Brahmo reformed man's uprightness and confidence in the nationalist bourgeoisie (represented in the figure of the casteist Marwari businessman Rambilas) to the destruction of those ideals amid the decadent pleasures of the same class. Ishwar, displaced from his home with his little sister Sita, creates an isolated mythic world on the bank of the Subarnarekha river, after 'deserting' Nabajiban Colony—a refugee encampment. He adopts a little boy—Abhiram— later revealed to be from an untouchable caste, whose mother is abducted by the zamindar's henchmen. In Ishwar's making of a new home and life by denying the historical separation and aspiring to be part of the ruling class, we see the making of the modern Indian citizen. Ghatak negotiates this modernising project by bringing back the 'mourning that underlines this growth'. Sita's eventual elopement with Abhiram on the day of her wedding, shatter's Ishwar mythical world and exposes the falseness under its surface. Undivided Bengal is a permanent absence. Subarnarekha is an epochal response to this absence; the portrayal of the change that has taken place in the country reflecting in Haraprashad's own conception of this struggle when he denounces Ishwar as a deserter, to his own desertion and cynicism and his realisation that "death does not come so easily".

Ghatak says
'Subarnarekha is not a flawless film. The story chosen was screamingly melodramatic. I have joined the different phases of the narrative together to make it a story of fateful coincidences. There are several novels that offer parallels for such plotting. e.g. Gora or Nauka Dubi (The Wrecked) or Shesher Kabita ( Farewell my Friend ), all by Rabindranath, where the author is not concerned exclusively with telling a story but more concerned with attitudes as they evolved along with the events, such coincidences, even if they occasionally appear incredible, don't really jar, as long as there is a certain overall verisimilitude.
The death of Abhiram's mother, or Ishwar discovering Sita in the brothel won't appear incredible if I have succeeded in projecting the problems of Abhiram and Sita, and Haraprasad and Ishwar authentically.
The divided, debilitated Bengal that we have known for days on end is in the same state as Sita in the brothel. And we who have lived in an undivided Bengal survive in a daze after a night of orgy.
There has been such a spate of talk and discussion around 'Subarnarekha that one need not add to it.'

The Bohurupee

The cult of the goddess Kali and Shakta worship is an intrinsic part of Bengal's cultural milieu. The sudden appearance of the 'bohurupee' (an impersonator who earns a living by dressing up as gods and goddesses), as Kali in the blasted airstrip, startles little Sita. Kali is the archetypal symbol of destruction and regeneration. Ichnographically identified by black skin, four arms, the tongue sticking out of a grisly, blood soaked mouth, a Munda-mala, and armed with a sickle shaped weapon called kharga, she is the portent of destruction. The destruction in the film thus becomes archetypal with the appearance, but soon recedes. All we see is a poor performance-artist asking for a coin. Modern myth gets intertwined with the ancient, as it is revealed to Sita that her legendary namesake is a daughter of the earth who receded into her womb, hence setting Sita into a similar path of suffering which is not epic but tragic in proportion, unlike her mythical counterpart.

"I would rather recall an episode from when we were shooting. We were camping at the time on the bank of the river Subarna. I did not have a clear plan of the narrative sequence to be followed in the film in my mind as yet, and was doing the outdoor shooting out of sequence. One morning, my younger daughter ran up to me to tell me how she had been scared by a Bohurupee who had suddenly appeared before her, while she had been walking alone in a mud road in the fields, and had chased her in his horrible guise of the goddess Kali. In a flash I could see Sita, the central character of my film, as a child of today, screaming in panic, maybe in the same way, as she suddenly confronted Mahakala.

I searched the Bohurupee out. I still did not know exactly how I would use him, I had no clear idea as yet; still, I carried out the shooting. I do not know how credible it appeared in the film to the viewers, but for me it has been vitally significant. In the film, I have drawn on this theme of Mahakala in several ways to underscore the hollow values of modern life, rent from its moorings in the puranic tradition.

I have used the Puranas in the same arbitrary manner in my earlier films, too in MEGHE DHAKA TARA and KOMAL GANDHAR, for example. The traditional songs that circulate in Bengal at the time when Uma is supposed to return to her in-laws' home have been used as part of the music in MEGHE DHAKA TARA, just as wedding songs are profusely scattered throughout KOMAL GANDHAR. I desire a reunion of the two Bengals. Hence the film is replete with songs of union. When the camera suddenly comes to a halt at the dead end of a railway track, where the old road to eastern Bengal has been snapped off, it raises (towards the close of the film) a searing scream in Anusuya's heart.

Such a use of mahakaala offers certain advantages that are associated with the use of mythology in art. On the bank of the river Subarnarekha I have seen an abandoned aerodrome sprawling over a large area. A little boy and a little girl, fascinated with the ruins of that aerodrome, have gone searching for their forgotten past. The two innocent creatures wouldn't know that several such ruins of aerodromes lie behind the disaster that looms over them. So, they play in the midst of destruction and ruins. How frightening their innocence is!"

