The traumatic effect of the partition of Bengal as a result of the independence of India in August 1947 left serious wounds in millions of hearts forever. Ritwik’s was one of those. Perhaps the most sensitive and reactive one. Most of Ghatak’s creations are the reminiscences of those unforgettable bleeding injuries causing permanent damage to Bengal’s economy and culture.
Ritwik Ghatak was born on 4th November 1925 at Jindabazar, Dhaka, the second most important city of undivided Bengal. He had to leave his homeland with millions of other refugees crossing the border just created to divide a nation living together from time immemorial. Initially they settled at Baharampur, a small sub-urban town about hundred kilometers away from Calcutta. In early fifties Ritwik moved to Calcutta. The war, the independence, the partition, the depression, the refugees, the famine, the humiliation of humanity and the emerging leftist movement touched young Ritwik very much. He became a strong sympathizer of the Communist Party of India and joined its cultural mass organisation Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). As a playwright, actor and director he wrote, produced, directed and acted in many plays at stage and street for IPTA. In IPTA’s national conference in Bombay in 1953, Ritwik’s play “Dalil” (The Document) was voted as the “Best Production”. Following some ideological differences with IPTA, he formed his own forum “Group Theatre” and staged the play “Sei Meye” (That Girl) in 1969. The content dealt with the patients of a mental asylum where he had to stay for sometime. Ritwik’s experience in theatre had a deep impact on his films on later days. His most famous film “Komal Gandhar” (The Gandhar Sublime / E-Flat, 1961) was a tribute to his days with IPTA. His transition from the theatre to cinema was explained in his own words: “I just want to convey whatever I feel about the reality around me I want to shout. Cinema still seems to be the ideal medium for this because I 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.”
In 1953, he completed his first film “Nagarik” (The Citizen). But it took two more decades to be released. It was about the struggle of a young man searching for his livelihood and erosion of his idealistic optimism. Being unsuccessful to release the film he had to accept a job for his own livelihood in the Bombay-based film studio “Filmistan” where he wrote some brilliant scripts for the well-known directors like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Bimal Roy. For Mukherjee he wrote the script of the film “Musafir” (The Traveler, 1957) and for Roy “Madhumati” in 1958. Both the films were commercially very successful, particularly the second one was an all time super hit in the history of mainstream Bollywood cinema, which still has got its evergreen popular appeal amongst mass.
But a genius like Ghatak was not born to be complacent with such popular success, which could bring earthly material comfort for him throughout his future life very easily. So he left “Filmistan” in particular and the Bombay film-world in general and came back to Calcutta to struggle for his next venture“Ajantrik” (The Un-mechanical, 1958). It was about Bimal, a taxi driver, played by the veteran IPTA actor Kali Banerjee and his battered vehicle placed in a small town in Bihar, a backward province of India. Ritwik said: “You can call my protagonist, Bimal, a lunatic, a child, or a tribal. At one level they are all the same. They reach to lifeless things almost passionately….” The attributes, one may found very similar to Ritwik’s own.
When he switched over to cinema from theatre Ritwik wanted to portray life through the lifeless mechanical medium: the camera and the celluloid. The song of life, which he tried to compose through sight and sound was very similar to the content of his films. He himself said: “The tribal song and dance in ‘Ajantrik’ describe the whole circle of life – birth, hunting, marriage, death, ancestor worship and rebirth. This is the main theme of ‘Ajantrik’, this law of life.”
This ‘law of life’ was the main theme of Ritwik’s films too, which he saw through the eyes of a machine, the camera. He used to watch very frequently Lumières’ “L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat” (Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station, 1896) and it made him always laughing, as ‘one machine is looking the other’. May be this was the genesis of his idea to depict life by one machine – a taxi through the other – the camera. His investigation of the taxi driver’s relationship with the car could be well compared with his own interpretation of life through the lifeless machine the ‘camera’. Bimal’s dedication to his 1920 Chevrolet jalopy called “Jagaddal” (meaning something which never moves) depicted Ghatak’s explanation of a filmmaker’s attachment to the equipment he used to make the film. The companionship Bimal felt towards his car “Jagaddal” in fact announced a deep attachment, which Ritwik always denounced verbally to possess as a filmmaker. He always rejected the emotion of Bimal as a self-portrait and also he refused to accept any emotional attachment to the film as a medium. He declared: “They say that television may soon take its (cinema’s) place. It may reach out to millions more. Then I will kick the cinema over and turn to T.V.”
