Ritwik Ghatak: Shunned in his lifetime, proven right at the end of it all

A rebel. An idealist. A non-conformist genius who refused to compromise. One hundred years after the legend was born, he has been rediscovered and recognized as a giant of Indian and world cinema. A tribute.

By Shamya Dasgupta

The World Cinema Project has restored, among other films, Titas Ekti Nodir Naam by Ritwik Ghatak. Martin Scorsese, the revered Hollywood film-maker who is also the founder of the project, didn’t know much about Ritwik Ghatak, who made the film in 1972-73, until recently. He quite candidly admits that he knew little about Indian cinema outside of Satyajit Ray and Bollywood. When he finally came across Ghatak, though, Scorsese saw “an extremely refined vision of cinema” and films that were “thematically dense and layered”.

Many film-watchers in India are no more likely to have encountered Ghatak—although that is only partly their fault. Ray had famously said, in 1989, to a French journalist in a broadcast interview, “We have a fairly backward audience here, I must say, in spite of the film society movement and all that. If you consider the larger audience, it is a backward audience, an unsophisticated audience.”

Ray was lashing out at the audience’s, and critics’, response to Devi, his film with a very young Sharmila Tagore as the lead actress. One of his true masterpieces, the film is about a young woman who is interpreted (perhaps not the right word for it) as an avatar of goddess Kali by her father-in-law, and the unsavoury reverberations of it. Ray said, “It [the film] dealt with religious dogmatism, it didn’t attack religion as such; it attacked dogmatism, the extreme form of religion... But people [are] writing in the papers that ‘Oh, because Mr Ray is not a Hindu, he is a Brahmo, he is making such films against Hinduism’ and all that. But they are stupid people, you can’t take them into account.”

And this is Ray, the man globally synonymous with great cinema in India.

What, then, of the socially, politically, morally, and much-elsely conscious cinema of Ghatak?

Yet, in this, his centenary year, I have discovered to my great joy over the past many months of working on Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments as its editor, an anthology of essays just published by Westland Books, that his work has its audience and is finding new viewers—and its place in Indian and world cinema.

Ghatak was usually less polished in his demeanour than Ray was, just rawer; perhaps that could be said about their cinema too. If he embarked on a diatribe against Bengali cinema-watchers, Ghatak would probably have dealt in the language of the streets. I say probably, but by all accounts, that’s exactly what he used to do.

Drunk much of time in the last fifteen years of his fifty-year-long life and out of work for large swathes in that period—he didn’t make a full-length film between 1962 and 1972-73, though he did make some short films and documentaries. He was vice-principal at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Poona (now Pune) — Ghatak was disillusioned with what we often refer to with the all-encompassing word -- ‘system’, and wasn’t shy of giving vent to his frustration.

His films attacked the very class of Bengalis he belonged to, the middle-class bhadralok, which was—and remains—the chief patron of the arts.

An unusually creative and sensitive young person, it appears that Ghatak could have had his pick of careers, coming as he did from a well-off family. But the times made the man: as a teenager, he lived through World War II, the struggle for independence, the Great Bengal Famine, the many communal riots, and, finally, the freedom and Partition of India, followed by more riots and killings and the refugee crisis.

From the writings of his twin, Pratiti, we find that even in his early teens, he was spending a lot of time with labourers and workers of various hues, and around the time of independence, taking active part in civil society initiatives that brought him closer and closer to the marginalised, and causing him to be disillusioned with the world of the urban elite. His ideas first burst through in writing—poetry and short stories—and then theatre, and finally cinema, as is well documented, in order to converse and communicate with more and more people.

That was the primary impulse, to speak to people, but, of course, he had the artist’s quest for recognition too. Letters to his wife Surama, when he was working at Filmistan Studios in Bombay, briefly, in the mid-1950s, speak of the fame he had hoped to find along the way.

And therein lies the unravelling of Ghatak.

His first film, Nagarik, made in 1952, went unreleased till after his death in 1976. Why? Because he had had his differences with the Communist Party of India (and the Indian People’s Theatre Association) he belonged to, and was expelled. And, from what I have picked up from various people I have spoken to, members of that party prevented the film from getting a release.

A similar fate befell Subarnarekha, made in 1962 but only released in 1965, because of issues with the censors. Apparently they objected to the film’s climax in which the drunk protagonist walks into the quarters of his sister, who has turned to prostitution, in the dead of night, prompting the sister to kill herself. It’s a gut punch of a scene in a magnificent film.

Komal Gandhar, made just before Subarnarekha in 1961, did get released on schedule, but only in limited theatres. It was scuppered by forces—it’s impossible for me to say who was chiefly responsible, though I have heard it said it was the Communist Party again—that played the pettiest of tricks: planting people in the audience in theatres that would laugh at gritty or emotional scenes and howl at the lighter moments.

By all accounts, Ghatak didn’t start out being the man he became—bitter, an alcoholic—when still only in his thirties. He was an idealist, a man full of ideas.

Yes, he wanted recognition, not necessarily a lot of money. Yet, from the early 1950s all the way to the time of his death in the mid-1970s, he also deliberately kicked every chance at success out of his path. To put it simply, he sought glory, but not by compromising. He wanted to do his work, his way, and only his way, and wanted the world to accept him for it.