Sita, devastated from the news of Abhiram's death in a mob attack, showing the return to that moment of rupture, of randomized outcomes in the life of the displaced people who can never feel at home. War, within and without, is always at the edge to threaten the secure world of the individual. 'I often hear complaints about the frequent use of coincidences in the film. There is no doubt that there are a good number of coincidences. But the main incident in the film, of the brother visiting his sister who is a prostitute: that, in itself, is such a big coincidence that I have used it as a form. From the very beginning, I have consciously shown the audience that form of coincidence. This is also a formal trick a kind of epic style. At the same time, by instilling a little significance into the coincidence I have tried to make it pregnant (with meaning).''

The clash between the world outside and the reality of the content wthin. In the so called space age, when the world was consumed by the frenzy of space exploration with the USSR launching Yuri Gagarin to the orbit, Ishwar, frustrated by the crumbling of his own inner world, throws the newspaper reading the same, into the furnace. In such a parallel moment of juxtaposition, Ishwar and Haraprasad who have both contemplated suicide after the personal losses that have depleted their uprightness, talk about the crisis of their time and the crowd of the club, dubious to all this, playing the tune of La Dolce Vita. Haraprashad calls it "bibhatsa-maja", a disgusting fun!

The film ends with the child- with Tagore's celebrated lines in Shishu Tirtha: "Victory to Man, the New-born, the Ever living".

Ghatak says, "I have tried to mould SUBARNAREKHA into a chronicle play. I implied that in the introduction. Keeping in mind the things necessary for such a chronicle, I have divided the film's movement up with cards, upon which the writing and calligraphy suggested by the chronicle appears.

It isn't possible to talk about all the different levels in the play. Because, after erecting the framework, I've tried to immerse myself in it. There are many things which arose spontaneously, thrown up from the deeps of the mind. Whatever they may be, they're certainly not despair. The use of Sita's face, Biru's face, and the use of a certain kind of landscape conveys, I hope, that denial of despair. My entire being protests when I hear of de- cadence in my film. These faces are no reflections of decadence. While making this film I was influenced by Tagore's Sishu-tirtha (the Bengali translation of the long poem The Child, originally written in English ). The influence was not just the question of adding two lines at the end. Throughout the film, from the beginning, in parts of the dialogue, the music, in the organisation of some incidents, Sishu-tirtha has inevitably crept in. And therefore the last three lines were irresistible. They are not in gloom."

The last scene in Apur Sansar- Apu's first steps to a new life with his son Kajal on his shoulders. It is the wholesome return, to the exhalation of relief for Apu that Ghatak doesn't allow his characters to enjoy. There's always a persisting doubt and the haunting memory of the rupture teetering at the edge.

Ghatak's stories are peopled with such characters as Nita, Ishwar and Sita, who howl that despite the past, they want to live; who try to negotiate violent interdictions of change only for the feudal family structure to fail. In the partition triptych, we see the complex struggle of the individual unable to comprehend the processes of change, struggling against the crumbling ruins of the myths that has sustained them their entire lives.

Ghatak with the editor of his seven full length feature films, Ramesh Joshi

Ghatak and Ideology

What is the ideological base of the contradictions and conflicts among the characters and events in your films?

The ideological base is essentially fundamental Marxism, Marxism not in the sense of this party or that party, but Marxism philosophically, psychologically. Marx, Engels, Lenin - there are many touches of their writings in the various contradictions and conflicts.

Can I say that you have used legend or myth in your form or structure, to place Marxism in an Indian context?
I have tried to unify the two.

Just as unpredictably he had arrived, Ghatak resigned from FTII in less than a year and left for Shillong to be reunited with Surama and the children.

Scientists of Tomorrow

In 1967, Films Division of India got Ghatak to direct Scientists of Tomorrow. The film explains the details of the research scheme instituted by the Government of India for the benefit of young talented scientists. Under the scheme, the government encourages students with a scientific bent of mind by awarding scholarships from the BSc to PhD degrees. The cinematography was by Amarjit while Ramesh Joshi edited it. Ritwik wrote and composed for this 10-minute-long propaganda documentary.

Ranger Golam (unfinished)

Starring Anil Chatterjee, Sita Devi and Jahar Roy, the film was abandoned after a few outdoor shoots.

Vietnam niye je chahbi karte chai' (The film I want to make on Vietnam)

Published originally in Bengali in a brochure for the West Bengal Youth Festival, Ghatak expressed his wish to make a film on Vietnam. In his words, the fight in Vietnam is a fight being fought in Bengal too for Vietnam stands as a symbol of protest against exploitation. More so, he consider Vietnam is the ultimate extension of that protest everywhere in the world. All the miseries of India have found a magnification in the Vietnam War.
"A Calcutta Slum.
A room, one of the shabbiest.
A mother, beside a sick kid. A voice from outside. The mother draws some country liquor from a vessel in the corner.
The sick child cries out.
The smoke from a newly lit oven outside. The mother hands the bottle of liquor over to a amn.
A police whistle rises over the child's wailing. A mass of people run in from all sides and make a circle.
The police whistle ... the child wailing ...
The sound of a rocket taking off.
An American bomber. Split into two in mid-air. It will drop now.
...
A young man hit by a bullet. He may be a student, or a peasant. The young man will fall on his face on the ground with his scream, combination of agony and ecstasy, ringing through the air. ... he would snatch at the earth again and again with both his hands. My camera would reach beyond his hands to fix on the mass of blood with earth sucking it up slowly.
That is where another Vietnam is being born. A Vietnam that is immortal. "