But it is very easy to find out so many parallels between the creator Ritwik and his creation Bimal in terms of the dependence on machine for life and livelihood. Ghatak, like Bimal, resisted all the contemporary fashions while dealing with their machines. Both refugees uprooted from their own homeland vision the world surrounding them completely from a different angle of view.
Before “Ajantrik” Ritwik’s debut directorial attempt was “Bedeni” (The Gypsy Girl) was an unfinished venture, which he took over from another director Nirmal Dey. After “Ajantrik”, Ritwik made “Bari Theke Paliye” (Run Away Home, 1959). It was about a little boy who ran away from home in search of adventure. In the backdrop of post partition Calcutta, it was a chronicle of Ramu and his family struggling to survive in a marginalized, frustrated, poverty-stricken, uprooted ambience contributing to the havoc erosion of human values and culture. Violent effect of uprooting due to partition of Bengal, which orphaned, crippled and humiliated an entire population was metaphorically represented in the pastoral images of trees with the clashing dissonance of a heavy machinery excavator, blindness of father, unrequited love et al.
Ghatak’s deepest personal account of partition, poverty and disillusionment was portrayed in a most provocative expression in “Meghe Dhaka Tara” (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960). He composed a unique narration of emotion, disenchantment, demoralization through a refugee family up-rooted due to partition through magnificently interwoven light and shadow and interplaying aggressive sound. Repeated imagery of a passing train bisecting the horizon haunted us to remind the division of the homeland. The protagonist Neeta’s (brilliantly played by Supriya Chowdhury) cry for agony, her self-denial, exploitation was reverberating voice of millions of souls uprooted from their land and life due to partition. “Meghe Dhaka Tara” narrated the story of Neeta, who sacrificed her life to reconstruct her family splintered by partition and subsequent hegira. In its deliberate but artistic use of melodrama, the film was the pioneer in the Indian Cinema. Ritwik was always inclined on epic Indian approach. He developed the story simultaneously on various levels, depending heavily on melodrama and co-occurrences. Melodrama was a purposeful refinement to him on the dramatic theatrical traditions. It was very much effective to Ritwik for contemporary interpretation of the intense emotion. In his own words: “We are an epic people. We like to sprawl, we are not much involved in story-intrigues, we like to be re-told the same myths and legends again and again. We, as a people, are not much sold on the ‘what’ of the thing, but the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of it. This is the epic attitude.”
“Subarnarekha” (The Golden Line, 1962), one of the most complex films of Ritwik, moved outside the immediate problems of the partition. The story of Ishwar and Sita, a brother and a sister of a floating population of refugees provided a prophetic glimpse of the future where post-independence optimism clashed with the abrasive realities and decaying moral values. The film ended up with Sita, compelled to accept prostitution for her survival, by cutting her own throat to escape the shame when drunken Iswar entered to her room for sexual pleasure.
In fact, “Meghe Dhaka Tara” (The Cloud-Clapped Star, 1960), “Komal Gandhar” (The Gandhar Sublime / E-Flat, 1961) and “Subarnarekha” (The Golden Line, 1962) is a magnificent trilogy on the partition of Bengal and its effect. Ritwik said: “The partition of Bengal had caused many upheavals in our economic and political life. If you talk to anyone who remembers those times, you’ll understand that the basic factor behind the economic collapse was the partition. I have never been able to accept the partition, not even today. And in three of my films I have tried to say just that. Quite unintentionally, they formed a trilogy, Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar, and Subarnarekha. When I started with Meghe Dhaka Tara, I did not talk of political unity….I don’t think of it even today. Because it is not easy to alter something that is already a historical fact. And it is not my job. What hurt me most was that cultural unity too was impossible to achieve, and there were political and economic factors involved in the problem. Komal Gandhar clearly speaks of this cultural unity. Meghe Dhaka Tara, too, expresses the same feelings at a deeper level. So does Subarnarekha. Of course, today the economic problems have become much more complicated. But even then, if you think over it deeply, you’ll find that at the root of many of our problems lies the partition.”
The nostalgic effect of river, the main life source of East Bengal always obsessed Ritwik to use it as an accolade of life in most of his films. Two of his very famous films “Subarnarekha” (The Golden Line, 1962)and “Titash Ekti Nadir Nam” (A River Called Titash, 1973) were structured on two famous rivers: ‘Subarnarekha’ in West Bengal and ‘Titash’ in East Bengal. In the title sequence of “Meghe Dhaka Tara”the transformation between the river and the heroine was presented in a unique manner. Running water of the river was sparkling like delicately formed twinkling stars. Soft light of the moon reflecting off the river strained across Neeta’s face in the duskiness of her bedroom suggesting the passing clouds over the night sky. Brilliant reflection of the twinkling stars from the very initial source, the riverbed, not the sky, was surrounding Neeta on her most critical moments when her face was clouded in distress. In another shot later, a train passed across the background overpowering the soundtrack totally with the heavy noise of the running wheels and shrilling whistle when Neeta was sitting with Sanat by the river.
