Rebel with a cause

A committed leftist, lay Jungian, sometime novelist, and notoriously self-destructive alcoholic, Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) struggled throughout his career to finance and complete his few films, continually wrestling with a variety of personal and political demons. His debut, The Citizen (Nagarik, 1952), which critiques the Horatio Alger-esque ambitions of a naive young man in the slums of Calcutta, is an overtly Communist film, ipso facto out of the running for international accolades during the Cold War era. The Citizen grew out of Ghatak’s work with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), an essentially Communist theatrical collective—briefly the cultural focal point of postwar Bengal. Ghatak was a born rebel, in every sense of the word, but with a cause, over a wide horizon ranging from political to personal.

Ghatak's bittersweet comedy Pathetic Fallacy (Ajantrik, 1957) was a modest success with Bengali audiences, but Ghatak never managed to produce a hit. He declined to exercise his considerable charm on international distributors or work the festival circuit. He alienated friends, political comrades, and business connections. He left major projects unfinished, bartered film rights for bottles of booze, and generally made a shambles of his life and career. Despite all this, Ghatak managed to acquire a small but remarkably loyal following among India’s left-leaning intelligentsia.

Crucially, during his brief tenure as vice principal of the Film and Television Institute at Pune, he mentored a new wave of progressive filmmakers like Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani and many of whom were to become leading lights of India’s so-called Parallel Cinema during the 1970s. Ghatak’s death in 1975 went unnoticed outside India, but the faithful kept his legacy alive. That legacy, eight extraordinary feature films, a clutch of provocative shorts and documentaries, and scattered writings in English and Bengali, is now widely celebrated in India, but remains largely invisible to filmgoers internationally.

To the uninitiated, these films came as a revelation. Each is a work of genuine distinction, marked by formal daring, intellectual vigour, and powerful emotional suasion. At least two of them—The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dakha Tara, 1960) and Streak of Gold (Subarnarekha, 1965)—are acknowledged masterpieces whose stature has only increased with time. A third, the virtually unknown ‘A River Called Titash’ (Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, 1972), strikes the viewer on first viewing as a film of unqualified greatness.

Ghatak’s limitless scope, freewheeling intelligence, and passionate political imagination permitted him to make startling connections. With equal aplomb and obvious delight, he might forge a link between Brecht and the classical Sanskrit poet Kalidasa in Komol Gandhar (E-flat, 1961), suggest intriguing parallels between commodity fetishism and the primitive animism of Bengali tribals in Ajantrik (Pathetic Fallacy), segue from sitars to a snatch of Beethoven’s Fifth symphony in order to announce a mock-heroic theme in Reason, Argument, and Story (Jukti Takka Ar Gappa, 1974), or conjure a manifestation of the bloodthirsty goddess Kali amidst the blasted ruins of a world war II airstrip in Subarnarekha (Streak of Gold).

This brand of intellectual audacity doesn’t always work on screen, but when it does, it strikes home unforgettably. Ghatak’s third feature, The Runaway (Bari Theke Paliye, 1959), is superficially the most play like of his films. It is a nostalgic evocation of Bengali village life, and has an impressive storyline—about an imaginative Brahmin boy, Kanchan, who runs away to the big city. It is far from Ghatak’s finest work, but there’s a singular, characteristically subversive moment that throws the whole film, and Indian cinema in general, into fresh perspective. Toward the end of his wanderings, Kanchan is seen walking along the banks of the Ganges with his new friend, a tattered refugee. We’re given virtually the whole Orientalist package in one scene—mysterious allure of the East, lilting Bengali dialogue, juxtaposition of stark poverty with formal beauty, the river as symbol of Indian spirituality and timelessness, etc, and we are lulled by its familiarity. Then a tall man in a suit briefly enters the frame. He’s seen only from behind, but the position of his arms makes it clear that he’s filming the scene with a portable camera. An unquestionably American voice is heard to exclaim, “Quite a study, honey!”

Here’s an alienation effect that still packs a punch, even in an era marked by stylish self-reflexivity. We’re made to think, all of a sudden, about the commodification of Indian exoticism; about our own complicity in this process as consumers of Oriental images; about the dilemma of the Third World filmmaker, who must remain “authentic” even as he is required to package a culture, a nation, and a history in a form attractive to European and American audiences. After experiencing this small epiphany, the viewer may well begin to notice the film’s many oblique but telling jokes about the queer relationship between cultural centre and periphery.