In 1969, Ritwik was grappling not only with alcoholism but also with what may have been a form of dementia — hallucinations, delirium, depression, and symptoms resembling schizophrenia. A pivotal decision was taken at this time that would have a lasting impact on his mental state. Doctors recommended electroconvulsive therapy as a drastic yet supposedly 'effective' measure in his treatment plan, and regrettably, his wife Surama did not oppose it. The outcome, however, was increased estrangement and mental turmoil. Ritwik occasionally spoke to Surama of disturbing visions — women drenched in blood — which he sometimes described as the “spirit of Bangladesh.” For a time, he was subjected to heavy daily injections that repeatedly left him unconscious. He confided in Surama that his thoughts had become muddled and that he simply wanted to return home. Despite this, his hospitalization continued, as the situation at home remained unstable and unresolved.

Amar Lenin (My Lenin)

Made on Lenin's centenary for the then Communist Government of West Bengal, Amar Lenin is a documentary short-propaganda film expounding on Lenin's impact on the workers and labourers of rural Bengal. After making the film, countries such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of Poland approached Ritwik Ghatak for him to show the movie in those countries. However, issues arose with the National Film Censorship Board of India which did not approve of the movie and banned it in India. Ghatak and his team had to work hard to have the movie passed by the censorship board. Ritwik Ghatak personally met with Indira Gandhi on this matter. The available print of the documentary is restored by the British Film Institute.

The Jatra Form and Amar Lenin

Jatra is a community based theatre/pala that harks back to Hindu mythology and local histories for the twin purpose of edification and entertainment. Ghatak's Amar Lenin documents the confluence of folk theatre and dramatic rendering of Lenin's life, topped with a voiceover narration. In the 60s and 70s, Jatra was the first point of contact between revolutionary ideology of Communism and rural Bengal. Before consolidation of the Left front, Bengal slipped in and out of President's rule, and Naxal uprisings were causing havoc in the countryside as well as in Calcutta. The documentary is perhaps the only surviving footage of community theatre propagating Communism and Marxist principles for edification of rural Bengalis and is testament to the mode of communal theatre being a persuasive mode of propaganda.

The revolutionary zeal was threaded across different mediums of artistic production. For instanace, Chittaprosad's painting, further affirms Ghatak's docu-film, and testifies to Bengal's the political ideation of USSR. Communists in Bengal were deeply engaged with the idea of the "Revolution" and applying themselves to political theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, besides the championing the inventive currents of Europe, in the works of Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, Gogol, Chekov and so on.

Puruliar Chhau (The Chhau Dance of Purulia)

In 1970, Ghatak explored the traditional heritage of Chhau in the documentary titled Puruliar Chhau. Chhau escaped the patronage of the Purulia royal estate and became a form of public performance. Ghatak probes into the life of the performers, including close shots of eminent dancers like Madhu Ray, Gokul Roy, Gambhir Singh and Lal Mahato, and dwells on the arduousness of the profession. His use of flambeau (a rural life lighting to avoid technical lights) and the dramatic way of the narration in which the narrator becomes an integral part of Chhau are highpoints of this documentary. Ritwik attempts to show how indigenous people of the poorest district in West Bengal at the time, Purulia, use this art form to articulate their struggle against oppression and exploitation, by evoking drama and myth to reach their audience.

Durbar Gati Padma (There Flows Padma, The Mother River)

The river Padma is the central motif in the film, the river that determines the lives of communities on its banks. The documentary was made by Ghatak in 1971 to protest the Pakistani genocide in then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with Biswajit Chatterjee playing the role of a mukti-joddha who offers a voice-over narration on the enormity of Bangladesh Mukti Juddho (Bangladesh Liberation War).
Rajesh Khanna, Sharmila Tagore, Dharmendra, Hema Malini, Dilip Kumar, Manna Dey, Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, Sunil Dutt, S D Burman and Saira Banu feature in this documentary, showing public support for the Mukti Bahini and waving the flag of Bangladesh.
Ghatak uses, a mix of media, filmed footage of the war, print reporting, posters and paintings of Chittaprosad Bhattacharya- Bangladesh War Series that define the pathos of the time.

The Liberation War started as an armed guerrilla resistance to indiscriminate killing of students, academicians, Bengali nationalists and commoners alike in Operation Searchlight initiated by the West Pakistani military junta, against the rise of Bengali Cultural Nationalism and the call for an independent Bangladesh by the Awami League under the leadership of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Ghatak reports on the war, the mobilisation of Bengalis against the oppressive regime of President Yahya Khan, widespread killings, and displacement to refugee camps across the border.

Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas)

"Titash has become a kind of commemoration of the past that I left behind long ago. There is no political argument in this film. The novel is epic in style, and I have tried to capture this quality in my film. Titash has been closely associated in my mind with many childhood events that I saw with my own eyes. It was as if I was journeying backward in time, to the East Bengal of thirty years ago. When I was making the film, it occurred to me that nothing of the past survives today, nothing can survive. History is ruthless. No, it is all lost. Nothing remains."

"The refugee problem has been a recurring theme in most of your films. Do you think this problem has a direct relevance to the film you have made in Bangladesh, Titash Ekti Nadir Naam? "

It doesn't affect me directly. It does in a broader sense, in an indirect way, in a subliminal way. Film-making is a question, you know, of your subconscious, your feeling of reality. I have tackled the refugee 'problem', as you have used the term, not as a refugee problem. To me it was the division of a culture, and I was shocked. During the partition period I hated these pretentious people who clamoured about our independence, our freedom. You kids are finished, you have not seen that Bengal of mine. I just kept on watching what was happening, how the behaviour pattern was changing due to this great betrayal of national liberation. And I probably gave vent to what I felt. Today I am not happy, and whatever I have seen unconsciously or consciously comes out in my films. My films may have been ridden with expressive slogan-mongering or they may be remote. But the cardinal point remains: that I am frustrated with what I see all around me, I am tired of it.

Master on Master: Mani Kaul on Ghatak's Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas)

"In Titash, Ghatak says something quite wonderful – a civilisation never dies. And if there is a paddy field on the dry bed of the river Titash, another civilisation will be born. So, for Ghatak, civilisation is eternal. And that's what people in India call “parampara,” it is stronger than tradition. They're saying the same thing, a river can dry up and go under the earth, but it'll suddenly spring up somewhere in a kind of a trickle and then suddenly become a river again.

So, for Ghatak, it's like making a film on a civilisation. You cannot identify the theme of Titash. When you want to say, “What is this film about?” It's impossible, it's so difficult. If you talk about one thing then you just sort of reduce the complexity of that work. So some people have looked at Titash, especially some Western critics and this has been their kind of objection to Ghatak, that he's melodramatic. To my mind he's not melodramatic at all, I feel he is actually using melodrama only as a medium."

Master on Master: Kumar Shahani on Ghatak and Titash

"It is the knowledge of being separated that creates the passion in Kishore of Titash, that madness which had made of itself a tribal archetype, upon which the great myths, across cultures, of Shiva and Christ have been built. For me, it was startling to find that such diverse mythologies as those of the self-created phallic god and the immaculately conceived martyr could rest upon the same archetype. It is not only the long hair and their unflinching attention to the secret of being that characterises them but also the way they are placed in relation to the evolved tribe.
It is only through the realisation of their madness that tradition will live, renew itself and Death be forgiven for drawing every child to himself. There, the archetype ends and the myths make their own distinctive elaborations."

Siva had let loose his long tresses and the waters of the Ganga had rushed out to flood the world. He had to tie them together again to contain her flow. Is this a reversal of an earlier myth or an anticipation of Leonardo da Vinci's metaphor of water for hair? With great daring, Ritwik creates his grand pause of silence in Titash by a shot of hair and water that unites the two terms of the container and the contained. A repose of such bursting energy that it makes real the imagined creation of the universe.

For, in the end all myths must refer to origins, ultimate causes that precede the concept of God. Titash Ekti Nadir Naam is not about the drying up of a river but of bringing it forth again. It is itself a ritual which takes on the form of ritual-myth that preceded theism and its attendant institution of prayer. Like the Vratas (ritual flows - ), that created fertility through transference of human modes of reproduction and thought-feeling to nature. That is the basis of language and, therefore, science as well as myth."

Ghatak's Health on Tenterhooks

Ritwik was diagnosed with tuberculosis after finish Titash in Bangladesh. His condition deteriorated swiftly.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, (who was introduced to Ghatak when he was a theatre activist while she lived in Santiniketan, and who later worked on an unfinished documentary on Mrs. Gandhi in 1972) sent her personal helicopter to bring him back to India. Ritwik was immediately hospitalised at the Calcutta Medical Hospital. Uttam Kumar contributed financially towards his treatment, and Surama travelled back and forth between Sinthia and Calcutta to check on his general condition.

After Ritwik was discharged, he started living with Biswajit Chatterjee in Calcutta again.

Juki Takko aar Goppo (Reason, Argument and Story)

Ghatak on Ghatak : "This is a statement by a profoundly frustrated person. He is seeking... to restore contact with contemporary reality which he has lost on a journey through life... I do not know whether I will be able to make others see eye-to-eye with me, especially at the present juncture, with the mood around me being what it is... The cardinal point is: I want to convey my personal, individual reaction to things in or around me... For a mass-media this is a dismal picture. Is it not so?"