Ritwik remembered the lost magic of his earlier days with intense nostalgia on river: “My days were spent on the banks of the Padma, the days of an unruly and wild child. The people on the passenger boats looked like dwellers of some distant planet. The large merchant ships coming from Patna, Bankipore, Monghyr, carried sailors speaking a strange tongue, with a mixture of dialect in it. I saw the fishermen. In the drizzling rain a joyful tune would float in the village air, pulling at one’s heartstrings with the sudden gusts of wind. I have rocked in the steamer on the turbulent river after dark, and listened to the rhythmic sound of the engines, the bell of the sareng, the cry of the boatman measuring the depths.”
Ritwik offered his tribute to the ‘river’ and to his homeland in “Titash Ekti Nadir Nam” (A River Called Titash, 1973) where he portrayed life through a fishing community living on the bank of the river ‘Titash’. After independence of Bangladesh in 1971, Mr. Habibur Rahaman Khan, a young man of his early twenties, a hard-core admirer of Ghatak, invited him to make the film for him at the newly born Nation ‘Bangladesh’. Ritwik instantly accepted the invitation and for near about two years he was there to complete this ‘Odyssey to River’. Based on the epic novel of the same title by the famous Bengali novelist Advaita Mallabarman, this film reflected the seal of Ghatak’s whole approach of filmmaking. It’s huge landscape, complicated range of characters, parallel building of events, folk culture helped him to re-search his lost root in East Bengal. But he was a little bit disillusioned, rather shocked by the contemporary scenario of this newly reconstructed Nation. He remarked: “I did not realise whatever ideas I had about Bengal, the two Bengals together were thirty years out of date”. He added: “My childhood and my early youth were spent in East Bengal. The memories of those days, the nostalgia maddened me and drew me towards Titash, to make a film on it. The period covered in the novel, Titash, is forty years old, a time I was familiar with …. Consequently Titash has become a kind of commemoration of the past that I felt behind long ago … When I was making he 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.”
Even the Ritwik’s beloved rivers were also lost. They were virtually raped by the contemporary politics, the man-made catastrophe. His favorite rivers, the Ganga, the Padma, the Titash, the Subarnarekha were lost in ruthless history. He said: “The waters of the Ganga and Padma were red with the blood of brothers. These are our own experiences. Our dreams faded. We stumbled and fell, desperately clutching at a wretched, impoverished Bengal. Which Bengal is this, where poverty and immorality are our constant companions, where the blackmarketeers and dishonest politicians rule, where terrible fear and sorrow are the inevitable fate of every man!….In the films I have made in recent years, I have not been able to free myself from this theme. What has seemed to me a most urgent need, is to present to the Bengali people this miserable, impoverished face of divided Bengal, to make them conscious of their own existence, their past, and their future.”
A ravaging tragedy aggravated by petty self-interest and destroyed relationship conduced the unavoidable disintegration of the village ostensibly inevitable cultural extermination as a result of partition. Same emotional desertion was reflected in “Meghe Dhaka Tara” as a passionate and stalking requiem for dying culture. “Jukti Takko Gappo” (Reason, Debate and a Story, 1974) also revealed the repeating over intoning themes: disruption, deportation, factionalism, segmentation, cultural disintegration; the man made famine in 1943 which eradicated communities and ushered a wave of refugees; division of Bengal in 1947 causing a further influx of millions of refugees; struggle for independence of the people of East Bengal and the creation of a new Nation Bangladesh in 1971; contemporary political agitation in West Bengal - the Naxalite movement. This film was so autobiographical and allegorical that Ritwik himself played the main role of Nilkantha, an alcoholic intellectual introducing the idea of self inflicted destruction. Nilkantha’s encounter with the former intellectual turned pornographic underground novelist Shatrujit played by another genius actor of India Utpal Dutta was a satirical metaphor of the deserted ideology and reconciled complacency. This acceptance of individual human infirmity was reflected in the protagonist Nilkantha’s comments “Somewhere, at some new day we shall learn that slipping is not death”.