At times, Ghatak’s distancing strategies may recall filmmakers like Bunuel or Godard, but he shares none of their icy detachment. Even in his satirical mode, Ghatak is invariably empathic and passionately engaged—much like Brecht himself, as opposed to the self-styled “Brechtians” who followed him. A case in point is The Cloud-Capped Star, a merciless, stunningly frank critique of the family-as-institution that is also one of the most heartbreaking movies ever made.

He had mastered the highly evolved conventions of Indian melodrama during a spell as a contract screenwriter in Bombay, where he wrote, inter alia, Bimal Roy’s Hindi romance Madhumati, 1955. An even bolder experiment with the form is Subarnarekha, on its face a kind of potboiler about forbidden passions and familial strife. In the dark days following the Partition of 1948, Ishwar, a refugee from East Bengal, attempts to cope with actual and psychic displacement by assembling a makeshift family; his much younger sister Sita becomes a kind of daughter, while Abhiram, an orphan boy of uncertain parentage, is a surrogate son. Inevitably, the children played as adults by Madhabi Mukherjee and Satindra Bhattacharya grow up to fall in love; to Ishwar, their relationship constitutes a psychosexual threat that he cannot consciously comprehend. When, in the first of several Dickensian narrative coincidences, Abhiram is revealed to be lower caste, Ishwar seizes the excuse to proscribe the marriage. In keeping with melodramatic logic, it’s the beginning of a downward spiral that ends in unspeakable squalor and tragedy.

Initially, A River Called Titash, was commissioned by the government of Bangladesh as part of an official effort to rebuild national identity following the break with Pakistan. Characteristically, however, Ghatak had other things in mind. Based on a well-loved Bengali novel by Advaita Malla Barman, Titash reinvents a straightforward pastoral romance as a microcosmic study of the complex interplay among natural forces, economic transformation, and rural culture. An East Bengali fishing community along the banks of the River Titash is in decline: the waters are drying up, and urban money men have begun to appropriate the bottomlands through legal chicanery and violence. In Ghatak’s hands, the story becomes a virtual case study in the devastation of peasant life by markets and modernity. But where a lesser filmmaker with a similar end in view would have used the language of documentary realism, Ghatak’s genius is to clothe his social analysis in highly stylized, even hypnagogic, imagery. It is difficult to think of parallels to the film’s stark, literally breathtaking visual texture; imagine Hiroshi Teshigahara's new wave film Woman in the Dunes stripped of existential portent and equipped with a social conscience. The result is a visionary, uniquely seductive political film—one that sticks in the mind far longer than the customary forms of agitprop. A River Called Titash was never properly released in India, and most local cineastes came to know Ghatak late only through his quasi-autobiographical final film, Reason, Argument and Story.

In Reason Argument and Story, Ghatak himself plays his own alter ego, thus the filmmaker is by turns querulous, hectoring, embittered, and pathetic. The performance is electric, and the autocritique is stunningly rigorous, but Ghatak’s swan song is perhaps the most abrasive and deliberately indecorous self-portrait ever committed to celluloid. It’s little wonder that contemporary audiences failed to respond. Ironically, it is precisely the qualities that once struck cultural gatekeepers as uncouth that may end up recommending Ghatak to a new generation of filmgoers. His use of melodrama in the service of high art—a habit for which even his most fervent supporters once felt required to apologize—should not trouble audiences accustomed to the melodramatic strategies of Sirk or Fassbinder. Nor should his formal experimentation—anti-naturalistic sound, editing to sprung rhythms, eccentric focal techniques—be dismaying to members of the generation next.

If Satyajit Ray was the suitable boy of Indian art cinema—unthreatening, career-oriented, reliably tasteful—Ritwik Ghatak, his contemporary and principal rival, was its problem child. Where Ray’s films are seamless, exquisitely rendered, conventional narratives that aim for the kind of psychological insights prized by 19th century novelists, Ghatak’s are ragged, provisional, intensely personal, yet epic in shape, scope, and aspirations. With Ray, you feel safe in the hands of an omniscient, authoritative master. Viewing Ghatak is an edgy, intimate experience, an engagement with a brilliantly erratic intelligence in an atmosphere of inquiry, experimentation, and disconcerting honesty. The feeling can be invigorating, but it’s never comfortable.

Views expressed are personal