"Which is the correct way? Society is a complex phenomenon and it should be tackled with great judiciousness. Multiple trends and tendencies cross each other continuously. The problem is which one to choose, and how to go
about it. I have emphasized that the genesis of all our present-day problems is that great betrayal, the so-called Independence. But I did not specify the current phase as strictly neo-colonial. I can visualize only two alternatives: either straight Fascism or some way out of it along Leninist ideology. If you are aware of German youth during 1929–33, you will understand the tensions in our present-day youngsters, fast turning
into lumens. . . . The entire structure is crumbling down and I believe that some drastic turn is bound to come soon."

Juki and the Prophecy

Juki is testament to Ghatak's deeply sceptical evaluation of the gains of Indian independence in the hands of what he would call a bourgeois–landlord ruling party; and finally his anguish at the disarray and sectarianism of the Communist Party from the 1960s onwards. When he made Juki in 1974 he was at the end of his tether and his health was failing him. But he was astute enough to realize that the nation, polarized between agents of political expediency and ultra radicalism, was on the brink—and if it was the last thing he did he would intervene as an artist.
In 1975, when Indira Gandhi declared a national emergency, the liberal phase of Indian democracy seemed to be over. And although democracy was restored in 1977—Ghatak died in 1976—Ghatak's prophecy about the lumpenization, indeed the continued brutalization of Indian political life can be said to have been borne out

The Wise Fool

Ghatak creates a mock-autobiographical sketch of the failed life and eventful death of a communist intellectual, Nilkantha Bagchi in Jukti. Nilkantha, a name acquired by Siva in a moment of awesome generosity when he swallows the poison that comes up with the ambrosia in the great churning of the ocean by gods and demons. This establishes Siva's omnipotence; he is nevertheless marked by the event: his throat is stained blue, hence the name Nilkantha. But having set up the protagonist in this mythical framework, Jukti's narrative proceeds to devolve his iconicity. Mockingly, affectionately, a transcendent figure is turned inside out into a man filled with grand illusion but also marked by the fallibility that distinguishes the martyr. Nilkantha is a middle-class schoolteacher and writer; he was a communist, he is now an alcoholic. He is the 'representative of an irresponsible middle-class intelligentsia, wasted and degenerate'. Nilkantha drinks liquor with a self-destructive voraciousness. When he says at the end, 'I am burning, the universe is burning', you know that this is the martyr of all religions reduced in our own time from a blazing icon to a mere effigy, yet aspiring to die on behalf of the good, to become a sign of the betrayal of the good.
Nilkantha is emblematic but he's never valorised. He admonishes his corrupt comrade Shatrujit, who has flourished over the years writing cheap drivel, telling him to 'practise thinking', but only after he has wheedled from him ten rupees for a drink, turning the joke on himself as a wasted ideologue

Jukti and the Godardian Film Logic

Ghatak uses what could be called Godardian techniques in Jukti—the interspacing of neutral images of the city and the landscape, the insertion of documentary footage, the abruptness of frontal address over and against the fictional narrative so as to privilege the present. Indeed Ghatak adopts the logic of the cinematic present in Jukti and he does this as much by the narrative style, the seemingly spontaneous performative aspect of the actors, as by the way the series of scenes are laid out. The exiled group (Nilkantha, Nachiketa, Bangabala, the impoverished Sanskrit teacher Jagannath Bhattacharya) meanders through perfunctory, nearly amateurish settings. They are seen wandering the Calcutta streets punctuated by derelict tea stalls and liquor shops, at the river front and on park benches. They go across the outskirts of the city and beyond into the countryside where they tarry with Panchanan Ustad, an exponent of chhau. Then through parched fields and peasant-land till they
come to the symbolic crossroads where they meet a drunken cart-driver who directs them to their destination by saying go right, then left, then right, then left. Nilkantha does make his way back to his son and estranged wife, now working as a schoolteacher at Kanchanpur, only to be compelled to set out once again.

Naxalbari and the Dance of Death

The stylised violence of the Dance of Death is precisely the image that comes, before one in the scene of the encounter with the Naxalites, and the arrival of the police. It is one of the most memorable in Ghatak's cinema, and perhaps offers us a key to what he felt and thought in the last years of his life.

The event and fallout of Naxalbari came as a strange attack on the peoples' conscience. While on one level the movement represented a radically new position within our political sphere- it is the only significant reflection of the Maoist position- its true impact has been more than human one. Between 1969-71, vast numbers of Calcutta's youth went out into the countryside and took up guns to fight alongside the peasantry. It was an amazing display of disenchantment with the dominant social system, the ruling class and the established left parties; a period when charismatic leadership was accompanied by a rousing determination to bring matters to a head.

But even as the people watched, dumbfounded, it was followed by cold-blooded reprisals as the state forces systematically cracked down on the youth. Calcutta was searched house by house, and hundreds of youth with Naxalite connections and their friends, were flushed out and killed. The memory of the entirely unequal battle, and the subsequent massacre still haunts people who lived through it.