The multicolored pattern of Ritwik Ghatak’s life depicted a unique coherence of determination, a kind of necessary insubordination. In spite of all his rebellious activities, all his intemperance, he had an exclusive commitment, a single determination, a complete vision. The twists and turns of life never led him away from his true destination. Cinema for Ghatak was an instrument to reach the masses. His films reflected the frantic urge to communicate, to transform apathy into rebellion, to assert that truth, beauty and the human spirit will survive after all. He said: “I have done many things in my life. I ran away from home a few times. I took a job in the billing department of a textile mill in Kanpur. I hadn’t thought of films then. They dragged me back home from Kanpur. That was in 1942. Meanwhile, I had missed two years of my studies. I was fourteen when I ran away from home. ……I had a creative urge, and began my artistic career with a few useless pieces of verse. I realized later that I wasn’t made for that sort of thing. I couldn’t get within a thousand miles of true poetry. It was after this that I got involved with politics. This was 1943 to 1945. Those who remember these years will know of the quick transitions in the political scene of the day…. The anti-fascist movement, the Japanese attack, the British retreat, a great deal happened in quick succession. Life was placid in 1940 and ’41. Suddenly, during ’44 and ’45, a series of events took place the price of foodstuffs soared, then came famine things changed so fast that it gave a great jolt to people’s attitudes and thinking….By that time I was an active Marxist; not a cardholder, but a close sympathizer, a fellow traveler. I started writing short stories then. This was not like my earlier nebulous and false attempts to be a poet. The urge to write stories arose out of a desire to protest against the oppression and exploitation I saw around me…… But later, I came to feel that short stories are inadequate. They take a long time to reach the people, and then few are deeply stirred by them. I was a hot-blooded youngster then, impatient for immediate reaction…..I started taking an interest in drama, became a member of the IPTA. When, at the end of 1947, a revised version of Nabanna was produced, I acted in it. After that I was completely involved with the IPTA…..I was also leader of the Central Squad. I wrote plays myself. Drama elicited an immediate response, which I found very exciting. But after a while even drama seemed inadequate, limited…….. But, when I thought of the cinema, I thought of the million minds that I could reach at the same time. This is how I came into films, not because I wanted to make films. Tomorrow, if I find a better medium, I’ll abandon films…..I have wanted to use the cinema as a weapon, as a medium to express my views….”
As the Vice Principal of the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) Pune during 1966-67, Ritwik had an intense impact upon the trajectory of Indian cinema. He was a powerful teacher there and had motivated Adoor Gopalkrishnan, Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani and so many other future directors having their own signatures in independent Indian cinema. He was very happy with his students there in Pune. He said: “The time I spent working at the Film Institute in Pune was one of the happiest periods of my life. The young students come there with a great deal of hope, and a large dose of mischief by which I mean, ‘There’s a new teacher, let’s give him a bad time!’ I found myself right in their midst. I cannot describe the pleasure I experienced winning over these young people and telling them that films can be different. Another thing that pleased me a lot was that I helped to mold many of them. My students are spread all over India. Some have made a name for themselves, some haven’t. Some have stood on their own feet, some have been swept away.”
Ghatak passed away on 6th February 1976, at the age of only fifty-one years leaving many incomplete projects behind him. Always non-compromising and anti establishment, from IPTA to FTII, his influence is so far-reaching which his contemporary time failed to hold but the future honored with respect. Now Ghatak is being reassessed by the world from a new dimension.
Satyajit Ray evaluated him quite correctly. In the foreword to a collection of Ritwik’s articles on cinema titled ‘Cinema and I’ Satyajit wrote: “ … Ritwik was one of the few truly original talents in the cinema this country has produced. Nearly all his films are marked by an intensity of feeling coupled with an imaginative grasp of the technique of filmmaking. As a creator of powerful images in an epic style he was virtually unsurpassed in Indian cinema. He also had full command over the all-important aspect of editing: long passages abound in his films, which are strikingly original in the way they are put together. This all the more remarkable when one doesn’t notice any influence of other schools of film making on his work. For him Hollywood might not have existed at all.”
Ritwik always claimed himself to be an artist first and a filmmaker second. Certainly he ignored any value of “entertainment” in filmmaking. He told: “I do not believe in ‘entertainment’ as they say it or slogan mongering. Rather, I believe in thinking deeply of the universe, the world at large, the international situation, my country and finally my own people. I make films for them. I may be a failure. That is for the people to judge.” His cinema compels us to contemplate “deeply of the universe” not to be “entertained”.
No comments:
Post a Comment