Does that suggest entitlement?

Or, naïveté?

Who knows?

Q: But what if the audience doesn’t accept the artist, or the artist’s worldview? What should the artist do—stay firm in his/her convictions or think about their worldview based on what the audience tells them? Where does the independence of the artist end?

A: An artist must always remain firm in their convictions.

The Q&A above is translated from an interview published posthumously in Ritwik: Nijer Kothay, Nijer Lekhay.

“I had a chance and made the film. It was fun all the way through—it is still fun while it is grossing exactly nothing at the box office.”

This is about Ajantrik (1958). Another colossal failure at the box office, but now regarded as an all-time global classic. But, then, as Safdar Hashmi said of him:

“Far from being a rebel protesting against ‘constraints’ within the cultural movement, Ritwik, unlike many erstwhile luminaries of the progressive cultural movement, never wavered in his pursuit of a medium and a message that is true to the people and carries on their struggles in the artistic sphere, he never placed his art at the disposal of commercial cinema or fell prey to the attractions of glamour and riches. In his films, he used no populist elements, the shortcuts to popularity resorted to by so many of our so-called ‘radical’ film-makers these days.”

Or consider what versatile Bengali actor Anil Chatterjee said about Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960): “The distributor, Mahendra Gupta, had suggested a different ending to the film: the sister should survive, and she would return home with her brother. Ritwikda shot that ending. But he told me, ‘This ending will not be used, I will shoot an alternate ending. This film must end in tragedy. The sister must die. She can’t survive.’ He didn’t compromise.”

He really didn’t. What happened instead, though, was steady deterioration, of his health, his relationships, even perhaps his work. Jukti, Tokko aar Goppo, his final film, can be thought of as a classic, a film so different from anything ever made, at least in India; it is autobiographical, raw and abrasive, a comment and a statement more than anything else. Of the film, Safdar Hashmi writes:

“In 1974, in a state of ill-health and near nervous breakdown, he completed his last film, Jukti, Tokko aar Goppo, a film so daring in its complete disregard of the very language and grammar of cinema he had mastered and developed that it is difficult to understand how it achieves its intense intimacy with the audience. It is as if the characters step out of the screen to talk to you and you are forced to respond to them, to react very sharply for or against them. The central character, played by Ritwik himself, parodies his real life in such a way that it compels the audience to reflect and criticise him. Perhaps that is just what Ritwik had been struggling to do through cinema all his life. Ironically, perhaps he wanted to see whether it could be achieved only through a conscious rejection of much of what has come to be accepted as the language of cinema.”

I get what he’s saying of the film, but I don’t agree.

The writer and poet Nabarun Bhattacharya says about Jukti, Tokko aar Goppo:

“When the film was made, and we watched it, I couldn’t understand it at all. In fact, I had a raging row with Ritwik about it. I remember telling him, ‘Enough is enough! You think you can do whatever you want and everyone has to sit and watch it? I can’t accept that you will walk to the camera lens and pour alcohol on it as a defence of your alcoholism.’ He conceded defeat at the time. He said so. He finished by quoting Shakespeare: ‘Then mum’s the word.’”

“But I have been astounded each time I have watched the film since, the modernity of it is incredible. Just watch it. See the heights he has reached, see where each image has travelled. And that film talked about every political issue in Bengal, and even in the rest of the world, at the time. This epic quality of Ritwik’s framing motivates me every day. Every day some new prostitutes are born, and every other day, their elder brothers reach them at night, drunk. But only Ritwik could have captured this in such a bold sequence.”

Photo courtesy: NFDC - National Film Archive of India.

My view is of a piece with Nabarun’s first impression. It was self-indulgent. It was entitled. It was roguish.

Knowing he wasn’t going to get better, knowing that he was going to die sooner rather than later—as his conversations with niece Aroma Dutta tell us—did Ritwik plan his swansong thus?

I will do what I want, with the National Film Development Corporation’s money at that, and you have to watch it.

Who can say?

What we can say with some certainty and conviction, though, is that this was a man who truly believed in the sanctity and relevance of his art and of his thoughts and theories. He did nothing he didn’t believe in.

He was willing to shun work, suffer deeply and waste away till he got a chance to do what he did. Lesser mortals would have compromised, taken the path more travelled. But here we stand today: this man, fifty years after his death, is more relevant than ever.

A giant of world cinema.

Shunned in his lifetime, proven right at the end of it all.

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Shamya Dasgupta is a sports journalist by profession, currently working as Deputy Editor with ESPNcricinfo , and a cinema enthusiast. He's the author of Don't Disturb the Dead: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers (2017), and two books on sports, Bhiwani Junction: The Untold Story of Boxing in India (2012) and Cricket Changed My Life: Stories of Hope and Despair from the IPL and Elsewhere (2014). He translated Mahasweta Devi's Laayl-e Aasmaner Aayna into the English (Mirror of the Darkest Night, 2019). He has recently edited a volume of essays on Ritwik Ghatak by eminent writers, filmmakers, academics, novelists, poets, among others: Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments, published by Westland.          

He lives and works in Bengaluru.