One can only imagine the impact this had on Ritwik Ghatak. But one can see in the film how Neelkantha, the enigmatic mask-figure, makes his only fervent attempt to get across to another person. It is almost laughable, were it not so savagely pathetic, to see the old man telling the youthful figure before him of dialectical and historical materialism while the boy is obviously more concerned with guarding his sleeping comrades against a possible attack from the police. The next morning come the police, and the students are massacred. And a stray bullet hits Neelkantha. We see him crumbling to the ground, the bottle of liquor gradually pouring out of his hand on to the lens of the camera itself.

His last words to Durga are, "Do you remember the story Madan Tati of Manik Bandopadhyay? About the weaver who ran an empty loom because he did not want to let down his comrades by going back to work but was too addicted to the habit of running it? I would like to be like him."

Bongobala and the Spirit of Bengal

Bongobala tells Neelkantha about what she has seen and experienced in Bangladesh during the Pakistani genocide. The man is sitting as he always does, looking away, betraying nothing. But then, as she falls into his lap, sobbing, he in- tones, "Some day, at some new moon we shall realise that sleeping is not death...". He looks up, and even as he says this a transformation comes over his face, as the mask gives way to compassion. It is a use of the mask that we have perhaps only seen in Chaplin before".

Ghatak has in this film used himself, his bohemian reputation, as the mythic base from which to open out the content. He is himself the past the past that disturbs Shatrujit, that is sought to be destroyed by Durga and it is only through his own destruction even as the Naxalite youths are killed, that makes it possible for the others to face the future afresh.

Here we see a transformation of myth, for it is now the cementing factor, the substance that unites individual struggles. Like the destruction of romanticism giving way to a more healthy romanticism, the strength to dream; destructive, constricting myth gives way to more constructive, political myth.

What is your privately-earned truth that has inspired your stories, films and plays?

Being a Bengali from East Pakistan. I have seen the untold miseries inflicted on my people in the name of independence- which is a fake and a sham. I have reacted violently to this and even in my last film, which is yet to be released (JUKTI TAKKO AR GAPPO) I have tried to portray different aspects of this. I am also aware of a complete break-down of moral values around me, especially among the younger generation of today. My next film, which will be called SHEY BISHNUPRIYA, deals with this problem. My recent play is based on the same theme.

Ghatak on World Cinema

"Films are still perhaps the most exciting mass medium in the world today. But few directors have cared to explore its vast possibilities. Which directors or schools of film-making, in your opinion, have been exceptionally successful?"

"In my opinion Sergei Yuktevich and Louis Buñuel are the very greatest. But Yuktevich died recently and Buñuel, in disgust, has stopped making films as a protest against the commercialisation of this great art form."

"Jean-Luc Godard says that as long as film-making is not as cheap as pen and paper in this bourgeois world, good films cannot be made. I last heard about him a few months ago from a French journalist. He has stopped making films and whiles away his time on the boulevards of Paris and in doing party-work."

"Then there is a Japanese school. I am not talking about export quality film directors such as Akira Kurosawa but of directors like Mizoguchi, Ozu and Tanaka. Now there are some promising young directors among them, such as Nagisa Oshima. In South- America we have Leopold Torre Nilson; in Greece there is Michael Cacoyannis and, of course, in Sweden there is Ingmar Bergman. I don't set much store by the so-called underground cinema of America, or by the British school, or by the clinically disinfected realism of poverty produced by directors such as Satyajit Ray. There is also a wave of pornographic films which makes me furious. There may be other notable filmmakers, but since the chance of seeing the latest works from abroad is almost non-existent in our country, I may have missed many remarkable works of art."

"I notice that you have not included the Italian school or the controversial Nouvelle Vague movement."

Well, the Italian school seems to me be a spent force. After the Italian spark of neo-realism, which ultimately turned into fantastic realism in the hands of great masters like Frederico Fellini, in Antonioni, Luchino Visconti and others, it has very little else to offer. The same is true of the Polish school led by Andrej Wajda hands of people like tended to go towards a sort of new existentialism. Polanski has rightly found his heaven in Hollywood.

Ghatak on the film form: "Film is not a form, it has forms"

Did you realize your ambition through the film medium?

Looking back I can say that there's no love lost between me and the film medium. I just want to convey whatever I feel about the reality around me and I want to shout. Cinema still seems to be the ideal medium for this, because it can reach umpteen billions once the work is done. That is why I produce films not for their own sake, but for the sake of my people. They say that television may soon take its place. It may reach out to millions more. Then I will drop the cinema and turn to TV.

Ghatak on 'Indian' Cinema

Well, you are aware of what Indian filmmakers are doing. How high would our films rate as creative works?

I am a very bad cinema-goer. I rarely see films, yet, from the few that I have seen, I would say that Bengali films have stopped making any progress. Our new filmmakers are wallowing in the mire with maudlin tears and horse opera. But in other parts of India, including Bombay, a new generation of filmmakers is showing signs of promise. There is a movement in Bengal as well, but it is being stifled by commercialism.

Ghatak and the Jungian Mother Complex

You have spoken and written on many occasions about the theory of Jung about the collective unconscious. But you also say that Marxism is your 'ideological base'. Is Jung's theory complementary to Marxism?

