Tribute: Ritwik Ghatak’s 99th Birth Anniversary on 4th November
Ritwik Ghatak: The Rebellious Visionary
Ritwik Ghatak, a tempestuous force in Indian cinema, burst onto the scene like a whirlwind. His films, filled with raw emotion and social commentary, garnered international acclaim only after his untimely death. Beyond his cinematic brilliance, Ghatak was a multifaceted artist. He was an actor-activist, a writer of short stories, essays, and plays, and a poet. His work was deeply rooted in Marxist ideology, as he declared, “The ideological base of my work is fundamentally Marxism.”
Ritwik Ghatak’s women are timeless and boundless, drawn from mythology and infused with a Marxist critique of the materialistic bourgeoisie. These women, unique and undeniably Indian, transcend cultural boundaries and embody the essence of the Universal Woman. Their eternal nature is a testament to Ghatak’s visionary storytelling.
The Agony of the Middle Class: A Glimpse into Ghatak’s Nagarik
Nagarik delves into the heart-wrenching struggles of a middle-class family in Calcutta. The film paints a poignant picture of their gradual descent into poverty, reflecting Ghatak’s personal experiences. The narrative is layered with pain. We witness the family’s downward spiral and the desperation of Ramu, a teacher’s son, who is forced to abandon his studies and take up manual labor to support his family. The film captures the emotional toll of this decline, from the pain of losing social status to the heartbreak of severed relationships.
Ritwik Ghatak’s characters, particularly the women, are complex and symbolic. Uma, a name synonymous with the divine consort of Shiva, represents the ideal woman. However, in Nagarik, she is a victim of circumstance, her life shattered by poverty. This juxtaposition of the divine and the mundane highlights the tragedy of the human condition.
Ghatak’s Partition Trilogy: A Cinematic Exploration of Loss and Longing
Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar, and Subarnarekha form a powerful trilogy that delves into the psychological scars of the Partition of Bengal. These films are hailed as cinematic masterpieces, setting new standards for Indian cinema.
Meghe Dhaka Tara, often considered Ghatak’s magnum opus, is a haunting tale of a refugee family. Ritwik Ghatak claimed that it was “the greatest of all my films.” Most people seemed to agree with him. It is a corrosive, complex account of a refugee family with an incredibly stoic protagonist, Nita.
According to Ghatak himself, his ‘trilogy’ comprised Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar, and Subarnarekha, which was his interpretation of the marriage of the two Bengals. “When I began making Meghe Dhaka Tara, I did not speak about the political union of the two Bengals. I do not seek to do this even today. I know that it is difficult to reverse history. It is not my responsibility either. My greatest pain sprung from the politics, the economics, and other things that deter the cultural union of these two forcibly divided states. It is this cultural union I have spoken about quite clearly in Komal Gandhar. The same applies to Meghe Dhaka Tara and to Subarnarekha.”i
In Subarnarekha (1965) the female protagonist Sita, represents a political uprootal. Ritwik Ghatak alludes to the imagery of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland in this film. He also uses the tunes of Patricia from Antonioni’s film La Dolce Vita on the soundtrack. Ghatak’s ‘wasteland’ is Calcutta, and Sita is the ‘waste’ in it. The wasteland of Calcutta does not permit Sita the freedom to live up to the mythical name with which she was christened. When she discovers that her ‘client’ is none other than her brother Ishwar, who ‘mothered’ her, she cannot accept this reality. Sita’s suicide is not an escape but a violent statement of protest against the degeneration of values in a modern, disintegrated society.
Ritwik Ghatak brutally exposes the tragedy of the mythical Sita’s modern namesake in Subarnarekha. Is he suggesting that being born a Sita today is more dangerous than it was during the Ramayana? Who is Sita, then? Is she the Creator, or is she the Destroyer? She is both. She is the Destroyer because she destroys herself and her relationship with the world, with her brother and her son, when she slaughters herself with a sickle.
She is also the Creator because she leaves behind her son for her brother Ishwar to bring back to Chhatispur to open a fresh page in the Book of Life. Towards the film’s end, Ritwik Ghatak underscores Sita evolving into the ‘terrible’ (Kali) version of the Great Mother, standing out as a symbol of the destructive forces of the 20th century.
