Centennial Tribute to the Stormy Petrel of Indian Celluloid | Jayanta Kumar Ghosal

Ritwik Ghatak who hit the Indian Cinema like a tornado, once said about his joining in film, “My joining in films has nothing to do with making money. Rather it is out of volition to express my pains and agonies for my suffering people. I do not believe in ‘entertainment’ or in ‘slogan mongering’. Rather, I believe in thinking deeply of the universe, the world at large, of the international situation, my country and finally, my own people. I make films for them.’ Declaring Unhesitatingly about his standpoint said, ‘The ideological base of my work is fundamentally Marxism.’

Born in Dhaka on November 1925, Ritwik and his twin sister Tapati were the youngest of nine children of Suresh Chandra Ghatak, then a Deputy Magistrate. The family led a lifestyle, a fusion of the West and the East.

Ritwik’s eldest brother Manish Ghatak, was a member of the famous Kallol group, a literary association. Manik Bandyopadhyay, the radical literateur and other famous literary persons were also attached to this group. During his childhood days, he witnessed Gandhiji’s Non-Co-operation movement, the Chittagong Armoury Raid under the leadership of ‘Masterda’ Surya Sen, the economic impact of World War I. The Second World War also left a deep scar on his mind. He was very much influenced by Tagore, who passed away in i941.

During his student days at Baharampur (W.B.) Krishnanath College from where he graduated with Honours in English, he came in touch with the IPTA, though he actively joined the organisation in 1948. Between 1942 and 1954, India passed through a turbulent time. As a result of various mass upsurge. Independence came and at the same time our country was partitioned in 1947. Ritwik was greatly shocked at the partition of India, his motherland. It left a deep scar upon his mind. He saw millions of uprooted people gathering either side of the borders and the erosion of values. This time his perception of life and politics fully changed. Famous IPTA production ‘Nabanna’ by Bijon Bhattacharya was staged which impressed Ritwik.

Ritwik’s observation, “A spate of massive changes gave a big jolt to the ideas and the ideals of the people........”. in 1946, he first joined actively the Communist Party, the CPI, and actively involved in the IPTA movement as an actor-activist. At that time he wrote some stories also. In the first phase of his IPTA connection, he was mainly involved in stage production. This time he also wrote some plays of which ‘Jwala’, ‘Sanko’ and ‘Dalil’ made history in the group theatre movement of India. But soon he was totally disappointed with group theatre and incidentally ‘thrown out of the central sqaud of IPTA because some party ‘bosses’ could not stand the success of ‘Dalil’ and finally he was dropped from the party membership.

But this could not destroy his strong will and capacity for loving the mankind which he learnt from his association with IPTA, as well as from Marx’s teaching. These led him to make ‘Komal Gandhar’ (1961)which is an autobiographical film. His later film ‘Jukti, Takko Ar Gappo’ made in 1974 was also autobiographical. All his films stand out for their stark depiction of social and cultural displacement.

Commenting on Ritwik Ghatak, another film personality Mrinal Sen said, “a restless, hyperactive man constantly searching for new dimensions of the aspects of objective reality as well as its transformation in the work of arts.”

Independence brought great changes in the social milieu of this sub-continent. Changes observed in ideas of mass entertainment, particularly in cinema. The film ‘Dharti ke lal’, directed by K. A. Abbas on Bengal’s 43 famine, started a film movement. Ritwik also was involved in the movement. Other reputed colluloid personalities who joined the new type of film movement that time were Mrinal Sen, Utpal Dutt, Hrishikesh Mukherjee. About his joining in Cinema Ritwik wrote “We (IPTA) used to give open-air performances where we could rouse and inspire an audience of four or five thousand. But, when I thought of Cinema, I thought of the million minds, not because I wanted to make films. Tomorrow, if I find a better medium, I’ll abandon films ..........’. He has strong passion for rivers – Padma, Ganga, Subarna Rekha and Titas. Actually they are metaphorical reflections of his own life which flows like a river.