Absolutely complementary. If you have studied Jung's theory- I hope you have read him then you will know that there is no conflict between Jung and Marx. Marx is busy with one world, Jung with another. There is no inherent contradiction between them. The collective unconscious has a great influence the unconscious behaviour of man. And the entire class structure determines the man's conscious behaviour. But the world of the unconscious is like the world of dreams, what is the use of analysing that through Marx? This is where Jung comes in. This is what I feel. There is no contradiction between Jung and Marx, they are dealing with two different worlds. And they complement each other immensely.

The one thing that I have imbibed from Jung in my films, is his mother complex. A friend once told me 'You have been devoured by the Mother.' The Mother image appears in all my films. But how have I been devoured by it? The raison d'être of the entire Chhau dance sequence in JUKTI TAKKO AR GAPPO is the mother complex. Equate that girl, Shaonli, with this factor. Gyanesh says, "Go on dancing. If you don't dance, nothing will evolve." This is entirely Jungian. In Titash Ekti Nadir Naam the boy dreams of his mother as an incarnation of Bhagabati (another name for the goddess Durga). This mother complex is a basic point.

Ghatak on Ghatak: Cinema is not art to me

What, in your opinion, is the role of an artist, particularly that of a cinema artist?

I am not an artist, nor am I a cinema artist. Cinema is no art form to me. It is only a means to the end of serving my people. I am not a sociologist, and hence, I do not harbour illusions that my cinema can change the people. No one filmmaker can change the people. The people are too great. They are changing themselves. I am not changing things, I am only recording the great changes that are taking place. Cinema for me is nothing but an expression. It is a means of expressing my anger at the sorrows and sufferings of my people. Tomorrow, beyond cinema, man's intellect may probably rear something else that may express the joys, sorrows, aspirations, dreams and ideals of the people with a force and immediacy stronger than that of the cinema. That would then become the ideal medium.

Ghatak on Ghatak: Political Cinema?

Since your films reflect an intense political awareness, is it true to say that you are the first political filmmaker of India?

I don't know. Why do you ask me this type of question? How can I test myself in this position! It is for my audience to decide whether I am a political filmmaker at all, whether I am the first political filmmaker, the only filmmaker, it's all up to them to decide. In a broader context, all films are political, as all art is, as all artists are. It is either of this or that class. One filmmaker may give it the name political, another may not, but ultimately it all serves the same purpose. Cinema, being what it is, also serves politics through its various forms and genres.

Ghatak on the Modern Tendencies of Cinema

What is your opinion about the modern tendencies in the cinema, particularly the thinking that emotional identification with the film's characters is a bourgeois pastime, that the director should break this illusion of reality and come out and speak to the audience?

There is nothing modern about this. This has existed from time immemorial. Have you read Aristophanes? He was born and died 2500 years ago in a city called Athens. He did it. Therefore there is nothing modern about it. There are forms and forms. This is one kind of form, and somebody like Jean-Luc Godard is practicing it. Don't forget there is nothing modern about it. Many of our epics are full of this of their authors coming out and talking to the people. This is also the very purpose of our Jatras (traditional folk plays ). In art nothing is modern, everything is modern. If someone takes credit for having done something very 'modern' he is a fool, and he lives in fool's paradise. Art eternally goes on changing forms, and all kind of forma have been applied, experimented with and exhausted, we are all only re-inventing it, that is all.

"Ritwik is now finished"

I hear from many people that Ritwik is now finished, he is no longer capable of making any film, and even if he starts making a film, it will never be completed, that is definite. Why should there is there such adverse comments about you? Why I there so much speculation, criticism, argument and counter-argument?

There is a great deal of truth in what the people say, even though it is not totally true. There are, possibly, several reasons for my beginning or not beginning a film. Firstly, there is my devilish bent of mind. I don't know why, I feel like being capricious after launching a film. Experimenting, like that little boy in Tagore. It is a "let me see what happens" sort of attitude. Just in to see what fun one could get out of destroying one's own interests, as well as those directly connected with the venture. Secondly, there is my strange love for alcohol.. Somehow I feel, alcohol is the final road to salvation. I get engrossed in it, I really do.
Thirdly, the people in the film business are all sons of pigs, from first to last. If I could whip them red from top to bottom with a whip made of the Shankar fish's tail, then it would be something worthwhile. These people always search for loopholes in others. The finite pleasure they get out of doing harm to somebody, can only be equalled to being in the seventh heaven. These semi-human beings do not have the moral courage to talk straight or even listen to simple things stated simply. The problem is, I don't think I have ever cheated in my films, though in my life, I have cheated often. It doesn't pay to do things that way. What is appreciated is the opposite of what I have done.