The women in Ghatak’s films tower over the male characters in their humanism, their defiance of corruptive forces that arrive to uproot them, and their decisive and collective solidarity that brooks no rupture.
Komal Gandhar, thematically, unfolds Ritwik Ghatak’s constant preoccupation with the shattering of dreams he nurtured and fought for to forge a unity where all objective conditions threaten to tear up the social and political fabric that keeps people coping with new-found Independence collectively. The music of Komal Gandhar illustrates Ghatak’s command over every imaginable school of music and the use of music within cinema that evolves as a detailed elaboration of the characters that may or may not form a traditional cinematic text. Music evolves as an influential language in cinema in his films, as do sound, silence, and dialogue.
From Meghe Dhaka Tara, one gets a definite indication of what elements constitute the epic. If we imagine a constant probing into the narrative scheme towards unveiling its mythic base, then these epic elements would, through montage structures, counterpoint the myths and expose them into epic energy. The music in the film touches the epic because it takes one beyond the linearity of the dramatic and evocativeness of the lyrical into the violent counterpointing of the antagonistic forces of the epic. The realization then has to emerge from the profundity of the life experience and echo the struggle for survival from its depths.
Also Read: Calcutta in Ritwik Ghatak’s Cinema
More into the Building of a World of Pain and Poetry
Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (1973) revealed Ghatak’s obsession with the female principle all over again. The film revolves around the life and ultimate dissolution of a fishing community on the banks of the river Titash in Bangladesh. Around the time setting of the film, forty years before it was made, the river starts drying up. Death and starvation threaten the lives of the fishing community. Urban vested interests enter to exploit the situation.
The fishermen are displaced, and Basanti alone stays back, a witness to and victim of the decadent, tragic reality. Ghatak draws a visual metaphor of the drying up of Titash with the drying up of Basanti, who dies as the river does. She drags herself to the sandbanks and claws into the soft earth for water so that she can perform her death rituals herself.
During those last dying moments, she watches a child run through the lush green paddy fields, playing on a leaf whistle against the stark silence of Basanti’s death. Ghatak’s ambivalent perception and critique of motherhood metamorphoses into a thought-provoking treatment. Basanti, Mungli, Malo, and the other women in Titash Ekti Nadir Naam are fiery creatures, unlike the simpering, passive, and helpless women of the average Indian film.
Jukti, Takko Aar Gappo is “about a failed life and an argument that goes beyond it, beyond Ghatak himself,” according to Geeta Kapur in her study of this film titled Self into History: Ritwik Ghatak’s Jukti Takko Aar Gappo. “When he made Jukti in 1974, he was at the end of his tether; his health and sanity were disintegrating. But he was astute enough to realize that the nation, polarized among political expediency and ultra-radicalism was on the brink, and if it was the last thing he did, he would intervene as an artist.”
Jukti, Takko Aar Gappo was Ghatak’s violent assertion for unity for human dignity. Like a great poet, he sang through it, as in his other films. “No filmmaker can change the people. The people are too great. They are changing themselves. I am only recording the changes that are taking place,” Ghatak once said in his quintessentially unique brand of English.
The Power of the Feminine
The women in Ghatak’s films tower over the male characters in their humanism, their defiance of corruptive forces that arrive to uproot them, and their decisive and collective solidarity that brooks no rupture. When Basanti entices a landlord’s agent into a hut, a group of women bash him up for having made advances to Basanti. When the young, widowed mother of Ananta, the little boy, arrives at the village for refuge, unknown and anonymous among the villagers, the men look at her suspiciously. But the women rally around her and offer her support.
Ghatak’s women are violent and fiery in different ways. They concur with the savage brutality Ghatak had converted into an idiom. They form the essence of his oeuvre. This feminine sensibility coming from a man as eccentric as he was a genius stuns us forever when we, women distanced from his women by a generation or two, sit back to watch his films again and again or, even for the first time.
Photo Courtesy: Author
i Mitra, Probir: “Bohumatrik Meghe Dhaka Tara” (Bengali) ” in Patabhoomi. Literary Journal of Asansol Film Study Circle, Special Issue on Ritwik Ghatak, May 2000, p.51.