Ritwik always treated cinema as a form of powerful revolutionary art as he was also a born rebel. He put his ideas and attitudes towards culture and art in a thesis titled ‘On the Cultural Front-Subtitled. “ A Thesis submitted by Ritwik Ghatak to the Communist Party of India in 1954”. Yet he was basically an aesthetic artist and was personal in his films. Films that failed to highlight Indian culture were meaningless as far as he was concerned. Most of his articles on cinema are in the book ‘Cinema and I’.

While describing cinema as a form of revolutionary art Ritwik said, “A revolution in the arts does not erupt out of the blue. It is through a different chemistry altogether that one genre of class art grows out of another genre of class art. One can find a commotion only by studying the past, absorbing its best elements into one’s heritage and then bringing one’s vision to bear upon it. There is no other way to reach consummation. All other ways I find purile, stupid and sick. There was a time when people forgot this and from out of such an attitude they proclaimed that Rabindra Nath Tagore was a poet of feudalism, of semi-colonial, religious mysticism and hence of no account.

‘Nagarik’ (1952), Ritwik’s first full-length feature film and then ‘Subarnarekha’ (1962) or ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’(1960) and ‘Bari theke Paliye’ (1959) These feature films are reflections of the Calcutta he loved to hate and hated to love. His uprooting from the dear native soil, East Bengal, was something destiny, history and politics forced on him. Actually, a Man like him found it impossible to come to terms with the city of his adoption.

Ritwik always claimed that ‘Nagarik’ was a political statement. It set out to analyse the agonies of a middle-class family in Calcutta engaged in a grim struggle for survival against oppressive social forces. Thus the film portrays the slow and tragic descent of a middle-class family.

‘Ajantrik’(1958) established through cinema, perhaps for the first time a new relationship between man and the machine and was praised as a ‘landmark in world cinema’ by eminent film personalities of the world.

‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ upholds against the backdrop of the refugee colonies concentrated in adjacent suburbs of Calcutta where survival for life faces a constant threat.

‘Subarnarekha’ opens with the foundation of a new refugee colony in Calcutta, and also reflects the decay of a lower middle-class Bengali family uprooted from East Bengal due to partition. Yet a strong belief in the future of man is very much visible in this film also confirming Ritwik’s firm conviction-“Through decay I see life, I believe in the continuity of life.

‘Bari Theke Palliye’ contains Ritwik’s auto-biographical childhood accounts. It is the story of a young boy who runs away from his village home to a large city.

‘Titas Ekti Nadir Naam’ (1973) is one of the greatest creations of Indian Cinema and actually may be termed as the ‘Magnum Opus’ of this legendary film-maker. Here again, Ritwik’s obsession with female principles is clear all over. The film revolves around the life and ultimate dissolution of a fishing community on the banks of the river Titas in Bangladesh. The film tells the story of a river drying up. The lives of the fishermen community fully dependent on the river are threatened by death and ruthless exploitation. Fishermen are displaced. Basanti alone stays, a living witness and victim of the tragic reality. She drags herself to the sandbanks and claws into the soft earth for water so that she can perform her death rituals herself. In her 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.

Like Basanti, Mungli, Malo and other women in the film are also fiery creatures and they tower over the male characters in the sense of humanism, decisive collective solidarity against the corruptions and destructive forces that reach to uproot them.

Ritwik’s last film ‘Jukti Takko Aar Gappo’ was made in 1974, when he reached at the end. His health and sanity disintegrated. But he was firm enough to realise that the nation, with its political polarisation and ultra-radicalism was on the brink and if it was the last thing, as an artist, he tried to intervene it. Thus the film is his violent assertion of the unity of human dignity. For which he always hankered.

Ritwik died a painful and tragic death in February 1976. Two years after playing his own death by police bullets in ‘Jukti Takko Aar Gappo.’

Ritwik once said, “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.” While doing so all through his life he turned an essentially provincial experience into an expression of Universal validity. Still, he remains the most authentic voice in Indian Cinema.

Eminent theatre personality Safdar Hashmi rightly said, ‘The movie camera was not merely an obstructive eavesdropper but a commentator, philosopher, historian, critic and poet, not a peep window into the lives of a group of characters but a testament narrating, reacting, rejecting, accepting, questioning, protesting, losing and winning . . .’

(Author: Jayanta Kumar Ghosal is a social activist)

Acknowledgement: I have taken immense help from different sources. I express my gratitude to all of them.