Ramkinkar (unfinished documentary)

Released posthumously by the Ritwik Memorial Trust, Ramkinkar is an unfinished personality study documentary-short on the pioneer of modern Indian sculptor and painter from Santiniketan, Ramkinkar Baij, shot at Santiniketan over four days. Ghatak expresses his intrigue on Ramkinkar's sculptures installed at Santiniketan; the chimera/hybrid figures of the bulls and fish, the Santhal Family, and the others that make a departure from the Romantic tradition of the dominant art schools of the time. Ramkinkar's visions from the quotidian in confluence with Western traditions of sculpturing create complex, stylised structures where the marginalised people of primarily the Santhal community are shown in close communion with nature.

Master on Master: Saeed Akhtar Mirza on Ghatak

Saeed Akhtar Mirza a stalwart of Indian parallel cinema, and director of films like Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro and Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hei testifies to Ghatak's lack of organization, discipline, and structure. Remembered to be dishevelled, with a slightly crazed appearance. There are the stories of Ghatak's genius with the aside of his alcoholism and fickle capriciousness, and more alcoholism, and then, in his later life, time at a mental hospital.

Master on Master: Kumar Shahani on Ghatak

Kumar Shahani, notable filmmaker from the parallel wave with films like Khayal Gatha and Maya Darpan under his belt, was also an FTII alumnus from Ghatak's short tenure and has gone on record to say, "Like many poets, while he (Ghatak) had a lot to say, he had not the ability to organize, he wasn't structured in his ways. By the time I met him, he had turned his back to Calcutta, though he missed the city and its people terribly. He was deeply disenchanted with his colleagues, his comrades."

''I met him the first time at a screening of Subarnarekha at Anandam Film Society in Bombay. This was before I went to FTII, or he had moved to FTII. He was hoping to get it released in Bombay, or elsewhere, because it had been taken out of the theatres in Calcutta almost immediately after it had released. He was sitting there, smoking a bidi, oblivious to the fact that the ash was falling on his rather crumpled kurta. He might have been drunk. He was very emotional, because we praised the film a lot. I was deeply moved by it, and he seemed to not believe what we were saying about the film. The Ritwik-da I came to know later was, if I may say so, quite arrogant. But not on that day."

In early January 1976, Ritwik visited his family in Sainthia. Soon after his return to Calcutta, Ritwik was once again admitted to the Calcutta Medical hospital.

On 6 February 1976, Ritwik passed away at the SSKM Hospital.

Mrinal Sen on Ghatak's Death

"On 6 February, at five minutes past eleven at night, Ritwik died. We knew he would. He knew it too. On 24 December, he was released from the hospital, or rather, forcibly discharged himself. He came to our home and I noticed that he was gasping for air. Gasping, and talking, laughing. He ate a lot. He said 'I won't drink any more.' He also said, 'I won't live for very long now. I didn't cop it this time. Let's see.'

On that terrible night of 6 February, Ritwik didn't see me. But I was beside him as he lay there, dying. Comatose Ritwik, larger-than-life Ritwik, reckless Ritwik, heartless Ritwik, indiscipline Ritwik. Ritwik died.

Who knows, perhaps death is what ultimately saved him. The last few years of his life were like one big unfortunate accident.

Today, while watching his films, I get glimpses of certain blurred experiences which, in the days of Paradise Café, had become clear through Ritwik's actions. In thought, in idea—he remained always the same larger-than-life Ritwik, reckless Ritwik, heartless Ritwik, undisciplined Ritwik."

Master on Master: Ray on Ghatak

"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."

Master on Master: Ghatak on Ray

"Dhyanga-ta ke namatey hobe" [The tall one has to be pulled down]. In his chronicles as young outcasts with Ghatak, Mrinal Sen has been recorded in many an interview saying Ghatak would always pretend to prop up P C Baruah over Ray, and pretentiously so, as it will only bring Ray down. Ritwik brandished Pather Panchali as an export-quality, sanitised version of Indian poverty. Moving away from serious or playful rivalry, Ghatak who had a more capricious way of filming and a dearth of financers through out his career, unlike the other, has spoken on the more organised and much publicised Ray later in life: "Satyajit Ray in his more inspired moments, can make us breathtakingly aware of truth, the individual, private truth. The Indir Thakuran sequences of that film (Panther Panchali) remain for me the highest and noblest expression of art in Indian films, somehow, Satyajit has achieved a link with contemporary reality in those moments committed to that contemporary reality, to the daily acts of heroism in that reality. No important work can be created without this commitment. "

Release of Nagarik

Following the discovery of a weather worn positive print of Nagarik that was considered lost for 20 years, a group of technicians dedicated themselves to piece together a new negative. It was finally released at the New Empire Theatre, Calcutta.

Ritwik Memorial Trust

In 1982, Surama Ghatak along with Satyajit Ray, Sankha Ghosh and Baleshwar Jha formed the Ritwik Memorial Trust for the purpose of preservation and distribution of his works.

Surama Ghatak

Surama, who lived most of her married life apart from Ritwik and raised their three children alone, thought that most of the film fraternity abandoned him at times of need. She passed away, relatively isolated, in May 2018.

In Search of Ajantrik

A documentary looking at the relevance of Ghatak's Ajantrik has been directed by Meghnath.